The bullet flew high, cutting one of the wings off Alan’s coronet in its flight. Half a dozen strides took him alongside his ship, and in another instant he was standing on her deck, his left arm round Alma’s waist holding her behind him and his right hand grasping one of his pistols. He raised his arm and the pistol flashed. At the same moment he stamped on the deck and the _Alma_ leapt a thousand feet obliquely into the air. The second before the pistol flashed Olga turned her head as though she were going to fire again, and the motion saved her life, for Alan’s bullet, instead of piercing her brain, as it was meant to do, cut a straight red gash across her forehead from temple to temple and buried itself in the breast of Orloff Lossenski as he sprang forward to snatch his mistress out of the line of fire. He pitched forward and dropped, and Khalid, forgetting everything else in the horror of the moment, caught Olga in his arms as a rain of blood streamed down over her face and a shrill scream of pain and rage burst from her lips. Although there were nearly three hundred warships floating in the air above Alexandria, and though the rapidly-enacted tragedy on the roof of the palace could be distinctly seen from their decks, the _Alma_ escaped scathless, for the simple reason that, so terrible was the energy developed by the projectiles in use, that had one struck her as she left the terrace the palace itself would have been wrecked, and every living being within a radius of two hundred yards from the focus of the explosion would have been instantly killed. Consequently, the captains of the Russian and Moslem ships had to look on in angry impotence as she leapt out of range, joined her consort, and with her soared away westward until a height of fifteen thousand feet was reached, and so vanished from the sight of their discomfited enemies. From Alexandria they crossed the Mediterranean and Europe to Britain by way of Italy, the Valley of the Rhone, and Paris, at a height of some five thousand feet from the land. What they saw more than justified the reports which had reached Aeria. The fairest countries of Europe were now only blackened deserts and wasted wildernesses. They flew all day over deserted fields and towns and cities that were little better than heaps of blackened ruins, and when night fell and the Fire-Cloud blazed out of the sky, its glare was answered by flames rising from the earth, and huge patches of mingled smoke and flame which marked the sites of other towns which were only now falling victims to the destroyers.