park, into which the Yusupoff Gardens of the nineteenth century had
been expanded, after which they would see the ice palaces illuminated
at dusk, then dine, and finish the day at the opera. When the air-ship
arrived, a rapid flight was to be taken across Europe over the Alps
and back to Moscow, across Italy, Greece, and the Black Sea, which
would enable Alan and Alexis to deposit their guests with their Moscow
friends soon after nightfall.

The sleigh drive took the form of a race, on the plain stretching
towards Lake Ladoga, between the two troikas driven by Serge and Olga,
who had so managed matters that she had Alan for a companion, and who,
not a little to Serge’s disgust, won it, after a desperate struggle,
by a head. The race was a revelation to the two Aerians, and when Alan
handed Olga out of the sleigh after they had trotted quietly back to
the city, the interest which she had excited in him during the railway
journey had already begun to deepen into a sentiment much more pleasing
and dangerous.

The rest of the morning was devoted to driving about the city, and to
paying a visit to the ancient fortress of Peter and Paul, which alone
of all the fortress prisons of Russia had been preserved intact as
a fitting monument of fallen despotism and a warning to all future
generations. Once at least in his life every man in Aeria visited this
fortress, as good Moslems visit Mecca, and this was the duty which Alan
and Alexis were now performing.

In one of the horrible dungeons deep down in the foundations of the
fortress, under the waters of the Neva, they were shown a massive gold
plate riveted on to the rough, damp, stone wall. Its surface was kept
brightly polished, and it looked strangely incongruous with the gloom
and squalor of the cell. On it stood an inscription in platinum letters
let into the gold:

“_In this cell Israel di Murska, afterwards known as Natas, the Master
of the Terror, was imprisoned in the year 1881, previous to his exile
to Siberia by order of Alexander Romanoff the last of the Tyrants of
Russia._”

With feelings wide asunder as love and hate, or gratitude and revenge,
the descendant of Natas and the daughter of the Romanoffs stood in
front of this memorial plate, and read the simple and yet pregnant
words. Alan and Alexis both bent their heads as if in reverence for
a moment, but Olga and Serge gazed at it with heads erect and eyes
glowing with the fires of anger, in a silence that was broken by Alan
saying--

“Liberty surely never had a stranger temple than this, and yet this
dungeon is to us what the Tomb of the Prophet is to the Moslems. I
wonder what the Last of the Tsars would have thought if he could have
foreseen even a little part of all that sprang from the tragedy that
was begun in this dismal cell?”

“He would have killed him,” said Olga, carried away for the moment by
an irrepressible burst of passion, “and then there would have been no
Natas, no Terror, and no Terrorist air-fleet, and Alexander Romanoff
would have died master of the world instead of a chained felon in
Siberia! Your ancestor, Richard Arnold, would have starved in his
garret, or killed himself in despair, as many other geniuses did before
him, and”--

“And the world would have remained the slave-market of tyrants and the
shambles of murderous men. Let us thank God that Natas lived to do his
work!” said Alan in a tone of solemn reverence, wondering not a little
at Olga’s strange outburst, and yet not having the remotest idea of its
true cause.

Neither Olga nor Serge could reply to this speech. They would have
bitten their tongues through rather than say “Amen” to it, and
anything else they dare not have said. After a moment more of somewhat
constrained silence, Olga turned towards the door and said--

“Come! Let us go, the air of this place poisons me!”

When they got on the ice after lunch, Olga was not a little astonished
to find that, perfect as she and Serge were in skating, the two Aerians
were little inferior to them, despite the fact that they had just left
their tropical home for the first time.

“How is this?” said Olga to Alan, as, hand in hand, they went sweeping
over the ice in long, easy curves. “I suppose you manufacture your ice
for skating purposes in Aeria?”

“No,” he said. “Some of our mountains rise above the snow-line, and in
their upper valleys they have little lakes, so, when we want a skating
surface, we just pump the water up and flood them and let it freeze.
Besides this--I don’t think there is any harm in my telling you that we
have a sort of wheel-skate which runs quite as easily as steel does on
ice.”

“Ah,” said Olga, possessed by a sudden thought. “Then I suppose that
is why the streets of your splendid city are so broad, and white, and
smooth?”

Quietly as the words were spoken, Alan’s hand tightened upon hers as he
heard them with a grip that almost made her cry out with pain. It was
some moments before he recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to
ask her the meaning of her unexpected and amazing question. She greeted
his question with a saucy smile and a mocking, upward glance, and said
quietly--

“Simply because I have seen them!”

It was a bow drawn at a venture. She had suddenly determined to test
the truth of her vision and hazard a description from it of the unknown
land.

“You have seen them?” cried Alan, now more amazed than ever. “But,
pardon me, even at the risk of contradicting you I must tell you that
that is impossible. No one not a born Aerian has set eyes on Aeria for
more than a hundred years.”

“So you think perhaps,” she said in the same quiet, half-mocking tone.
“Well now, listen and tell me whether this description is entirely
incorrect. If it is correct you need say nothing, if it is not you can
tell me so.”

And then she began, while he listened in a silence of utter
stupefaction, and described the valley and city of Aeria as she had
seen them in her dream-vision. When she had finished he was silent for
several moments, and then said in a voice that told her that she had
really seen it as though with the eyes of flesh--

“What are you? A sorceress, or--No, you cannot be an Aerian girl in
disguise, for none ever leaves the country till she is married.”

“Then as I cannot be the latter,” said Olga, “you must, I suppose,
consider me the former. Now I shall take my revenge for your reticence
in the train yesterday, and tell you no more. We are quits to that
extent at least, and now we will go back to my brother, if you please.”

With this Alan was forced to be content. Indeed, he could not have
pursued the subject without breaking his oath, and so a few minutes
later it came about that Olga and Serge were skating together in an
unfrequented part of the lake, and here Olga took an opportunity that
she might not have again of telling him as much as she thought fit for
him to know of her plans for capturing the air-ship on the following
day.

“I needn’t tell you,” said she, “that this air-ship is worth everything
to us, and that therefore we must be ready to go to any extremities to
get possession of it. It is the first step to the command of the world,
for you heard Alan say to-day that she is the swiftest vessel in the
whole Aerian fleet.”

“But to do that we must first overcome the crew,” said Serge, looking
anxiously about to see if there was anyone within earshot. “How are we
going to do that--two of us against ten or a dozen, armed with powers
we know nothing about?”

“We must find means to drug them--to poison them, if necessary, during
to-morrow’s voyage,” came the reply, in a whisper that made his heart
stand still for the moment with utter horror.

“Good God! is that really necessary? It seems a horrible thing to do,
when they are trusting us and taking us as their guests,” he said in a
low, trembling tone.

“Yes,” she replied, with a well simulated shudder; “it is horrible, I
know, but it is necessary. Remember that we have solemnly sworn war to
the knife against this people, and that, armed as they are, all open
assault is impossible; therefore they must be struck in secret, or not
at all.

“Now listen. I have brought with me a flask which my grandfather gave
me a day or two before he died. It contains enough of a tasteless,
powerful narcotic to send twenty people to sleep so that nothing will
wake them for several hours. I will give you half of this to-night and
keep half myself, and one of us must find an opportunity to get the
crew to take it in their wine, or whatever they may drink, for they are
sure to have one or two meals while we are on board.

“To-night I will send instructions in cypher to the Lossenskis in
Vorobièvŏ to tell them that as many as possible of the Friends must be
ready for action by eight to-morrow night, and must wait, if necessary,
night after night till we come. If all goes well we shall select the
new crew of the _Ithuriel_ from them before we see two more sunrises.
In fact, by the time we return from our voyage we must have absolute
control of the vessel.

“Such an opportunity as this will never offer itself again, and I, for
my part, am determined to risk anything, not excepting life itself,
to take the best advantage of it. It would be madness to allow any
scruples to stand in our way when the Empire of the Air is almost
within our grasp.”

“And none shall, so far as I am concerned,” replied Serge in a low,
steady voice that showed that his horror at the deed they contemplated
had succumbed, at least for the moment, to the tremendous temptation
offered by the prospect of success.

“Spoken like a true Romanoff!” said Olga, looking up at him with a
sweet smile of approval. “As the deed is so shall the reward be. Now
we must get back to our friends. We will find a means to get an hour
together before to-night to arrange matters further, and we will have
Alan and Alexis to supper with us after the opera, and then I will
begin my share of the work. Once the air-ship is ours, we can hide
her in one of the ravines of the Caucasus, hold a council of war in
the villa at Vorobièvŏ, and set about the work of the Revolution in
regular fashion.”

The rest of the day was spent in accordance with the plans already
agreed on. Olga and Serge had tea together in their private room before
going to the theatre, and put the finishing touches to their plans for
the momentous venture of the following day; and Alan and Alexis, all
unsuspecting, accepted their invitation to supper after their return
from the opera-house.

The seemingly innocent and pleasant little supper, which passed off so
merrily in the private sitting-room occupied by Olga and Serge, had
but one incident which calls for description here, and even that was
unnoticed not only by the two guests, but by Serge himself.

Just before midnight, Olga proposed that, in accordance with the
ancient custom of Russia, they should drink a glass of punch, brewed
in the Russian style; and as she volunteered to brew it herself, it is
needless to say that the invitation was at once accepted.

The apparatus stood upon a little table in one corner of the room. For
a single minute her back was turned to the three sitting at the table
in the centre; her share in the conversation was not interrupted for
an instant, and no one saw a couple of drops of sparkling, blue liquid
fall into each of three of the glasses from the little flask that she
held concealed in the palm of her hand, and when she turned round
with the little silver tray on which the glasses stood, the flask was
resting at the bottom of her dress-pocket.

She handed a glass to each of them, and then took her own up from the
side-table where she had left it. She went to her place, and, holding
her glass up, said simply--

“Here’s to that which each of us has nearest at heart!” and drank.

All followed suit, and as the clock chimed twelve a few minutes later,
the two Aerians took their leave, and left Olga and Serge alone.

“You said you would begin your share of the work to-night,” said he, as
soon as they were alone. “Have you done so?”

“If you do your work to-morrow as successfully as I have done mine
to-night,” replied Olga, looking steadily into his eyes as she spoke,
“the Empire of the Air will no longer be theirs.”

Serge returned her glance in silence. He wanted to speak, but some
superior power seemed to have laid a spell upon his will, and as long
as Olga’s burning eyes were fixed on his, his tongue was paralysed,
nay, more than this, his mind even refused to shape the sentences that
he would have liked to speak. Olga held him mute before her for several
minutes, and then she said quietly, still keeping her eyes fixed on
his--

“Now speak, and tell me what you would do if I told you that I
preferred Alan as a lover to you, and that I would rather a thousand
times be his slave and plaything than your wife.”

“I should say that you are the mistress of my destiny, that I have no
law but your will, and that it is for you to give me joy or pain, as
seems good to you.”

Serge spoke the unnatural words in a calm, passionless tone, rather
as though he were speaking in a sort of hypnotic trance than in full
command of his senses. A strange, subtle influence had been stealing
through his veins and over his nerves ever since he had drunk the
liquor which Olga had prepared.

He seemed perfectly incapable of resisting any suggestion that
might have been made to him. His will was paralysed, but even the
consciousness of this fact was fading from his mind. All his passions
were absolutely in abeyance. Even his love for Olga failed to inspire
him with any jealous resentment of words which half an hour before
would have goaded him to frenzy. He heard them as though they concerned
someone else.

The ruin of his life’s hopes, which they implied so distinctly, had
no meaning for him; so far as his volition was concerned he was an
automaton, ready to obey without question the dictates of her imperious
will.

“That will do,” said Olga, in the tone of a mistress addressing a
servant. “Now go to bed and sleep well, and remember the work that lies
before you to-morrow.”

“I will,” said Serge, and without another word, without attempting to
take his customary good-night kiss, he walked out of the room, leaving
her to the enjoyment of her victory and the contemplation of triumphs
that now seemed almost certain to her.

Punctual to its appointed time, the air-ship appeared in mid-air over
the city a few minutes before ten the next morning. It sank slowly and
gracefully to within a hundred feet of the ground over the garden of
the hotel in which the two Aerians and their new friends were staying.

Signals were rapidly exchanged as before between Alan and one of the
crew standing on the afterpart of the deck. Then it sank down on to one
of the snow-covered lawns of the garden, a door opened in the glass
covering of the deck, a short, light, folding ladder with hand-rails
dropped out of it to the ground, and Alan, springing up three or four
of the steps, held out his hand to Olga, saying--

“Come along! we shall have a crowd round us in another minute.”

This was true, for the appearance of the air-ship had already attracted
hundreds of people in the streets, and many of them had already made
their way into the gardens of the hotel in order to get a closer view
of her.

Olga, feeling not a little like a queen ascending a throne, ran lightly
up the steps, followed by Serge and Alexis. The moment they got on to
the deck the ladder was drawn up, the glass door slid noiselessly to,
and Alan at once presented them to his friends on deck.

While the introductions were taking place, the wings of the air-ship
began to vibrate and undulate with a wavy motion from forward aft, at
first slowly, and then more and more swiftly, her propeller whirled
round, and the wonderful craft rose without a jar or a tremor from the
earth. Then the propellers began to revolve faster and faster, and
she shot forward and upward over the trees amid the admiring murmurs
of the crowds in the streets about the hotel. But little did those
light-hearted sightseers dream, any more than did the captain and
crew of the _Ithuriel_, that this aerial pleasure-cruise was destined
to mark the beginning of a tragedy that would involve the whole of
civilised humanity in a catastrophe so colossal that the like of it had
never been seen or even dreamt of on earth before. From the wit of a
woman and the weakness of a man were now to be evolved the elements of
destruction that ere long should lay the world in ruins.

CHAPTER VIII. THE NEW TERROR.

FIVE years had passed since the _Ithuriel_ had vanished like a cloud
from the sky, leaving, so far as the air-ship itself was concerned, no
more trace than if she had soared into space beyond the sphere of the
earth’s attraction and departed to another planet.

All the rest of the winter of 2030-1, tidings had been sought most
anxiously, but in vain, by the kindred and friends of those who
had formed her crew during the ill-fated voyage on which she had
disappeared into the unknown. The earth had been ransacked east and
west, north and south, by the aerial fleet in search of the missing
_Ithuriel_, but without result.

She had been traced to St. Petersburg and Vorobièvŏ, but there, like
the phantom craft of the Flying Dutchman, she had melted into thin
air so far as any result of the search could show. But when the snows
thawed on the mountains of Norway, and the bodies of eight Aerians
who had formed her crew on her last fatal voyage were discovered by a
couple of foresters in a melting snowdrift on the very spot on which
Vladimir Romanoff had been killed with his companions by order of the
Supreme Council, a thrill both of horror and excitement ran through the
whole civilised world.

That their death was intimately connected with the disappearance of the
air-ship was instantly plain to everyone, and the only inference which
could be drawn from such a conclusion was that at last some power,
silent, mysterious, and intangible, had come into existence prepared to
dispute the empire of the world with the Aerians, and, more than this,
had already struck them a deadly blow which it was utterly beyond their
power to return.

The effects of this discovery were exactly what Olga had anticipated.
From the first time since their ancestors had conquered the earth and
made war impossible, the supreme authority of the Aerians was called
into question. It was quite beyond their power to conceal the fact
that their flagship had either deserted or been captured, incredible
as either alternative seemed. The Central Council therefore wisely
accepted the situation, and immediately after the discovery of the
bodies the President published a full account of her last voyage, as
far as was known, in the columns of _The European Review_, the leading
newspaper of the day in the Old World.

The only clue to the fate of the air-ship seemed to lie in the fact
that at St. Petersburg a youth and young girl with whom Alan and Alexis
had made friends on their journey from London had gone on board the
_Ithuriel_ for a trip to the clouds. But this led to nothing. Who was
to recognise the daughter of the Tsar and the last male scion of the
House of Romanoff in Olga and Serge Ivanitch, who had never been known
as anything but the orphan grandchildren of Paul Ivanitch, the sculptor.

More than this, even to entertain for a moment the supposition that
this boy and girl--for they were known to be little more--could by any
possible means have overcome the ten Aerians, armed as they were with
their terrible death-power, and then have vanished into space with the
air-ship would have been to shatter the supremacy of the Aerians at a
blow.

Even as it was, the wildest and most dangerous rumours began to fly
from lip to lip and nation to nation all round the world, and for the
first time since the days of the Terror the “Earth Folk” began to think
of the Aerians rather as men like themselves than as the superior race
which they had hitherto regarded them.

The President of Aeria at once issued a proclamation asking, in the
interests of peace and public security, for the assistance of all the
civilised peoples of the earth in his efforts to discover the lost
air-ship, and also conditionally declaring a war of extermination on
any Power or nation which either concealed the whereabouts of the
_Ithuriel_ or gave any assistance to those who might be in possession
of her. This proclamation was published simultaneously in all the
newspapers of the world, and produced a most profound sensation
wherever it was read.

The terrible magic of the ominous word “war” roused at once the
deathless spirit of combativeness that had lain dormant for all these
years. It was impossible not to recognise the fact that this mysterious
power, which had come unseen into existence and had snatched the finest
vessel in the Aerian navy from the possession of the Council with such
daring and skill that not a trace of her was to be found, could have
but one object in view, and that was to dispute the Empire of the Air
with the descendants of the Terrorists.

This could mean nothing else than the outbreak, sooner or later, of
a strife that would be a veritable battle of the gods, a struggle
which would shake the world and convulse human society throughout its
whole extent. The general sense of peace and security in which men had
lived for four generations was shattered at a stroke by the universal
apprehension of the blow that all men felt to be inevitable, but which
would be struck no man knew when or how.

A year passed, and nothing happened. The world went on its way in
peace, the Aerian patrols circled the earth with a moving girdle of
aerial cruisers, ready to give instantaneous warning of the first
reappearance of the lost _Ithuriel_; but nothing was discovered. If
she still existed, she was so skilfully concealed as to be practically
beyond the reach of human search.

Then without the slightest warning, while Anglo-Saxondom was in
the midst of the hundred and thirtieth celebration of the Festival
of Deliverance, the civilised world was started out of the sense of
security into which it had once more begun to fall by the publication,
in _The European Review_, of the following piece of intelligence:--

  A MYSTERY OF THE SEA.

  DISAPPEARANCE OF THREE TRANSPORTS.

  It is our duty to chronicle the astounding and disquieting fact that
  the three transports, _Massilia_, _Ceres_, and _Astræa_, belonging
  respectively to the Eastern, Southern, and Western Services, have
  disappeared.

  The first left New York for Southampton four days ago, and should
  have arrived yesterday. The Central Atlantic signalling station
  reported her “All well” at midday on Tuesday, and this is the last
  news that has been heard of her. The second was reported from Cape
  Verd Station on her voyage from Cape Town to Marseilles, and there
  all trace of her is lost, as she never reached the Canary Station.
  The third was last heard of from Station No. 2 in the Indian Ocean,
  which is situated at the intersection of the 80th meridian of east
  longitude with the 20th parallel of south latitude; she was on her
  way from Melbourne to Alexandria, and should have touched at Aden two
  days ago.

  The disappearance of these three magnificent vessels, filled as
  they were with passengers and loaded with cargoes of enormous value
  both in money and material, can only be described as a calamity of
  world-wide importance. Unhappily, too, the mystery which surrounds
  their fate invests it with a sinister aspect which it is impossible
  to ignore.

  That their loss is the result of accident or shipwreck it is almost
  impossible to believe. They represented the latest triumphs of modern
  shipbuilding. All were over forty thousand tons in measurement, and
  had engines capable of driving them at a speed of fifty nautical
  miles an hour through the water.

  For fifty years no ocean transport has suffered shipwreck or even
  serious injury, so completely has modern engineering skill triumphed
  over the now conquered elements. Added to this, no storms of even
  ordinary violence have occurred along their routes. After passing the
  stations at which they were last reported, they vanished, and that is
  all that is known about them.

  The President of Aeria has desired us to state that he has ordered
  his submarine squadrons stationed at Zanzibar, Ascension, and Fayal,
  to explore the ocean beds along the routes pursued by the transports.
  Until we receive news of the result of their investigation it will be
  well to refrain from further comment on this mysterious misfortune
  which has suddenly and unexpectedly fallen upon the world, and in
  doing so we shall only express the fervent desire of all civilised
  men and women when we express the hope that this calamity, grievous
  as it is, may not be the precursor of even greater misfortunes to
  come.

It would be almost impossible for us of the present day to form any
adequate estimate of the thrill of horror and consternation which this
brief and temperately-worded narration of the mysterious loss of the
three transports sent through the world of the twenty-first century.
Not only was it the first event of the kind that had occurred within
the memory of living men, but, saving the loss of the _Ithuriel_, it
was the first dark cloud that had appeared in the clear heaven of peace
and prosperity for more than a hundred and twenty years.

But terrible as was the state of excitement and anxiety into which it
threw the nations of the world, it gave place to a still deeper horror
and bewilderment when day after day passed and no tidings were received
of the three submarine squadrons, consisting of three vessels each,
which had been sent to inquire into the fate of the transports. They
dived beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, and that
was the last that was ever seen of them.

Month after month went by, every week bringing news of some fresh
calamity at sea--of the disappearance of transport after transport
along the great routes of ocean travel, of squadron after squadron
of submarine cruisers which plunged into the abysses of the sea to
discover and attack the mysterious enemy of mankind that lay hidden in
the depths, and which never reappeared on the surface. Whether they
were captured or destroyed it was impossible to say, simply because no
member of their crews ever returned to tell the tale.

Whatever doubt there had been as to the existence or hostile nature
of this ocean terror that was paralysing the trade of the world was
speedily set at rest by a discovery made in the spring of the year 2032
by a party of divers who descended to repair a fault in one of the
Atlantic cables about two hundred miles west of Ireland.

There, lying in the Atlantic ooze, they found the shattered fragments
of the _Sirius_, a transport which had disappeared about a month
before. The great hull of the splendid vessel had been torn asunder by
some explosive of tremendous power, and, more than this, her hold had
been rifled of all its treasure and the most valuable portions of its
cargo. After this there no longer remained any doubt that the depths
of the ocean were the hunting-ground of some foe of society, one at
least of whose objects was plunder.

The President and Council of Aeria found themselves at last confronted
and baffled by an enemy who could neither be seen nor reached in his
hiding-place, wherever it might be, beneath the surface of the waters.
Thousands of lives had been sacrificed, and treasure in millions had
been lost by the end of the first year of what men had now come to call
the New Terror.

New fleets of submarine cruisers were built and held in readiness
in all the great ports of the world, and these scoured the ocean
depths in all directions with no further result than the swift and
silent annihilation of vessel after vessel by some power which struck
irresistibly out of the darkness and then vanished the moment that the
blow had been delivered.

As yet, however, no enemy appeared on land or in the air, nor were any
tidings heard of the lost _Ithuriel_, or her captain and lieutenant.
The Aerians had replaced her with ten almost identical vessels and had
raised the strength of their navy to two hundred and fifty vessels,
one hundred of which were kept in readiness in Aeria, while the other
hundred and fifty were distributed in small squadrons at twenty-four
stations, half of which were in the Western hemisphere and half in the
Eastern.

The submarine warfare had now practically ceased. Nearly two hundred
vessels belonging to Aeria, Britain, and America, had been captured or
destroyed by an enemy which at the period at which this portion of the
narrative opens was as supreme throughout the realm of the waters as
the Aerians were in the air. To the menace of the air-ships this hidden
foe replied by severing all the oceanic cables and paralysing the
communication of the world save overland and through the air.

Thus, at the end of six years after the capture of the _Ithuriel_ by
Olga Romanoff more than half the work of those who had brought peace on
earth after the Armageddon of 1904 had been undone. All over the world,
not even excepting in Aeria, men lived in a state of constant anxiety
and apprehension, not knowing where or how their invisible enemy would
strike them next.

The Masters of the World were supreme no longer, for a new power had
arisen which, within the limits of the seas, had proved itself stronger
than they were. Communication between continent and continent had
almost ceased, save where the Aerian air-ships were employed. In six
short years the peace of the world had been destroyed and the stability
of society shaken.

Among the nations of Anglo-Saxondom the change had manifested itself by
a swift decadence into the worst forms of unbridled democracy. Men’s
minds were unhinged, and the most extravagant opinions found acceptance.

Parliaments had already been made annual and were fast sinking into
machines for registering the ever-changing opinions of rival factions
and their leaders. Sovereigns and presidents were little better than
popular puppets existing on sufferance. In short, all that Paul
Romanoff had prophesied was coming to pass more rapidly than even he
had expected so far as the area of the Anglo-Saxon Federation was
concerned.

In the Moslem Empire affairs were different, but no less threatening.
The Sultan Khalid the Magnificent, as he was justly styled by his
admirers, saw clearly that the time must come when this mysterious
enemy would emerge from the waters and attempt the conquest of the
land, and for three years past he had been manufacturing weapons
and forming armies against the day of battle which he considered
inevitable, and which he longed for rather than dreaded.

Thus, while Anglo-Saxondom was lapsing into the anarchy of unrestrained
democracy, the Moslem monarch was preparing to take advantage of the
issue of events which, skilfully turned to account, might one day make
him master of the world.

Such was the condition of affairs throughout the world on the 1st of
May 2036, and then the long-expected came in strange and terrible
shape. At midnight a blaze of light was seen far up in the sky over
the city of Aeria. A moment later something that must have been a
small block of metal fell from a tremendous height in the square in the
centre of the city, and was shivered to fragments by the force of its
fall.

On the splintered pavement where it fell was found a little roll of
parchment addressed to the President. It was taken to him, and he
opened it and read these words:--

  To Alan Arnold, President of Aeria.

  If you want your son Alan and his friend Alexis, go and look for them
  on an island which you will find near the intersection of the 40th
  parallel of south latitude and the 120th meridian of west longitude
  in the South Pacific. They have served my turn, and I have done with
  them. Perhaps they will be able to tell you how I have conquered the
  Empire of the Sea. Before long I shall have wrested the Empire of the
  Air from you as well.

  OLGA ROMANOFF.

CHAPTER IX. THE FLIGHT OF THE “REVENGE.”

ASTOUNDING, almost stupefying, as were the tidings conveyed by this
letter, which had dropped like a veritable bolt from the blue, the
challenge contained in the last sentence and the ominous name with
which it was signed were matters of infinitely greater and more instant
importance.

Alan Arnold was the responsible President of Aeria first and a father
afterwards. He lost not a moment in speculating upon the strange fate
of his son and first-born. The safety not only of Aeria, but of the
world, demanded his first attention, and he gave it.

Crushing the missive in his hand he took two swift strides to a
telephone in the wall of the room in which he had received the message
from the skies and delivered several rapid orders through it. If they
had been the words of a demi-god instead of those of a man their
effects could scarcely have been more instantaneous or marvellous.

On a hundred mountain-peaks all round the great valley of Aeria
enormous lights blazed out simultaneously, flinging long streams
of radiance, dazzling and intense, for miles into the sky towards
all points of the compass, and at the same moment fifty air-ships
soared up from their stations all round the mountains, flashing their
search-lights ahead and astern in all directions.

[Illustration: FLINGING LONG STREAMS OF RADIANCE FOR MILES INTO THE
SKY. _Page 83._]

It was a scene of unearthly wonder and magnificence, a scene such as
could only have been made possible by the triumphant genius of a race
of men, heirs of all the best that earth could give them, who had
turned the favour of circumstance to the utmost advantage.

Three minutes sufficed for the aerial cruisers to clear the mountains,
and as they did so the wide-sweeping rays of fifty search-lights,
assisted by the blazing orbs which crowned every mountain-peak,
illuminated the darkness for many miles outside the valley. In the
midst of the sea of light thus projected through the semi-darkness
of the starlit heavens the flying shape of an air-ship was detected
speeding away to the south-eastward.

Instantly the prows of the whole squadron were turned towards her,
and the first aerial race in the history of the world began. The
pursuing air-ships spread themselves out in a huge semicircle, at the
extremities of which were the two swiftest vessels in the fleet, almost
exact counterparts of the lost _Ithuriel_. One of these bore the same
name as the stolen flag-ship, and the other had been named the _Ariel_,
after the first vessel built by Richard Arnold, the conqueror of the
air, a hundred and thirty-two years before.

These two vessels carried ten guns each, and were capable of a maximum
speed of five hundred miles an hour, the highest velocity that it had
so far been found possible to attain. The others were somewhat smaller
craft, mounting eight guns each, and capable of a speed of about four
hundred miles an hour. The chase, either because she could not travel
faster or for some hidden reason, allowed the pursuing squadron to gain
upon her until she was only some five miles ahead of its two foremost
vessels, which were travelling at the highest speed attainable by the
whole flotilla.

She showed no lights, and so in order to keep her in view it was
necessary for her pursuers to keep their search-lights constantly
sweeping the skies ahead of them, lest they should lose sight of her in
the semi-darkness.

This placed the Aerian fleet at a serious disadvantage, which very
soon became apparent, for before the pursuit had lasted an hour the
chase opened fire with her stern guns and shell after shell charged
with some terrific explosive began bursting along the line of the
pursuing squadron, producing fearful concussions in the atmosphere, and
causing the pursuers to rock and toss in the shaken air like ships on a
stormy sea.

The _Ithuriel_ and the _Ariel_, at the two extremities of the
semicircle, replied with a rapid converging fire from their bow guns
in the hope of reaching the now invisible chase. All the projectiles
were, of course, time-shells, but the speed at which the vessels were
travelling not only made the aim hopeless, but caused such an in-rush
of air into the muzzles of the guns that the projectiles, checked in
their course through the barrels, flew wild and exploded at random,
often in dangerous proximity to the vessels themselves.

Hence, after about a dozen shots had been fired, the commanders of the
two vessels found themselves compelled to cease firing, and to trust to
speed alone to overtake the enemy. On the other hand, this disadvantage
to them was all in favour of the chase, which was able to work her
two stern guns without the slightest impediment. Before long she got
the range of her pursuers, and at last a shell burst fairly under
one of the smaller vessels. A brilliant flash of light, blue as the
lightning-bolt, illuminated her for an instant, and in that instant her
companions saw her stop and shiver like a stricken bird in mid-air, and
then plunge downwards like a stone to the earth.

Olga Romanoff, standing on the deck of what had once been the
_Ithuriel_, flag-ship of the Aerian fleet, and now renamed the
_Revenge_, saw this catastrophe, as the others had done, through her
night-glasses. She lowered them from her eyes, and said to a dark-eyed,
black-haired young fellow, who was commanding the gun that had done the
execution--

“Bravo, Boris Lossenski! Did you sight that gun?”

Boris drew himself up and saluted, saying--

“Yes, Majesty, I did.”

“Then for that you shall be a Prince henceforth, and if you can bring
another down you shall command an air-ship of your own when this fight
is over.”

Boris saluted again, and ordered the gun to be reloaded. Before
it could be discharged a shell from the port gun, which had been
fired as Olga spoke, struck another of the Aerian vessels square on
the fore-quarter. The flash of the exploding projectile was almost
instantaneously followed by the outburst of a vast dazzling mass of
flame which illumined for the instant the whole scene of the aerial
battle.

The air-ship with all its cargo of explosives blew up like one huge
shell, and the frightful concussion of the atmosphere induced by the
explosion hurled the two vessels that were close on either side of her
like feathers into space, turning them completely over and flinging
them to the earth six thousand feet below. A few moments later they
struck the ground simultaneously, two great spouts of flame shot up
from the spots where they struck, and when the darkness closed over
them again four of the pursuing squadron had been annihilated.

“Better still, Levin Ostroff!” cried Olga, as she saw the awful effects
of this last shot. “For that you too shall be a Prince of the Empire
and command an air-ship on our next expedition. Now, Boris, let us see
if you can beat that!”

“Yes, Majesty,” said Boris again, knitting his brows and clenching
his teeth in anger at his rival’s superior success. He glanced along
the line of the pursuers and saw four of the Aerian squadron flying
close together. He brought the gun to bear upon the two inner ones,
took careful aim, and despatched the projectile on its errand of
destruction. The moment he had released it he said to the two men who
were working under him--

“Load again, quickly!”

The command was instantly obeyed, and scarcely had the explosion of
the first blazed out than a second shell was sent after it. The very
firmament seemed split in twain by the frightful results of the two
well-aimed shots, each of which had found its mark on the two inner
vessels with fatal accuracy.

Great sheets of flame leapt out in all directions from the focus of the
explosion, and in the midst of their dazzling radiance those on board
the _Revenge_ saw the two outside air-ships of the four roll over and
dive head foremost into the dark abyss below them. They struck the
earth as the others had done, and vanished into annihilation in the
midst of the momentary mist of fire.

This last catastrophe made it plain to the commanders of the _Ithuriel_
and the _Ariel_ that to continue the chase under such conditions meant
the destruction in detail of all the smaller ships of the squadron.
Those on board the _Revenge_ saw signals rapidly flash from one end of
the line, and instantaneously answered from the other end.

“Ah!” said Olga. “My Lords of the Air seem to have had enough of it for
the present. Look, the small fry are falling to the rear; our reception
has been a little too hot for them. I wonder what they are going to do
now. Cease firing, and let us watch them. You two gunners have done
gloriously and earned quite enough laurels for your first battle.”

It soon became evident that the Aerians had decided to send their
smaller craft back. From the speed of the _Revenge_, and the terrible
accuracy and destructiveness of her guns, the commanders of the
squadron were now convinced that she was either the lost _Ithuriel_, or
some vessel even superior to her, built upon the same plan.

This being so, to have continued the pursuit under such conditions with
the smaller craft would simply have been to court destruction for them
in detail. It was impossible for them to use their guns effectively at
the speed at which they were travelling, while, as had been so terribly
proved, the chase could use hers with perfect ease.

The flying fight could thus only result under present conditions in the
ignominious defeat of the squadron by the single vessel as long as she
was able to keep ahead. The only hope of success lay, therefore, in a
trial of speed and manœuvring skill between her and the _Ithuriel_ and
_Ariel_, so orders were flashed to the smaller vessels to return to
Aeria with the mournful tidings of the destruction of eight of their
number.

As they vanished into the darkness behind, Olga divined instantly the
tactics that were to be adopted. She saw the converging search-lights
of the two remaining air-ships begin to glow brighter and brighter in
the rear of the _Revenge_, proving that they had increased their speed.

“So, it is going to be a race, is it!” she said, half to herself.
“Well, we will see if we can lead them into the trap. How fast are we
going, Boris?”

He went to the engine-room, and returned saying--

“Four hundred miles an hour, Majesty.”

“Make it five,” replied Olga.

He saluted, and transmitted the order to the engineer. The lights of
the pursuers immediately began to recede again, then they seemed to
stop.

“That will do!” said Olga. “They have reached the limit of their speed.
Keep to the southward, and see that they come no nearer.”

The three air-ships were, in fact, now travelling at their utmost
speed. If anything, the advantage was slightly in favour of the
_Revenge_, thanks to the high efficiency of the motive-power which had
been applied to her in accordance with the directions left by Olga’s
father, and transmitted in the will of Paul Romanoff.

So all the rest of the night and on into the next day pursuers and
pursued sped on with fearful velocity through the air. They passed over
Africa and out above the ocean, and still on and on they swept until
the Southern Sea was crossed and the mighty ice-barrier that fences in
the South Pole gleamed out white upon the horizon.

This was passed, and still they rushed on over the dreary wastes of
Antarctica. The pole was crossed along the 40th meridian, and then they
swept northward until the smoke-cloud that crowned the crest of Mount
Erebus rose above the snow-clouds that hid the earth. The _Revenge_
headed straight towards this and swept over it, followed at a distance
of about ten miles by her pursuers.

Then with a mighty upward sweep she leapt two thousand feet higher
still, came to equilibrium, and discharged a shell downwards on to
the ice. The explosion was answered by the rising of a flotilla of
air-ships, which seemed to have sprung out of the bowels of the earth.

Thirty vessels as large as herself rose simultaneously through the
clouds and spread themselves out in a wide circle round the two Aerian
vessels, which thus found themselves surrounded by an overwhelming
force and dominated by the _Revenge_ floating far above them with her
ten guns pointed down upon them.

To an observer so placed as to be able to command a view of the
situation it would have seemed that nothing short of the surrender or
annihilation of the _Ithuriel_ and the _Ariel_ could have been the
outcome of it.

So evidently thought Olga and those in command of the Russian aerial
fleet, for, although for one brief instant the two Aerian vessels lay
at their mercy, they failed to take advantage of it, and in losing
this one precious moment they reckoned without the superior skill and
perfect control of their air-ships possessed by those of whom they
thought to make an easy prey.

What really happened took place with such stupefying suddenness that
they were taken completely off their guard. The _Ithuriel_ and the
_Ariel_ lay end on to each other in the midst of the circle of their
enemies. Each mounted ten guns, and of these every one was available.
The crews of both vessels, trained by constant practice to the highest
point of efficiency, knew exactly what to do without so much as an
order being given.

Automatically the twenty guns were trained in the twinkling of an eye,
each on a Russian vessel, and discharged simultaneously. A moment later
the two vessels sank like stones through the thick clouds below them;
and while the heavens above were shaken with the combined explosions
of the twenty projectiles, each of which had found its mark with
unerring accuracy, they had regained their equilibrium a thousand feet
from the surface of the ice, and darted away full speed northward.

To such a fearful pitch of efficiency had their guns and projectiles
been brought that, while the aim was unerring if once a fair sight was
obtained, nothing shaped by human hands could withstand the impact of
their shells without destruction. Twenty out of the thirty vessels of
the Russian fleet collapsed, and, as it were, shrivelled up under the
frightful energy of the Aerian projectiles. Twenty masses of flame
blazed out over the grey surface of the cloud-sea, and in another
moment the fragments of the vessels it had taken so many months of
labour and such wondrous skill to construct were lying scattered far
and wide over the snow and ice of the Antarctic desert.

The awful suddenness with which this destruction had been accomplished
deprived Olga and her subordinates of all power of thought for the
moment. They heard the roar of the explosions, and saw a mist of flame
burst out round them as though all the fires of Mount Erebus had broken
loose at once, and then came the silence of speechless horror and
stupefaction. It was more like the work of omnipotent fiends than of
men. The bolts of heaven themselves could have done nothing like it.

Then the moment of the shock passed, and those who survived remembered
what they ought never to have forgotten--that, armed as they were
with weapons which under favourable circumstances were absolutely
irresistible, the first shot meant victory for those who fired it, and
destruction for their enemies. Odds of mere numbers went for nothing,
for each air-ship was equal to ten others provided she could send her
ten projectiles home first, and this is just what had happened.

All this had passed in a twentieth of the time that it has taken to
describe it, and by the time Olga and her subordinates grasped the
extent of the calamity that had overtaken them the two Aerian vessels,
darting through the air at five hundred miles an hour, had swept
far out of range of their guns, and were moreover so hidden by the
cloud-sea, that they had no idea which course they had taken.

Olga stamped her foot upon the deck, and, in a paroxysm of unrestrained
passion, literally screamed with rage as she ordered the _Revenge_ to
sink below the clouds. Less than two minutes sufficed for the remains
of the fleet, that had been thirty-one strong five minutes before and
now only numbered eleven vessels, to sink through the clouds.

A rapid glance round showed them the _Ithuriel_ and the _Ariel_, tiny
specks far out over the waste of snow and ice, speeding away to the
northward. To give chase was out of the question, for scarcely had they
sighted them than they vanished as completely as though they had melted
into the atmosphere; and so Olga signalled for her remaining vessels
to proceed to their secret haven in the snowy solitudes of the South,
while the _Ithuriel_ and her consort sped onward on their homeward
voyage, to carry the news of the terrible vengeance that they had taken
for the destruction of the eight air-ships which had been annihilated
by the guns of the _Revenge_.

Twenty hours sufficed for the two Aerian vessels to pass over a quarter
of the earth’s circumference, and carry their tidings of vengeance
and victory to Aeria, and shortly after noon on the day but one after
Olga had dropped her challenge from the skies, a meeting of the Ruling
Council was held at the President’s house in order to consider the
startling and pregnant events which had taken place, and to determine
the plan of the war which, after a hundred and thirty years of
unquestioned supremacy, they were now called upon to wage not only for
the mastery of the world, but for the very lives and liberties of the
citizens of Aeria.

It had of course been impossible to conceal from the inhabitants of the
valley the gravity of the startling events which had taken place in
such rapid succession, nor did the President and Council consider any
such concealment desirable. There were no demagogues and no politics
in Aeria, and therefore there was no need for any State secrets save
those which contained the essentials of aerial navigation.

There was also no fear of panic in a community which contained no
ignorant or criminal classes, and so, while the Council was sitting,
the strange tidings were promulgated throughout the length and breadth
of the valley. Marvellous and disquieting as they were they yet gave
rise to very few external signs of excitement. They were gravely,
earnestly, and even anxiously discussed, for they brought with them a
prophecy of calamities to come, the probability of whose realisation
was too plain to be ignored.

But ever since the days of the Terror each generation of Aerians had
been carefully trained to recognise the fact that the progress of
science and the restlessness of human invention in the world outside
their borders must, sooner or later, produce some challenge to their
supremacy and some attempt to dispute with them the Empire of the Air.
Now, after four generations--in spite of all the elaborate precautions
that had been taken, the stringent laws that had been enacted and more
than once mercilessly enforced--the crisis had come.

It was now impossible to doubt that by some means, which so far seemed
almost superhuman, the flag-ship of their fleet had been stolen, and
the son of the President kidnapped with his greatest friend. More than
this, the news brought back by the _Ithuriel_ and the _Ariel_ proved
beyond all doubt that means had been found to build a large fleet of
aerial warships without even arousing the suspicions of the Council.
And, worst and most sinister sign of all, there was also the fact,
proved by Olga’s letter to the President, that the moving spirit in
this defiant revolt against the supremacy of Aeria was one who bore the
ill-omened and still hated name of Romanoff.

As has been said, there was no panic that night in Aeria, but still
many a man and woman anxiously asked, either aloud or in his or her
own soul, whether in the mysterious revolution of human affairs it
might not be about to come to pass that she who had wrought this
apparent miracle might not yet be able to avenge the terrible fate
of her ancestor, the Last of the Tsars. Then, with this thought
came a universal revulsion of horror at the prospect of such a crime
against humanity and a deep resolve to exact the penalty for it to the
uttermost.

If war was to be brought once more upon the earth, those who brought
it would find Aeria worthy of its splendid traditions and ready, if
necessary, to reconquer the earth as the founders of its empire had
done in the Armageddon of 1904. Fierce as that mighty struggle had
been, its horrors would pale before those of a conflict in which
conquest would mean extermination, for if Aeria was forced once more
to draw the sword it would not be sheathed until there was peace again
on earth, even if that peace were to be but the silence of universal
desolation.

CHAPTER X. STRANGE TIDINGS TO AERIA.

THE sitting of the Council lasted until nightfall, and just as the
western mountains were throwing their huge shadows over the lovely
valley, two more air-ships passed between two of the southward peaks
and alighted in the great square in the centre of the city. They were
the two vessels which had been sent to the island indicated in Olga’s
letter to bring back the long-lost Alan and Alexis.

It would be vain to attempt to describe the feelings with which the
President and the father of Alexis went, as they thought, to receive
their sons, but the air-ships had returned without them, and in
their stead they brought a written message which conveyed tidings no
less strange and startling than those brought from Antarctica by the
_Ithuriel_ and her consort.

It was a letter from Alan to his father, and as soon as he received it
from the captain of one of the air-ships, who had found it nailed to a
tree on the island, he took his friend into his library, and there the
two fathers read it together.

After briefly but circumstantially recounting the capture of the
flag-ship by Olga by means of her subtle drugs, and showing how, by
using the power they gave her, she had kept them in mental slavery
for years, forcing them to employ their skill and knowledge in aiding
her to build her aerial and submarine fleets out of the spoils of
the destroyed ocean transports, from which the latter had taken an
incalculable amount of treasure, Alan’s letter concluded thus:--

  I will now tell you the reason why Alexis and myself have not waited
  for the air-ship which we knew you would send for us as soon as you
  received the message which Olga Romanoff told us she would despatch
  to you. We consider that by our weakness and folly--or, in truth, I
  should rather say mine, for it was I who invited these treacherous
  guests on board the _Ithuriel_--we have not only brought endless
  calamities upon the world, but we have also forfeited our right to
  the citizenship of Aeria.

  What the judgment of the Council would be upon us I don’t know, but
  we are resolved that, whatever it might have been, you and Alexis’s
  father shall be spared the sorrow of pronouncing sentence upon your
  own sons. Some day perhaps we may win at least the right to plead our
  cause before you. At present we have none, and until we have won it
  you shall not see us again unless you capture us by force.

  We were sent here in the _Narwhal_, the swiftest and most powerful
  vessel of the Russian submarine fleet. Only a few days ago an
  accident revealed to Alexis for the first time during our long mental
  slavery the means which this woman, who is as beautiful as an angel
  and as merciless as a fiend, had used to keep us in subjection. We
  took the utmost care to give her no suspicion of his discovery, and
  although we drank no more of her poison we acted exactly as though we
  were still under its influence.

  In what could only have been mockery she gave us back our belts and
  coronets, bidding us wear them “when we returned to our kingdom,” as
  she put it. We shall never wear the winged circlets again till we
  have regained the right to do so, but the belts and a couple of brace
  of magazine pistols which we took before we left her stronghold in
  Antarctica stood us in good stead.

  We have killed the crew of the _Narwhal_, and taken possession of
  her. She is far swifter and more powerful than any vessel in our
  submarine navy, for she can be driven at a hundred and fifty miles an
  hour through the water, and can destroy anything that floats in or
  on the sea with a blow of her ram, and, more than this, she carries
  a torpedo battery which has an effective range of two miles, and can
  strike and destroy anything within that distance without giving the
  slightest warning of her presence.

  There are fifty vessels of this type in the Russian fleet, but the
  _Narwhal_ is at least thirty miles an hour faster than any of them.
  An attack will probably be made by the Russians on our station at
  Kerguelen Island within a week by submarine vessels and a small
  squadron of air-ships, and there we shall begin our operations
  against the enemy. If you have any reply to make to this letter we
  will wait for it at sea off Kerguelen, and then begin the campaign we
  have planned. We shall never rest until we have either destroyed the
  Russian fleet in detail or have died in the attempt to do so.

  If we ever return it will be to restore to you the supremacy of the
  sea, and then, and not till then, we will ask you to pardon our fault
  and will willingly submit to such further conditions as you may see
  fit to impose upon us before you give us back--if ever you do--the
  rights which we have lost.

  With all love and duty to yourself, and loving remembrances to the
  dear ones in Aeria, your son

  ALAN.

At the foot of the letter was a postscript signed by Alexis, indorsing
all that Alan had said, save with regard to his sole responsibility for
the calamity that had ensued from the admission of Olga and Serge on
board the _Ithuriel_.

The two fathers discussed the strange, and, to them, most affecting
communication for nearly an hour in private, and then another meeting
of the Council was called to consider it and pronounce authoritatively
upon it. The President read the letter aloud in a voice which betrayed
no trace of the deep emotion that moved his inmost being, and then left
the Council chamber with Maurice Masarov, so that their presence might
not embarrass their colleagues.

The simple, manly straightforwardness of Alan’s letter appealed far
more eloquently to the Council than excuses or prayers for forgiveness
would have done. It was plain, too, that after the first indiscretion
of taking the strangers on board the air-ship, no moral responsibility
or blame could be laid on Alan and Alexis for what they had done under
the influence of a drug which had paralysed their moral sense.

The Council, therefore, not only accepted the conditions of the letter,
but without a dissentient voice, agreed to confer the first and second
commands of the Aerian submarine fleets and stations for the time being
upon Alan and Alexis, with permission to call in the aid of the nearest
aerial squadron when necessary. This decision was despatched forthwith
by an air-ship to Kerguelen, and within an hour all Aeria was talking
of nothing else than the strange fate of the two youths who for five
years had been mourned as dead.

Later on that evening, when the twin snow-clad peaks which towered
high above the city of Aeria had lost the pink afterglow of the
departed sunlight, and were beginning to gleam with a whiter radiance
in the level beams of the newly-risen moon, a girl was standing on
the spacious terrace of a marble villa which stood on the summit of a
rounded eminence a couple of miles from the western verge of the city.

She had just crossed the threshold of womanhood. The next sun that
would rise would be that of her twentieth birthday. Yet for two years
she had worn the silver circle and crystal wings, for in Aeria a girl
became of legal age at eighteen, though she took no share in the civil
life of the community until she was married, an event which, as a
rule, took place not long after she was invested with the symbol of
citizenship.

It was an exceedingly rare event for an Aerian girl to reach the eve
of her twentieth year unmarried, for the sexes in the Central-African
paradise were very evenly balanced, and, as was natural in a very high
state of civilisation, where families seldom exceeded three or four
children, celibacy in either sex was looked upon as a public misfortune
and a private reproach.

But Alma Tremayne, the girl who was standing on the terrace of her
father’s house on this most eventful evening, had become an exception
to the rule through circumstances so sad and strange that her
loneliness was an honour rather than a reproach. There were many of the
wearers of the golden wings who had sought long and ardently to win her
from the allegiance which forbade her to look with favouring eyes upon
any of them.

She was beautiful in a land where all women were fair, a land where,
under the most favourable conditions that could be conceived, a race
of almost more than human strength and beauty had been evolved, and
she came of a family scarcely second in honour even to that of the
President, for she was the direct descendant in the fifth generation of
Alan Tremayne, first President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, through
his son Cyril born two years after the daughter who had married the
first-born son of Natasha and Richard Arnold.

More than five years before she and Alan had plighted their
boy-and-girl troth on the eve of his departure on the fateful voyage
from which he had never returned, and of which no tidings had reached
Aeria until a few hours before. To the simple vow which her girlish
lips had then spoken she had remained steadfast even when, as the years
went by and still no tidings came of her lost lover, she, in common
with her own kindred, had begun to mourn him as dead.

It is true that she was in love rather with a memory than with a man,
yet with some natures such a love as this is stronger than any other,
more ideal and more lasting, and exempt from the danger of growing cold
in fruition. So strong was the hold that this ideal love had taken upon
her being that the idea of even accepting the love and homage of any
other man appeared as sacrilegious to her as the embrace of an earthly
lover would have seemed to a nun of the Middle Ages.

And so, with a single companion in her solitary state, she stood aside
and watched with patient, unregretful eyes the wedded happiness of her
more fortunate friends. This companion was Isma Arnold, Alan’s sister,
who had a double reason for doing as Alma had done.

Not only had she resolved never to marry while her brother’s fate
remained uncertain, but she, too, had also made her choice among the
youths of Aeria, and in such matters an Aerian girl seldom chose twice.
So she waited for Alexis as Alma did for Alan, hoping even against her
convictions, and keeping his memory undefiled in the sacred shrine of
her maiden soul.

No artist could have dreamed of a fairer picture than Alma standing
there on the terrace overlooking the stately city and the dark shining
lake at her feet. She was clad in soft, clinging garments of whitest
linen and finest silk of shimmering, pearly grey, edged with a dainty
embroidery of gold and silver thread.

Her dress, confined at the waist with a girdle of interlinked azurine
and gold, clothed without concealing the beauties of her perfect
form, and her hair, crowned by her crystal-winged coronet, flowed
unrestrained, after the custom of the maidens of Aeria, over her
shoulders in long and lustrous waves of dusky brown. There was a shadow
in the great deep grey eyes which looked up as though in mute appeal to
the starlight, the shadow of a sorrow which can never come to a woman
more than once.

All these years she had loved in cheerful patience and perfect faith
the man for whose memory she had lived in maiden widowhood--and now,
who could measure the depth of the darkness, darker than the shadow of
death itself, that had fallen across her life, severing the past from
the present with a chasm that seemed impassable, and leaving the future
but a barren, loveless waste to be trodden by her in weariness and
loneliness until the end!

All these years she had loved an ideal man, one of her own splendid
race, the very chosen of the earth, as pure in his unblemished manhood
as she was in the stainless maidenhood that she had held so sacred
for his sake even while she thought him dead--and, lo! the years had
passed, and he had come back to life, but how? Hers was not the false
innocence of ignorance. She knew the evil and the good, and because she
knew both shrank from contamination with the horror born of knowledge.

She had seen both Olga’s letter and Alan’s, and those two terrible
sentences, “They have served my turn, and I have done with them,” and
“She is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend,” kept
ringing their fatal changes through her brain in pitiless succession,
forcing all the revolting possibilities of their meaning into her
tortured soul till her reason seemed to reel under their insupportable
stress.

Mocking voices spoke to her out of the night, and told her of the
unholy love that such a woman would, in the plenitude of her unnatural
power, have for such a man; how she would subdue him, and make him
not only her lover but her slave; how she would humble his splendid
manhood, and play with him until her evil fancy was sated, and then
cast him aside--as she had done--like a toy of which she had tired.

Better a thousand times that he had died as his murdered comrades had
died--in the northern snowdrift into which this Syren of the Skies had
cast them, to sleep the sleep that knew neither dreams nor waking!
Better for him and her that he had gone before her into the shadows,
and had remained her ideal love until, hand in hand, they could begin
their lives anew upon a higher plane of existence.

As these thoughts passed and repassed through her mind with pitiless
persistence, her lovely face grew rigid and white under the starlight,
and, but for the nervous twining and untwining of her fingers as her
hands clasped and unclasped behind her, her motionless form might have
been carved out of stone. For the first time since peace had been
proclaimed on earth, a hundred and thirty-two years ago, the flames of
war had burst forth again, and for the first time in the story of her
race the snake had entered the now no longer enchanted Eden of Aeria.

It was hers to suffer the first real agony of soul that any woman of
her people had passed through since Natasha, in the palm-grove down
yonder by the lake, had told Richard Arnold of her love on the night
that he had received the Master’s command to take her to another man to
be his wife.

There were no tears in the fixed, wide-open eyes that stared almost
sightlessly up to the skies, in which the stars were now paling in the
growing light of the moon. The torment of her torturing thoughts was
too great for that.

She was growing blind and dizzy under the merciless stress of them,
when--it might have been just in time to save her from the madness that
seemed the only outcome of her misery--the sweet, silvery tones of a
girl’s voice floated through the still, scented air uttering her name--

“Alma!”

The sound mercifully recalled her wandering senses in an instant. It
was the voice of her friend, of the sister of her now doubly-lost
lover, and it reproved the selfishness of her great sorrow by reminding
her that she was not suffering alone. As the sound of her name reached
her ear the rigidity of her form relaxed, the light came back to her
eyes, and turning her head she looked in the direction whence it came.

There was a soft whirring of wings in the still air of the tropic
night, and out of the half-darkness floated a shape that looked like a
realisation of one of the Old-World fairy-tales. It was a vessel some
twenty-five feet long by five wide, built of white, polished metal, and
shaped something like an old Norse galley, with its high, arching prow
fashioned like the breast and neck of a swan.

From the sides projected a pair of wide, rapidly-undulating wings, and
in the open space between these stood on the floor of the boat the
figure of a girl whose loose, golden hair floated out behind her with
the rapid motion of her fairy craft.

There was no need for words of greeting between the two girl friends.
Alma knew the kindly errand on which Isma had come, and as she stepped
out she went towards her with hands outstretched in silent welcome.

As their hands met, and the two girls stood face to face, motionless
for a moment, they made an exquisite contrast of opposite types of
womanly beauty--Alma tall and stately, with a proudly-carried head,
clear, pale skin, grey eyes, and perfectly regular features, and Isma,
a year younger and a good inch shorter, slender of form yet strong and
lithe of limb, with golden, silky hair and sunny-blue eyes, fresh, rosy
skin, and mobile features which scarcely ever seemed to wear the same
expression for a couple of minutes together--as sweet a daughter of
delight as ever man could look upon with eyes of love and longing.

But she was grave enough now, for her friend’s sorrow was hers too, and
its shadow lay with equal darkness upon her. The ready tears welled
up under her dark lashes as she looked upon Alma’s white, drawn face
and dry, burning eyes, and her low, sweet voice was broken by a sob
as, passing her arm round her waist, she drew her towards the boat and
said--

“Come, dear, this sorrow belongs to me as well as you and we must help
each other to bear it. I have brought my new boat so that we can take
a flight round the valley and talk about it quietly. If two heads are
better than one, so are two hearts.”

Alma’s only reply to the invitation was a sad, sweet smile, and a
gentle caress, but the welcome, loving sympathy had come when it was
most sorely needed, and so she got into the aerial boat with Isma, and
a few moments later the beautiful craft was bearing them at an easy
speed southward down the valley.

CHAPTER XI. THE SNAKE IN EDEN.

NO more perfect place could have been imagined for an exchange of
confidences and sympathy between two girls situated as Alma and Isma
were than the oval, daintily-cushioned interior of the _Cygna_, as Isma
had called her swan-prowed craft.

Skirting the mountains, at a distance of about five hundred yards from
them, and at a height of about as many feet from the summits of the
undulating foothills below, the _Cygna_ sped quietly along at a speed
of some twenty-five miles an hour. The temperature of the tropic night
was so soft and warm, and the air was so dry that it was not even
necessary for them to make use of the light wraps that lay in the stern
of the boat.

Isma reclined in the after part of the broad, low seat which ran round
the inside, with one hand resting lightly upon a little silver lever
which could be used for working the rudder-fan, in addition to the
tiller-ropes, which she held in her hands while standing up. Alma sat
almost upright amidships, with one hand clasped on the rail of polished
satin-wood which ran round the well of the boat, her head turned away
from Isma and her eyes fixed upon two dim points of light far away to
the southward, which marked the position of the two moonlit, snowy
peaks which guarded the southern confines of the valley.

For several minutes they proceeded thus in silence, which neither
seemed inclined to break. At length Isma looked up at a planet that
was shining redly over the northern mountains, and, possessed by a
sudden inspiration, said--

“Look, Alma, there is Mars returning to our skies!”

“Yes,” said Alma, turning round and gazing from beneath her
slightly-frowning brows at the ruddy planet; “it is a fitting time
for him to come back now that, after all these years of peace and
happiness, human wickedness and ambition have brought the curse of war
back again on earth.”

“Yes,” said Isma. “If there were anything in what the old astrologers
used to say we could look upon his rising as an omen. And yet we have
very little reason surely for taking as an emblem of war a world in
which wars have been unheard of for thousands of years.”

“I wonder when that time will come on earth?” said Alma bitterly. “If
ever it does! We terrestrials seem to be too hopelessly wicked and
foolish for such wisdom as that.

“Mankind will never have a fairer opportunity of working out its
redemption than it had after the Terror, and yet here, after four
generations of peaceful happiness and prosperity, the wickedness of one
woman is able to set the world ablaze again. Our forefathers were wise,
but they would have been wiser still if they had stamped that vile
brood out utterly. Their evil blood has been the one drop of venom that
has poisoned the whole world’s cup of happiness!”

As Alma spoke these last words her grey eyes grew dark with sudden
passion under her straight-drawn brows. Her breast heaved with a sudden
wave of emotion, and the sentences came quickly and fiercely from the
lips which Isma had never heard speak in anger before.

“Yes,” she replied, rather sadly than angrily, “perhaps it would have
been better for the world if they had done so, or, at anyrate, if they
had shut them up for life, as they did the criminals and the insane in
the middle of the last century. But we must remember, even in our own
sorrow and anger, that this Olga Romanoff is in her way not altogether
unlike our own Angel was in hers.”

“Surely you’re speaking sacrilege now!” interrupted Alma. “How can the
evil be like the good under any circumstances?”

“No, I am not,” said Isma, with a smile. “Remember how Natasha was
trained up by the Master in undying hate of Russian tyranny, and how
she inherited the legacy of revenge from her mother and him. No doubt
this Olga has done the same, and she has been taught to look upon us as
the Terrorists looked upon the Tsar and his family.

“We are the descendants of those who flung her ancestor from his
throne, extinguished his dynasty, and sent him to die in Siberia. I
would kill her with my own hand if I could, and believe that I was
ridding the world of a curse, but surely we two daughters of Aeria are
wise enough to be just even to such an enemy as she is.”

“But she has done worse than kill us,” Alma almost hissed between her
clenched teeth. “If she had a thousand lives and we took them one by
one they would not expiate her crime against us, or equal the hopeless
misery that she has brought upon us.

“What is mere death, the swift transition from one stage of existence
to another, compared with the hopeless death-in-life to which her
wanton wickedness has condemned you and me, or to the calamities which
she has brought upon the world?”

“It is nothing, I grant you,” said Isma. “But still I do not agree with
you about that hopeless death-in-life, as you call it. Our present
sorrow is great and heavy enough, God knows, but for me at least it is
not hopeless, nor will it be for you when the first stress of the storm
is over.”

“What do you mean?” cried Alma, almost as fiercely as before, and
leaning forward and looking through the dusk into her face as though
she hardly credited her ears. “Do you mean to say that either you or I
could ever”--

“Yes,” said Isma, interrupting her, and speaking now with eager
animation. “Yes, I mean just what you were going to say. And some day,
I believe, you will think as I do.”

Alma shook her head in mournful incredulity, and Isma noticing the
gesture went on--

“Yes, you will! The reason that you do not agree with me now is that
yours is a deeper and stronger nature than mine. You are like the sea,
and I am like the lake. Your grief and anger struck you dumb at first.

“You were in a stupor when I found you on the terrace, and now the
depths of your nature are broken up and the storm is raging, and until
it is over you will see nothing but your own sorrow and anger.

“But with me the storm broke out at once, and I ran to my room and
threw myself upon my bed and sobbed and wailed until my mother thought
I was going mad. You have not wept yet, and it will be well for you
when you do. Your nature is prouder than mine, and it will take longer
to melt, but it must melt some time, for we are both women, after all,
and then you will see hope through your tears, as I did.”

Alma shook her head again, and said in a low, sad, steady voice--

“I can never see hope until I can see Alan as he was when he left me,
and you know that is impossible.”

“You will never see him again as he was,” replied Isma gently. “But
that is no reason why you should not see him better than he was.”

“Better?” exclaimed Alma, with an involuntary note of scorn in her
voice, which brought a quick flush to Isma’s cheek, and a flash into
her eyes for her brother’s sake. “Better! How can that be?”

“Just as the man who has fallen and risen again of his own native
strength, is better and stronger than the man who has never been
tempted,” replied Isma almost hotly.

“Remember the lessons we have learnt from the people of Mars since we
learnt to communicate with them. You know how they have gone through
civilisation after civilisation until they have refined everything out
of human nature that makes it human except their animal existence and
their intellectual faculties.

“They have no passions and they make no mistakes. What we call love
they call sexual suitability, the mechanical arrangement into which
they have refined our ruling passion. Do you remember how almost
impossible Vassilis, after he had perfected the code of signals, found
it to make even their brightest and most advanced intellects understand
the meaning of jealousy?”

The skilfully-aimed shot struck home instantly. A bright wave of colour
swept from Alma’s throat up to her brow. Her eyes shone like two pale
fires in the dusk, and her hand grasped the rail on which it was
resting till the bones and sinews stood out distinct in it. She seemed
to gasp for breath a moment before she found her voice, but when she
spoke her tone seemed to ring and vibrate like a bell in the sudden
strength of her unloosed passion.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you innocent-looking little Isma! You are wiser
than I am after all. I did not know the meaning of that word till
Olga’s letter fell from the sky, but I know it now. My God, how I hate
that woman!”

“She is not a woman,” replied Isma, speaking in the unconscious pride
of her pure descent. “She is a baseborn animal, for she has used her
beauty for the vilest ends, yet I am glad to hear you say that you hate
her for Alan’s sake, as I do, and--and for Alexis’s. While you can hate
you can love, and some day you will love Alan--the real Alan, not your
ideal lover--all the better because you have hated Olga for his sake.”

“What?” almost wailed Alma, in the intensity of her anger and misery.
“After he has held her in his arms--after his lips have kissed
hers--after”--

“Yes, even after that. When your first bitterness has passed, as mine
has, you will be more just, and remember the influence under which he
did so--if he did. Do you hold yourself responsible for what you think
or do in your dreams, or do you not believe what Alan said in his
letter about the drug? You know too much about chemistry not to know
that such horrible poisons have existed for centuries.”

“Yes, yes, I know that, and I know that he has no share in the moral
guilt; but how can I ever forget he has been what those cruel words
of Olga’s told us she had made of him?” replied Alma, her face growing
cold and hard again as she spoke.

“Alma,” said Isma, with gentle dignity, yet with a note of keen
reproach in her voice, “surely you are forgetting that you are speaking
of my brother as well as of your lover. No, I am not angry, for I
am too sad myself not to understand your sorrow. But I want you to
remember that I who have lost both a lover and a brother am asking you
to be patient and to hope with me.

“We have never seen Alan and Alexis as they are. We only remember them
as two handsome boys who had never seen or known evil. When we meet
them again, as I firmly believe we shall, they will be men who have
passed through the fire; for if they do not pass through it and come
out stronger and better than they were, rest assured we shall never
meet on earth again.

“Alan would no more come to you now than you would go to him. When he
believes himself worthy of you he will come for you as Alexis will come
for me, and then”--

She stopped short in her eloquent pleading, for Alma, at last melted
and overcome by her sweet unselfishness and loving logic, had felt the
springs of her own woman’s nature unloosed, and with a low, wailing cry
had sunk down upon the cushions towards her, and was sobbing out her
sorrow on her lap. Isma said nothing more, for her end was achieved.
She laid her left hand caressingly on Alma’s hair, and with her right
she pulled the steering-lever back and swung the _Cygna_ round until
her prow pointed towards home again.

When they reached the villa they found the President’s private yacht
resting on the terrace, for Alan’s father and mother had come over
after the Council meeting to discuss with Alma’s parents the more
intimate family aspect of the strange events which had cleared up in
such terrible fashion the mystery which had so long shrouded the fate
of the sons of the two chief families in Aeria.

So revolting was the idea of their mental servitude to such an enemy
of the human race as they could not but believe Olga Romanoff to be,
and so frightful were the consequences that must infallibly befall
humanity in consequence of it, that their parents would rather have
known them dead than living under such degrading circumstances. To the
Aerians, far advanced as they were beyond the standards of the present
day, both in religion and philosophy, the conception of death was one
which included no terrors and no more regret than was natural and
common to all humanity at parting with a kinsman or a friend.

As they were destined to prove, when face to face with a crisis
unparalleled in the history of humanity, they regarded death merely
as a natural and necessary transition from one state of existence to
another, which would be higher or lower according to the preponderance
of good or evil done in this life.

If, therefore, the parents and kinsmen of those who were now exiles
and wanderers upon the ocean wastes could have chosen, they would
infinitely rather have known that Alan and Alexis had shared the fate
of their companions in the Norwegian snowdrift than they would have
learnt that for six years they had been the slaves and playthings of a
woman who, as they guessed from Alan’s letter, combined the ambition
of a Semiramis with the vices of a Messalina, and who had used the
skill and knowledge which they had acquired and inherited as Princes of
the Air with the avowed purpose of subverting the dominion of Aeria,
undoing all that their ancestors had done, and bringing back the evil
era of strife, bloodshed, and political slavery.

So, too, with Alma. As she had told Isma, she would a thousand times
rather have seen her lover dead than degraded to such base uses.
Although she, like everyone else in Aeria, admitted that the strange
circumstances absolved both Alan and Alexis from all moral blame and
responsibility, she, in common with her own father and mother, and
perhaps, also, with others not less intimately concerned, found it
impossible to forget or ignore the taint of such an association, and to
look upon it as a stain that might never be washed away.

Indeed, the only member of the family council who openly proclaimed
her belief that the two exiles would, if ever they returned, come back
to Aeria better and stronger men than those who had known no evil was
Isma, who repeated, with all the winning eloquence at her command, all
the arguments that she had used to Alma during their cruise together.
Whether Alma and the others would ever come round to her view could of
course only be proved by time, but it is nevertheless certain that when
the family council at last separated the hearts of its members were
less sore than they would have been had Alan and Alexis not possessed
such an advocate as the girl who had so good a double reason for
pleading their causes.

CHAPTER XII. THE BATTLE OF KERGUELEN.

THE Council of Aeria possessed, as has already been said,
four-and-twenty stations, scattered over the oceans of the world, which
it used as depôts for the submarine fleets, by means of which, acting
in co-operation with its aerial squadrons, it had made any attempt at
naval warfare hopeless until the disasters described at the beginning
of this book proved that an enemy, in this respect at least, more
powerful than itself, had successfully challenged its empire of the sea.

Of these stations the most important in the Southern hemisphere
was that on Kerguelen Island, or Desolation Land, situated at the
intersection of the 49th parallel of south latitude with the 69th
meridian of east longitude. This lonely fragment of land in the midst
of the ocean, barren of surface, and swept by the almost constant
storms of long winters, had been chosen, first, because of its
situation on the southern limits of the Indian Ocean, equidistant
between Africa and Australia, and, secondarily, because of its numerous
and sheltered deep-water harbours, so admirably adapted for vessels
which were perfectly independent of storm.

Added to this, the island contained large supplies of coal, from which
the motive-power of both the submarine vessels and the air-ships was
now derived by direct conversion of its solar energy into electrical
force through the secret processes known only to the President and two
members of the Council.

So far the Russians had not ventured to make any attack upon this
stronghold, so strongly was it defended, not only by its submarine
squadrons and systems of mines, guarding the entrances to all the
harbours, but also by the large force of air-ships which had been
stationed there since the new naval warfare had broken out.

The warning which Alan had conveyed in his letter to his father was
based on the knowledge that a general attack was soon to be made upon
it both by air and sea, with the object of crippling the power of the
Aerians in the Southern Ocean. No time had been lost in acting upon
this warning. The aerial squadron was increased to forty, with the
_Ariel_ as flagship, and twenty new submarine vessels, the largest and
best possessed by the Aerians, had been despatched from Port Natal to
reinforce the fleet of thirty-five already at Kerguelen Island. With
these must of course be counted the _Narwhal_, under the command of
Alan and Alexis.

The strength of the attacking force could only be guessed at, as even
Alan did not know it, but it was not expected that, however strong a
force the Russians might bring up by sea, they would be able, after the
disaster of Antarctica, to muster more than a dozen air-ships.

The Aerian headquarters was at Christmas Harbour, on the northern shore
of the island. This is an admirably-sheltered inlet running westward
into the land between Cape François and Arch Point, and its upper and
narrower half forms an oval basin nearly a mile long by a quarter of
a mile broad, walled in by high perpendicular basaltic cliffs, and
containing a depth of water varying from two to sixteen fathoms, as
compared with twenty-five to thirty fathoms in its outer half.

North of the harbour, Table Mount rises to a height of thirteen hundred
feet, and to the south is a huge mass of basalt over eleven hundred
feet high. On both of these elevations were mounted batteries of guns
capable of throwing projectiles of great size and enormous explosive
energy to a distance of several miles. There were altogether twelve of
these batteries placed on various heights about the island, and the
guns composing them were mounted on swivels, which enabled them to be
trained so as to throw the projectile either into the sea or high up
into the air.

Soon after daybreak on the fourth day after Alan’s letter had been
received the outlook on Cape François, a bold mass of basalt to
the north of the outer bay, telephoned “_Narwhal_ in sight” to the
settlement at the head of the harbour. Immediately on this message
being received the commander of the station, named Max Ernstein, a
man of about thirty-four, and the most daring and skilful submarine
navigator and engineer in the service of the Council, went on board his
own vessel, the _Cachalot_, and set out to welcome the long-lost son of
the President and convey to him the commission which had been sent out
by air-ship from Aeria.

The _Cachalot_, which may as well be described here as elsewhere as
a type of the submarine warship of the time, was a double-pointed
cylinder, built of plates of nickelised aluminium steel, not riveted,
but electrically fused at the joints, so that they formed a continuous
mass equally impervious all over, and presenting no seams or overlaps.

The cylinder was a hundred and fifty feet from point to point, with
a midship’s diameter of forty feet. The forward end was armed with a
sheathing of azurine, the metal peculiar to the mines of Aeria, which
would cut and pierce steel as a diamond cuts glass. This sheathing
formed a ram, which was by no means the least formidable portion of the
warship’s armament.

The upper part of the cylinder was flattened so as to form an oval deck
forty feet long by fifteen wide. A centre section of this deck, three
feet wide, could be opened by means of a lateral slide which allowed
of the elevation of a gun twenty-five feet long, which could be used
either for discharging torpedoes by water or for throwing projectiles
through the air.

It could be aimed and fired from below the deck without the
artillerists even seeing the objects aimed at, save in an arrangement
of mirrors, so adjusted that when the object appeared in the centre of
the lowest of them, the gun could be fired with the certainty of the
projectile reaching its mark. Four underwater torpedo tubes, two ahead
and two astern, completed the armament of the submarine warship.

When under water the deck could be hermetically closed, and sliding
plates could be drawn over the opening of the torpedo tubes, so that
from stem to stern of the cylinder there were no excrescences to impede
the progress of the vessel through the water with the sole exception
of a dome of thick forged glass just forward of the deck, under which
stood the helmsman, who gave place to the commander of the vessel when
she went into action. Her powerful four-bladed screw, driven by engines
almost precisely similar to those of the air-ships, gave her a maximum
speed of a hundred miles an hour.

The _Cachalot_ ran at twenty-five miles an hour down the harbour, and
as soon as he got abreast of Cape François Captain Ernstein, who was
standing on deck, saw a small red flag apparently rising from the waves
about a mile to seaward. A similar flag was soon flying from a movable
flagstaff on the _Cachalot_, and a few minutes later she was lying
alongside the _Narwhal_.

This vessel was a very leviathan of the deep, and as she lay three
parts submerged in the water Captain Ernstein calculated that she
could hardly be less than two hundred feet in length and forty-five in
diameter amidships. She appeared to be built on very much the same plan
as the _Cachalot_ and of the same materials, saving only, of course,
the ram of azurine, which was replaced by one of nickel steel.

As the _Cachalot_ got alongside, a slide was drawn back in the
deck of the _Narwhal_ and the head and shoulders of a man dressed
in close-fitting seal-fur appeared. It was Alan, little changed in
physical appearance since the fatal day that he invited Olga Romanoff
on board the _Ithuriel_, save that he had grown a moustache and beard,
which he wore trimmed somewhat in the Elizabethan style, and that the
frank, open expression of the boy had given place to a grave, almost
sad, sternness, which marked the man who had lived and suffered.

Max Ernstein recognised him at once and saluted as though greeting
a superior officer, for, although all the Aerians were friends and
comrades, the etiquette of rank and discipline was scrupulously
observed amongst them when on active service.

“What do you salute me for?” said Alan gravely, as he reached the deck
and came to the side on which the _Cachalot_ lay. “Do you not see that
I am no longer wearing the golden wings? Are you the officer in command
of the station?”

“Yes, Admiral Arnold,” returned the other, in the same formal tone and
at the same time presenting the letter from the Council. “I suppose you
have forgotten me. I am Max Ernstein, in command of the naval fleet at
Kerguelen. That letter will explain why I saluted and why I have come
to hand over my command to you.”

Before he replied Alan ran his eye rapidly over the letter. As he did
so the pale bronze of his face flushed crimson for a moment, and he
turned his head away from Ernstein, brushed his hand quickly across his
eyes, and then read the letter again more deliberately. Then he turned
and said in a voice that he vainly strove to keep steady--

“This is more than I have deserved or could expect, but obedience is
the first duty, so I accept the command. Come on board, Ernstein; of
course I recognised you, but until I knew how I stood with the Council
I looked upon myself as an outlaw, and therefore no friend or comrade
for you.”

The captain of the _Cachalot_ had a gangway-plank brought up and passed
from one vessel to the other, and in another moment he was standing
beside Alan on the deck of the _Narwhal_, and their hands were joined
in a firm clasp.

“That’s the first honest hand that I have grasped for six years, except
Alexis’,” said Alan, as he returned the clasp with a grip that showed
his physical forces had been by no means impaired by his long mental
servitude. “Come down into the cabin, we shall find him there.”

He led the way below, and as soon as Alexis had been told the
unexpected good news, which seemed to affect him even more deeply than
it had Alan, the three sat down at the table in the saloon of the
_Narwhal_, a plain but comfortably furnished room, about twenty-five
feet long by fifteen broad and ten high, to discuss a plan of
operations in view of the expected attack on the station.

Alan at once assumed the authority with which he had been invested by
the Council, and made minute inquiries into the nature and extent of
the defending force at his disposal.

“I think that ought to be quite sufficient, not only to defeat, but
pretty well destroy any force that the Russians can bring against us,”
said Alan, as soon as Ernstein had finished his description. “We have
much more to fear from the air-ships than from the submarine boats,
because the _Narwhal_ would give a very good account of them, even by
herself. Have any more vessels of the type of the _Ithuriel_ been built
since the old _Ithuriel_ was lost?”

“Yes,” replied Ernstein; “but only ten, I am sorry to say. One of them
is here, as I told you just now, but we have forty of the others, and I
don’t suppose the Russians can bring more than a dozen against us.”

“What do you mean?” said Alan. “They have fifty, every one of them
as fast and as powerful as the old _Ithuriel_. I ought to know,” he
continued grimly, “for they were every one of them built under my own
eyes.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Ernstein. “I ought to have told you before
now that we have already won our first victory, and that though we lost
eight vessels we destroyed twenty of the Russians’.” And then he went
on to give Alan and Alexis a rapid description of the pursuit of the
_Revenge_, and the havoc wrought at the end of it by the _Ithuriel_ and
the _Ariel_.

“That is glorious news!” said Alan. “But they have thirty ships at
their disposal still, and I expect they will bring at least twenty of
these against us, and they are all swifter than ours saving only the
_Ariel_. Of course my command ends with the shore, but I think it will
be as well if the captain of the _Ariel_ were to come on board the
_Narwhal_ so that we could arrange our plans of defence together--I for
the sea, and he for the air.”

“But why not come ashore and see him?” said Ernstein. “He and all of us
will be delighted to see you on the island.”

“No,” said Alan, shaking his head. “Alexis and I have promised each
other never to leave the _Narwhal_ until the Russian sea power is
crippled. The day that we set foot on dry land again will be the day
that we give back the supremacy of the sea to the Council, so if we two
Admirals of the Sea and Air are to meet, the commander of the _Ariel_
must come here.”

“Very well,” said Ernstein. “I understand you. Write a note and I will
send the _Cachalot_ back with it. She will bring him back in under half
an hour, for he was up at the settlement when I left.”

Alan wrote the letter forthwith, and the _Cachalot_ departed,
returning, as her captain had said, in less than half an hour, with
Edward Forrest, the commander of the _Ariel_. He was a lean, wiry,
active man of about forty-five, of mixed English, Scotch, and Aerian
descent, with short, crisp, curly black hair and smooth-shaven face,
rather sharp, regular features, and a pair of keen grey eyes which
seemed to look into the very brain of the person he was talking to--a
man of prompt decisions and few words, and one of the most able aerial
navigators that Aeria could boast of.

He held the rank of admiral, and was responsible for the station of
Kerguelen, and the command of the southern seas. He greeted Alan and
Alexis courteously, but a trifle stiffly, as though he thought that
their indiscretion had been somewhat lightly dealt with by the Council.
This, however, was no business of his, for the first law of Aeria
was that the decisions of the President and Council were not open to
criticism by any private or official citizen whatever his rank or
experience.

Therefore, after reading, as a matter of form, the commission sent to
Alan and Alexis, he addressed himself at once to the business of the
moment, and before they had been discussing the plan of defence for
many minutes he was forced to admit to himself that the President’s
son, young as he was, was more than his master both in aerial and naval
tactics.

For the greater part of the morning plan after plan was suggested,
thrashed out, and either accepted or thrown aside, and when he took his
leave he shook hands with both Alan and Alexis far more cordially than
he had done in greeting, and said with brief, blunt candour--

“This is not the first time that a woman has used a man to upset the
peace of the world, and I tell you honestly that I once thought you
had both turned traitors. I don’t think so now, and I am heartily glad
you are back. If you could only have returned three years ago a lot of
trouble might have been saved, but I must confess that you have both
learnt more in five years than I have in twenty. I will follow your
instructions to the letter.”

“What is done is done,” said Alan, smiling, and yet with a grave
dignity that showed Admiral Forrest that, despite all that had
happened, he was standing in the presence of his master. “The work in
hand now is to regain what we have lost, and if every man does his duty
we shall do so. I think everything is arranged now, and as we have no
time to lose I will say good-morning.”

He held out his hand as he spoke, and Admiral Forrest took his
dismissal and his leave at the same time.

Captain Ernstein took six men out of the _Cachalot_ and placed them at
the disposal of Alan and Alexis, for the working of the _Narwhal_, and
then took his leave to execute his part of the plan of defence.

It was a bitterly cold day, for the southern winter had already
set in in all its severity. The sea to the north of the island was
comparatively smooth, but swept every now and then with violent gusts
of wind from the southward. The sky was entirely covered by thick
masses of cold grey cloud, every now and then torn up into great
rolling masses by the sudden blasts of icy wind from the pole, which
drove fierce storms of hard frozen snow across the bare and desolate
island.

But the roughness of the elements was a matter of small concern to
the crews of the air-ships and the submarine cruisers, for both were
independent alike of sea and storm. The former could literally ride
upon the wings of the fiercest gale that ever blew. Their interiors
were warm and wind-proof, and their machinery was powerful enough to
drive them four and five times as fast as the air-currents in which
they floated, while the latter had only to sink a few feet below the
level of the waves to find perfect calm.

The days, in short, were past when men had been at the mercy of the
elements, and so the atmospheric conditions which would have made a
modern naval attack upon a rocky and exposed coast almost impossible
were not even taken into account in preparing to meet the threatened
assault on Kerguelen Island.

No one knew when or how the first assault would be delivered. All that
was known was that, unless Olga and her advisers had completely altered
their plans, the attack would take place either that day or the next,
and consequently ceaseless vigilance was necessary on sea and land and
in the air.

In accordance with the plan arranged on board the _Narwhal_, ten
air-ships rose above the clouds to an altitude of five thousand
feet, and from each of these an electric thread hung down to as many
signal-stations on the island, all of which were connected with the
headquarters at the top of Christmas Harbour.

Twenty cruisers patrolled the coast at a distance of a mile from the
land, and two miles outside these the _Narwhal_ ran to and fro along
the northern shore. All the more important inlets which had sufficient
depth of water for submarine attack were guarded with mines and chains
of torpedoes, so disposed that no vessel could possibly enter without
firing them, and so giving warning of the locality of the attack.

The afternoon passed without any alarm, and at nightfall the clouds
sent down a blinding storm of snow, which, added to the intense
darkness, made vision impossible both on land and sea, although high
above the clouds the ten air-ships floated in a calm, clear atmosphere,
under the brilliant constellations of the southern hemisphere.

No attack seemed possible without warning, either by sea or above the
clouds, for the hostile air-ships could not approach without being seen
from a great distance through the clear, starlit sky, and without their
lights, which would instantly betray their presence, it was impossible
for the submarine vessels even to find the coast.

Hour after hour passed, and still no hostile sign rewarded the
vigilance of the defenders. No one of the present day could have
guessed that all the preparations had been made for such a battle as
had never been fought before on sea or land, or in the air.

Nothing was visible but the snow-covered earth and the storm-swept sea,
for the sentinel ships, floating far above the clouds, were beyond
the reach of vision. And yet, if the combined fleets of the modern
world had attacked Kerguelen that night, not a ship would have escaped
to tell the tale of annihilation, so terrible were the engines of
destruction which waited but the signal of battle to strike their swift
and irresistible blows.

It was about half-past six o’clock the next morning when Alexis, who
was on watch in the conning-tower of the _Narwhal_, saw a faint beam of
light illuminating the water a long way ahead. He instantly signalled
to Alan--“Enemy in sight. Back. I am going to ram.”

Alan, unwilling to leave the new crew, who were not yet perfectly
acquainted with the working of the machinery, had taken command of the
engine-room alternately with Alexis, who was now taking his four hours’
watch in the conning-tower, and to whom the fortune of war had given
the honour of striking the first blow. The _Narwhal_ backed rapidly,
and as she did so Alexis turned a small wheel in the side of the
conning-tower, and the whole chamber sank into the hull of the vessel.

As soon as it stopped he pulled a lever and a heavy steel sheet slid
over the opening where the glass dome had been. In front of him as he
stood at the steering-wheel was a long, very slender needle hung with
extreme delicacy on a pivot, up which an electric current constantly
passed.

This needle was terrestrially insulated by a magnet which always swung
opposite to the magnetic pole, and when acted upon only by the steel of
the vessel’s fabric, swung indifferently as long as there was no other
vessel within a thousand yards of the _Narwhal_. But the moment one
came within that distance the needle pointed towards it with unerring
accuracy, as it was doing at the present moment.

Alexis allowed the vessel to back until he saw the needle begin to
waver. Then he knew that the thousand-yard limit had been reached, and
signalled--

“Full speed ahead.”

The next moment the engines were reversed and the _Narwhal_ bore down
on her invisible prey. The needle became rigid again. Alexis kept it
pointing dead ahead as the _Narwhal_ gathered way and rushed silently
but with irresistible force upon her victim.

She passed over the thousand yards in forty seconds. Then came a dull,
rending crash, a slight shiver of the mighty fabric, and then she
swept on her way as though she had passed through a couple of inches
of planking instead of the steel hull of a submarine warship more than
two-thirds her own size.

And so in silence and darkness, without the discharge of a gun or the
flash of a shot or an audible cry of human pain, the work of death and
destruction began and ended. In the passing of an instant a warship
had been destroyed which could have annihilated a fleet of modern
battleships in detail without once appearing above the surface of the
water.

The moment that the shock told Alexis that the ram of the _Narwhal_
had done its work, he signalled “Stop,” and as the vessel slowed down
he watched the momentous fluctuations of the needle in front of him.
It oscillated for an instant and then became still again, pointing to
another victim hidden away somewhere under the dark waters. He brought
the vessel round until it pointed ahead again, and then once more the
leviathan plunged forward at full speed on her errand of destruction.

Thirty seconds later a rasping tearing sound, told him that he had
ripped the side out of a second Russian vessel; and again he stopped,
and again the fatal tell-tale needle pointed to a mark on which he
hurled his irresistible ram. So the work went on, and vessel after
vessel was torn to pieces and sunk in the midst of the darkness and
silence of the wintry sea, without even a warning having been given
either to the consorts of the destroyed vessels or to those nearer in
shore, all of which were, of course, outside the range of the needle’s
indication. But for this fact Alexis would have been unable to do his
work, for he would not have known whether he was ramming friend or foe.

When the ram had found its mark for the twelfth time, the needle
oscillated vaguely to and fro, showing that within a thousand-yards
radius at least there were no more victims to be found. Then the
_Narwhal_ rose to the surface of the water, and Alexis resumed his
watch as the vessel patrolled the coast again at a speed of fifty miles
an hour.

Alan now came and relieved Alexis from his watch. As he entered the
conning-tower he said--

“How many is that you’ve settled? A dozen, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Alexis, “but I can hardly think they can have been anything
but scouts, and so we shall have the main fleet to tackle yet.”

“Do you think any of them have got through?” said Alan. “You know they
may have approached from east and west as well, and if so they are
lying inside of us.”

“No,” replied Alexis, “I don’t think they would do that. You see we
have the advantage of them in this way. They can’t see ten yards in
front of them unless there is bright sunshine on the water, or unless
they turn their lights on to the full, in which case they would betray
their presence at once.

“Then they don’t know what has become of the _Narwhal_, and probably
think that she has been attacked by an overwhelming force, or blown up
by some lucky torpedo. They daren’t go inshore in force for fear of
springing a mine, and so you may depend upon it the twelve we have
destroyed were scouts, prowling about very slowly and waiting for
daylight to examine the coast and find a way into Christmas Harbour.

“They must have been in single line, and we had the luck to catch one
of the end ones first, and so we sank the lot in the order in which
they were floating. I don’t think we can do anything more till daylight
except run up and down the coast and keep a sharp look-out to seaward
and on the needle.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Alan. “You’d better go and get an hour’s
sleep if you can.”

“There won’t be much sleep for any of us till to-night,” said Alexis
quickly, pointing to the clouds over the island. “Look! the row has
begun in the air already.”

Alan glanced up and saw a series of intensely bright flashes stream
downwards through the clouds, which at the same moment were rent and
rolled up into vast shadowy billows by some tremendous concussion of
the atmosphere above them. There could be only one explanation of this.
The attack on the island had begun from the air, and the flashes were
those of the first shots of the aerial bombardment.

[Illustration: THE CLOUDS WERE RENT AND ROLLED UP INTO VAST SHADOWY
BILLOWS. _Page 122._]

What had really happened was this.

A fleet of fifty submarine warships, under the command of Michael
Lossenski, the eldest son of Orloff Lossenski, who was now Olga
Romanoff’s chief adviser in the conduct of the war that she had
commenced with the Aerians, had reached the northern coast of Kerguelen
Island about four o’clock in the morning in order to co-operate with
an aerial squadron of fifteen vessels led by the _Revenge_, under the
command, nominally, of Lossenski’s second son Boris, but really of Olga
herself.

As Alexis had surmised, the twelve vessels destroyed by the _Narwhal_
were scouts sent out to, if possible, feel their way to the entrance
of Christmas Harbour, which was known to be the headquarters of the
station.

These were to have returned to the fleet with all the intelligence they
could get as to bearings and soundings, and the position of mines
and the defending fleet. Then at daybreak, that is to say about eight
o’clock, the whole squadron was to have advanced to the entrance to the
harbour, ramming any of the defenders who barred their way, and then,
after sending a swarm of torpedoes into the mouth of the bay to explode
the mines and blow up any submarine defences that might exist, to have
made a rush for the inner bay at the same time that the air-ships
engaged the land defences.

The naval portion of the programme was completely frustrated by the
destruction of the scouts, while the aerial attack was foiled by the
look-outs stationed above the clouds. Soon after seven it became light
enough at their altitude for the powerful glasses of their commanders
to make out the fifteen Russian air-ships coming up from the southward
at a distance of about twenty miles.

A few minutes later they were themselves discovered by the Russians,
and Olga, to her intense chagrin, saw at a glance that all hope of a
surprise was gone. By some means or other the Aerians had received
intelligence of the attack, and were ready for it.

The terrible experience taught by the disaster of Antarctica warned her
and her lieutenants that any approach, now that they were seen, must be
made with the utmost caution, for they had no precise knowledge as to
the range of the Aerian guns. All they knew was that it was very great,
and that where one of their projectiles found its mark destruction
followed instantly.

Added to this, there was another difficulty. The dense masses of cloud
completely hid both sea and land from their view, and made accurate
shooting at the land defences impossible. Consequently there was
nothing for it but to fight the battle out in the upper regions of the
air, against a force of whose actual strength they were ignorant. They
dare not attempt to surround the ten air-ships, which hung stationary
over the island, for this meant bringing all their guns into play,
while they could only use half of their own.

While they were debating on a plan of operations, two new factors in
the coming struggle were swiftly and unexpectedly brought into play. As
soon as the news of their arrival had been telegraphed to headquarters,
the _Ariel_ took the air and passed under the clouds to the rear of
the Russian squadron. Ten miles behind them, she swept round sharply,
and with her wings inclined to the utmost, and her engines working at
the fullest capacity, she took a mighty upward swoop, passed through
the clouds like a flash of light, and before the Russians knew what
had happened, she was floating three thousand feet above them, out of
reach of their guns, and hurling projectile after projectile into their
midst. Three of their ships, struck almost simultaneously, were torn
into a thousand fragments, and vanished through the clouds.

It was the glare and shock of this explosion that Alexis had seen
from the conning-tower of the _Narwhal_. The remaining Russian ships
instantly scattered and sank through the clouds to seek a refuge from
the foe whose deadly blows they were completely unable to return.

But the moment they appeared on the under-side of the cloud-sea, all
the guns of the land batteries opened fire in all directions with
time-shells, and so rapid were the discharges, and so terrible the
energy of the explosives, that the whole firmament above the island
seemed ablaze with them, while the concussions of the nether atmosphere
were so tremendous and continuous, that it would have been madness for
the Russian air-ships to have approached within the zone of fire with
which the Aerians had covered and encircled their positions.

The clouds were torn and broken up into vast whirling masses, which
completely obscured the view of the Russians, and rendered anything
like accurate shooting in the direction of the island impossible. Worse
than this, the range of the great land guns, fired at an elevation
of forty-five degrees, was so enormous that they were forced by the
incessantly exploding projectiles, which were hurled up into the air in
all directions, to retire to a distance which, beyond the most random
shooting, the results of which were spent upon the rocks of the island
and the sea, rendered their own guns useless.

Rise up through the clouds they dare not, for they knew the _Ariel_ was
still there, and that the first ship that showed herself would be an
almost helpless mark for one of the ten guns which, for the time being,
commanded the heavens. There seemed nothing for it but an ignominious
retreat, for, as Boris Lossenski said to Olga when, furious with rage
and mortification, she reproached him with a lack both of skill and
courage, an attack upon a volcano in full eruption would have been
child’s play to an assault at close quarters on Kerguelen Island.

Their one hope of success had lain in a surprise, and that, by some
unaccountable means, had been made impossible. They had reckoned only
on the air-ships and the submarine defences, and even these they had
expected to take unawares. The terrible power of the battery guns,
which were able to spread their seas of fire through the air and to
shake the very firmament itself with their projectiles, had been a
revelation to them.

They could not train their own guns without seeing their mark, and
neither flame nor smoke betrayed the position of the batteries, while
on the other hand the artillerists on the island had simply to surround
the station with a zone of fire and a continuous series of atmospheric
convulsions through which no air-ship could have passed without the
risk of overturning or completely collapsing.

So Olga was at last convinced that her choice lay between abandonment
of the attack or running the gauntlet of fire in the almost forlorn
hope of engaging the land batteries and an aerial fleet of unknown
strength at close quarters.

Baffled and defeated, and yet convinced that to continue the unequal
contest under its present conditions would be merely to court still
more disastrous defeat, and even probable destruction, Olga at last
allowed Lossenski to give the signal for retreat, and the Russian
squadron withdrew to a position twelve miles northward of the island.
Its departure was seen both from the air and the land, and the
cannonade immediately stopped.

Meanwhile Alan had run the _Narwhal_ into the mouth of Christmas
Harbour flying his red flag. He was met by the _Cachalot_, and,
after telling Captain Ernstein what he had done, and learning of the
repulse of the Russians in the aerial battle, he directed forty of the
submarine vessels to follow him out to sea to look for the Russian
flotilla.

All the craft were furnished with tell-tale needles similar to the
one on board the _Narwhal_, for it is impossible to see a sufficient
distance under water to effectively attack an enemy as agile as the
submarine warships were, and this fact had led to the universal
employment of the needles.

As it was now quite light, the whole Aerian squadron, with the
exception of five vessels whose duty it was to act as scouts under
water, proceeded seaward on the surface of the waves, keeping a
sharp look-out for the remains of the Russian fleet, which they soon
discovered lying about five miles off the island. They could make out
thirty-five of the long, black, half-submerged hulls lying together
like a school of whales with the waves breaking over them as over
sunken rocks.

Alan immediately signalled from his conning-tower in the manual
sign-language, used by the Aerians to communicate between their
air-ships, to his consorts, and ordered them to scatter and form a wide
circle round the Russian squadron at a distance of a mile, and a depth
of two fathoms, but on no account to approach within a thousand yards
of them. When they had reached their positions they were to rise to the
surface and each was to discharge a couple of torpedoes towards the
centre of the circle. After that they were to retire and leave the rest
to him.

The moment the order had been passed through the fleet, everyone of the
vessels disappeared and proceeded to her station. The _Narwhal_ sank
at the same time until nothing but the glass dome of her conning-tower
remained above the water.

By carefully noting the course steered by the compass, and accurately
measuring the distance travelled by the number of revolutions of the
propeller, each captain was able to place his craft in the desired
position.

So perfectly, indeed, was the manœuvre performed that when the vessels
rose to the surface they formed a circle two miles in diameter, in the
centre of which lay, within a space of about two hundred yards square,
the Russian flotilla, the commanders of which, afraid to advance nearer
to the shore without the intelligence which they still awaited from
their scouts, and confounded by the awful spectacle presented by the
aerial battle, of the issue of which they were utterly ignorant, were
waiting in bewilderment and indecision the issue of the events which
had taken such a marvellous and unexpected turn.

The manœuvre ordered by Alan had been executed so promptly and secretly
that the Russians were not even aware that they were surrounded until
torpedo after torpedo, coming in from all points of the compass, began
exploding in their midst, hurling vast masses of water and foam up
into the air, tearing their plates and crippling their propellers, and
disabling half their number before they had time to recover from the
confusion into which the sudden attack had thrown them.

To communicate signals from one vessel to another under such
circumstances was impossible, and so united action was out of the
question. All that the captains of the vessels could see was that
there were enemies upon all sides of them. The explosion of the eighty
torpedoes had churned the water up into a mass of seething foam, in the
midst of which fifteen vessels were lying crippled and helpless on the
surface, while six more had been sent to the bottom.

This was bad enough, but while the captains of those which had escaped
were recovering from the stupefaction into which this sudden disaster
had thrown them Alan saw his chance, and as soon as the last torpedo
had exploded headed the _Narwhal_ full speed into the midst of them.
Then followed a scene which would have beggared all description.

The great ship, moving at a speed of nearly three miles a minute, tore
her way through the half-crippled squadron, hurling everything she
struck to the bottom of the sea. Every Russian vessel that was able to
do so after the first assault sank out of the way of the terrible ram
of the _Narwhal_ and headed off at full speed into the open sea.

But for those that were partially or wholly disabled there was no
escape. Alan standing in his conning-tower, his teeth clenched and his
blue eyes almost black with the fierce passion of battle and revenge,
whirled his steering-wheel this way and that, and as the steel monster
swung round in rapid curves in obedience to the rudder, he hurled her
again and again upon his practically helpless victims, piercing them
through and through as though their plates had been cardboard instead
of steel.

When the last one had gone down he left the conning-tower, hoisted his
flagstaff, and flew a signal to his consorts to return to harbour. What
had become of the Russian vessels that had escaped he neither knew nor,
for the present, cared.

The victory of the Aerians both at sea and in the air was complete, and
he was certain that the Russians had received such a lesson as would
convince them that Kerguelen Island was impregnable to any assault that
they could make upon it, unless they were able to take its defenders by
surprise--a contingency which was justly considered impossible.

CHAPTER XIII. THE SYREN’S STRONGHOLD.

AS soon as the first pitched battle in the world-war was over, a
lengthy and detailed report of the attack on Kerguelen and its repulse
was drawn up by Alan, Captain Ernstein, and Admiral Forrest for
presentation to the Council. To this report Alan added a supplement,
which is here reproduced in his own words.

“From what I know of the designs of Olga Romanoff and her advisers I
am convinced that the defeats which have been inflicted upon them will
merely have the effect of checking, and not putting a stop to, their
operations against the peace and freedom of the world.

“I have seen and heard enough during the last five years to feel
satisfied that there exists a very widespread conspiracy, the object
of which is the restoration of the Romanoff dynasty, in the person
of Olga, the breaking up of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, and the
inauguration of an era of personal despotism and popular slavery.

“As far as we have been able to learn, this conspiracy embraces
practically all the descendants of those families who lost their
rank, official position, or property during the reconstitution of
Russia after the fall of the Romanoffs. These people have, of course,
everything to gain and not much to lose by the destruction of the
present order of things, and Olga has promised them, no doubt quite
sincerely, that in the event of her triumph they shall be restored to
all that their ancestors lost.

“As a matter of fact, the greater part of Russia will be divided
amongst them should she ever accomplish her designs. The old order
of things, as it existed before the days of Alexander II., is to be
completely reinstated. The lower orders of the people are to be reduced
once more to serfdom, and the trading classes to a condition very
little better.

“If they resist they are to be terrorised into submission by the
air-ships, and all who raise their voices for freedom are to be
banished to Siberia, which is once more to be the prison-land of the
Russian Empire. A large standing army is to be kept constantly on the
war-footing, while the sea navy and the aerial fleet are to be kept up
to such a strength as to be able to hold the rest of the Continent in
practical subjection.

“In short, Olga aspires to nothing less than the throne of an empire
which shall stretch from the Yellow Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. I am
afraid, too, that there can be no doubt but that this conspiracy is
not only favoured, but actually assisted, by large numbers of people
throughout the Federation area.

“In fact, during the latter part of our stay at Mount Terror, the
stronghold was visited by men of all nations, who, of course, came
and went away in the submarine vessels, and who openly promised to do
everything they could to further what they called the cause of the
New Revolution in their own countries, on the understanding that the
old evils of capitalism and private ownership of land by which their
ancestors had grown wealthy are to be restored.

“This will, I trust, be enough to show you that the triumph of Olga
Romanoff means nothing less than the complete undoing of all the work
that was done in the days of the Terror.

“We have proved so far that Kerguelen, and, therefore, Aeria, is
impregnable to attack save by surprise, which will now, of course,
be impossible. But, on the other hand, the force at the disposal of
Olga and her allies is still so strong that all our present resources
will have to be kept constantly employed to protect ourselves, and
this leaves the world at the mercy of any Power which can obtain
the assistance of the Russians’ aerial navy, which still numbers
twenty-seven vessels, all equal to our best ships.

“In addition to these they possess a submarine navy of at least forty
vessels, all of which are swifter and more powerful than ours, with the
exception of the _Narwhal_. I therefore suggest that the whole of the
resources at the command of the Council shall at once be devoted to the
building of at least fifty air-ships of the _Ithuriel_ type, and the
same number of submarine battleships like the _Narwhal_, complete plans
of which I enclose.

“Until this additional force is at our command, I think it would
be useless to attempt the destruction of the Russian stronghold in
Antarctica, and until this is destroyed there can be no hope of
peace. This stronghold, which I will now attempt to describe for the
information of the Council, is one of the most marvellous places on
earth.

“It lies in and about Mount Terror and the Parry Mountains, which run
from it towards the pole behind the ice-barrier of Antarctica. Nearly
ten years ago a Russian explorer named Kishenov reached the ice-barrier
and made the discoveries which have enabled the Russian revolutionists
to create their stronghold. In addition to his ship, he took with him
three aerostats, which were chiefly constructed during his voyage, and
also a small submarine vessel, which he took out in sections and put
together at sea.

“He skirted the coast of Victoria Land, and was stopped by the ice in