ir, the Terrorist fleet
receded northward and southward from the batteries. Their guns had a
six-mile range, and it did not matter to them which side of the
assailed area they lay. They could still hurl their explosives with
the same deadly precision on the appointed mark. But with the
aerostats it was a very different matter. They could only drop their
shells vertically, and where they were not exactly above the object
of attack their shells exploded with comparative harmlessness.

As a natural consequence they had to follow the air-ships, not only
away from London, but over their own encampments, in order to bring
them to anything like close quarters. The aerostats possessed one
advantage, and one only, over the air-ships. They were able to rise
to a much greater height. But this advantage the air-ships very soon
turned into a disadvantage by reason of their immensely superior
speed and ease of handling. They darted about at such a speed over
the heads of the massed forces of the League on either side of
London, that it was impossible to drop shells upon them without
running the inevitable risk of missing the small and swiftly-moving
air-ship, and so causing the shell to burst amidst friends instead of
foes.

Thus the Terrorist fleet, sweeping hither and thither, in wide and
ever changing curves, lured the most dangerous assailants of the
beleaguered city farther and farther away from the real scene of
action, at the very time when they were most urgently needed to
support the attacking forces which at that moment were being poured
into London.

To destroy the air-ships seemed an impossibility, since they could
move at five times the speed of the swiftest aerostat, and yet to
return to the bombardment of the city was to leave them free to
commit what havoc they pleased upon the encampments of the armies of
the League. So they were drawn farther and farther away from the
beleaguered city, while their agile enemies, still keeping within
their six-mile range, evaded their shells, and yet kept up a constant
discharge of their own projectiles upon the salient points of the
attack on London.

By four o'clock in the afternoon all the batteries of the besiegers
had been put out of action by the aerial bombardment. It was now a
matter of man to man and steel to steel, and so the gage of final
battle was accepted, and as dusk began to fall over the beleaguered
city, the Russian, French and Italian hosts left their lines,