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WE HAD BEEN FLYING LOW over the desert, scanning its scarlet- and ochre-colored floors when hillsides sudden loomed before us. Carthoris, who was at the controls, nimbly guided us over the top of the ridge. We continued in this way for some time when, after flying over a narrow gorge, we came to an open valley, at the far extremity of which was a low table land over which spread an enormous city. Over this we passed, passing over a ruined roadway leading out from the city, and ending abruptly in a flight of broad steps.
It was, as is so often to be found on the hillsides that were once the shores of the vanished Barsoomian seas, one of the dead cities of ancient times. The buildings below were deserted, and while not greatly decayed had the appearance of not having been tenanted for years, even ages. Toward the center of the city was a large plaza with a tall tower nearby, and this we circled while searching for a place to land.

ChatGPT's revision (knit together with the other fragment, which prefaces it):

We had been skimming low across the ochre and scarlet wastes of the Martian desert, the sun glinting on the rippling dunes and the jagged shoulders of rock that thrust upward like the bones of a long-dead world. Far ahead the floor of the desert seemed to lift and break into rugged hills, their flanks dark with shadow and streaked with rusty red. Rather than take our flier soaring over them, Carthoris, who held the controls with the ease of long habit, inclined our prow toward a shadowed gap that opened invitingly between the slopes.
It proved to be the mouth of a winding gorge, narrow and twisting, whose walls rose ever higher as we drove into its depths. Here and there the sunlight broke upon ledges or caught the tips of overhanging crags, but for the most part we were gliding through a world of stone and silence, the only sound the thin whine of our engine echoing from cliff to cliff. I was just about to advise that we rise above what I supposed were the final barriers ahead, when the gorge curved sharply—and without warning our little flier shot forth into a broad and deathly silent valley, bathed in the melancholy splendor of the dying Martian afternoon. At the farthest rim of this valley rose a low escarpment, and upon that rocky table spread the vast sprawl of a Martian city, lifeless and austere beneath the waning sun. We skimmed toward it, the wind of our passage whispering over stone and sand, until the shattered outworks loomed beneath us.
A broad, ancient roadway ran straight as an arrow from the city’s heart, only to end in a colossal stairway that climbed down toward the long‑vanished sea whose waves had once lapped the valley floor. Such were the cities of old Barsoom, built proudly upon the shores of oceans that are now but deserts; and as the waters receded, the people drifted away, leaving their splendid habitations to crumble slowly beneath the lonely winds.
Below us stretched mile on mile of silent avenues, lined with dwellings and palaces still firm in their foundations, though tenantless for untold ages. In the city’s heart lay a great oval plaza, from which soared a solitary tower like a sentinel of stone. Circling above, we spied at last a flat terrace along the tower’s flank, broad enough for our flier to alight, and we dropped toward it in cautious descent.