Doubtless they would have been exterminated long ago but for the fact that they had been expressly preserved for the purposes of sport, just as foxes are in England. Packs of smaller tame eagles, of a different breed, were trained to hunt them. Assisted by these, a party of Martian nobles would sally forth in their air-yachts and chase the formidable giant eagles from peak to peak, following them in their circling flights into the upper air or their dizzy downward swoops, until some expert hunter-aeronaut contrived to throw a net over the quarry and capture it alive. That was, briefly, the general procedure, Monck explained; but, as he further remarked, it did not always come off as per programme. Sometimes the krondos assumed the offensive against the hunters; and cases had been even known of their dragging men out of the airships and carrying them off, or dashing them down upon the rocks below. ’The king has arranged for a grand krondo-hunt to-morrow, in your honour!’ Alondra one day informed the chums. ’We must be astir early in the morning. You are to come with me in my yacht. Now you will see some truly royal sport. Our air-yacht races are but as a children’s game compared with this!’ It came to pass, accordingly, that at dawn a great procession of air-craft, headed by the king in his own yacht—known as the _Nelda_—started off in the beams of the rising sun for the district which was the haunt of the great birds. An hour’s run brought them to the hunting-ground, and the chums thought they had never seen a more desolate tract. Great, rocky cliffs and heights, and soaring mountain-peaks above, with dark, gloomy ravines and valleys below, were its chief features—truly a suitable region for the ferocious winged monsters they were in search of. Alondra was the first to sight one of the creatures; and, following the rules of the hunt, turned his yacht quickly and dashed away in pursuit. He was wearing, as it happened, through a fancy of his own, his new flying-dress. Why, exactly, the chums who were with him did not know; though he had hinted mysteriously at some new experiment he was desirous of trying. As the _Lokris_ shot upwards, and then swerved to round a towering peak, something went wrong with one of the revolving spirals; and Gerald, as he had done before in a similar case, climbed up the mast to try to right it. In the meantime, the speed was checked, and the craft passed closer to the rock than had been intended. Other yachts, which had turned aside to follow, were catching them up; and Alondra, who did not like this, was shouting excited instructions to Gerald, when there came a loud rushing of wings as two immense dark forms rose unexpectedly from off the rock and sailed upwards within a few yards of him. One of the giant birds swung round in a narrow circle, poised, and then swooped down upon the busy worker on the top of the mast.