wer of
sparks as his barrage was broken, exploded like a tiny bursting bomb;
and as the sparks died, there was nothing where the man had been.

A suicide; but one of our aerials was shattered. And then others came
down--not many, for it was grim business and the courage of them must
have failed at the last. Falling bodies; tiny bolts striking the power
house; the sparks--then empty air where living men had been.

Our tower left the ground. Some of our men, with small flying platforms
strapped to them, were crowding its top. Its beams preceded it--but I
saw the beams breaking intermittently as the bolts struck the power
house. The invaders wavered with indecision. Some of them came down to
voluntary death; others strove for the cliff-top; some took flight. Our
tower swept into them; one of them, injured but not annihilated, fell
with a crash into the encampment.

Above Elza and me was a maze of flashing beams; futile bolts; the puffs
of myriad sparks. A bolt seemed to strike quite near where we were
sitting; I drew Elza back and we crouched in the hollow of a rock. A
body came hurtling down, crashed to the cliff-ledge almost at our feet
with the sickening thump of mangled flesh and broken bones--hung an
instant to give me a momentary glimpse of a face contorted in death
agony; then rolled over and fell further down the jagged cliff.

Then above us presently there was silence and the drab empty sky. Our
tower was back beyond the cliff-top. Soon it appeared; apparently
unharmed, it came dropping down to its former place on the ground.

The first attack was over. And off in the distance a few solitary
figures were winging their way back to the City of Ice.

CHAPTER XXXVI

_City of Ice Besieged_

We were not greatly harmed by this surprise attack; the power house was
superficially damaged, but soon repaired. That night--I call it that
though the constant weak daylight made the term incongruous--activity
showed in the City of Ice.

It came with a vertical spray of light rising from the ice wall which
encircled the city. Spreading light beams rising from points a hundred
feet apart along the wall. The beams spread fan-shape, so that within
fifty feet above their source they met and merged into a thin sheet of
effulgence rising into the sky. Tarrano's barrage.

It seemed then that beyond suicidal sorties of the kind we had just
repulsed, Tarrano was planning to stand purely on the defensive. It was
our own p