Conan the Barbarian #41 (Marvel Comics, 1974)

Conan arrives in a nameless desert village on his way to Zamora's City of Thieves. He dismounts his horse and immediately heads to a bar to get drunk and laid, but is distracted by a beautiful girl running away from an armed mob wielding torches.

She seeks the aid of a man coming out of the pub, who calls her Zhadorr and then punches her out. Conan never takes kindly to the mistreatment of women, and repays the man by bashing him in the head with a rock. She then asks for Conan's help, who seems mildly inconvenienced, but also thinks that she is pretty. He holds off the angry crowd with his sword so that they don't kill her.

They accuse her of being a witch, and a man leaps at her and stabs, yet she lives. Conan is confused but fights off the mob and rides out of town with the girl in the direction of Zamora. The girl is strange, but requests that they stop at the Oasis of Shar-Al-Tjinn. He thinks it sounds familiar, but can't remember why.

On their journey, to Conan's chagrin, she sleeps at night and wakes in the morning, soaking up the sun. She doesn't eat, but drinks water. Conan tries to learn about her. She has no people, she claims, because she Zhadorr. She is weird, but also attractive, and that is usually enough for Conan.

At last, she warms up to him, but requests that they bathe in the Oasis before moving on to any funny business.

The next day, they encounter a group of armed brigands who give chase. Conan rides quickly toward the Oasis as Haak-Shi and his bandits wish to steal the girl and prevent Conan from reaching the "forbidden" oasis.

Upon reaching the oasis, Conan dives into the water and suddenly starts to remember why the name Oasis of Shar-Al-Tjinn sounds familiar to him. Upon seeing the skeletons of dead travelers at the bottom of the small lake, he recalls that it means "The Bones of Fools."

Conan leaps out of the water because he thinks it is poison, and immediately gets into a swordfight with the four brigands, who manage to overpower Conan but not kill him. They plan to tie him up and sell him at a slave market. The girl is bound and held captive, for she awaits a similar fate.

In the middle of the night, while Conan slowly cuts his way free, she hums a strange song, which wakes one of the brigands, who proceeds to attack her. Conan rushes to help, and after noticing a strange, enormous fruit hanging from the tree that he did not see earlier, he finds the girl standing next to a stack of bones and a brigand's sword.

She collapses in Conan's arms and says that she spared him, and tells him to flee the oasis.

Conan hears the screams of the other men and runs to them, only to discover an unspeakable scene of horror as the great tree by the oasis sproats vine-like tentacles that ensnare the brigands and horses and pulls them into its gaping mouth. It then grabs Conan and tries to eat him, but the barbarian throws a lit torch from the fire pit into its mouth, setting it ablaze, and runs away.

The next morning, he wakes and returns to the scene of the conflagration. The tree is burned, but a strange fruit grows nearby. As Conan watches, the fruit "hatches" and the beautiful girl, Zhadorr, emerges. Conan, who has no stomach for sorcery, cuts "it" into small pieces and rides away.