“THE temperature has been normal now for three hours. Don’t you think we may venture to raise the sluice-gate?”

“I see nothing against it. If the world is not habitable again now it never will be. It is a good two days since the contact now, and if the atmosphere had been burnt up or carried away by the attraction of the comet it would either be much colder or much hotter than that.”

“Very well then, up it comes, and then we shall get our last question answered.”

It was Alan who thus questioned and answered his father. All had gone well with the refugees of Mount Austral and the remnant of the Aerian race. Their science and their faith in themselves had been triumphantly justified by the event and had carried them safely through the sternest ordeal that man had ever been called upon to face.

And now there was only one more chance to be met, one more problem to be solved. The temperature showed that the earth still possessed an atmosphere, but was that atmosphere capable of supporting human life? If yes, all would be well and they could go forth into the wasted world and possess and replenish it. If no, then all their labour would have been in vain and they might as well have died in battle or with those friends and kin who had taken their silent and dignified farewell of the world in the last days of the State of Aeria.

They had a calorimeter and a pressure-gauge communicating with the outer world to tell the temperature and the height of the water in the valley. The former, after rising for a few hours to over a thousand degrees, had now sunk back to normal, while the latter stood at thirty feet above the entrance doors to the cavern.

The machinery for raising the sluice-gate was put into motion and they watched it with almost breathless anxiety lest the straining or shifting of the rocks, which had been very perceptible during the terrific convulsions which had apparently lasted for nearly ten hours, should have so dislocated the grooves that the gate could not be raised.

There were a few preliminary creaks and groans, a hitch and an increased strain on the lifting chains, and then the great sheet of steel rose easily and smoothly to the top of the channel and the pent-up waters rushed forth in a black boiling flood through the narrow opening and roared away, foaming and tossing along the bottom of the crevasse, once more on their way to their unknown destination.

Very soon after this it was discovered that the waters were subsiding much more rapidly than could be accounted for by the volume that escaped through the subterranean channel. It was therefore necessary to conclude that there must have been some convulsion in another part of the mountains which had opened a fresh channel from the lake to the outer world.

The next step was to raise the two inner of the three doors which guarded the entrance to the caverns. The raising of the first one showed the ice still intact between it and the second, and this had to be broken up and removed before the second could be reached. Then the middle door was raised an inch or so and the water spurted out from beneath it.

Was this the water of the melted ice or was it that which filled the valley? Had their outer door stood firm or had it cracked or shrivelled up under the heat of the furnace through which the earth had passed? It flowed for ten minutes and then slackened and stopped. The outer door had held fast. Then, in case of accidents, the middle one was lowered again and they waited until the waters should have sufficiently subsided to enable them to challenge the last hazard on which their fate depended.

The sluice-gate had been raised at what would be four o’clock on the morning of the 26th of September, if the cataclysm through which the earth had passed had not so far affected the terrestrial economy as to alter the relations of day and night. Twelve hours later the pressure-gauge ceased to act, showing that the rapidly-sinking waters of the lake had reached the threshold of the outer door. The time had now come to ask the question on the answer to which the lives of the remnant of humanity depended—was the atmosphere breathable or not?

That was the one question which occupied, to the momentary exclusion of all others, the mind of every Aerian who was in the caverns. The middle gate was lifted, and every heart stood still as Alan and Alexis strode forward into the dark passage and grasped the levers which actuated the lifting mechanism of the outer one.

They took one glance back at the anxious faces which showed so white in the gleam of the electric lamps, and then they pulled. The machinery creaked and groaned as the power was applied. Then came a rending sound and a dull crash. The door lifted a little, quivered and dropped again, and remained immovable.

“The machinery has broken down!” said Alan, going back into the gallery. “There must have been a land-slip over the doorway.”

“What will you do then?” said Alma. “Surely we have not escaped the conflagration of the world to be buried alive after all!”

“No,” he said, looking down at her with a reassuring smile. “It can hardly be as bad as that. Unless a whole mountain has fallen in front of the door, we shall soon find a way out.”

The first thing to be done was to get rid of the door, and this Alan accomplished in summary fashion by undermining it with drills, and then, after he had sent everyone into the inner recesses of the caverns, tearing it to fragments with a small quantity of the explosive used in the shells.

A mass of earth and stones came rolling into the gallery immediately after the explosion, then an excavating machine was run up on hastily-laid rails and was soon boring its way into the obstructing mass. A distance of ten yards was tunnelled and then there was a rattle and whir in front of the machine, which told that the work was done. There was a cloud of dust from pulverised stones and earth and then came a rush of fresh warm air and a gleam of sunlight through the opening.

“Thank God the atmosphere is still there and the sun is still shining!” cried Alan, as he drew the machine back and ran out into the open air.

He looked about him for a few moments and then turned and walked back to his companions, who were already crowding towards the opening with faces glad with new hope and drawing deep breaths of the life-giving air, which the mysterious alchemy of Nature had restored unchanged to the earth. He stopped them with a gesture and said—

“Don’t go out yet till we have made the tunnel safe. You will find an awful change out yonder. Aeria is no longer a paradise. It is only a swamp surrounded by naked rocks!”

And so they found it to be when they at length passed out through the tunnel and stood upon the black oozy shores of the dreary lake which still half filled what had once been the lovely land of Aeria.

The once verdure-clad mountains rose up bare and gaunt and blackened, a vast circle of ragged rock, unrelieved by a blade of grass or a single tree of all the myriads that had clothed their slopes three days before. It seemed as though the clock of Time had been put back through countless ages and the world was once more as it had been before the first forms of life appeared upon it.

But still the air that fanned their cheeks was fresh and warm and sweet, and the afternoon sun was shining across the western peaks out of a cloudless sky of purest blue. The calm had come after the storm and the world was waiting to begin its life anew. The Alma and the Isma had utterly vanished, and were probably buried deep in the black slimy mud. Of the city of Aeria not a vestige was visible.

The first thing that Alan did as soon as the last momentous question had thus been asked and answered was to ask his father to order one of the smaller air-ships, which had been stored in sections in the cavern, to be put together and charged with motive-power as rapidly as possible.

“Certainly if you wish it,” he replied; “but what is your reason for being in such a hurry to reassert your empire of the air?”

“I can tell you now,” said Alan in reply, “what there would have been no need to tell you if, well, if we had not been able to leave the caverns. Just after sunrise on the last day of the battle Bruno Vincent brought the Orion as near as he could to the Alma and told me by signal that he had seen the Revenge leave the fight and head away at full speed to the southward and westward. That means, I think, that Olga’s courage failed her at the last and that she meant to try the forlorn hope of saving herself in her old stronghold at Mount Terror. I am going to see whether she is alive or dead.”

“And suppose by a miracle you should find her alive. What then?” said Alma, who had overheard his request, coming up to him and looking up into his face with melting eyes as she slipped her hand caressingly through his arm.

“The world is beginning its life anew in us, dear,” he replied with tenderness in his eyes but none in his voice, “and there shall be no snake in our Eden if I”—

“If you have to be the Cain of the new world to prevent it!” interrupted Alma, reading his dark meaning at a glance, and interpreting it with a directness and force that startled him. “No, Alan, that must not be! If she has escaped the vengeance of God you may well forego yours. I can hardly think that she is still alive, but it is right that we should go and see”—

“We!” echoed Alan before she could finish. “Do you mean that you will come with me? No, Alma, you must not do that. Remember that if she has by any chance escaped, the crew of the Revenge may be alive too, and then we may have to fight”—

“No, no, Alan, not that! not that!” she cried with a gesture of horror. “The world has done with fighting, for there is nothing left to fight about. We will go as friends with open hands to them, and the new life of the world shall be begun with the forgiveness of our enemies. Who are we that we should judge after the Voice of God has spoken?”

In the end she had her way, and so it came to pass that soon after sunrise on the following day an air-ship, which a hundred skilled and willing hands had toiled all night in fitting together and equipping for her voyage, rose into the air above the ghastly wilderness that had once been Aeria, and winged her way towards the southern pole.

Twenty hours later she sank down on to the ice that had already re-covered the rocks in front of the fissure in the side of Mount Terror, and as she did so a figure came forth out in the darkness into the half light of the polar morning.

“Look! There she is!” said Alma in an awe-stricken whisper to Alan. “Alone in this awful place! Come, let us go to her.”

As she spoke the gangway steps were lowered and she descended them first, followed by Alan, his father, Alexis, and Isma. Some strange influence held the others back as she advanced with outstretched hands and words of kindly greeting on her lips towards the piteous wreck of womanhood that slowly emerged from the gloom of the chasm.Olga Romanoff had survived the doom of the world, but the hand of a just vengeance had fallen heavily upon her. Her once splendid form was shrunken as though three score years had passed over her in as many hours. Her left side was half paralysed and her shaking limbs hung loosely as she tottered along.

Her golden fillet and jewelled wings had been cast away, leaving bare the great livid scar that crossed her forehead; her white, drawn face was seamed with deep lines marked by agony and terror, and the thick masses of the once glorious hair that hung about her head and shoulders were streaked with grey and clotted with blood.

The fire had died out of her eyes and the red from her shrivelled lips, and the weak broken voice in which she answered Alma’s greeting quavered like that of an old woman in her dotage.

“I have been expecting you,” she said as Alma took her trembling hands in hers. “I thought you would come. You have come for Alan, haven’t you? He is yonder, but he is dead. I kept him alive as long as I could but he was wounded, and when the world was changed to hell for my sins the fire choked him.

“I tried to die too, but it wouldn’t kill me. There was air enough for me and I wanted to give it to him to breathe but he wouldn’t take it. I suppose you have been dead and are an angel now like those others behind you. Come, I will take you to him. It is dark but I know the way.”

The moment she began to speak Alma saw the awful calamity that had befallen her. The haughty daring spirit that had essayed and almost achieved the conquest of the world was dissolved in the bitter waters of the Marah of Madness. The soul that had quailed before no human fear had collapsed into imbecility under the superhuman terrors which she alone had witnessed and survived. Without a word she suffered her to lead her into the gloom, beckoning to the others to follow. They turned on the electric lamps they had brought with them and entered the chasm.

They reached the black ash-strewn floor of the gloomy subterranean lake in the heart of the mountain, and Alan, pausing for a moment, flashed the light of his lamp round the vast chamber that had once been so terribly familiar to him. The walls were burnt and blackened, and here and there masses of rock and boulders had been calcined to dust as though the long pent-up lava that had once flowed in fiery torrents over them had again been let loose.

Then the light fell upon something that was not rock and which gave back a dull metallic sheen. He took a few strides towards it and soon recognised it as all that was left of the once shapely and beautiful Ithuriel, the old flagship of the Aerian fleet with which he had lost the mastery of his own manhood and his people the empire of the air.

The crystal dome of the roof was gone and lay in patches of congealed glass about the blackened and shrivelled-up deck. The wings were burnt away and the transverse ribs of azurine stood out bare and twisted like the bones of a skeleton, and in the fore part of the hull a great gap showed where her magazine had taken fire and burnt with such terrific heat that it had melted even the azurine plates of which she was built.

“The poor old Ithuriel has flown her last flight!” he said to himself with a sigh as he turned away and followed the others, thinking sadly of all that had come to pass since he had last trodden her deck.

Olga, holding Alma by the hand, led the way from the lower gallery to the council chamber. As she pulled the curtain aside from the doorway a puff of foul air that seemed to bear a faint smell of blood was wafted in their faces. Alan called Alma back, fearing that she would faint in the sickening atmosphere, and at the sound of his voice Olga stopped short and looked back with a reawakened gleam in her eyes.

“Who is that?” she cried, pressing her hand to her brow. “Why, it is Alan! But no, Alan is here—here. He has been with me all the time since Khalid shot him. My God, can he have come to life again?”

Her voice rose to a shrill wavering scream as she said this. She dropped Alma’s hand and ran with faltering, stumbling steps towards a divan on which lay the form of a man whose black beard and moustache were thickly clotted with blood. She stopped and bent over it for a moment, then she raised herself and faced them with her hands locked in her hair and the light of frenzied insanity blazing in her eyes.

“No! No!” she cried in a voice, half a scream and half a wail, that rang weirdly through the great chamber. “He is dead still and that is only his ghost. Oh, Alan, my love, Alan! Why could I not die with you? Curse the hand that wounded you. Curse”—

In the one syllable her voice died away from a scream to a whisper, and at the same instant the paralysis, which had already smitten her once, laid its swift icy hand on her heart and brain. She swayed to and fro for a moment and then fell forward across the corpse of the man whose love for her had plunged the world into madness on the eve of its doom.

“What an awful end!” gasped Alma, shuddering in the close embrace she had sought in Alan’s arms. “And yet, Alan, she loved you to the end through all. That love for you was the one true thing in her life, and for its sake I will say God forgive her! Come, let us go!”

THE END.

MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.

[1] The 8th of December, on which day, in the year 1904, the armies of the Anglo-Saxon Federation and the aerial navy of the Terrorists defeated and almost annihilated the hosts of the Franco-Slavonian League, then besieging London under the command of Alexander Romanoff, last of the Tsars of Russia, and so made possible the universal disarmament which took place the following year.—The Angel of the Revolution, chap. xlvi.