irtieth of April.

Then he went back to the telescope and picked up the comet again. Just
as he had got its ominous shape into the centre of the field a score of
other shapes drifted swiftly across it, infinitely vaster--huge winged
forms, apparently heading straight for the end of the telescope, and
only two or three yards away.

His nerves were not perhaps as steady as they would have been without
the shock which he had already received, and he shrank back from the
eye-piece as though to avoid a coming blow. Then he got up from his
chair and laughed.

"What an ass I am! That's Mr Parmenter's fleet; but what monsters they
do look through a telescope like this!"

CHAPTER XXXIII

MR PARMENTER RETURNS

Just at the north of the summit on the top of which the observatory was
built there was an oval valley, or perhaps it might be better described
as an escarpment, a digging away by the hand of Nature of a portion of
the mountain summit by means of some vast landslide or glacier action
thousands of years ago.

As he closed the door of the main entrance to the observatory behind
him, he saw these strange, winged shapes circling in the air some three
miles away, just dimly visible in the moonlight and starlight. They were
hovering about in middle air as though they were birds looking for a
foothold. He ran back, switched the electric current off the aerograph
machines at the base of the observatory, and turned it on to the
searchlight which was on the top of the equatorial dome. A great fan of
white light flashed out into the sky, he spelt out "Welcome" in the
dot-and-dash code, and then the searchlight fell upon the valley.

"Thanks," came the laconic answer from the foremost airship; and then
Lennard saw twenty-five winged shapes circle round the observatory and
drop to rest one by one in perfect order, just as a flock of swans might
have done, and, as the last came to earth, he turned the switch and shut
off the searchlight.

He walked down to the hollow, and in the dim light saw something that he
had hardly believed possible for human eyes to see. There, in a space
of, perhaps, a thousand yards long and five hundred yards wide, lay, in
a perfect oval, a fleet of ships. By all appearances they had no right
to be on land. There was no visible evidence that they could rise from
the solid earth after once touching it, any more than the albatross can
do from a ship's deck.

A light flashed out from a ship ly