Read "Olga Romanoff" by George Griffith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
WITHIN an hour the wondering inhabitants of Alexandria saw the Russian fleet rise a thousand feet into the air and form in two columns of line ahead. Then the Aerian fleet ranged itself in two long lines five hundred feet outside them and a thousand feet above them. A time-shell from the _Ithuriel_ gave the signal to start, and the two fleets leapt forward to the south-east at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, and in a few minutes had vanished over the desert. The speed was quickly increased to two hundred miles, and so they sped on all day and through the next night -- the Russian ships being forced to show their lights while the Aerians remained in darkness -- until, when morning dawned and Olga and her captains looked for Alan's fleet they found that it had vanished, and that they were floating alone over the solitudes of the Southern Ocean.
They had been escorted like offending school children out of harm's way, and then left to their own devices. It was a bitterly humiliating ending to an expedition which had really produced such important results, but there was no possibility of present revenge, and so Olga gave the order to proceed straight to Mount Terror, intending to begin there and then the working out of her part of the compact that she had made with the Sultan.