The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 4 Audio |
After getting this sudden lesson
in the power of terrestrial weapons, the Martians retreated to their original
position upon Horsell Common; and in their haste, and encumbered with the débris
of their smashed companion, they no doubt overlooked many such a stray and
negligible victim as myself. Had they left their comrade and pushed on
forthwith, there was nothing at that time between them and London but batteries
of twelve-pounder guns, and they would certainly have reached the capital in
advance of the tidings of their approach; as sudden, dreadful, and destructive
their advent would have been as the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon a century
ago.
But they were in no hurry.
Cylinder followed cylinder on its interplanetary flight; every twenty-four hours
brought them reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval authorities,
now fully alive to the tremendous power of their antagonists, worked with
furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun came into position until, before
twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly slopes about
Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black muzzle. And through the charred
and desolated area--perhaps twenty square miles altogether--that encircled the
Martian encampment on Horsell Common, through charred and ruined villages among
the green trees, through the blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a
day ago pine spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were
presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But the Martians now
understood our command of artillery and the danger of human proximity, and not a
man ventured within a mile of either cylinder, save at the price of his life.
It would seem that these giants
spent the earlier part of the afternoon in going to and fro, transferring
everything from the second and third cylinders--the second in Addlestone Golf
Links and the third at Pyrford--to their original pit on Horsell Common. Over
that, above the blackened heather and ruined buildings that stretched far and
wide, stood one as sentinel, while the rest abandoned their vast
fighting-machines and descended into the pit. They were hard at work there far
into the night, and the towering pillar of dense green smoke that rose therefrom
could be seen from the hills about Merrow, and even, it is said, from Banstead
and Epsom Downs.
And while the Martians behind me
were thus preparing for their next sally, and in front of me Humanity gathered
for the battle, I made my way with infinite pains and labour from the fire and
smoke of burning Weybridge towards London.
I saw an abandoned boat, very
small and remote, drifting down-stream; and throwing off the most of my sodden
clothes, I went after it, gained it, and so escaped out of that destruction.
There were no oars in the boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my
parboiled hands would allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going
very tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well understand. I
followed the river, because I considered that the water gave me my best chance
of escape should these giants return.
The hot water from the Martian's
overthrow drifted downstream with me, so that for the best part of a mile I
could see little of either bank. Once, however, I made out a string of black
figures hurrying across the meadows from the direction of Weybridge. Halliford,
it seemed, was deserted, and several of the houses facing the river were on
fire. It was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite desolate under the
hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of flame going straight up into
the heat of the afternoon. Never before had I seen houses burning without the
accompaniment of an obstructive crowd. A little farther on the dry reeds up the
bank were smoking and glowing, and a line of fire inland was marching steadily
across a late field of hay.
For a long time I drifted, so
painful and weary was I after the violence I had been through, and so intense
the heat upon the water. Then my fears got the better of me again, and I resumed
my paddling. The sun scorched my bare back. At last, as the bridge at Walton was
coming into sight round the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my fears, and
I landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick, amid the long grass. I
suppose the time was then about four or five o'clock. I got up presently, walked
perhaps half a mile without meeting a soul, and then lay down again in the
shadow of a hedge. I seem to remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during
that last spurt. I was also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no
more water. It is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot
account for it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead worried me
excessively.
I do not clearly remember the
arrival of the curate, so that probably I dozed. I became aware of him as a
seated figure in soot-smudged shirt sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven
face staring at a faint flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is
called a mackerel sky--rows and rows of faint down-plumes of cloud, just tinted
with the midsummer sunset.
I sat up, and at the rustle of
my motion he looked at me quickly.
"Have you any water?" I asked
abruptly.
He shook his head.
"You have been asking for water
for the last hour," he said.
For a moment we were silent,
taking stock of each other. I dare say he found me a strange enough figure,
naked, save for my water-soaked trousers and socks, scalded, and my face and
shoulders blackened by the smoke. His face was a fair weakness, his chin
retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead;
his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke abruptly,
looking vacantly away from me.
"What does it mean?" he said.
"What do these things mean?"
I stared at him and made no
answer.
He extended a thin white hand
and spoke in almost a complaining tone.
"Why are these things permitted?
What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the
roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then--fire, earthquake, death! As
if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work---- What are
these Martians?"
"What are we?" I answered,
clearing my throat.
He gripped his knees and turned
to look at me again. For half a minute, perhaps, he stared silently.
"I was walking through the roads
to clear my brain," he said. "And suddenly--fire, earthquake, death!"
He relapsed into silence, with
his chin now sunken almost to his knees.
Presently he began waving his
hand.
"All the work--all the Sunday
schools---- What have we done--what has Weybridge done? Everything
gone--everything destroyed. The church! We rebuilt it only three years ago.
Gone! Swept out of existence! Why?"
Another pause, and he broke out
again like one demented.
"The smoke of her burning goeth
up for ever and ever!" he shouted.
His eyes flamed, and he pointed
a lean finger in the direction of Weybridge.
By this time I was beginning to
take his measure. The tremendous tragedy in which he had been involved--it was
evident he was a fugitive from Weybridge--had driven him to the very verge of
his reason.
"Are we far from Sunbury?" I
said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
"What are we to do?" he asked.
"Are these creatures everywhere? Has the earth been given over to them?"
"Are we far from Sunbury?"
"Only this morning I officiated
at early celebration----"
"Things have changed," I said,
quietly. "You must keep your head. There is still hope."
"Hope!"
"Yes. Plentiful hope--for all
this destruction!"
I began to explain my view of
our position. He listened at first, but as I went on the interest dawning in his
eyes gave place to their former stare, and his regard wandered from me.
"This must be the beginning of
the end," he said, interrupting me. "The end! The great and terrible day of the
Lord! When men shall call upon the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and
hide them--hide them from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!"
I began to understand the
position. I ceased my laboured reasoning, struggled to my feet, and, standing
over him, laid my hand on his shoulder.
"Be a man!" said I. "You are
scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?
Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to
men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent."
For a time he sat in blank
silence.
"But how can we escape?" he
asked, suddenly. "They are invulnerable, they are pitiless."
"Neither the one nor, perhaps,
the other," I answered. "And the mightier they are the more sane and wary should
we be. One of them was killed yonder not three hours ago."
"Killed!" he said, staring about
him. "How can God's ministers be killed?"
"I saw it happen." I proceeded
to tell him. "We have chanced to come in for the thick of it," said I, "and that
is all."
"What is that flicker in the
sky?" he asked abruptly.
I told him it was the heliograph
signalling--that it was the sign of human help and effort in the sky.
"We are in the midst of it," I
said, "quiet as it is. That flicker in the sky tells of the gathering storm.
Yonder, I take it are the Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about
Richmond and Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up
and guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way
again."
And even as I spoke he sprang to
his feet and stopped me by a gesture.
"Listen!" he said.
From beyond the low hills across
the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying.
Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us.
High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of
Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.
"We had better follow this
path," I said, "northward."
My younger brother was in London
when the Martians fell at Woking. He was a medical student working for an
imminent examination, and he heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday
morning. The morning papers on Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy
special articles on the planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a
brief and vaguely worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.
The Martians, alarmed by the
approach of a crowd, had killed a number of people with a quick-firing gun, so
the story ran. The telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as they seem
to be, the Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen,
and, indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative
strength of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last text their
leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
Of course all the students in
the crammer's biology class, to which my brother went that day, were intensely
interested, but there were no signs of any unusual excitement in the streets.
The afternoon papers puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing
to tell beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of the
pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then theSt. James's
Gazette, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare fact of the
interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought to be due to the
falling of burning pine trees across the line. Nothing more of the fighting was
known that night, the night of my drive to Leatherhead and back.
My brother felt no anxiety about
us, as he knew from the description in the papers that the cylinder was a good
two miles from my house. He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in
order, as he says, to see the Things before they were killed. He despatched a
telegram, which never reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the evening at a
music hall.
In London, also, on Saturday
night there was a thunderstorm, and my brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the
platform from which the midnight train usually starts he learned, after some
waiting, that an accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The
nature of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities
did not clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement in the
station, as the officials, failing to realise that anything further than a
breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction had occurred, were running the
theatre trains which usually passed through Woking round by Virginia Water or
Guildford. They were busy making the necessary arrangements to alter the route
of the Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal
newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to whom he
bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview him. Few people,
excepting the railway officials, connected the breakdown with the Martians.
I have read, in another account
of these events, that on Sunday morning "all London was electrified by the news
from Woking." As a matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that very
extravagant phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the
panic of Monday morning. Those who did took some time to realise all that the
hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority of people
in London do not read Sunday papers.
The habit of personal security,
moreover, is so deeply fixed in the Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence
so much a matter of course in the papers, that they could read without any
personal tremors: "About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the
cylinder, and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an entire
battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims have been
absolutely useless against their armour; the field guns have been disabled by
them. Flying hussars have been galloping into Chertsey. The Martians appear to
be moving slowly towards Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West
Surrey, and earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward."
That was how the Sunday Sun put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt
"handbook" article in the Referee compared the affair to a menagerie
suddenly let loose in a village.
No one in London knew positively
of the nature of the armoured Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that
these monsters must be sluggish: "crawling," "creeping painfully"--such
expressions occurred in almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams
could have been written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers
printed separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of
it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people until late in the
afternoon, when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in their
possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and Weybridge, and all the
district were pouring along the roads Londonward, and that was all.
My brother went to church at the
Foundling Hospital in the morning, still in ignorance of what had happened on
the previous night. There he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special
prayer for peace. Coming out, he bought a Referee. He became alarmed at
the news in this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if
communication were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and innumerable
people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely affected by the strange
intelligence that the news venders were disseminating. People were interested,
or, if alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local residents. At the station
he heard for the first time that the Windsor and Chertsey lines were now
interrupted. The porters told him that several remarkable telegrams had been
received in the morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these had
abruptly ceased. My brother could get very little precise detail out of them.
"There's fighting going on about
Weybridge" was the extent of their information.
The train service was now very
much disorganised. Quite a number of people who had been expecting friends from
places on the South-Western network were standing about the station. One
grey-headed old gentleman came and abused the South-Western Company bitterly to
my brother. "It wants showing up," he said.
One or two trains came in from
Richmond, Putney, and Kingston, containing people who had gone out for a day's
boating and found the locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a
blue and white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.
"There's hosts of people driving
into Kingston in traps and carts and things, with boxes of valuables and all
that," he said. "They come from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say
there's been guns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers
have told them to get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns
firing at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the dickens
does it all mean? The Martians can't get out of their pit, can they?"
My brother could not tell him.
Afterwards he found that the
vague feeling of alarm had spread to the clients of the underground railway, and
that the Sunday excursionists began to return from all over the South-Western
"lung"--Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth--at unnaturally
early hours; but not a soul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of.
Everyone connected with the terminus seemed ill-tempered.
About five o'clock the gathering
crowd in the station was immensely excited by the opening of the line of
communication, which is almost invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and
the South-Western stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns
and carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought up
from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an exchange of
pleasantries: "You'll get eaten!" "We're the beast-tamers!" and so forth. A
little while after that a squad of police came into the station and began to
clear the public off the platforms, and my brother went out into the street
again.
The church bells were ringing
for evensong, and a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo
Road. On the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that
came drifting down the stream in patches. The sun was just setting, and the
Clock Tower and the Houses of Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful
skies it is possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long transverse
stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There was talk of a floating body. One of the
men there, a reservist he said he was, told my brother he had seen the
heliograph flickering in the west.
In Wellington Street my brother
met a couple of sturdy roughs who had just been rushed out of Fleet Street with
still-wet newspapers and staring placards. "Dreadful catastrophe!" they bawled
one to the other down Wellington Street. "Fighting at Weybridge! Full
description! Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!" He had to give
threepence for a copy of that paper.
Then it was, and then only, that
he realised something of the full power and terror of these monsters. He learned
that they were not merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they
were minds swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move swiftly and
smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not stand against them.
They were described as "vast
spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an
express train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat." Masked batteries,
chiefly of field guns, had been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and
especially between the Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been
seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been destroyed.
In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries had been at once
annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned, but the
tone of the despatch was optimistic.
The Martians had been repulsed;
they were not invulnerable. They had retreated to their triangle of cylinders
again, in the circle about Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing
forward upon them from all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor,
Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich--even from the north; among others, long
wire-guns of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen
were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering London. Never before
in England had there been such a vast or rapid concentration of military
material.
Any further cylinders that fell,
it was hoped, could be destroyed at once by high explosives, which were being
rapidly manufactured and distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation
was of the strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to
avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible in
the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty of them
against our millions.
The authorities had reason to
suppose, from the size of the cylinders, that at the outside there could not be
more than five in each cylinder--fifteen altogether. And one at least was
disposed of--perhaps more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach of
danger, and elaborate measures were being taken for the protection of the people
in the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances of
the safety of London and the ability of the authorities to cope with the
difficulty, this quasi-proclamation closed.
This was printed in enormous
type on paper so fresh that it was still wet, and there had been no time to add
a word of comment. It was curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the
usual contents of the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this place.
All down Wellington Street
people could be seen fluttering out the pink sheets and reading, and the Strand
was suddenly noisy with the voices of an army of hawkers following these
pioneers. Men came scrambling off buses to secure copies. Certainly this news
excited people intensely, whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a map
shop in the Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his
Sunday raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window hastily
fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.
Going on along the Strand to
Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand, my brother saw some of the fugitives
from West Surrey. There was a man with his wife and two boys and some articles
of furniture in a cart such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the
direction of Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay waggon with
five or six respectable-looking people in it, and some boxes and bundles. The
faces of these people were haggard, and their entire appearance contrasted
conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance of the people on the omnibuses.
People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of cabs. They stopped at the
Square as if undecided which way to take, and finally turned eastward along the
Strand. Some way behind these came a man in workday clothes, riding one of those
old-fashioned tricycles with a small front wheel. He was dirty and white in the
face.
My brother turned down towards
Victoria, and met a number of such people. He had a vague idea that he might see
something of me. He noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic.
Some of the refugees were exchanging news with the people on the omnibuses. One
was professing to have seen the Martians. "Boilers on stilts, I tell you,
striding along like men." Most of them were excited and animated by their
strange experience.
Beyond Victoria the
public-houses were doing a lively trade with these arrivals. At all the street
corners groups of people were reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at
these unusual Sunday visitors. They seemed to increase as night drew on, until
at last the roads, my brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day.
My brother addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory answers
from most.
None of them could tell him any
news of Woking except one man, who assured him that Woking had been entirely
destroyed on the previous night.
"I come from Byfleet," he said;
"man on a bicycle came through the place in the early morning, and ran from door
to door warning us to come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and
there were clouds of smoke to the south--nothing but smoke, and not a soul
coming that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from
Weybridge. So I've locked up my house and come on."
At the time there was a strong
feeling in the streets that the authorities were to blame for their incapacity
to dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience.
About eight o'clock a noise of
heavy firing was distinctly audible all over the south of London. My brother
could not hear it for the traffic in the main thoroughfares, but by striking
through the quiet back streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite
plainly.
He walked from Westminster to
his apartments near Regent's Park, about two. He was now very anxious on my
account, and disturbed at the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was
inclined to run, even as mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He
thought of all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic
countryside; he tried to imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet high.
There were one or two cartloads
of refugees passing along Oxford Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but
so slowly was the news spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full
of their usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along
the edge of Regent's Park there were as many silent couples "walking out"
together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The night was
warm and still, and a little oppressive; the sound of guns continued
intermittently, and after midnight there seemed to be sheet lightning in the
south.
He read and re-read the paper,
fearing the worst had happened to me. He was restless, and after supper prowled
out again aimlessly. He returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to
his examination notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened
from lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers,
feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells. Red
reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay astonished, wondering
whether day had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped out of bed and ran to
the window.
His room was an attic and as he
thrust his head out, up and down the street there were a dozen echoes to the
noise of his window sash, and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared.
Enquiries were being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering
at the door; "the Martians are coming!" and hurried to the next door.
The sound of drumming and
trumpeting came from the Albany Street Barracks, and every church within earshot
was hard at work killing sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a
noise of doors opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed
from darkness into yellow illumination.
Up the street came galloping a
closed carriage, bursting abruptly into noise at the corner, rising to a
clattering climax under the window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close
on the rear of this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession
of flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the
North-Western special trains were loading up, instead of coming down the
gradient into Euston.
For a long time my brother
stared out of the window in blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering
at door after door, and delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door
behind him opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed
only in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his
hair disordered from his pillow.
"What the devil is it?" he
asked. "A fire? What a devil of a row!"
They both craned their heads out
of the window, straining to hear what the policemen were shouting. People were
coming out of the side streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.
"What the devil is it all
about?" said my brother's fellow lodger.
My brother answered him vaguely
and began to dress, running with each garment to the window in order to miss
nothing of the growing excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early
newspapers came bawling into the street:
"London in danger of
suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences forced! Fearful massacres in the
Thames Valley!"
And all about him--in the rooms
below, in the houses on each side and across the road, and behind in the Park
Terraces and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the
Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn
and St. John's Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London from
Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their eyes, and opening windows to stare
out and ask aimless questions, dressing hastily as the first breath of the
coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of the great
panic. London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was
awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.
Unable from his window to learn
what was happening, my brother went down and out into the street, just as the
sky between the parapets of the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying
people on foot and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!"
he heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of such a
unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the door-step, he saw
another news vender approaching, and got a paper forthwith. The man was running
away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran--a
grotesque mingling of profit and panic.
And from this paper my brother
read that catastrophic despatch of the Commander-in-Chief:
"The Martians are able to
discharge enormous clouds of a black and poisonous vapour by means of rockets.
They have smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon,
and are advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It is
impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but in instant
flight."
That was all, but it was enough.
The whole population of the great six-million city was stirring, slipping,
running; presently it would be pouring en masse northward.
"Black Smoke!" the voices cried.
"Fire!"
The bells of the neighbouring
church made a jangling tumult, a cart carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks
and curses, against the water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to
and fro in the houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished
lamps. And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.
He heard footsteps running to
and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to
the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed
ejaculating.
As my brother began to realise
the import of all these things, he turned hastily to his own room, put all his
available money--some ten pounds altogether--into his pockets, and went out
again into the streets.
| Day Five Text | The War of the Worlds |
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