s had agreed upon an armistice and accepted a proposition of
mediation on the part of the United States looking toward permanent
peace. The news of the devastation and flood caused by this strange and
terrible dreadnought of the air created the profoundest apprehension and
caused the wildest rumours, for what had happened in Tunis was assumed
as likely to occur in London, Paris, or New York. Wireless messages
flashed the story from Algiers to Cartagena, and it was thence
disseminated throughout the civilized world by the wireless stations at
Paris, Nauen, Moscow, and Georgetown.

The fact that the rotation of the earth had been retarded was still a
secret, and the appearance of the Ring had not as yet been connected
with any of the extraordinary phenomena surrounding it; but the
newspaper editorials universally agreed that whatever nation owned and
controlled this new instrument of war could dictate its own terms. It
was generally supposed that the blasting of the mountain chain of
Northern Africa had been an experiment to test and demonstrate the
powers of this new demoniacal invention, and in view of its success it
did not seem surprising that the nations had hastened to agree to an
armistice, for the Power that controlled a force capable of producing
such an extraordinary physical cataclysm could annihilate every capital,
every army, every people upon the globe or even the globe itself.

The flight of the Ring machine had been observed at several different
points, beginning at Cape Race, where at about four A.M. the
wireless operator reported what he supposed to be a large comet
discharging earthward a diagonal shaft of orange-yellow light and moving
at incredible velocity in a southeasterly direction. During the
following day the lookout on the _Vira_, a fishguard and scout cruiser
of the North Atlantic Patrol, saw a black speck soaring among the clouds
which he took to be a lost monoplane fighting to regain the coast of
Ireland. At sundown an amateur wireless operator at St. Michael's in the
Azores noted a small comet sweeping across the sky far to the north.
This comet an hour or so later passed directly over the cities of
Lisbon, Linares, Lorca, Cartagena, and Algiers, and was clearly
observable from Badajoz, Almaden, Seville, Cordova, Grenada, Oran,
Biskra, and Tunis, and at the latter places it was easily possible for
telescopic observers to determine its size, shape, and general
construction.

Daniel W. Qui