The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 6 Audio |
Had the Martians aimed only at
destruction, they might on Monday have annihilated the entire population of
London, as it spread itself slowly through the home counties. Not only along the
road through Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the
roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and
Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that June
morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and
eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed
stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror
and physical distress. I have set forth at length in the last chapter my
brother's account of the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers
may realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned.
Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved
and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies
Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no
disciplined march; it was a stampede--a stampede gigantic and terrible--without
order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving
headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of
mankind.
Directly below him the
balloonist would have seen the network of streets far and wide, houses,
churches, squares, crescents, gardens--already derelict--spread out like a huge
map, and in the southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it
would have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart.
Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising ground, now
pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley, exactly as a gout of ink
would spread itself upon blotting paper.
And beyond, over the blue hills
that rise southward of the river, the glittering Martians went to and fro,
calmly and methodically spreading their poison cloud over this patch of country
and then over that, laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its
purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to
have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and the
destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder they came
upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and there. They were
hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their
operations, and did not come beyond the central part of London all that day. It
is possible that a very considerable number of people in London stuck to their
houses through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home suffocated
by the Black Smoke.
Until about midday the Pool of
London was an astonishing scene. Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there,
tempted by the enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that
many who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned.
About one o'clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the black
vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At that the Pool
became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and collision, and for some time a
multitude of boats and barges jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge,
and the sailors and lightermen had to fight savagely against the people who
swarmed upon them from the riverfront. People were actually clambering down the
piers of the bridge from above.
When, an hour later, a Martian
appeared beyond the Clock Tower and waded down the river, nothing but wreckage
floated above Limehouse.
Of the falling of the fifth
cylinder I have presently to tell. The sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother,
keeping watch beside the women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of
it far beyond the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting
across the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.
The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of London was
confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it was said, at Neasden.
But they did not come into my brother's view until the morrow.
That day the scattered
multitudes began to realise the urgent need of provisions. As they grew hungry
the rights of property ceased to be regarded. Farmers were out to defend their
cattle-sheds, granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A
number of people now, like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there were
some desperate souls even going back towards London to get food. These were
chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge of the Black Smoke
came by hearsay. He heard that about half the members of the government had
gathered at Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of high explosives were
being prepared to be used in automatic mines across the Midland counties.
He was also told that the
Midland Railway Company had replaced the desertions of the first day's panic,
had resumed traffic, and was running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve
the congestion of the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar
announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern towns and
that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed among the starving
people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence did not deter him from the
plan of escape he had formed, and the three pressed eastward all day, and heard
no more of the bread distribution than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact,
did anyone else hear more of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon
Primrose Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that
duty alternately with my brother. She saw it.
On Wednesday the three
fugitives--they had passed the night in a field of unripe wheat--reached
Chelmsford, and there a body of the inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of
Public Supply, seized the pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange
for it but the promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of
Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder Mills in
a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.
People were watching for
Martians here from the church towers. My brother, very luckily for him as it
chanced, preferred to push on at once to the coast rather than wait for food,
although all three of them were very hungry. By midday they passed through
Tillingham, which, strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted,
save for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they
suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all
sorts that it is possible to imagine.
For after the sailors could no
longer come up the Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and
Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the
people. They lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last
towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks--English,
Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts,
electric boats; and beyond were ships of large burden, a multitude of filthy
colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships, passenger boats, petroleum tanks,
ocean tramps, an old white transport even, neat white and grey liners from
Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast across the Blackwater my
brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people
on the beach, a swarm which also extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.
About a couple of miles out lay
an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a
waterlogged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child. It was the only
warship in sight, but far away to the right over the smooth surface of the
sea--for that day there was a dead calm--lay a serpent of black smoke to mark
the next ironclads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line,
steam up and ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the course of
the Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.
At the sight of the sea, Mrs.
Elphinstone, in spite of the assurances of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic.
She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust
herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman,
to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar. She had
been growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed during the two
days' journeyings. Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had been
always well and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at Stanmore.
It was with the greatest
difficulty they could get her down to the beach, where presently my brother
succeeded in attracting the attention of some men on a paddle steamer from the
Thames. They sent a boat and drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the
three. The steamer was going, these men said, to Ostend.
It was about two o'clock when my
brother, having paid their fares at the gangway, found himself safely aboard the
steamboat with his charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices,
and the three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats forward.
There were already a couple of
score of passengers aboard, some of whom had expended their last money in
securing a passage, but the captain lay off the Blackwater until five in the
afternoon, picking up passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously
crowded. He would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound of
guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the ironclad
seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags. A jet of smoke sprang
out of her funnels.
Some of the passengers were of
opinion that this firing came from Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it
was growing louder. At the same time, far away in the southeast the masts and
upperworks of three ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath
clouds of black smoke. But my brother's attention speedily reverted to the
distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke rising out of
the distant grey haze.
The little steamer was already
flapping her way eastward of the big crescent of shipping, and the low Essex
coast was growing blue and hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the
remote distance, advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness.
At that the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and
anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his terror. Every
soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the steamer and stared at
that distant shape, higher than the trees or church towers inland, and advancing
with a leisurely parody of a human stride.
It was the first Martian my
brother had seen, and he stood, more amazed than terrified, watching this Titan
advancing deliberately towards the shipping, wading farther and farther into the
water as the coast fell away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another,
striding over some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther off,
wading deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway up between sea
and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as if to intercept the escape of the
multitudinous vessels that were crowded between Foulness and the Naze. In spite
of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the little paddleboat, and the
pouring foam that her wheels flung behind her, she receded with terrifying
slowness from this ominous advance.
Glancing northwestward, my
brother saw the large crescent of shipping already writhing with the approaching
terror; one ship passing behind another, another coming round from broadside to
end on, steamships whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let
out, launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and by
the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for anything seaward.
And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she had suddenly come round to avoid
being run down) flung him headlong from the seat upon which he was standing.
There was a shouting all about him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed
to be answered faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his
hands.
He sprang to his feet and saw to
starboard, and not a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast
iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on
either side in huge waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her
paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the
waterline.
A douche of spray blinded my
brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had
passed and was rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong
structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot
with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong,
coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.
Keeping his footing on the
heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging
leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close
together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost
entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared
far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist
with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such
another as themselves. The Thunder Childfired no gun, but simply drove
full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get
so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell,
and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace
that in a minute she seemed halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a
diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex
coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian
lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It
hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to
seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove
clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in
their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.
They saw the gaunt figures
separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of
them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing
obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It
must have driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod
through paper.
A flicker of flame went up
through the rising steam, and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another
moment he was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high in the
air. The guns of theThunder Child sounded through the reek, going off
one after the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to
matchwood.
But no one heeded that very
much. At the sight of the Martian's collapse the captain on the bridge yelled
inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted
together. And then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult,
drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its
ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
She was alive still; the
steering gear, it seems, was intact and her engines working. She headed straight
for a second Martian, and was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray
came to bear. Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her
funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her
explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward
with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of
cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam hid
everything again.
"Two!," yelled the captain.
Everyone was shouting. The whole
steamer from end to end rang with frantic cheering that was taken up first by
one and then by all in the crowding multitude of ships and boats that was
driving out to sea.
The steam hung upon the water
for many minutes, hiding the third Martian and the coast altogether. And all
this time the boat was paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and
when at last the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour
intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could be made out, nor
could the third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite
close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
The little vessel continued to
beat its way seaward, and the ironclads receded slowly towards the coast, which
was hidden still by a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas,
eddying and combining in the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering
to the northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and the
steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud bank, the
warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and passed into the
thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew faint, and at last
indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that were gathering about the
sinking sun.
Then suddenly out of the golden
haze of the sunset came the vibration of guns, and a form of black shadows
moving. Everyone struggled to the rail of the steamer and peered into the
blinding furnace of the west, but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A
mass of smoke rose slanting and barred the face of the sun. The steamboat
throbbed on its way through an interminable suspense.
The sun sank into grey clouds,
the sky flushed and darkened, the evening star trembled into sight. It was deep
twilight when the captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes.
Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed slantingly upward
and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western
sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve,
grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the
night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.
In the first book I have
wandered so much from my own adventures to tell of the experiences of my brother
that all through the last two chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the
empty house at Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day--the day of the
panic--in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke from the rest
of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching inactivity during those two
weary days.
My mind was occupied by anxiety
for my wife. I figured her at Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me
already as a dead man. I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I
was cut off from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I
knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man to
realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was not bravery,
but circumspection. My only consolation was to believe that the Martians were
moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague anxieties keep the mind
sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and irritable with the curate's
perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the sight of his selfish despair. After some
ineffectual remonstrance I kept away from him, staying in a room--evidently a
children's schoolroom--containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed
me thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to be
alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.
We were hopelessly hemmed in by
the Black Smoke all that day and the morning of the next. There were signs of
people in the next house on Sunday evening--a face at a window and moving
lights, and later the slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people
were, nor what became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer and nearer
to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house that hid us.
A Martian came across the fields
about midday, laying the stuff with a jet of superheated steam that hissed
against the walls, smashed all the windows it touched, and scalded the curate's
hand as he fled out of the front room. When at last we crept across the sodden
rooms and looked out again, the country northward was as though a black
snowstorm had passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to
see an unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.
For a time we did not see how
this change affected our position, save that we were relieved of our fear of the
Black Smoke. But later I perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we
might get away. So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream
of action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.
"We are safe here," he repeated;
"safe here."
I resolved to leave him--would
that I had! Wiser now for the artilleryman's teaching, I sought out food and
drink. I had found oil and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a
flannel shirt that I found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that
I meant to go alone--had reconciled myself to going alone--he suddenly roused
himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we started about
five o'clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road to Sunbury.
In Sunbury, and at intervals
along the road, were dead bodies lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as
men, overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That
pall of cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of
Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange
and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved to find
a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. We went through Bushey
Park, with its deer going to and fro under the chestnuts, and some men and women
hurrying in the distance towards Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These
were the first people we saw.
Away across the road the woods
beyond Ham and Petersham were still afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either
Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and there were more people about here, though none
could give us news. For the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage
of a lull to shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses
here were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even for flight.
Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along the road. I remember
most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded into the road by the
wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond Bridge about half past eight. We
hurried across the exposed bridge, of course, but I noticed floating down the
stream a number of red masses, some many feet across. I did not know what these
were--there was no time for scrutiny--and I put a more horrible interpretation
on them than they deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that
had once been smoke, and dead bodies--a heap near the approach to the station;
but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were some way towards Barnes.
We saw in the blackened distance
a group of three people running down a side street towards the river, but
otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly;
outside the town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.
Then suddenly, as we approached
Kew, came a number of people running, and the upperworks of a Martian
fighting-machine loomed in sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away
from us. We stood aghast at our danger, and had the Martian looked down we must
immediately have perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but
turned aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping
silently, and refusing to stir again.
But my fixed idea of reaching
Leatherhead would not let me rest, and in the twilight I ventured out again. I
went through a shrubbery, and along a passage beside a big house standing in its
own grounds, and so emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left in the
shed, but he came hurrying after me.
That second start was the most
foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was manifest the Martians were about us. No
sooner had the curate overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we
had seen before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew
Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green-grey
of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian pursued them. In three
strides he was among them, and they ran radiating from his feet in all
directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one.
Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind
him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
It was the first time I realised
that the Martians might have any other purpose than destruction with defeated
humanity. We stood for a moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate
behind us into a walled garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch,
and lay there, scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.
I suppose it was nearly eleven
o'clock before we gathered courage to start again, no longer venturing into the
road, but sneaking along hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly
through the darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who
seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched and
blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered dead bodies of
men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but with their legs and boots
mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four
ripped guns and smashed gun carriages.
Sheen, it seemed, had escaped
destruction, but the place was silent and deserted. Here we happened on no dead,
though the night was too dark for us to see into the side roads of the place. In
Sheen my companion suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided
to try one of the houses.
The first house we entered,
after a little difficulty with the window, was a small semi-detached villa, and
I found nothing eatable left in the place but some mouldy cheese. There was,
however, water to drink; and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in
our next housebreaking.
We then crossed to a place where
the road turns towards Mortlake. Here there stood a white house within a walled
garden, and in the pantry of this domicile we found a store of food--two loaves
of bread in a pan, an uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this
catalogue so precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon
this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under a shelf, and there
were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. This pantry opened into a
kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood; there was also a cupboard, in
which we found nearly a dozen of burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins
of biscuits.
We sat in the adjacent kitchen
in the dark--for we dared not strike a light--and ate bread and ham, and drank
beer out of the same bottle. The curate, who was still timorous and restless,
was now, oddly enough, for pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his
strength by eating when the thing happened that was to imprison us.
"It can't be midnight yet," I
said, and then came a blinding glare of vivid green light. Everything in the
kitchen leaped out, clearly visible in green and black, and vanished again. And
then followed such a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close
on the heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash of
glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the plaster of
the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of fragments upon our
heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor against the oven handle and
stunned. I was insensible for a long time, the curate told me, and when I came
to we were in darkness again, and he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards,
with blood from a cut forehead, was dabbing water over me.
For some time I could not
recollect what had happened. Then things came to me slowly. A bruise on my
temple asserted itself.
"Are you better?" asked the
curate in a whisper.
At last I answered him. I sat
up.
"Don't move," he said. "The
floor is covered with smashed crockery from the dresser. You can't possibly move
without making a noise, and I fancy they are outside."
We both sat quite silent, so
that we could scarcely hear each other breathing. Everything seemed deadly
still, but once something near us, some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down
with a rumbling sound. Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic
rattle.
"That!" said the curate, when
presently it happened again.
"Yes," I said. "But what is it?"
"A Martian!" said the curate.
I listened again.
"It was not like the Heat-Ray,"
I said, and for a time I was inclined to think one of the great
fighting-machines had stumbled against the house, as I had seen one stumble
against the tower of Shepperton Church.
Our situation was so strange and
incomprehensible that for three or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely
moved. And then the light filtered in, not through the window, which remained
black, but through a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken
bricks in the wall behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for
the first time.
The window had been burst in by
a mass of garden mould, which flowed over the table upon which we had been
sitting and lay about our feet. Outside, the soil was banked high against the
house. At the top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The
floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the
house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was evident the
greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting vividly with this ruin was
the neat dresser, stained in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of
copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles,
and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen
range.
As the dawn grew clearer, we saw
through the gap in the wall the body of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose,
over the still glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as
circumspectly as possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness
of the scullery.
Abruptly the right
interpretation dawned upon my mind.
"The fifth cylinder," I
whispered, "the fifth shot from Mars, has struck this house and buried us under
the ruins!"
For a time the curate was
silent, and then he whispered:
"God have mercy upon us!"
I heard him presently whimpering
to himself.
Save for that sound we lay quite
still in the scullery; I for my part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes
fixed on the faint light of the kitchen door. I could just see the curate's
face, a dim, oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a
metallic hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again, after a quiet
interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for the most
part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if anything to increase
in number as time wore on. Presently a measured thudding and a vibration that
made everything about us quiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift,
began and continued. Once the light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen
doorway became absolutely dark. For many hours we must have crouched there,
silent and shivering, until our tired attention failed....
At last I found myself awake and
very hungry. I am inclined to believe we must have spent the greater portion of
a day before that awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it
moved me to action. I told the curate I was going to seek food, and felt my way
towards the pantry. He made me no answer, but so soon as I began eating the
faint noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling after me.
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