Society had practically come to an end. People who a few weeks before had been wealthy watched almost with apathy the plunder of their homes and the burning of their palaces by the armed bands of robbers which sprang up everywhere. There was no longer any protection for life and property. If anarchists on the earth did not burn and slay and plunder, their enemies in the air would, and even if they did not, what did it matter if friends and foes, plunderers and plundered, were to be consumed together in the fire that was about to fall from heaven? Amidst the universal terror Alma, with her almost unearthly beauty, the calm dignity of her bearing, and the sweetness and gentleness of her loving counsels, passed through the devastated lands rather like an angel of mercy than a woman of the same flesh and blood as the distracted panic-stricken crowds through which she moved by Alan’s side, speaking her message in a voice that seemed to be an echo from some other world. When the _Alma_ and the _Isma_ reached London ten days after leaving Alexandria, they found the vast and once splendid metropolis of the world a wide waste of broken, blackened, and in some places still smoking ruins. Of its fifteen millions of inhabitants barely three millions remained to people its fragments. All the rest had either fled soon after the first assault, or had fallen in the pitiless carnage that had been let loose upon them. They remained three days amidst the ruins of London, listening to the most heartrending tales of suffering and cruelty, and giving in return such consolation as they could. Then they took the air again, and journeyed on westward over the once fair and smiling English land that was now a wilderness amidst which plague and famine, anarchy and destruction, stalked triumphant, while the few who listened to their message waited in despairing terror for the fate that could hardly be worse than what they had passed through since the fatal 16th of May. From England they crossed the Atlantic to America, and from America they sped over the Pacific to Australia, finding everywhere the same desolation upon the face of the earth, and the same terror and despair in the minds of men. But for the awful reality before their eyes, it would have been impossible for them to believe that the civilisation which had seemed so strong and splendid four months before, could have collapsed as it had done into such utter chaos. In those four short months the whole tragedy of human life on earth seemed to have been re-enacted. The frenzy and panic of war had degenerated into a universal delirium. Men, women, and children had gone mad by millions. Religious fanatics, impostors, and enthusiasts, if possible more insane than their hearers, preached the wildest and most blasphemous doctrines, and uttered the most hideous prophecies, not only as to the approaching end of the world, but of the imaginary eternal horrors that were to follow it.