The bullet flew high, cutting one of the wings off Alan’s coronet in its flight. Half a dozen strides took him alongside his ship, and in another instant he was standing on her deck, his left arm round Alma’s waist holding her behind him and his right hand grasping one of his pistols.
He raised his arm and the pistol flashed. At the same moment he stamped on the deck and the Alma leapt a thousand feet obliquely into the air. The second before the pistol flashed Olga turned her head as though she were going to fire again, and the motion saved her life, for Alan’s bullet, instead of piercing her brain, as it was meant to do, cut a straight red gash across her forehead from temple to temple and buried itself in the breast of Orloff Lossenski as he sprang forward to snatch his mistress out of the line of fire.
He pitched forward and dropped, and Khalid, forgetting everything else in the horror of the moment, caught Olga in his arms as a rain of blood streamed down over her face and a shrill scream of pain and rage burst from her lips.
Although there were nearly three hundred warships floating in the air above Alexandria, and though the rapidly-enacted tragedy on the roof of the palace could be distinctly seen from their decks, the Alma escaped scathless, for the simple reason that, so terrible was the energy developed by the projectiles in use, that had one struck her as she left the terrace the palace itself would have been wrecked, and every living being within a radius of two hundred yards from the focus of the explosion would have been instantly killed.
Consequently, the captains of the Russian and Moslem ships had to look on in angry impotence as she leapt out of range, joined her consort, and with her soared away westward until a height of fifteen thousand feet was reached, and so vanished from the sight of their discomfited enemies.
From Alexandria they crossed the Mediterranean and Europe to Britain by way of Italy, the Valley of the Rhone, and Paris, at a height of some five thousand feet from the land. What they saw more than justified the reports which had reached Aeria. The fairest countries of Europe were now only blackened deserts and wasted wildernesses.
They flew all day over deserted fields and towns and cities that were little better than heaps of blackened ruins, and when night fell and the Fire-Cloud blazed out of the sky, its glare was answered by flames rising from the earth, and huge patches of mingled smoke and flame which marked the sites of other towns which were only now falling victims to the destroyers.
Society had practically come to an end. People who a few weeks before had been wealthy watched almost with apathy the plunder of their homes and the burning of their palaces by the armed bands of robbers which sprang up everywhere. There was no longer any protection for life and property. If anarchists on the earth did not burn and slay and plunder, their enemies in the air would, and even if they did not, what did it matter if friends and foes, plunderers and plundered, were to be consumed together in the fire that was about to fall from heaven?
Amidst the universal terror Alma, with her almost unearthly beauty, the calm dignity of her bearing, and the sweetness and gentleness of her loving counsels, passed through the devastated lands rather like an angel of mercy than a woman of the same flesh and blood as the distracted panic-stricken crowds through which she moved by Alan’s side, speaking her message in a voice that seemed to be an echo from some other world.
When the Alma and the Isma reached London ten days after leaving Alexandria, they found the vast and once splendid metropolis of the world a wide waste of broken, blackened, and in some places still smoking ruins. Of its fifteen millions of inhabitants barely three millions remained to people its fragments. All the rest had either fled soon after the first assault, or had fallen in the pitiless carnage that had been let loose upon them.