But the two friends had gained even more than this, for in answer to their earnest pleadings, in which it may be suspected they were not altogether unsupported by those as vitally concerned as themselves, a joint family council had decided that, under the unparalleled circumstances of the case, there was no valid reason for refusing consent to their immediate union with the two faithful brides who had waited so long and so patiently for their lords.
Therefore, on the morning of the 31st, it came to pass that they stood upon the spot sanctified by the ashes of their great ancestors, and took each other for man and wife, for life or death, as the hazard of the world’s fate might decide, in the presence of a vast congregation of those who stood with feet already touching the brink of the valley of the shadow of death.
No bridal so strange or solemn had ever been celebrated in the world before. It was human love and hope and genius, serene and confident in the presence of the most awful catastrophe that had ever befallen humanity, defying the fate that was about to overwhelm a world in destruction.
That evening, as the sun was touching the tops of the western mountains, the last preparations for the voyage were completed, the last farewells exchanged, and the Isma and the Avenger, now renamed the Alma by the hands of her name-mother, rose into the air amid salvoes of aerial artillery, and winged their way northward over the Ridge.
As they sped out over the plains of Northern Africa the sun sank, and out of the north-western heavens shone the luminous haze of the Fire-Cloud, which had now grown in visible magnitude until the two fan-like wings which spread out from its central nucleus spanned an arc of twenty degrees in the heavens.
As the two air-ships sped on their northward course towards Alexandria, where Alan had decided to make his first attempt to stay the progress of the world-war, the two pairs of new-wedded lovers watched with anxious eyes from the decks of their flying craft the terrible portent in the skies whose meaning they above all others on earth were so well qualified to read.
There could be no doubt now, even apart from all the elaborate calculations which had been made, that the prediction of the Martian astronomers was far more likely to be fulfilled than contradicted by the event.
Yet, so great was the happiness they found in this strange fulfilment of the faint hopes of years of almost hopeless waiting that, even as they journeyed on through the night with this threatening sign of approaching ruin pouring its angry light out of the skies, their talk was still rather of love and life and hope than of the death and desolation which they knew to be overhanging their race with such remorseless certainty.
They had lived and loved, and their love had found fruition. What more could they have asked of Fate than this, even if they could have prolonged their lives indefinitely by a mere effort of will? As Alan had said to Alma at the moment of their re-betrothal in the palm-grove, they were immortal now, and for them the death of a world was but an accident on the onward progress of an evolution in which such souls as theirs, veritable sparks of the divine fire itself, were the dominating factors.