The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 1 Audio |
Book One
The Coming of the Martians
Chapter One
The Eve of the War
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . .
Are we or they Lords of the World? . . .
And how are all things made for man?--
Kepler (quoted in The Anatomy
of Melancholy)
No one would have believed
in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched
keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his
own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were
scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope
might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of
water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their
little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is
possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a
thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It
is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to
themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of
space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that
perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with
envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in
the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely
need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000
miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that
received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth,
older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon
its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh
of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature
at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for
the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so
blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth
century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there
far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood
that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not
only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that
must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour.
Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in
its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our
coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have
shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons
change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate
its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still
incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.
The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged
their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with
instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at
its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of
hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a
cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting
cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded
seas.
And we men, the creatures
who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the
monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life
is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the
belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this
world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as
inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from
the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them
too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species
has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but
upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were
entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European
immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to
complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have
calculated their descent with amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is
evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations with
a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have
seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like
Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless
centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to interpret the fluctuating
appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must
have been getting ready.
During the opposition of
1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the
Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English
readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am
inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in
the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us.
Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak
during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six
years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of
the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge
outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight
of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,
indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous
velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a
quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and
violently squirted out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
A singularly appropriate
phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers
except a little note in theDaily Telegraph, and the world went in
ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I
might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known
astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the
excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
scrutiny of the red planet.
In spite of all that has
happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and
silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor
in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little
slit in the roof--an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.
Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one
saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It
seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with
transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little
it was, so silvery warm--a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but
really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that
kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet
seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply
that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us--more than forty
millions of miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which
the dust of the material universe swims. Near it in the field, I remember, were
three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all
around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that
blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far
profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying
swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer
every minute by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us,
the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the
earth. I never dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that
unerring missile.
That night, too, there was
another jetting out of gas from the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at
the edge, the slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck
midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night was warm and
I was thirsty, and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the
darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at
the streamer of gas that came out towards us.
That night another
invisible missile started on its way to the earth from Mars, just a second or so
under twenty-four hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table
there in the blackness, with patches of green and crimson swimming before my
eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the
minute gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched
till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and walked over to his
house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their
hundreds of people, sleeping in peace.
He was full of speculation
that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its
having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be
falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was
in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had
taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.
"The chances against
anything manlike on Mars are a million to one," he said.
Hundreds of observers saw
the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night
after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the
tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the
firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible
through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches,
spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere and obscured its more
familiar features.
Even the daily papers woke
up to the disturbances at last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and
everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical
Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in the political cartoon. And, all
unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing
now at a pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by
hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost incredibly
wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their
petty concerns as they did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a
new photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.
People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of
our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning
to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable
developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.
One night (the first
missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk
with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her,
and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which
so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of
excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music.
There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed.
From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains,
ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife
pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights
hanging in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.
Then came the night of the first
falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester
eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it,
and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Albin described it as leaving a
greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest
authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was
about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about
one hundred miles east of him.
I was at home at that hour and
writing in my study; and although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and
the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw
nothing of it. Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from
outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only
looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a
hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey,
and Middlesex must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought that
another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the
fallen mass that night.
But very early in the morning
poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a
meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking,
rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not
far from the sand pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the
projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction
over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on
fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.
The Thing itself lay almost
entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had
shivered to fragments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a
huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured
incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached the mass,
surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites are
rounded more or less completely. It was, however, still so hot from its flight
through the air as to forbid his near approach. A stirring noise within its
cylinder he ascribed to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it
had not occurred to him that it might be hollow.
He remained standing at the edge
of the pit that the Thing had made for itself, staring at its strange
appearance, astonished chiefly at its unusual shape and colour, and dimly
perceiving even then some evidence of design in its arrival. The early morning
was wonderfully still, and the sun, just clearing the pine trees towards
Weybridge, was already warm. He did not remember hearing any birds that morning,
there was certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds were the faint
movements from within the cindery cylinder. He was all alone on the common.
Then suddenly he noticed with a
start that some of the grey clinker, the ashy incrustation that covered the
meteorite, was falling off the circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in
flakes and raining down upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came off and fell
with a sharp noise that brought his heart into his mouth.
For a minute he scarcely
realised what this meant, and, although the heat was excessive, he clambered
down into the pit close to the bulk to see the Thing more clearly. He fancied
even then that the cooling of the body might account for this, but what
disturbed that idea was the fact that the ash was falling only from the end of
the cylinder.
And then he perceived that, very
slowly, the circular top of the cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a
gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark
that had been near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the
circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he
heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward an inch or so.
Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was
artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed out! Something within the cylinder
was unscrewing the top!
"Good heavens!" said Ogilvy.
"There's a man in it--men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!"
At once, with a quick mental
leap, he linked the Thing with the flash upon Mars.
The thought of the confined
creature was so dreadful to him that he forgot the heat and went forward to the
cylinder to help turn. But luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he
could burn his hands on the still-glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for
a moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running wildly into
Woking. The time then must have been somewhere about six o'clock. He met a
waggoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale he told and his
appearance were so wild--his hat had fallen off in the pit--that the man simply
drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with the potman who was just unlocking the
doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge. The fellow thought he was a lunatic
at large and made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the taproom. That
sobered him a little; and when he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his
garden, he called over the palings and made himself understood.
"Henderson," he called, "you saw
that shooting star last night?"
"Well?" said Henderson.
"It's out on Horsell Common
now."
"Good Lord!" said Henderson.
"Fallen meteorite! That's good."
"But it's something more than a
meteorite. It's a cylinder--an artificial cylinder, man! And there's something
inside."
Henderson stood up with his
spade in his hand.
"What's that?" he said. He was
deaf in one ear.
Ogilvy told him all that he had
seen. Henderson was a minute or so taking it in. Then he dropped his spade,
snatched up his jacket, and came out into the road. The two men hurried back at
once to the common, and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But
now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed
between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either entering or
escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.
They listened, rapped on the
scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting with no response, they both
concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead.
Of course the two were quite
unable to do anything. They shouted consolation and promises, and went off back
to the town again to get help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited
and disordered, running up the little street in the bright sunlight just as the
shop folks were taking down their shutters and people were opening their bedroom
windows. Henderson went into the railway station at once, in order to telegraph
the news to London. The newspaper articles had prepared men's minds for the
reception of the idea.
By eight o'clock a number of
boys and unemployed men had already started for the common to see the "dead men
from Mars." That was the form the story took. I heard of it first from my
newspaper boy about a quarter to nine when I went out to get my Daily
Chronicle. I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and
across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand pits.
I found a little crowd of
perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge hole in which the cylinder lay. I
have already described the appearance of that colossal bulk, embedded in the
ground. The turf and gravel about it seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion.
No doubt its impact had caused a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not
there. I think they perceived that nothing was to be done for the present, and
had gone away to breakfast at Henderson's house.
There were four or five boys
sitting on the edge of the Pit, with their feet dangling, and amusing
themselves--until I stopped them--by throwing stones at the giant mass. After I
had spoken to them about it, they began playing at "touch" in and out of the
group of bystanders.
Among these were a couple of
cyclists, a jobbing gardener I employed sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg
the butcher and his little boy, and two or three loafers and golf caddies who
were accustomed to hang about the railway station. There was very little
talking. Few of the common people in England had anything but the vaguest
astronomical ideas in those days. Most of them were staring quietly at the big
tablelike end of the cylinder, which was still as Ogilvy and Henderson had left
it. I fancy the popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses was
disappointed at this inanimate bulk. Some went away while I was there, and other
people came. I clambered into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under
my feet. The top had certainly ceased to rotate.
It was only when I got thus
close to it that the strangeness of this object was at all evident to me. At the
first glance it was really no more exciting than an overturned carriage or a
tree blown across the road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas
float. It required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the
grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white metal that
gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue.
"Extra-terrestrial" had no meaning for most of the onlookers.
At that time it was quite clear
in my own mind that the Thing had come from the planet Mars, but I judged it
improbable that it contained any living creature. I thought the unscrewing might
be automatic. In spite of Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men in Mars.
My mind ran fancifully on the possibilities of its containing manuscript, on the
difficulties in translation that might arise, whether we should find coins and
models in it, and so forth. Yet it was a little too large for assurance on this
idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed
happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in Maybury. But I
found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract investigations.
In the afternoon the appearance
of the common had altered very much. The early editions of the evening papers
had startled London with enormous headlines:
"A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS."
"REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,"
and so forth. In addition,
Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical Exchange had roused every observatory in the
three kingdoms.
There were half a dozen flies or
more from the Woking station standing in the road by the sand pits, a
basket-chaise from Chobham, and a rather lordly carriage. Besides that, there
was quite a heap of bicycles. In addition, a large number of people must have
walked, in spite of the heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there
was altogether quite a considerable crowd--one or two gaily dressed ladies among
the others.
It was glaringly hot, not a
cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, and the only shadow was that of the few
scattered pine trees. The burning heather had been extinguished, but the level
ground towards Ottershaw was blackened as far as one could see, and still giving
off vertical streamers of smoke. An enterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the
Chobham Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green apples and ginger
beer.
Going to the edge of the pit, I
found it occupied by a group of about half a dozen men--Henderson, Ogilvy, and a
tall, fair-haired man that I afterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal,
with several workmen wielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving directions
in a clear, high-pitched voice. He was standing on the cylinder, which was now
evidently much cooler; his face was crimson and streaming with perspiration, and
something seemed to have irritated him.
A large portion of the cylinder
had been uncovered, though its lower end was still embedded. As soon as Ogilvy
saw me among the staring crowd on the edge of the pit he called to me to come
down, and asked me if I would mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord of
the manor.
The growing crowd, he said, was
becoming a serious impediment to their excavations, especially the boys. They
wanted a light railing put up, and help to keep the people back. He told me that
a faint stirring was occasionally still audible within the case, but that the
workmen had failed to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to them. The case
appeared to be enormously thick, and it was possible that the faint sounds we
heard represented a noisy tumult in the interior.
I was very glad to do as he
asked, and so become one of the privileged spectators within the contemplated
enclosure. I failed to find Lord Hilton at his house, but I was told he was
expected from London by the six o'clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then
about a quarter past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up to the
station to waylay him.
When I returned to the common
the sun was setting. Scattered groups were hurrying from the direction of
Woking, and one or two persons were returning. The crowd about the pit had
increased, and stood out black against the lemon yellow of the sky--a couple of
hundred people, perhaps. There were raised voices, and some sort of struggle
appeared to be going on about the pit. Strange imaginings passed through my
mind. As I drew nearer I heard Stent's voice:
"Keep back! Keep back!"
A boy came running towards me.
"It's a-movin'," he said to me
as he passed; "a-screwin' and a-screwin' out. I don't like it. I'm a-goin' 'ome,
I am."
I went on to the crowd. There
were really, I should think, two or three hundred people elbowing and jostling
one another, the one or two ladies there being by no means the least active.
"He's fallen in the pit!" cried
some one.
"Keep back!" said several.
The crowd swayed a little, and I
elbowed my way through. Every one seemed greatly excited. I heard a peculiar
humming sound from the pit.
"I say!" said Ogilvy; "help keep
these idiots back. We don't know what's in the confounded thing, you know!"
I saw a young man, a shop
assistant in Woking I believe he was, standing on the cylinder and trying to
scramble out of the hole again. The crowd had pushed him in.
The end of the cylinder was
being screwed out from within. Nearly two feet of shining screw projected.
Somebody blundered against me, and I narrowly missed being pitched onto the top
of the screw. I turned, and as I did so the screw must have come out, for the
lid of the cylinder fell upon the gravel with a ringing concussion. I stuck my
elbow into the person behind me, and turned my head towards the Thing again. For
a moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in my
eyes.
I think everyone expected to see
a man emerge--possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all
essentials a man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring
within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two
luminous disks--like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about
the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and
wriggled in the air towards me--and then another.
A sudden chill came over me.
There was a loud shriek from a woman behind. I half turned, keeping my eyes
fixed upon the cylinder still, from which other tentacles were now projecting,
and began pushing my way back from the edge of the pit. I saw astonishment
giving place to horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate
exclamations on all sides. There was a general movement backwards. I saw the
shopman struggling still on the edge of the pit. I found myself alone, and saw
the people on the other side of the pit running off, Stent among them. I looked
again at the cylinder, and ungovernable terror gripped me. I stood petrified and
staring.
A big greyish rounded bulk, the
size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder.
As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.
Two large dark-coloured eyes
were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing,
was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes,
the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole
creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped
the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.
Those who have never seen a
living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The
peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges,
the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering
of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the
lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement
due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the
extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense,
inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown
skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably
nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with
disgust and dread.
Suddenly the monster vanished.
It had toppled over the brim of the cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a
thud like the fall of a great mass of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick
cry, and forthwith another of these creatures appeared darkly in the deep shadow
of the aperture.
I turned and, running madly,
made for the first group of trees, perhaps a hundred yards away; but I ran
slantingly and stumbling, for I could not avert my face from these things.
There, among some young pine
trees and furze bushes, I stopped, panting, and waited further developments. The
common round the sand pits was dotted with people, standing like myself in a
half-fascinated terror, staring at these creatures, or rather at the heaped
gravel at the edge of the pit in which they lay. And then, with a renewed
horror, I saw a round, black object bobbing up and down on the edge of the pit.
It was the head of the shopman who had fallen in, but showing as a little black
object against the hot western sun. Now he got his shoulder and knee up, and
again he seemed to slip back until only his head was visible. Suddenly he
vanished, and I could have fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I had a
momentary impulse to go back and help him that my fears overruled.
Everything was then quite
invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the heap of sand that the fall of the
cylinder had made. Anyone coming along the road from Chobham or Woking would
have been amazed at the sight--a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people
or more standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind
gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short, excited
shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of sand. The barrow of ginger
beer stood, a queer derelict, black against the burning sky, and in the sand
pits was a row of deserted vehicles with their horses feeding out of nosebags or
pawing the ground.
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