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No one seemed to know in which direction lay the most danger, and I decided to try and get towards the river; so even I was compelled to fight and struggle for my life, as the others.

III.

I was rather surprised to find my progress towards Westminster fairly easy, but-this was partly due to my cutting through the side streets, while the largest crowds were all going down the great main roads; and it was while in one of these side turnings that I witnessed a most terrible incident.

It had already been discovered that the airships would not fly owing to the atmospherical influence of this great electrical cataclysm; yet, on arriving at the Charing Cross Overhead Station, I saw that an attempt was being made to fly one of the Southern Counties Company’s aeroplanes, and huge crowds of people were flocking up the staircases to it, and badly overcrowding it.

All this I could dimly perceive by gazing upwards as I hurried along.

In the main road directly under the station, and blocking the direction in which I wanted to go, the huge crowds roared and surged. Presently there was the clanging of a bell, and a shouting, as the anchors of the aeroplane were cast off. I was afraid, and something within me impelled me to draw back. Fascinated, I watched the airship, as the propellers began to revolve; the vessel moved a few feet — and then down it fell, with its tremendous burden of human life, on to the struggling mass of people below, and with the screams of the dying in my ears I covered my eyes with my hands, to shut out the sight, and fled.

At last, I succeeded in getting to Westminster. My object in going there was to see if there was any possibility of escaping by water. The river Thames, as everyone knows, has been built over for some years, being simply a wide subterranean river, used by the British government as a dockyard for the submarine navy.

Erected across the river, at regular intervals of about two hundred yards, were wide traffic bridges composed entirely of steel, and along each embankment were situated the great artificial ice-storage houses, belonging to the British Food Trust.

The great steel-girdered bridges, and the approaches thereto, were one vast congested mass of struggling and frantic humanity. I was swept along in the crowd, and at last I was wedged into a jutting corner on one of the bridges, a prisoner with very little hope of escape.

I could see the river, into which hundreds were jumping or being thrown; under the water the submarine electric lamps still burned, making the stream transparent, and showing drowning people fighting each other underneath — a sickening sight, but I was used to horrors by now.

It was fortunate for me that I was in a great measure guarded by the jutting comer I have mentioned, for I was, at least, protected from serious injury. Out in the crowd people were being crushed to death, their bodies still maintained upright by the pressure of the others. One poor old man came near me, with tears of terror streaming down his face; his arm was fractured, and he was moaning with pain and despair. Another man was bawling. “Oh! Oh! My ribs are broken! Keep back! Keep back!” But he was borne down, overwhelmed, and trodden upon. Still another man, who saw my advantageous position, with fierce oaths tried to force me from it; but I fought with him desperately, and he did not succeed. And so the fearsome riot went on.

By this time the green fire, which had been working rapidly along the river from the east, had already begun to lick the balustrade of the next bridge; and here, again, I feel utterly powerless to describe the scene. At the near approach of the fire the great public electric lamps went out, and everything was lit up by that ghastly, unforgettable green flare; the deadly fireballs descended in showers upon the frenzied people on the bridge; lightning flashed everywhere; loud deafening explosions rang in my ears, heightened by the tremendous reverberating booming of the crashing