Olga Romanoff

by George Chetwynd Griffith

They remained three days amidst the ruins of London, listening to the most heartrending tales of suffering and cruelty, and giving in return such consolation as they could. Then they took the air again, and journeyed on westward over the once fair and smiling English land that was now a wilderness amidst which plague and famine, anarchy and destruction, stalked triumphant, while the few who listened to their message waited in despairing terror for the fate that could hardly be worse than what they had passed through since the fatal 16th of May.

From England they crossed the Atlantic to America, and from America they sped over the Pacific to Australia, finding everywhere the same desolation upon the face of the earth, and the same terror and despair in the minds of men. But for the awful reality before their eyes, it would have been impossible for them to believe that the civilisation which had seemed so strong and splendid four months before, could have collapsed as it had done into such utter chaos.

In those four short months the whole tragedy of human life on earth seemed to have been re-enacted. The frenzy and panic of war had degenerated into a universal delirium. Men, women, and children had gone mad by millions. Religious fanatics, impostors, and enthusiasts, if possible more insane than their hearers, preached the wildest and most blasphemous doctrines, and uttered the most hideous prophecies, not only as to the approaching end of the world, but of the imaginary eternal horrors that were to follow it.

The art and science and culture of five hundred years had been forgotten in those few weeks of madness, and mankind had sunk back wholesale into the grossest superstitions of the Dark Ages. Every night, when the flaming shape of the Fire-Cloud blazed out among the stars, millions fell down on their knees and greeted it with prayers and invocations, as savages had once been wont to worship their fetishes.

By the end of August, when the fiery arc overarched more than two-thirds of the heavens and rivalled the sunlight itself in brightness, the degeneration of humanity had advanced to such a fearful stage of intellectual and moral depravity, that even human sacrifices were offered to appease the wrath of the deity who was believed to have taken the shape of the Fire-Cloud. Under the influence of delirium the human mind had gone back through twenty-five centuries, and the worship of Baal and Moloch had returned upon earth.

Only a small minority of men and women preserved their senses amidst the universal madness. These greeted the Aerians as friends, and heard their message, and promised to remain steadfast to the end, but as day after day went by and the terror grew and the nations plunged deeper and deeper into the saturnalia of frenzy and despair, the task undertaken by Alan and Alma grew more and more hopeless, and when the last day of August came, they at length confessed to themselves that it was useless to pursue it any further.

This, too, was the day on which the term of absence granted by the Council expired, and so at nightfall, after having carried their message round the whole world and passed it, by the mouths of those who were willing to listen, through many lands, they at length reluctantly turned their prows homeward, and, with hearts sickened by all the unspeakable horrors they had witnessed, soared upward into the luridly-lighted heavens, leaving the world to the fate which in twenty-three days more would overwhelm the conquerors and the conquered, the few sane and the many mad, in universal and inevitable destruction.

Alan timed his arrival so that the Alma and her consort crossed the Ridge a few minutes after sunrise on the 1st of September. As they alighted in the central square of the city and disembarked to greet the group of friends and kindred who were waiting to receive them, a strange stillness struck their ears and sent a mysterious chill to their hearts.

The splendid capital of Aeria seemed like a city of the dead. Its broad white streets and squares were empty, there were no boats on the lake, and no aerial yachts in the air as there were wont to be at sunrise. The gardens were deserted and silent, even the songs of birds which had welled up from them in a chorus of greeting to the coming sun were now hushed, and the birds themselves were flying restlessly from branch to branch, twittering and calling to each other, frightened sharers in the universal fear. It was not long before Alan learnt from his father the explanation of this strange and mournful change in the life of the valley. A few days after their departure a mysterious epidemic had appeared among the people of Aeria. First the old, then the middle-aged, and then the young had been silently and swiftly stricken down, first in hundreds and then in thousands.