Uttering a cry of rage and despair, he headed the _Al Borak_ at full speed towards the scene of the disaster. In three minutes he was floating over it, helpless to do anything to avert or even delay the swift destruction that was overwhelming the splendid fleet. Distracted by impotent rage and passionate sorrow for the fate of his soldiers and sailors, who were being slain hopelessly and by wholesale beneath his eyes, he watched the awful submarine storm rage on, wrecking ship after ship, and swallowing them up with all the thousands on board in the boiling gulfs which opened ever and anon amidst the waves. When the first panic passed, the transports which were still uninjured scattered and headed away as fast as their engines would drive them to the southward, where the only chance of safety seemed to lie. But there was no escape for them from their invisible and merciless enemies. The fate of one magnificent transport, the flagship of the fleet, may be described as an illustration of the general disaster. She was a vessel of fifty thousand tons measurement, and her crew and complement of troops numbered together nearly twenty-five thousand. She escaped the first discharge from the submarine torpedoes unharmed, and heading southward with her triple propellers revolving at their utmost velocity, rushed through the water at a speed of more than forty nautical miles an hour. She had scarcely gained a mile on her course when the glass-domed conning-tower of a battleship appeared for an instant above the waves. Before Khalid, not knowing whether it was friend or foe, could make up his mind to fire on it, it disappeared again. A few seconds later the great ship stopped and shuddered with some mighty shock, as though she had run head-on to a sunken reef, and heeled over to one side. Then came a dull roar, a huge column of white foaming water rose up under her side amidships, and she broke in two and vanished in the midst of a white space of swirling eddies. Such scenes as this were occurring simultaneously in twenty different parts of the naval battlefield. The foe never showed himself save for an instant. Then came the blow that meant destruction, and the victim vanished. There was none of the pomp and pageantry of modern naval warfare; no splendid armaments of mighty ironclads and stately cruisers vomiting thunder and flame and storms of shot and shell at each other, nor were there any rolling masses of battle smoke to darken the brightness of the sky. The occupants of an open boat five miles away would not have known that the most deadly sea-fight ever waged since men had first gone down to the sea in ships was being fought out under that smiling May-day sky.