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?”