So spacious were the approaches to the vast building that in less than ten minutes from the time the President had left the rostrum on hearing the salutes from the sky not a soul remained within its precincts.
Outside the Council Hall the scene was such as to baffle all attempts at adequate description. Hundreds of aerial craft, fashioned in every conceivable variety of design that the educated fancy of their owners could suggest, soared up from various parts of the city and its environs, and made towards the Ridge to the north of the valley.
The summit was about four thousand feet above the slope on which the city stood, and it was quite within the capacity of the pleasure-craft to scale this height. So their glittering wings beat the cool, fresh air of the morning with rapid strokes, and the whole flotilla of them soared upwards until their occupants were able to see over the mighty rock-wall, and the illimitable landscape beyond opened out before their expectant gaze.
The President, the Vice-President, and the twelve members of the Council with their families had embarked on one of the new aerial battleships, two hundred and fifty of which had been constructed during the past year. The Avenger, as she had been named, in view of the fact that she was henceforth to be placed under Alan’s immediate command as flagship of the combined Aerian and Federation fleets, was the largest aerial cruiser then in existence, and embodied the highest structural skill to which the engineers of Aeria had attained.
From the stern to the point of her ram she was two hundred and seventy-five feet in length, with a midships beam of thirty feet. She was sustained in the air on two pairs of wings, one working under the other. Of these, the lower and larger pair measured two hundred feet from point to point and fifty feet in their greatest breadth, while the upper pair, working nearly flush with the deck, were two-thirds of their size.
She carried ten guns on each broadside, and two bow and two stern chasers of a range limited only by the possibility of taking aim at the object to be destroyed, and her propellers were capable of driving her through the air at the hitherto unheard-of speed of six hundred miles an hour.[4]
The Avenger, attended by an escort of fifty cruisers of somewhat smaller dimensions than her own, rapidly out-distanced the flotilla of pleasure-craft, and passing over the Ridge at a speed of sixty miles an hour, stopped at an elevation of a thousand feet above it.
From here those on her deck could see the vast oval of the valley encircled by the sentinel ships which now constantly patrolled the mountain bulwarks of Aeria, and which were launching hundreds of time-shells up into the air from their outer broadsides and producing a continuous roar of explosions which formed such a greeting salute as had never been heard on earth or in the air before.
Presently an answering roll of thunder was heard far away to the north, growing every moment louder and louder.