She paused and looked at Khalid with cheeks glowing and eyes shining with enthusiasm and passion. He returned her glance with one no less fiery and passionate as he replied—
“I will be your guest, as you say, but the honour and the favour will be to me, your Majesty—for Majesty you are, crowned by the hand of favouring Nature with that which makes all men your subjects. Your air-ships shall rest in the garden of my palace to-night, and an hour after sunrise you shall find me ready for another journey to the skies, for my first experience has given me a taste for more. Till then farewell. The memory of your eyes will make me dream of Paradise to-night!”
There was that in his tone which told Olga that his words meant more than a neatly turned Oriental compliment, and as he stooped and kissed her hand in leave-taking she said half in jest and half in earnest—
“And I shall dream of the nearer glories of the world-empire which your Majesty and I may in the not very distant future divide between us.”
“Or share together!” said Khalid in his soul, as he raised his head again and their eyes met.
At the appointed time the next morning the squadron rose into the air from the palace gardens. In order to produce as widespread an effect as possible, Olga had extended her invitation to the Grand Vizier and about a score of the Sultan’s highest officials, including the commanders of his armies and fleets who happened to be in Alexandria at the time. These were distributed among the twenty air-ships, but Olga took care to arrange matters so that only the Grand Vizier should accompany the Sultan on board the Revenge.
In order that the Vizier, who was a cool-headed, wary, far-seeing man of nearly seventy, and therefore beyond the power of her own personal spells, might not interfere with her designs upon his master, she lost no time in placing him under the power of the drug which she had already used with such disastrous results to the world.
Although he had said nothing about it, she felt certain that Khalid must have been warned by Alan of the danger of taking anything to eat or drink from her hands, and therefore she had decided to make no attempt upon his liberty of will, unless it became absolutely necessary to do so; but the Vizier was easily taken unawares, and she had little difficulty in causing him to drink a cup of coffee while her chief engineer was explaining the working of the machinery to the Sultan in the engine-room.
The coffee, of course, contained a sufficient quantity of the drug to deprive the Vizier of all power of opposing her will or resisting her suggestions for many hours to come. So far as all independent advice was concerned, he was safely disposed of.
The air-ships rose to an elevation of some two thousand feet, and at a speed of two hundred miles an hour ran first along the valley of the Nile to the southward. At Khartoum they swerved to the eastward, crossed the mountains of the Red Sea littoral at a height of nine thousand feet, then sank again and skirted the Arabian coast until Mecca, the sacred city of Islam, came in sight.