CHAPTER XXXII. THE SHE-WOLF TO HER LAIR.

IN the mysterious revolution of human things it came about that the only spectator of the closing scene of the tragedy of humanity who endured and survived its final terrors was the woman to whom it had been due that the fire from heaven had fallen upon a world mad with the frenzy and agony of war instead of sane and calm with the sanity and calmness of peace and reason.

On the issue of the Battle of Aeria, Olga and, under her unnaturally acquired influence, the Sultan, had staked the empire of the world and lost it. Before the fight had been raging many hours even she was forced to admit that Aeria was impregnable to any assault that she could deliver. But when the Aerians began to practise the desperate tactics of the second day it became manifest that nothing but annihilation awaited the invading fleet, out-matched as it was in speed and gun-power by the new Aerian warships and the land batteries.

With eyes burning with rage and envy she had watched through her glasses the incomparable Alma floating serenely at her unattainable altitude far above the battle-storm, and she had pictured Alan, her former slave, standing upon her deck perhaps—bitterest thought of all—with his wedded love beside him, and like a very arbiter of war hurling his destroying lightnings far and wide upon her ships until the[360] supreme moment came in which he would descend like a very god from the upper air, and, hand in hand with Alma, strike the last terrible blow which would end the last conflict of man with man and leave neither friend nor foe alive to tell what the issue had been.

It would be a glorious end, worthy of him and the splendid traditions of his race, and she loathed herself for the craven fear that had seized upon her in the fateful hour of battle, and made her incapable of challenging the same fate at his hands. Khalid himself would have done so without hesitation, but she had robbed him of his manhood and debased him, as she had debased every other human being that had fallen under her influence.

She had spent nearly the whole of the night of the 22nd on deck, and when the awful radiance of the Fire-Cloud was for the last time succeeded by the light of day, even her haughty spirit had at last bowed before the supernatural terrors that were multiplying about her. For the first time since she had brought bloodshed back into the world a thrill of panic shuddered through her soul, and, for the first time, she learnt the meaning of fear.

Then, too, came a longing which for the time being overmastered all other considerations. The elementary animal instinct of self-preservation rose up within her with irresistible force and conquered the hate and the ambition whose objects would have vanished when another sun had risen.

Her thoughts went back to her old stronghold in the snowy solitudes of Antarctica, to the deep dark caverns of Mount Terror. Surely those mighty walls of living rock, shrouded in eternal ice and snow, would give her an asylum in which she could defy the fate that was about to overwhelm humanity—and what then? For a moment an awful vision of the unspeakable loneliness of such a survival amidst the ruins of the world struck such terror to her heart that she almost resolved to head the Revenge into the thick of the fight that was still raging round Aeria, and die rather than[361] face it. Then the vision passed, and the terrors of the present blotted out the fear of the future.

The last sun that the human race would ever see was just rising when she sent for Boris Lossenski, who was still commanding the Revenge under her, and said abruptly, and without even consulting Khalid, who was standing by her side—

“There is nothing but death to be found here. We will escape if we can. Head the ship for Mount Terror and make her fly as she has never flown before. Don’t spare either the engines or the power. We must be there before nightfall if possible.”

Boris saluted and obeyed in silence, and Olga turned to Khalid and said in a tone of weariness and almost of despair—

“It is no use fighting any longer. The Fates themselves are against us, and I—yes, I have been frightened into belief at last. A shameful confession is it not?”

“Not shameful but only reasonable,” he replied. “All I regret is that you did not believe sooner, and save this last slaughter of these gallant people.”

“What is done, is done!” she said with a half-regretful glance at the mountains of Aeria, which were now rapidly fading away into the blue distance; “it is only a question of sooner instead of later. Indeed, it seems hardly worth while even for us to attempt to live when, even if we survive, only the ruins of the world can be ours. And yet”—

“Yet sweeter would be life with you even in a wilderness of death than destruction that might be eternal parting,” replied Khalid in low tones that thrilled with passion. “Nay, what dearer destiny could man desire than to be the Adam of a new world of which you were the Eve?”

The words of her husband—for Khalid was her husband now as well as her slave—brought a sudden flush to Olga’s face, and this was succeeded by an almost deathly pallor. She put up her hand to the broadened circlet of gold which concealed the terrible scar of the wound made by Alan’s bullet, and said almost in a whisper—

[362]

“You and I—yes, you and I may live. We will! But if we do we must save ourselves alone.”

And with that she left him abruptly and went to her own room with the plan of her last crime already shaped in her mind.

She was the only woman on board the Revenge. Her maid Anna had been left behind at Alexandria, a maniac driven mad by the universal terror. What of Boris and the twenty-five men who formed the air-ship’s crew? If they were permitted to survive to the time when there would be no law but might, she would be the one woman in the world—one woman, beautiful and almost defenceless, among those who, though now her servants, would then be ready to slay each other in the dispute as to which of them should be her master.

Such a thought in such a mind as hers could have but one outcome. When the hour for the midday meal arrived, she bade Boris invite the whole crew into the main saloon, saying that, as this might be the last meal that any of them would eat, they would take it together. Then, as though moved by some sudden gracious fancy, she filled for every man with her own hands a glass of the best and oldest wine that had been reserved for her own use.

Khalid, rigid Moslem as he was, refused it, and she only touched it with her lips, but the others drained their glasses and drank death at her hands, even as the Aerians had drunk it in the same fashion and at the same table seven years before.

But this time it was fated that her sin should find her out more quickly. Later on in the afternoon Boris, to his amazement and alarm, found every man of his crew succumbing to an irresistible drowsiness, and soon this began to affect himself. A terrible thought at once flashed into his ever-suspicious mind. Fighting against the stupor that was stealing over his senses, he took a deep draught of strong spirit.

This conquered the poison for a time and cleared his intellect sufficiently for him to see what his pitiless mistress had done, and then there rose up in his mind a desperate longing for[363] vengeance on the murderess who had used him and his companions as long as they were useful and then poisoned them like so many rats.

He took out his pistol and examined it to see if it was charged, and then, with the poison and the spirit fighting in his brain for mastery, he made his way from the engine-room to the quarter-deck, where Olga and Khalid were standing, watching with strained, fascinated eyes and faces that looked livid and corpse-like in the unnatural light of the Fire-Cloud, the long tongues of many-coloured flame that were shooting like so many gigantic serpents down from the zenith, as though they would lick the life-blood out of the world that now lay panting for breath and paralysed with fear beneath them.

Just as he reached the top of the companion-way a mist swam before Boris’s eyes, his brain reeled, and he stumbled forward on to the deck, discharging his pistol aimlessly as he did so. The bullet struck and broke to fragments against the bulwarks. Khalid and Olga turned round to see him lying on his side with savagely-gleaming eyes, livid face, and foam-flecked lips, trying to raise himself on one hand and take aim at them with the other.

As Khalid sprang forward Olga’s ever-ready pistol came out of her belt. She cried to Khalid to get out of the line of fire, but just as she spoke Boris made his last effort, and, taking what aim he could, pulled the trigger. Khalid stopped short and clasped his hand to his right side. Then Olga, with a low cry of fury breaking from her white lips through her clenched teeth, sent a bullet through Boris’s brain just as he was struggling to bring his pistol up again.

“Are you hurt, Khalid?” she asked with a deadly fear at her heart as she crossed the deck to where he was standing with his hand still pressed to his side.

“Yes,” he gasped. “He has shot me through the lung.”

Then he coughed, and Olga saw drops of blood on his black beard and moustache. Without wasting any time in useless words she helped him down into the saloon and set herself at[364] once to examine and dress his wound. The bullet had entered between the fourth and fifth ribs on the right side, drilled a clean hole through the lower lobe of the right lung, and passed out at the back without touching any bone.

With perfect rest and quiet there was nothing to prevent recovery from such a wound, but Olga shuddered as she thought of its consequences in their present situation. If Khalid succumbed, as he well might do under the unknown terrors and dangers of the night that was now so near, she would have to choose between killing herself beside him, or, if the rock-chambers of Mount Terror proved a safe asylum, living mateless and alone until she starved to death on the wilderness that the world would be when it had passed through its baptism of fire.

She satisfied Khalid’s whispered request for an explanation of Boris’s attempt on their lives by saying that he had probably made himself drunk in an attempt to fortify himself against the terrors that were multiplying around him. Then she went through the ship and in a few minutes came back and said—

“I shall have to take the ship to Mount Terror myself. It was not only Boris, for every man of the crew is dead drunk. Think of them making such brutes of themselves at such a time!

“No,” she continued, putting her hand on his shoulder as she saw him make an attempt to rise. “You must not move yet; you will want all your strength when we get there, for you will have to regulate the engines while I am in the conning-tower. As for these animals, we will leave them to their fate.”

A couple of hours later she went on deck to see whether Mount Terror, or at anyrate the smoke-crest of Mount Erebus, was in sight, for the Revenge had now been flying almost long enough to have reached the confines of Antarctica. The speed was, however, so great that nothing was distinctly visible. There was only the flaming heaven above and a grey blur beneath, so she went to the engine-room and slowed down to a hundred miles an hour.

[365]

Then she helped Khalid to the engineer’s seat in front of the controlling levers and took her place in the conning-tower. She had scarcely been at her post half an hour before she saw the huge white cones of the twin mountains of Antarctica shining against the dull grey sky beyond, one of them crowned as she had last seen it by a long stream of smoke that rose almost vertically in the windless air.

She signalled to Khalid to reduce the speed, first to fifty and then to thirty miles an hour, allowing the Revenge at the same time to sink gently down towards the ice-covered continent. She crossed the well-remembered bay in which the Narwhal had performed her terrible exploit, swept over the ice-wall at an elevation of a hundred feet, swung the ship round and stopped her in front of the great cleft in the side of Mount Terror.

No human foot seemed to have trodden the Antarctic solitude from the day she left it to crown herself Tsarina of the Russias to this one on which she brought her flagship back with its crew of murdered men to seek her last chance of life amidst the general doom which she could now almost bring herself to believe she had directly brought upon the world.

She ran the Revenge slowly into the vast portal that yawned black and deep before her between the snow slopes of the mountain, and then, turning on the search-light, took her along the great gallery which led to the shore of the subterranean lake, and there lowered her for the last time to the earth. Then she and Khalid disembarked, he moving slowly and painfully, and she supporting him as well as she was able, and watching him with the intense anxiety of a supreme selfishness which had now centred itself upon him as the one possibility of making her life endurable.

Thus did Tsarina Olga and Khalid the Magnificent, conquerors of the earth and sharers of the world-throne, come back, one wounded almost to death, and the other half distraught with fear and perplexity, to take refuge at the uttermost ends of the earth from the assault of the foe that had confounded all their schemes of conquest.

[366]

Leaving the Revenge in the great gallery, she led him to the council chamber and laid him on the cushions of the luxurious divan on which she had been wont to hold her audiences. There she examined and redressed his wound, and then for the next three hours she busied herself bringing supplies of food and drink from the ship and preparing for the final siege which their last stronghold would so soon have to endure.

Then the fancy took her to go once more into the air to take one more look at the world and the splendours of the fate that was menacing it. Nineteen hours had passed since she gave the order to head the Revenge for Mount Terror. Sixteen of these had been consumed in the most rapid flight that the air-ship had ever accomplished. So fast had the Revenge flown westward and southward that the sun had almost seemed to stand still waiting for her journey to be accomplished, but still it had slowly sunk farther and farther down into the luminous mist that now seemed to fill the whole sky.

The difference between the longitude of Aeria and Mount Terror had lengthened the last fateful day by nearly five hours, but now the end was very near at hand, and here even, on the very confines of the world, life had little more than four hours to live. To the north the whole sky was flaming out into indescribable splendours, and the long fire-streams radiating from the nucleus now seemed to be literally holding the planet in their clasp. Enormous meteors were bursting out from the heart of the flaming cloud and exploding without a sound in the ever-silent abysses of space.

She stood rooted to the spot by the weird and awful glories of the spectacle, and for the time being seemed to forget even Khalid and the indescribable dangers that were threatening them both. Instead of being daunted, her spirit rose as though in response to the splendours before her. She felt that she was standing upon Nature’s funeral pyre watching the conflagration of the world she had ruined. Saving only Khalid there was not another human being within thousands of miles of her, and in her loneliness her soul seemed to expand and rise to a nobility that it had never known before.

[367]

She saw the utter insignificance and contemptibility of the human strife which had been superseded and silenced by this majestic assault of the primal forces of Nature, and for the first time in her life she thought of herself and her sins with a disgust and shame that humbled her in her own eyes to the dust.

So she stood and watched, oblivious of everything but the celestial glories above and around her, until a rapid series of frightful explosions seemed to run roaring round the whole horizon. She looked up with shaded eyes towards the zenith. The central mass had suddenly become convulsed and expanded until it looked as though the whole sky had been transformed into an ocean of fire torn by incessant storms.

Huge masses of many-coloured flame were falling from it in all directions on the devoted earth, and as each of these entered the atmosphere it burst into myriads of fragments which fell in swarms until the blazing sky was literally raining fire over sea and land.

The blazing Sky was literally raining Fire over Sea and Land. Page 367.

The Fire-Cloud had at last invaded the outer confines of the earth’s atmosphere.

All this while there had been no change in the Antarctic cold of the air, but soon after the first storm of explosions roared out Olga felt a puff of warm tainted air blow across her face. Then came another and another, and then she heard what had never been heard before on the slopes of Mount Terror—the sound of running water. The snows were melting, and soon there would come avalanche and deluge.

She hurried back into the council chamber, convinced that it was no longer safe to remain in the open air. She made the great bronze doors fast and covered them with layer after layer of thick heavy curtains. Every other opening into the chamber she closed up as tightly as possible. In the nature of the case they were compelled to trust to the supply of air already in it to last them through the ordeal.

Then she went and sat down on the divan by Khalid’s side, and, taking his hand in hers, bent over him and kissed him on the lips, saying—

“Now we must wait for life or death together!”

[368]

And so they waited—waited while the ages-old snow and ice melted from the bare black rocks under the fierce breath of the fire-storm; while the ocean of flame seethed and roared and eddied about them, licking up the seas and melted snows and fighting with them as fire and water have fought since the world began; while the foundations of the Southern Pole quivered and rocked beneath their feet, and the walls of their refuge quaked and cracked with the throes of the writhing earth, and cosmos was dissolved into chaos once more.

[369]
EPILOGUE.
“VENGEANCE IS MINE.”

“THE temperature has been normal now for three hours. Don’t you think we may venture to raise the sluice-gate?”

“I see nothing against it. If the world is not habitable again now it never will be. It is a good two days since the contact now, and if the atmosphere had been burnt up or carried away by the attraction of the comet it would either be much colder or much hotter than that.”

“Very well then, up it comes, and then we shall get our last question answered.”

It was Alan who thus questioned and answered his father. All had gone well with the refugees of Mount Austral and the remnant of the Aerian race. Their science and their faith in themselves had been triumphantly justified by the event and had carried them safely through the sternest ordeal that man had ever been called upon to face.

And now there was only one more chance to be met, one more problem to be solved. The temperature showed that the earth still possessed an atmosphere, but was that atmosphere capable of supporting human life? If yes, all would be well and they could go forth into the wasted world and possess and replenish it. If no, then all their labour would have been in vain and they might as well have died in battle or with those friends and kin who had taken their silent and dignified farewell of the world in the last days of the State of Aeria.

[370]

They had a calorimeter and a pressure-gauge communicating with the outer world to tell the temperature and the height of the water in the valley. The former, after rising for a few hours to over a thousand degrees, had now sunk back to normal, while the latter stood at thirty feet above the entrance doors to the cavern.

The machinery for raising the sluice-gate was put into motion and they watched it with almost breathless anxiety lest the straining or shifting of the rocks, which had been very perceptible during the terrific convulsions which had apparently lasted for nearly ten hours, should have so dislocated the grooves that the gate could not be raised.

There were a few preliminary creaks and groans, a hitch and an increased strain on the lifting chains, and then the great sheet of steel rose easily and smoothly to the top of the channel and the pent-up waters rushed forth in a black boiling flood through the narrow opening and roared away, foaming and tossing along the bottom of the crevasse, once more on their way to their unknown destination.

Very soon after this it was discovered that the waters were subsiding much more rapidly than could be accounted for by the volume that escaped through the subterranean channel. It was therefore necessary to conclude that there must have been some convulsion in another part of the mountains which had opened a fresh channel from the lake to the outer world.

The next step was to raise the two inner of the three doors which guarded the entrance to the caverns. The raising of the first one showed the ice still intact between it and the second, and this had to be broken up and removed before the second could be reached. Then the middle door was raised an inch or so and the water spurted out from beneath it.

Was this the water of the melted ice or was it that which filled the valley? Had their outer door stood firm or had it cracked or shrivelled up under the heat of the furnace through which the earth had passed? It flowed for ten minutes and then slackened and stopped. The outer door had held fast. Then, in case of accidents, the middle one was lowered again[371] and they waited until the waters should have sufficiently subsided to enable them to challenge the last hazard on which their fate depended.

The sluice-gate had been raised at what would be four o’clock on the morning of the 26th of September, if the cataclysm through which the earth had passed had not so far affected the terrestrial economy as to alter the relations of day and night. Twelve hours later the pressure-gauge ceased to act, showing that the rapidly-sinking waters of the lake had reached the threshold of the outer door. The time had now come to ask the question on the answer to which the lives of the remnant of humanity depended—was the atmosphere breathable or not?

That was the one question which occupied, to the momentary exclusion of all others, the mind of every Aerian who was in the caverns. The middle gate was lifted, and every heart stood still as Alan and Alexis strode forward into the dark passage and grasped the levers which actuated the lifting mechanism of the outer one.

They took one glance back at the anxious faces which showed so white in the gleam of the electric lamps, and then they pulled. The machinery creaked and groaned as the power was applied. Then came a rending sound and a dull crash. The door lifted a little, quivered and dropped again, and remained immovable.

“The machinery has broken down!” said Alan, going back into the gallery. “There must have been a land-slip over the doorway.”

“What will you do then?” said Alma. “Surely we have not escaped the conflagration of the world to be buried alive after all!”

“No,” he said, looking down at her with a reassuring smile. “It can hardly be as bad as that. Unless a whole mountain has fallen in front of the door, we shall soon find a way out.”

The first thing to be done was to get rid of the door, and this Alan accomplished in summary fashion by undermining it with drills, and then, after he had sent everyone into the inner[372] recesses of the caverns, tearing it to fragments with a small quantity of the explosive used in the shells.

A mass of earth and stones came rolling into the gallery immediately after the explosion, then an excavating machine was run up on hastily-laid rails and was soon boring its way into the obstructing mass. A distance of ten yards was tunnelled and then there was a rattle and whir in front of the machine, which told that the work was done. There was a cloud of dust from pulverised stones and earth and then came a rush of fresh warm air and a gleam of sunlight through the opening.

“Thank God the atmosphere is still there and the sun is still shining!” cried Alan, as he drew the machine back and ran out into the open air.

He looked about him for a few moments and then turned and walked back to his companions, who were already crowding towards the opening with faces glad with new hope and drawing deep breaths of the life-giving air, which the mysterious alchemy of Nature had restored unchanged to the earth. He stopped them with a gesture and said—

“Don’t go out yet till we have made the tunnel safe. You will find an awful change out yonder. Aeria is no longer a paradise. It is only a swamp surrounded by naked rocks!”

And so they found it to be when they at length passed out through the tunnel and stood upon the black oozy shores of the dreary lake which still half filled what had once been the lovely land of Aeria.

The once verdure-clad mountains rose up bare and gaunt and blackened, a vast circle of ragged rock, unrelieved by a blade of grass or a single tree of all the myriads that had clothed their slopes three days before. It seemed as though the clock of Time had been put back through countless ages and the world was once more as it had been before the first forms of life appeared upon it.

But still the air that fanned their cheeks was fresh and warm and sweet, and the afternoon sun was shining across the western peaks out of a cloudless sky of purest blue. The calm[373] had come after the storm and the world was waiting to begin its life anew. The Alma and the Isma had utterly vanished, and were probably buried deep in the black slimy mud. Of the city of Aeria not a vestige was visible.

The first thing that Alan did as soon as the last momentous question had thus been asked and answered was to ask his father to order one of the smaller air-ships, which had been stored in sections in the cavern, to be put together and charged with motive-power as rapidly as possible.

“Certainly if you wish it,” he replied; “but what is your reason for being in such a hurry to reassert your empire of the air?”

“I can tell you now,” said Alan in reply, “what there would have been no need to tell you if, well, if we had not been able to leave the caverns. Just after sunrise on the last day of the battle Bruno Vincent brought the Orion as near as he could to the Alma and told me by signal that he had seen the Revenge leave the fight and head away at full speed to the southward and westward. That means, I think, that Olga’s courage failed her at the last and that she meant to try the forlorn hope of saving herself in her old stronghold at Mount Terror. I am going to see whether she is alive or dead.”

“And suppose by a miracle you should find her alive. What then?” said Alma, who had overheard his request, coming up to him and looking up into his face with melting eyes as she slipped her hand caressingly through his arm.

“The world is beginning its life anew in us, dear,” he replied with tenderness in his eyes but none in his voice, “and there shall be no snake in our Eden if I”—

“If you have to be the Cain of the new world to prevent it!” interrupted Alma, reading his dark meaning at a glance, and interpreting it with a directness and force that startled him. “No, Alan, that must not be! If she has escaped the vengeance of God you may well forego yours. I can hardly think that she is still alive, but it is right that we should go and see”—

“We!” echoed Alan before she could finish. “Do you[374] mean that you will come with me? No, Alma, you must not do that. Remember that if she has by any chance escaped, the crew of the Revenge may be alive too, and then we may have to fight”—

“No, no, Alan, not that! not that!” she cried with a gesture of horror. “The world has done with fighting, for there is nothing left to fight about. We will go as friends with open hands to them, and the new life of the world shall be begun with the forgiveness of our enemies. Who are we that we should judge after the Voice of God has spoken?”

In the end she had her way, and so it came to pass that soon after sunrise on the following day an air-ship, which a hundred skilled and willing hands had toiled all night in fitting together and equipping for her voyage, rose into the air above the ghastly wilderness that had once been Aeria, and winged her way towards the southern pole.

Twenty hours later she sank down on to the ice that had already re-covered the rocks in front of the fissure in the side of Mount Terror, and as she did so a figure came forth out in the darkness into the half light of the polar morning.

“Look! There she is!” said Alma in an awe-stricken whisper to Alan. “Alone in this awful place! Come, let us go to her.”

As she spoke the gangway steps were lowered and she descended them first, followed by Alan, his father, Alexis, and Isma. Some strange influence held the others back as she advanced with outstretched hands and words of kindly greeting on her lips towards the piteous wreck of womanhood that slowly emerged from the gloom of the chasm.

Olga Romanoff had survived the doom of the world, but the hand of a just vengeance had fallen heavily upon her. Her once splendid form was shrunken as though three score years had passed over her in as many hours. Her left side was half paralysed and her shaking limbs hung loosely as she tottered along.

Olga Romanoff had survived the Doom of the World. Page 374.

Her golden fillet and jewelled wings had been cast away, leaving bare the great livid scar that crossed her forehead; her white, drawn face was seamed with deep lines marked by agony[375] and terror, and the thick masses of the once glorious hair that hung about her head and shoulders were streaked with grey and clotted with blood.

The fire had died out of her eyes and the red from her shrivelled lips, and the weak broken voice in which she answered Alma’s greeting quavered like that of an old woman in her dotage.

“I have been expecting you,” she said as Alma took her trembling hands in hers. “I thought you would come. You have come for Alan, haven’t you? He is yonder, but he is dead. I kept him alive as long as I could but he was wounded, and when the world was changed to hell for my sins the fire choked him.

“I tried to die too, but it wouldn’t kill me. There was air enough for me and I wanted to give it to him to breathe but he wouldn’t take it. I suppose you have been dead and are an angel now like those others behind you. Come, I will take you to him. It is dark but I know the way.”

The moment she began to speak Alma saw the awful calamity that had befallen her. The haughty daring spirit that had essayed and almost achieved the conquest of the world was dissolved in the bitter waters of the Marah of Madness. The soul that had quailed before no human fear had collapsed into imbecility under the superhuman terrors which she alone had witnessed and survived. Without a word she suffered her to lead her into the gloom, beckoning to the others to follow. They turned on the electric lamps they had brought with them and entered the chasm.

They reached the black ash-strewn floor of the gloomy subterranean lake in the heart of the mountain, and Alan, pausing for a moment, flashed the light of his lamp round the vast chamber that had once been so terribly familiar to him. The walls were burnt and blackened, and here and there masses of rock and boulders had been calcined to dust as though the long pent-up lava that had once flowed in fiery torrents over them had again been let loose.

Then the light fell upon something that was not rock and[376] which gave back a dull metallic sheen. He took a few strides towards it and soon recognised it as all that was left of the once shapely and beautiful Ithuriel, the old flagship of the Aerian fleet with which he had lost the mastery of his own manhood and his people the empire of the air.

The crystal dome of the roof was gone and lay in patches of congealed glass about the blackened and shrivelled-up deck. The wings were burnt away and the transverse ribs of azurine stood out bare and twisted like the bones of a skeleton, and in the fore part of the hull a great gap showed where her magazine had taken fire and burnt with such terrific heat that it had melted even the azurine plates of which she was built.

“The poor old Ithuriel has flown her last flight!” he said to himself with a sigh as he turned away and followed the others, thinking sadly of all that had come to pass since he had last trodden her deck.

Olga, holding Alma by the hand, led the way from the lower gallery to the council chamber. As she pulled the curtain aside from the doorway a puff of foul air that seemed to bear a faint smell of blood was wafted in their faces. Alan called Alma back, fearing that she would faint in the sickening atmosphere, and at the sound of his voice Olga stopped short and looked back with a reawakened gleam in her eyes.

“Who is that?” she cried, pressing her hand to her brow. “Why, it is Alan! But no, Alan is here—here. He has been with me all the time since Khalid shot him. My God, can he have come to life again?”

Her voice rose to a shrill wavering scream as she said this. She dropped Alma’s hand and ran with faltering, stumbling steps towards a divan on which lay the form of a man whose black beard and moustache were thickly clotted with blood. She stopped and bent over it for a moment, then she raised herself and faced them with her hands locked in her hair and the light of frenzied insanity blazing in her eyes.

“No! No!” she cried in a voice, half a scream and half a wail, that rang weirdly through the great chamber. “He is dead still and that is only his ghost. Oh, Alan, my love, Alan![377] Why could I not die with you? Curse the hand that wounded you. Curse”—

In the one syllable her voice died away from a scream to a whisper, and at the same instant the paralysis, which had already smitten her once, laid its swift icy hand on her heart and brain. She swayed to and fro for a moment and then fell forward across the corpse of the man whose love for her had plunged the world into madness on the eve of its doom.

“What an awful end!” gasped Alma, shuddering in the close embrace she had sought in Alan’s arms. “And yet, Alan, she loved you to the end through all. That love for you was the one true thing in her life, and for its sake I will say God forgive her! Come, let us go!”

The End