CHAPTER XV.
A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY.
While all Europe was thrilling with the apprehension of approachingwar, and the excitement caused by the appearance of the strangeair-ship and the news of its terrible exploits at Kronstadt andTiumen, the _Ariel_ herself was quietly pursuing her way in mid-airsouth-westerly from the scene of the skirmish outside the Sir UlangPass.
She was bound for a region in the midst of Africa, which, even in thefirst decade of the twentieth century, was still unknown to thegeographer and untrodden by the explorer.
Fenced in by huge and precipitous mountains, round whose bases layvast forests and impenetrable swamps and jungles, from whose deadlyareas the boldest pioneers had turned aside as being too hopelesslyinhospitable to repay the cost and toil of exploration, it hadremained undiscovered and unknown save by two men, who had reached itby the only path by which it was accessible--through the air and overthe mountains which shut it in on every side from the external world.
These two adventurous travellers were a wealthy and eccentricEnglishman, named Louis Holt, and Thomas Jackson, his devotedretainer, and these two had taken it into their heads--or ratherLouis Holt had taken it into his head--to achieve in fact the featwhich Jules Verne had so graphically described in fiction, and tocross Africa in a balloon.
They had set out from Zanzibar towards the end of the last year ofthe nineteenth century, and, with the exception of one or two vaguereports from the interior, nothing more had been heard of them until,nearly a year later, a collapsed miniature balloon had been picked upin the Gulf of Guinea by the captain of a trading steamer, who hadfound in the little car attached to it a hermetically sealedmeat-tin, which contained a manuscript, the contents of which willbecome apparent in due course.
The captain of the steamer was a practical and somewhat stupid man,who read the manuscript with considerable scepticism, and then put itaway, having come to the conclusion that it was no business of his,and that there was no money in it anyhow. He thought nothing more ofit until he got back to Liverpool, and then he gave it to a friend ofhis, who was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and who dulylaid it before that body.
It was published in the _Transactions_, and there was some talk ofsending out an expedition under the command of an eminent explorer torescue Louis Holt and his servant; but when that personage wasapproached on the subject, it was found that the glory would not beat all commensurate with the expense and risk, and so, after beingthe usual nine days' wonder, and being duly elaborated by severalable editors in the daily and weekly press, the strange adventures ofLouis Holt had been dismissed, as of doubtful authenticity, into thelimbo of exhausted sensations.
One man, however, had laid the story to heart somewhat moreseriously, and that was Richard Arnold, who, on reading it, hadformed the resolve that, if ever his dream of aerial navigation wererealised, the first use he would make of his air-ship would be todiscover and rescue the lonely travellers who were isolated from therest of the world in the strange, inaccessible region of which themanuscript had given a brief but graphic and fascinating account. Hewas now carrying out that resolve, and at the same time working out aportion of a plan that was not his own, and which he had been veryfar from foreseeing when he made the resolution.
Louis Holt's original MS. had been purchased by the President of theInner Circle, and the _Ariel_ was now, in fact, on a voyage ofexploration, the object of which was the discovery of this unknownregion, with a view to making it the seat of a settlement from whichthe members of the Executive could watch in security and peace thecourse of the tremendous struggle which would, ere long, be shakingthe world to its foundations.
In such a citadel as this, fenced in by a series of vast naturalobstacles, impassable to all who did not possess the means of aeriallocomotion, they would be secure from molestation, though all thearmies of Europe sought to attack them; and the _Ariel_ could, ifnecessary, traverse in twenty-five hours the three thousand odd mileswhich separated it from the centre of Europe.
After the rescue of Natasha and the Princess on the Tobolsk road, the_Ariel_, in obedience to the orders of the Council, had shaped hercourse southward to the western slopes of the Hindu Kush, in order tobe present at the prearranged attack of the Cossacks on the Britishreconnoitring force.
Arnold's orders were simply to wait for the engagement, and only towatch it, unless the British were attacked in overwhelming numbers.In that case he was to have dispersed the Russian force, as the planof the Terrorists did not allow of any advantage being gained by thesoldiers of the Tsar in that part of the world just then.
As the British had defeated them unaided, the _Ariel_ had taken nopart in the affair, and, after vanishing from the sight of theastonished combatants, had proceeded upon her voyage of discovery.
As a good month would have to elapse before she could keep herrendezvous with the steamer that was to bring out the materials forthe construction of the new air-ships from England, there was plentyof time to make the voyage in a leisurely and comfortable fashion. Assoon, therefore, as he was out of sight of the skirmishers, he hadreduced the speed of the _Ariel_ to about forty miles an hour, usingonly the stern-propeller driven by one engine, and supporting theship on the air-planes and two fan-wheels.
At this speed he would traverse the three thousand odd miles whichlay between the Hindu Kush and "Aeria"--as Louis Holt had somewhatfancifully named the region that could be reached only through theair--in a little over seventy-five hours, or rather more than threedays.
Those three days were the happiest that his life had so farcontained. The complete success of his invention, and the absolutefulfilment of his promises to the Brotherhood, had made him a powerin the world, and a power which, as he honestly believed, would beused for the highest good of mankind when the time came to finallyconfront and confound the warring forces of rival despotisms.
But far more than this in his eyes was the fact that he had been ableto use the unique power which his invention had placed in his hands,to rescue the woman that he loved so dearly from a fate which, evennow that it was past, he could not bring himself to contemplate.
When she had first greeted him in the Council-chamber of the InnerCircle, the distance that had separated her from him had seemedimmeasurable, and she--the daughter of Natas and the idol of the mostpowerful society in the world--might well have looked down uponhim--the nameless dreamer of an unrealised dream, and a pauper, whowould not have known where to have looked for his next meal, had theBrotherhood not had faith in him and his invention.
But now all that was changed. The dream had become the reality, andthe creation of his genius was bearing her with him swiftly andsmoothly through a calm atmosphere, and under a cloudless sky, oversea and land, with more ease than a bird wings its flight throughspace. He had accomplished the greatest triumph in the history ofhuman discovery. He had revolutionised the world, and ere long hewould make war impossible. Surely this entitled him to approach evenher on terms of equality, and to win her for his own if he could.
Natasha saw this too as clearly as he did--more clearly, perhaps;for, while he only arrived at the conclusion by a process ofreasoning, she reached it intuitively at a single step. She knew thathe loved her, that he had loved her from the moment that their handshad first met in greeting, and, peerless as she was among women, shewas still a woman, and the homage of such a man as this was sweet toher, albeit it was still unspoken.
She knew, too, that the hopes of the Revolution, which, before allthings human, claimed her whole-souled devotion, now depended mainlyupon him, and the use that he might make of the power that lay in hishands, and this of itself was no light bond between them, though notnecessarily having anything to do with affection.
So far she was heart-whole, and though many had attempted the task,no man had yet made her pulses beat a stroke faster for his sake.Ever since she had been old enough to know what tyranny meant, shehad been trained to hate it, and prepared to work against it, and, ifnecess
ary, to sacrifice herself body and soul to destroy it.
Thus hatred rather than love had been the creed of her life and themainspring of her actions, and, save her father and her one friendRadna, she stood aloof from mankind and its loves and friendships,rather the beautiful incarnation of an abstract principle than awoman, to whom love and motherhood were the highest aims ofexistence.
More than this, she was the daughter of a Jew, and therefore heldherself absolutely at her father's disposal as far as marriage wasconcerned, and if he had given her in wedlock even to a Russianofficial, telling her that the Cause demanded the sacrifice, shewould have obeyed, though her heart had broken in the same hour.
Although he had never hinted directly at such a thing, the convictionhad been growing upon her for the last two or three years that Natasreally intended her to marry Tremayne, and so, in the case of his owndeath, form a bond that should hold him to the Brotherhood when thechain of his own control was snapped. Though she instinctively shrankfrom such a union of mere policy, she would enter it withouthesitation at her father's bidding, and for the sake of the Cause towhich her life was devoted.
How great such a sacrifice would be, should it ever be asked of her,no one but herself could ever know, for she was perfectly well awarethat in Tremayne's strange double life there were two loves, one ofwhich, and that not the real and natural one, was hers.
Had she felt that she had the disposal of herself in her own hands,she would not, perhaps, have waited with such painful apprehensionthe avowal which hour after hour, now that they were brought intosuch close and constant relationships on board this little vesselhigh in mid-air, she saw trembling on the lips of her rescuer.
Arnold's life of hard, honest work, and his constant habit of facingtruth in its most uncompromising forms, had made dissimulation almostimpossible to him; and added to that, situated as he was, there wasno necessity for it. Colston knew of his love, and the Princess hadguessed it long ago. Did Natasha know his open secret? Of that hehardly dared to be sure, though something told him that theinevitable moment of knowledge was near at hand.
For the first twenty-four hours of the voyage he had seen very littleof either her or the Princess, as they had mostly remained in theircabins, enjoying a complete rest after the terrible fatigue andsuffering they had gone through since their capture in Moscow, but onthe Thursday morning they had had breakfast in the saloon with himand Colston, and had afterwards spent a portion of the morning ondeck, deeply interested in watching the fight between the British andRussians. Thanks to Radna's foresight, they had each found a trunkfull of suitable clothing on board the _Ariel_. These had been takento Drumcraig by Colston, and placed in the cabins intended for theiruse, and so they were able to discard the uncouth but useful costumesin which they had made their escape.
In the afternoon Arnold had had to perform the pleasant task ofshowing them over the _Ariel_, explaining the working of themachinery, and putting the wonderful vessel through variousevolutions to show what she was capable of doing.
He rushed her at full speed through the air, took flying leaps overoutlying spurs of mountain ranges that lay in their path, swoopeddown into valleys, and flew over level plains fifty yards from theground, like an albatross over the surface of a smooth tropic sea.Then he soared up from the earth again, until the horizon widened outto vast extent, and they could see the mighty buttresses of "the Roofof the World" stretching out below them in an endless succession ofranges as far as the eye could reach.
Neither Natasha nor the Princess could find words to at alladequately express all that they saw and learnt during that day ofwonders, and all night Natasha could hardly sleep for waking dreamsof universal empire, and a world at peace equitably ruled by a powerthat had no need of aggression, because all the realms of earth andair belonged to those who wielded it.
When at last she did go to sleep, it was to dream again, and thistime of herself, the Angel of the Revolution, sharing the aerialthrone of the world-empire with the man who had made revolutionsimpossible by striking the sword from the hand of the tyrants ofearth for ever.