The work was performed by the Ruling Council assisted by a council of an equal number of matrons who had what had once been accounted the misfortune to be childless. Neither joy nor sorrow was shown, at least in public, either by those who were chosen or by those upon whom the joint Council was forced to pronounce sentence of death by rejecting them.
The natural joy of the chosen was lost in the universal sorrow of the now inevitable parting, and those who were destined not to survive, satisfied with the perfect justice with which the selection had been made, consoled each other with the knowledge that they would die hand in hand and be spared the sorrow of surviving all who were nearest and dearest to them.
On the morning of the 18th, the temple of Aeria witnessed the last ceremony that would ever take place within its walls. This was the marriage of those who, unless their last refuge shared in the destruction that was about to bring chaos upon earth, were to be the parents of the new race that was to repeople the world.
The survivors of the whole nation now barely filled the vast interior of the temple. The solemn words which bound youth and maid together as man and wife to face side by side the last ordeal that humanity would ever have to pass through were spoken in the midst of a silence which reigned not only in the temple but now throughout the whole valley.
All the sentinel ships had now been withdrawn save one, which, from a height of fifteen thousand feet, still kept watch and ward against the coming of the foe that was even yet expected. But this was the only sign of life within the confines of Aeria, and when the solemn ceremony was ended and the assembly filed out of the doors, the members of it betook themselves almost in silence to their homes, there to make their final preparations for life or death as Destiny had selected them to live or die.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE LAST BATTLE.
AT sunset on the 15th the sluice-door had been finally lowered into its place and the pent-up waters of the lake of Aeria had risen nearly forty feet by the next morning. Only the upper parts of the villas on its banks were visible and its area was so enormously increased that the whole appearance of the valley was altered.