The Argenta pitched and tossed, but Masters and Hector worked steadily at the delicate levers. Now they headed her right, now left; now she climbed above the average ten thousand feet, now dropped low to avoid the nasty air patches. Mavis was in her bed, her eyes wide open in terror. Above the roaring of the engines, came claps of thunder, deafening and awe inspiring.
“I don’t understand,” she moaned. “What is happening?”
“It is impossible to say,” said Desmond. “But I feel we are safer here than we should be on earth to-night.” And the night of horror passed.
Below, as they hovered to and fro, the whole country was blazing. Dawn came, but an angry dawn. Dark clouds scudded across the sky; the thunder grumbled in the distance, and occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the angry heavens.
“Where are we?” asked Sir John.
“Over Edinburgh,” answered Masters from the other end of the ’phone, “we have scarcely moved for the last four hours.”
“What?”
“The engines seem disinclined to work. I can’t make it out at all.”
The ship suddenly swerved to one side—a terrific explosion filled the air, and they saw the Castle Rock suddenly shiver, crumple up, and fall a shapeless ruin on to the railway line beneath. In a few minutes, Edinburgh, the Modern Athens, Edinburgh the Fair, was a mass of flames! They watched the populace, mad with fear, running aimlessly along the streets. “This is awful,” muttered Alan. “Make south if you can. Let us get away from this desolation.”
With a great amount of patience and skill, Masters at length managed to get the engines to work. But they came upon havoc and destruction whichever way they went,—indeed, the whole world seemed to have turned upside down. They circled London, but the first metropolis of the world had been the first English city to suffer from the terrible scourge. Blackened, charred, lifeless, London was a city of the dead.