As she gazed upon it, the Fires died away. Page 57.
The valley itself was of such incomparable and fairy-like beauty, that it seemed to belong rather to the realm of imagination than to the world of reality. A great lake lay in the centre, its emerald shores lined with groves of palms and orange-trees, and fringed with verdant islets spangled with many coloured flowers.
On the northern shore of the lake lay a splendid city of marble palaces, surrounded by shady gardens, and divided from each other by broad, straight streets, smooth as ivory and spotless as snow, and lined with double rows of wide-spreading trees, which cast a pleasant shade along their sides.
In the midst of a vast square, in the centre of the city, rose an immense building of marble of perfect whiteness, surmounted by a great golden dome, which in turn was crowned by the silver shape of a woman with great spreading wings, which blazed and scintillated in the sunlight as though they had been fashioned of sheets of crystal, pure and translucent as diamonds.
All over the valley, villas and palaces of marble were scattered in cool ravines and on shaded, wooded slopes; and as far as her eye could reach, vast expanses of garden land, emerald pastures, and golden corn fields stretched away over hill and vale, until the most remote were met by the cool, dark forests which clothed the middle slopes of the all-encircling mountains, and themselves gave place higher up to dark, frowning precipices, vast walls of living rock, rising thousands of feet sheer upwards, and ending in the mighty peaks which stood like eternal sentinels guarding this enchanted realm.
If she had had her will, she would have gazed for ever upon this delightful scene; but the spirit of the dream was not to be controlled, and it faded from her sight just as the picture of death and desolation had done. As it faded away, Alan, who had now come back to her side, laid his hand upon her shoulder, and, looking at her with mournful eyes, said wearily—
“That was your first and last glimpse of heaven. Now comes the judgment!”
As he spoke, the air-ship soared upwards again, and was instantly enveloped in a cloud of impenetrable darkness. She sped on and on in utter silence through the gloom, which was so dense that it seemed to cast the rays of the ship’s electric lights back upon her as she floated amidst it. Presently the deathlike silence was broken by a low, weird sound, that seemed like a wail of universal agony rising up from the earth beneath.
Then, far ahead and high up in the sky, appeared a faint light, which grew and brightened until the darkness melted away before it; and Olga saw the air-ship floating near enough to the earth for her to see that all its vegetation was withered and yellow, and the beds of its streams almost dry, with only little, thin rivulets trickling sluggishly along them.
Millions of people seemed wandering listlessly and aimlessly about the streets of the cities and the parched fields of the open country, ever and anon stretching their hands as though in appeal up to the dark, moonless sky, in which the fearful shape of light and fiery mist was growing every moment brighter and vaster.
It grew and grew until it arched half the horizon with its tremendous curve; and then out of the midst of it came a huge, dazzling globe of fire, from the rim of which shot forth great flames of every colour, some of which seemed to descend to the surface of the earth like long fiery tongues that licked up the seething lakes in wreathing clouds of steam, which hissed and roared as they rose like ascending cataracts.
She looked down between them at the earth. The myriads of figures were there still, but now they lay prone and lifeless on the ground, as though the last agony of mankind were past. The light of the blazing globe grew more and more dazzling, and the heat more and more intense. The speed of the air-ship slackened visibly, although the wings and propellers were working at their utmost speed, and it was falling rapidly, as though there was no longer any air to support it.
She gasped for breath in the choking, burning atmosphere of the deck chamber, and then a swift, vivid wave of light seemed to sweep through her brain, and she woke with a choking gasp of terror, with the chimes of her watch ringing sweetly in her ears, telling her that the vision had been but a dream of a night that had passed.
Wide awake in an instant, she got out of bed and turned on the electric lamp. As the room had been perfectly warmed all night by the electric conduction-stoves, which were then in almost universal use, she only stopped to throw a fur-lined cloak round her shoulders before she went to remove the cap of the crucible.
She peered anxiously into the vessel, and saw about two fluid ounces of a dark, glittering liquid, from the surface of which the light of the lamp was reflected as though from a mirror. With hands that trembled slightly, in spite of the great effort she made to keep her nerves in check, she poured the precious fluid into one of the glass measures that she had used the night before.
Seen through the glass, its colour was a deep, brilliant blue, and, like the white liquid first prepared, shone as though with an inherent, light-giving power of its own. She held it up admiringly to the light, and said to herself, with the same cruel smile that had curved her lips when she had contemplated the other fluid—
“How beautiful it is! It might be made of sapphires dissolved in some potent essence. In reality, it is an elixir capable of dissolving the souls of men. Ah, my proud Masters of the World, we shall soon see how much your boasted powers avail you against this and a woman’s wit and hatred!
“And you, my splendid Alan, before to-morrow night you shall be at my feet! Two drops of this, and that proud, strong soul of yours shall melt away like a snowflake under warm rain, and you shall be my slave and do my bidding, and never know that you are not as free as you are now.
“The days have gone by when men sought the Elixir of Life, but Paul Romanoff sought and found the Elixir of Death—death of the body or of the soul, as the possessor of it shall will; and he is gone, and I, alone of all the children of men, possess it!”[3]
She set the measure down on the table, and took out of her valise a similar little flask to the one which held the white liquid. In this she carefully poured the contents of the measure, screwed the cap on as before, and hung it with the other on the chain round her neck. Then, woman-like, she turned to the mirror, threw back her cloak a little, and gazed at the reflection of the two flasks, which shone like two great gems upon her white skin.
“There is such a necklace as woman never wore before, since woman first delighted in gems—a necklace that all the jewels in the world could not buy. How pretty they look!”
So saying, she turned away from the mirror and carefully put away all traces of the work she had been engaged in, then she threw off her cloak and turned the lamp out and got into bed again, to wait until the attendant called her at eight o’clock as she had directed.
She did not go to sleep again, but lay with wide-open eyes looking at the darkness, and conjuring out of it visions of love and war, and the world-wide empire which she believed to be now almost within her grasp. In all these visions, two figures stood out prominently—those of Serge and Alan, her lover that had been and the lover that was to be—if only the elixir did its work as its discoverer had said it would.
As such thoughts as these passed through her brain, a new and perhaps a nobler conception of her mission of revenge took possession of her. In the past, Natasha had won the love of the man whose genius had made possible, nay, irresistible, the triumph of that revolution which had subverted the throne of her ancestors, and sent the last of the Tsars of Russia to die like a felon in chains amidst the snows of Siberia.
What more magnificent vengeance