“With those thirty ships, if you have as many as that, and I suppose you must have twenty-four or twenty-five at least, you could wreck half the great cities of the world in six months, and we could do little or nothing to stop you. We have only eleven ships equal in speed to yours, and most of those must be kept in call of Aeria.
“I would give my life and my ship willingly for permission to fight it out here and now, and yet, after all, that would be frightful cruelty and injustice to the unoffending thousands who would lose their lives by the destruction of the city, so I suppose it must be peace for a year, and then—ah, what then?”
His soliloquy began on the terrace and ended on the deck of the Ithuriel. He gave the order to rise into the air, and the aerial cruiser soared slowly upwards, still flying the flag of truce as a signal to her consorts that the mission had been successfully accomplished. As he felt certain that the Sultan would carry out the directions agreed upon to the letter, he left the city without any misgivings, and in a few minutes the Ithuriel was floating alongside her consort the Isma, and Alan and Alexis had clasped hands once more.
CHAPTER XX.
THE CALL TO ARMS.
WITHIN an hour the wondering inhabitants of Alexandria saw the Russian fleet rise a thousand feet into the air and form in two columns of line ahead. Then the Aerian fleet ranged itself in two long lines five hundred feet outside them and a thousand feet above them. A time-shell from the Ithuriel gave the signal to start, and the two fleets leapt forward to the south-east at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, and in a few minutes had vanished over the desert. The speed was quickly increased to two hundred miles, and so they sped on all day and through the next night—the Russian ships being forced to show their lights while the Aerians remained in darkness—until, when morning dawned and Olga and her captains looked for Alan’s fleet they found that it had vanished, and that they were floating alone over the solitudes of the Southern Ocean.
They had been escorted like offending school children out of harm’s way, and then left to their own devices. It was a bitterly humiliating ending to an expedition which had really produced such important results, but there was no possibility of present revenge, and so Olga gave the order to proceed straight to Mount Terror, intending to begin there and then the working out of her part of the compact that she had made with the Sultan.