Last Day

The Last Day is the name the besieging fleet’s sailors give to a night-time spectacle staged by the Empress: thousands of burning lights spread across the air and water until they believe Judgment has come. The episode makes apocalyptic expectation a weapon of war, using the enemy’s fear to immobilize it before the Empress reveals her forces and announces that she has come to aid her native country.

The Spectacle and Its Interpretation

As the Empress approaches her native country, she sends Bird-men and Fish-men to reconnoiter the enemy fleet. She then orders them, at night, to carry Fire-stones with their tops wetted. Cut into shapes like torches or candles, the stones are carried in the birds’ beaks and held above the water by the fish-men. Their thousands of lights make it appear that the air and sea themselves have become a flaming fire.

The effect is immediate: those on the sea and near it believe that the Last Day has arrived, fall down, and pray. The sailors’ reaction is not based on knowledge of the Empress’s force or purpose; they interpret an unfamiliar military display through the language of final judgment. The scene converts religious dread into a tactical advantage without requiring the invading fleet to understand what it is seeing.

From Apocalyptic Fear to Political Encounter

At daybreak, the Empress orders the lights extinguished. The enemy then sees ships without sails, guns, arms, or other instruments of war, apparently swimming by themselves. Their hulls are painted black or another dark color, concealing that they are made of gold even from the best Telescopes. After the night’s apparent cosmic fire, the motionless-looking spectacle of strange, unarmed ships compounds the enemy’s confusion: its commanders cannot tell what the vessels are or which side they represent, and the fleet is too frightened to move.

The Empress follows the display with a letter to the enemy general and chief commanders. She identifies herself as a powerful princess who has come to assist them against their enemies and asks them to declare when they want her help. Their council cannot quickly agree on an answer because its members hold conflicting opinions. Impatient with the delay, the Empress considers returning to the Blazing-World without helping; the Duchess of Newcastle urges her to allow for the slow deliberations of a large council.

Meaning and Consequences

When the appointed hour comes, the Empress appears supported above the water on the heads and backs of Fish-men, while Bird-men and Fish-men carry lit Fire-stones through the air and above the waves. Her countrymen’s fear gives way to submission as she approaches in garments of light and they kneel before her. She keeps her distance so that they see the garments’ radiance rather than their construction, then declares that she has crossed from another world to defend them. The earlier vision of judgment thus leads into an encounter in which she presents herself as protector and sovereign power.

The episode’s apocalyptic image carries an irony: the sailors’ prayer does not mark the end of the world but the beginning of the Empress’s intervention in its politics. Their misreading helps her command attention and paralyze resistance, while the sudden change from terrifying lights to enigmatic ships preserves uncertainty about her identity and intentions. The spectacle therefore joins religious imagery to imperial theater: the Last Day is not a prophecy fulfilled but a fear that the Empress’s staged arrival makes operational.