All but he and Alexis hurried in, and they, grasping the levers on either side of the door, pulled them, and the enormous sheet of steel descended quickly along its grooves and shut them in from the outer world, upon which chaos was about to fall.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SHE-WOLF TO HER LAIR.
IN the mysterious revolution of human things it came about that the only spectator of the closing scene of the tragedy of humanity who endured and survived its final terrors was the woman to whom it had been due that the fire from heaven had fallen upon a world mad with the frenzy and agony of war instead of sane and calm with the sanity and calmness of peace and reason.
On the issue of the Battle of Aeria, Olga and, under her unnaturally acquired influence, the Sultan, had staked the empire of the world and lost it. Before the fight had been raging many hours even she was forced to admit that Aeria was impregnable to any assault that she could deliver. But when the Aerians began to practise the desperate tactics of the second day it became manifest that nothing but annihilation awaited the invading fleet, out-matched as it was in speed and gun-power by the new Aerian warships and the land batteries.
With eyes burning with rage and envy she had watched through her glasses the incomparable Alma floating serenely at her unattainable altitude far above the battle-storm, and she had pictured Alan, her former slave, standing upon her deck perhaps—bitterest thought of all—with his wedded love beside him, and like a very arbiter of war hurling his destroying lightnings far and wide upon her ships until the supreme moment came in which he would descend like a very god from the upper air, and, hand in hand with Alma, strike the last terrible blow which would end the last conflict of man with man and leave neither friend nor foe alive to tell what the issue had been.
It would be a glorious end, worthy of him and the splendid traditions of his race, and she loathed herself for the craven fear that had seized upon her in the fateful hour of battle, and made her incapable of challenging the same fate at his hands. Khalid himself would have done so without hesitation, but she had robbed him of his manhood and debased him, as she had debased every other human being that had fallen under her influence.