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Wrote to OAM. \J2--:----:::::::-<@H@T@`@l@:x@@@@@@@@@:A AA$A0A  ˌ  ˌLT!L t >  ˌ  +xxxxSNtuuh>Ix^Z!`@@&9_9_9_9_`?DDDD@ D H L P T X T X  PO4OdO::::(;|;;;-<;:: v  (;=L<$<!Q@-U@ nO4rOP$ P$ P$ P$ P$ (;<<: 9: =0=:+ P CSv(;\=;;?(;=<:(;=::C9@-0<<<<8$@DA$HLI -$@DHL$T?99 0Px h8Tx0`|  P 8Lt@`4PhH 4 ` |       8 P l        4 P |        @ X t       $ @ X t       <X p0\(<Pdx @l4p$`(\$THH0Lh ,Hh(Dd0d<l (ldlBDTl$ X h P$     !(!d!!!!!0"X"""""#<#T#### $ $$$$:::::::(::::8 ;;D+bkGG@@>BEoE>B>RG>Uff s nٙgcnܙ3>CLAS WARW12 003^ Copyright (C)2000-2001 Pat Crowe. This Book Reader was distributed solely for the reading of classic books which are out of copyright. Program extends to address 3fffh. No responsibilty can be accepted for any breach of copyright nor for any other matter involved with material above this address. This material will have been added by a user of this program and not the author of this program. 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(dJ- 5*1 s 2c1'!-d (d1%q:c ( %J%0j!c() - "dC( -$C)% -B$B (%-- O6( Cc (C*-1c J)1c()--()A%d (k-$5B H%-(%J-c!()Ab add( -C )5c-p:%J)!)'2c "dCC ( -C%k-c)>)) J)H% )%/21Bd!tZd( 1dk$1d . r: )H)P"%P2AHb !!(L1C $K!d)-$- 1 (%%cjd1 d&7dS 2s)( C s  l &dS s  cs [R   *%t K2  kBs " $S+%$-!$s % ldt  K(!$ts RZ   $ t2 l  d1Bd!dC -%.>c(  $d! k-$% C !!C B O>R --5Sd)%5$ $ )d $c )!!c cPJ$0>)Wek5 /B"  1!(e" $!d$" ()C ) 5qFj1Z$D(! f+1!$ -B  db % 2! )"$dI)/J -N!)-` j cW  c[ cd# c}.Ao5 Y The War of the Worlds by Author   !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOThe War of the Worlds by H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells [1898] 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) BOOK ONE THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS CHAPTER ONE THE EVE OF THE WAR 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 variousconcerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope mightscrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency menwent 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 assources 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 missionaryenterprise. Yet across the gulfof space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to thoseof 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 itreceives from the sun is barelyhalf 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 uponits surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must haveaccelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessaryfor 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 moredistant 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 physicalcondition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperaturebarely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, itsoceans 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 cloudyatmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses throughits 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 alreadyadmits 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 thespace 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 permittedit, 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 sunkinto 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, Lavelleof 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 hadat once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards thisearth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violentlysquirted out of the planet, "asflaming gases rushed out of a gun." A singularly appropriate phraseit proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little notein the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and the world went in ignorance ofone 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 smalland still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightlyflattened 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 thatkept 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 ofmiles 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 mebecause 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 theoutline 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 theminute gleam I had seen and allthat it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and then gave it up; and we litthe lantern and walked over tohis house. Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundredsof people, sleeping in peace. He was full of speculation thatnight about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signallingus. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanicexplosion was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikelyit was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets. "The chances against anythingmanlike on Mars are a million to one," he said. Hundreds of observers saw theflame that night and the nightafter 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 ofthe firing caused the Martiansinconvenience. Dense clouds ofsmoke 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 upto the disturbances at last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes uponMars. The seriocomic periodicalPUNCH, I remember, made a happy use of it in the politicalcartoon. 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, withthat 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 inthese 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 theprobable 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 wasstarlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a brightdot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed.It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionistsfrom Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music. There were lights in theupper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in thedistance 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 hangingin a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil. CHAPTER TWO THE FALLING STAR 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 thingsthat 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 thosewho saw its flight say it !travelled with a hissing sound. Imyself 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 theshooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite laysomewhere 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 violentlyin 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 firtree 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 thirtyyards. 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  Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4Hj` c c S / c & c )"  * c5 X to him that it might be hollow. He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thinghad made for itself, staring atits strange appearance, astonished chiefly at its unusual shape and colour, and dimly perceiving even then some evidence of design in itsarrival. 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 allalone on the common. Then suddenly he noticed witha 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 hismouth. 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 thecooling 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 ofthe cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing that ablack mark that had been nearhim 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 sawthe black mark jerk forward aninch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an endthat 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 justunlocking 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 Londonjournalist, 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--anartificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside." Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand. "What's that?" he said. He wasdeaf 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 concludedthe man or men inside must beinsensible 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 thelittle 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, inorder to telegraph the news toLondon. The newspaper articleshad 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 Iwent 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. CHAPTER THREE ON HORSELL COMMON 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 tobe 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 anythingbut the vaguest astronomical ideas in those days. Most of them were staring quietly at the big table like 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 inanimatebulk. 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 wasat 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 thatgleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had anunfamiliar hue. "Extra-terrestrial" had no meaning for most of the onlookers. At that time it was quite clearin my own mind that the Thinghad 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 scatteredpine trees. The burning heather had been extinguished, but the level ground towards Ottershaw wasblackened 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, Ifound 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 muchcooler; 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 withinthe case, but that the workmen had failed to unscrewthe top, as it afforded no gripto them. The case appeared tobe enormously thick, and it was possible that the faint sounds we heard represented anoisy 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 trainfrom 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. CHAPTER FOUR THE CYLINDER OPENS 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 blackagainst 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, twoor three hundred people elbowing and jostling one another, the one or two ladiesthere 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, andI 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 scrambleout 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. Thensomething 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 awoman 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 ofthe pit. I saw astonishment giving place to horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate exclamations on all sides. Therewas 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, thesize, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged upand 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 absenceof brow ridges, the absence ofa 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 ofa 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 yardsaway; but I ran slantingly and stumbling, for I could not avertmy face from these things. There, among some young pinetrees 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, staringat these creatures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jyp/T cR cN c&e{& c1ON94at 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 theroad 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 ofsand. The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black against the burning sky, and in the sand pits was a rowof deserted vehicles with theirhorses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the ground. CHAPTER FIVE THE HEAT-RAY After the glimpse I had had of the Martians emerging from the cylinder in which they hadcome to the earth from their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions. I remained standing knee-deep in the heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was a battleground of fear and curiosity. I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a big curve, seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at the sandheaps that hid these new-comers to our earth. Once a leash of thin black whips, like the arms of an octopus, flashed across the sunset and was immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose up, joint by joint, bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling motion. What could be going on there? Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups--one a little crowd towards Woking, the other a knot of people in the directionof Chobham. Evidently they shared my mental conflict. There were few near me. One man I approached--he was, I perceived, a neighbour of mine, though I did not know his name--and accosted. But it was scarcely a time for articulate conversation. "What ugly brutes!" he said. "Good God! What ugly brutes!" He repeated this over and over again. "Did you see a man in the pit?"I said; but he made no answer to that. We became silent, andstood watching for a time sideby side, deriving, I fancy, a certain comfort in one another's company. Then I shifted my position to a little knoll that gave me the advantage of a yard or more of elevation and when I lookedfor him presently he was walking towards Woking. The sunset faded to twilight before anything further happened. The crowd far awayon the left, towards Woking, seemed to grow, and I heard now a faint murmur from it. The little knot of people towards Chobham dispersed. There was scarcely an intimation of movement from the pit. It was this, as much as anything, that gave people courage, and I suppose the new arrivals from Woking also helped to restore confidence. At any rate, as the dusk cameon a slow, intermittent movement upon the sand pits began, a movement that seemed to gather force as thestillness of the evening about the cylinder remained unbroken. Vertical black figures in twos and threes would advance, stop, watch, and advance again, spreading out as they did so in a thin irregular crescent that promised to enclose the pit in its attenuated horns. I, too, onmy side began to move towards the pit. Then I saw some cabmen and others had walked boldly into the sand pits, and heard the clatter of hoofs and the gride of wheels. I saw a lad trundlingoff the barrow of apples. And then, within thirty yards of the pit, advancing from the direction of Horsell, I noted a little black knot of men, the foremost of whom was waving a white flag. This was the Deputation. Therehad been a hasty consultation,and since the Martians were evidently, in spite of their repulsive forms, intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show them, by approaching them with signals,that we too were intelligent. Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the left. It was too far for me to recognise anyone there, but afterwards I learned that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were with others in this attempt at communication. This little group had in its advance dragged inward, so tospeak, the circumference of the now almost complete circleof people, and a number of dim black figures followed it atdiscreet distances. Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinctpuffs, which drove up, one after the other, straight into the still air. This smoke (or flame, perhaps, would be the better word for it) was so bright that the deepblue sky overhead and the hazy stretches of brown common towards Chertsey, setwith black pine trees, seemed to darken abruptly as these puffs arose, and to remain the!darker after their dispersal. At the same time a faint hissing sound became audible. Beyond the pit stood the littlewedge of people with the white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke arose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then slowly thehissing passed into a humming,into a long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisiblejet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their owndestruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in !that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was somethingvery strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the unseenshaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire, and every dry furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set alight. It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming !death, this invisible, inevitablesword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pitsand the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through theheather between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and crackled. Something fell with a crash far away to the left where the road from Woking station opens out on the common. Forth-with the hissing and humming ceased, and the black, dome-like object sank slowly out of sightinto the pit. All this had happened with such swiftness that I had stood motionless, dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light. Had that death swept through a full circle, it must inevitably have slain me in my surprise. But it passed and spared me, and left the night about me suddenly dark and unfamiliar. The undulating common seemed now dark almost to blackness, except where its roadways lay grey and pale under the deep blue sky of theearly night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men. Overhead the stars were mustering, and in the west thesky was still a pale, bright, almost greenish blue. The tops of the pine trees and the roofs of Horsell came out sharp and black against the western afterglow. The Martians and their appliances were altogether invisible, savefor that thin mast upon which their restless mirror wobbled. Patches of bush and isolated trees here and there smoked and glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were sending up spiresof flame into the stillness of the evening air. Nothing was changed save for that and a terrible astonishment. The little group of black specks with the flag of white had been swept out of existence, and the stillness of the evening, so it seemed to me, had scarcely been broken. It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--fear. With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the heather. The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all aboutme. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as achild might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare to look back. I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that Iwas being played with, that presently, when I was upon thevery verge of safety, this mysterious death--as swift asthe passage of light--would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me down. CHAPTER SIX THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they projectin a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, muchas the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutelyproved these details. However !it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam. That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the pit, charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze. The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so forth, attracted by thestories they had heard, were walking over the Horsell Bridgeand along the road between the hedges that runs out at last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming. . . . As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that thecylinder had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a bicycle to the post office with a special wireto an evening paper. As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they found little knots of people talking excitedly andpeering at the spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt, soon infected by the excitement of the occasion. By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may have been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place, besides those who had left the road toapproach the Martians nearer. There were three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their best, under instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter them from approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from those more thoughtless and excitable soulsto whom a crowd is always an occasion for noise and horse-play. Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a collision, had telegraphed fromHorsell to the barracks as soonas the Martians emerged, for the help of a company of soldiers to protect these strange creatures from violence. After that they returned to lead that ill-fated advance. The description of their death, as it was seen by the crowd, tallies very closely with my own impressions: the three puffs of green smoke, the deep humming note, and the flashes of flame. But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than mine. Only the fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower part of the Heat-Ray saved them. Hadthe elevation of the parabolic mirror been a few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the tale. They saw the flashes and the men falling andan invisible hand, as it were, lit the bushes as it hurried towards them through the twilight. Then, with a whistlingnote that rose above the droning of the pit, the beam swung close over their heads, lighting the tops of the beech trees that line the road, and splitting the bricks, smashing the windows, firing the window frames, and bringing down in crumbling ruin a portion of the gable of the house nearest the corner. In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees, thepanic-stricken crowd seems tohave swayed hesitatingly for some moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the road, and single leaves like puffs of flame. Hatsand dresses caught fire. Then came a crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts, and suddenly a mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion with his hands clasped over his head, screaming. "They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone was turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way to Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep. Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd jammed,and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there, and left to dieamid the terror and the darkness. CHAPTER SEVEN HOW I REACHED HOME For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heat seemed !whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between the crossroads and Horsell, andran along this to the crossroads. !At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of my emotion and ofmy flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside. That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I fell and lay still. I must have remained there some time. I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I couldnot clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me like a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from its fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me--the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it wasas if something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There was no sensibletransition from one state of mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day again--a decent, ordinarycitizen. The silent common, the impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as if creatures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hjp c+ c  c# c.mp. c o9 8 they had been in a dream. I asked myself had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it. I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge.My mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly.A head rose over the arch, andthe figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside him ran a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to speak to him, but did not. I answeredhis greeting with a meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge. Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying south-- !clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It !was all so real and so familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things,I told myself, could not be. Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience iscommon. At times I suffer fromthe strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream. But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of business from the gasworks, and the "electric lamps were all alight. I stopped at the group of people. "What news from the common?" said I. There were two men and a woman at the gate. "Eh?" said one of the men, turning. "What news from the common?" I said. "'Ain't yer just BEEN there?" asked the men. "People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over the gate. "What's it all abart?" "Haven't you heard of the menfrom Mars?" said I; "the creatures from Mars?" "Quite enough," said the woman over the gate. "Thenks"; and all three of them laughed. "I felt foolish and angry. I tried and found I could not tell themwhat I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences. "You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home. I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went into the dining room, satdown, drank some wine, and so soon as I could collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and remained neglected on the table while I told my story. !"There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had aroused; "they are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep the pit and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out of it. . . . But the horror of them!" "Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and puttingher hand on mine. !"Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think he may be lying dead there!" My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw how deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly. "They may come here," she said again and again. I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her. "They can scarcely move," I said. I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the#earth. In particular I laid stress !on the gravitational difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That, indeed, was the general opinion. Both THE TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences. The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen or far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars. The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians indisputably did muchto counterbalance the increased weight of their bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch. But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure. "They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my wineglass. "They are dangerousbecause, no doubt, they are mad with terror. Perhaps they expected to find no living things--certainly no intelligentliving things." !"A shell in the pit" said I, "if the worst comes to the worst will kill them all." The intense excitement of theevents had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinaryvividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days even philosophical writershad many little luxuries--the crimson- purple wine in my glass, are photographically !distinct. At the end of it I sat,tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians. So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days. CHAPTER EIGHT FRIDAY NIGHT The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the strange and wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong. If on Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawna circle with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand pits, I doubt if you would havehad one human being outside it, unless it were some relationof Stent or of the three or four cyclists or London people lying dead on the common, whose emotions or habits wereat all affected by the new-comers. Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done. In London that night poor Henderson's telegram describing the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and hisevening paper, after wiring forauthentication from him and receiving no reply--the man was killed--decided not to print a special edition. Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people were inert. I have already described the behaviour of the men and women to whom I spoke. All over the district people were dining and supping; working men were gardening after the labours of the day, children were being put to bed, young people were wandering throughthe lanes love- making, students sat over their books. Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel anddominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger, or even aneye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl ofexcitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but for themost part the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done for countless years--as though no planet Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking station and Horsell and Chobham that was the case. In Woking junction, until a latehour, trains were stopping andgoing on, others were shuntingon the sidings, passengers were alighting and waiting, and everything was proceedingin the most ordinary way. A boy from the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was selling papers with the afternoon's news. The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of the engines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of "Men from Mars!" Excited men came into the station about nine o'clock with incredible tidings, and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might have done. People rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage windows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from the direction ofHorsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving across the stars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath fire was happening. It was only round the edge of the common that any disturbance was perceptible. There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border. There were lights in all the houses on the common side of the three villages, and the people there kept awake till dawn. A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and going but the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell bridges. One or two adventurous souls,it was afterwards found, wentinto the darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now and again a light-ray, like the beam of a warship's searchlight swept the common,and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow. Save for such, that big area of common was silent and desolate, and the charred bodies lay about on it all nightunder the stars, and all the next day. A noise of hammering from the pit was heard by many people. So you have the state of things on Friday night. In the centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart, was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around itwas a patch of silent common,smouldering in places, and witha few dark, dimly seen objectslying in contorted attitudes here and there. Here and therewas a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery,deaden nerve and destroy brain, had still to develop. All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable, at work upon the machines they were making ready, and ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the starlit sky. About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and deployed along the edge of the common to form a cordon. Later a second company marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of the common. Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been onthe common earlier in the day,and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing. The colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge and was busy questioning the crowd at midnight. The military authorities were certainly aliveto the seriousness of the business. About eleven, the next morning's papers were able to say, a squadron of hussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of theCardigan regiment started from Aldershot. A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the Chertsey road, Woking, saw a star fall from heaven into the pine woods to the northwest. It hada greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness like summerlightning. This was the second cylinder. CHAPTER NINE THE FIGHTING BEGINS Saturday lives in my memory asa day of suspense. It was a day of lassitude too, hot and !close, with, I am told, a rapidlyfluctuating barometer. I had slept but little, though my wife had succeeded in sleeping, and I rose early. I went into my garden before breakfast and stood listening, but towards the common there was nothing stirring but a lark.The milkman came as usual. I heard the rattle of his chariot and I went round to the side gate to ask the latest news. He told me that during the night the Martians had been surrounded by troops, and that guns were expected. Then--a familiar, reassuring note--I heard a train running towards Woking. !"They aren't to be killed," said the milkman, "if that can possibly be avoided." I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning. My neighbour was of opinion that the troops would be able to capture or to destroy the Martians during the day. "It's a pity they make themselves so unapproachable," he said. "It would be curious to know how they live on another planet; we might learn a thing or two."He came up to the fence and extended a handful of strawberries, for his gardeningwas as generous as it was enthusiastic. At the same timehe told me of the burning of the pine woods about the Byfleet Golf Links. "They say," said he, "that there's another of those blessed things fallen there--number two. But one's !enough, surely. This lot'll cost the insurance people a pretty penny before everything's settled." He laughed with an air of the greatest good humour as he said this. The woods, he said, were still burning, and pointed out a haze of smoke to me. "They will be hot under foot for days, on account of the thick soil of pine needles and turf," he said, and then grew seriousover "poor Ogilvy." After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to walk down towards the common. Under the railway bridge I found a group of soldiers-- sappers, I think, men in small round caps, dirty red jackets unbuttoned, and showing their blue shirts, dark trousers, and boots coming to the calf. Theytold me no one was allowed over the canal, and, looking along the road towards the bridge, I saw one of the Cardigan men standing sentinelthere. I talked with these !soldiers for a time; I told them of my sight of the Martians onthe previous evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and they had but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with questions. They said that they did not know who had authorised the movements of the troops; their idea was that a dispute had arisen at the Horse Guards. The ordinary sapper is a great deal better educated than the common soldier, and they discussed the peculiar conditions of the possible fight with some acuteness. I described the Heat-Ray to them, and they began to argue among themselves. "Crawl up under cover and rush'em, say I," said one. "Get aht!," said another. "What's cover against this 'ere'eat? Sticks to cook yer! What we got to do is to go as near as the ground'll let us, and then drive a trench." "Blow yer trenches! You alwayswant trenches; you ought to ha' been born a rabbit Snippy." "Ain't they got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly--a little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe. I repeated my description. "Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls 'em. Talk about fishers of men--fighters of fish it is this time!" "It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the first speaker. "Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish 'em?" said the little dark man. "You carn tell what they mightdo." "Where's your shells?" said the first speaker. "There ain't no time. Do it in a rush, that's mytip, and do it at once." So they discussed it. After a while I left them, and went on to the railway station to get as many morning papers as I could. But I will not weary the reader with a description of that longmorning and of the longer afternoon. I did not succeed ingetting a glimpse of the common, for even Horsell and Chobham church towers were in the hands of the military authorities. The soldiers I addressed didn't know anything; the officers were tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj` c j c !#D "@ c #2( c $E3: c %> mysterious as well as busy. I found people in the town quitesecure again in the presence of the military, and I heard forthe first time from Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son was among the dead on the common. The soldiers had madethe people on the outskirts of Horsell lock up and leave their houses. I got back to lunch about two, very tired for, as I have said, the day was extremely hot anddull; and in order to refresh myself I took a cold bath in the afternoon. About half pastfour I went up to the railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers had contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of Stent, Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I didn't know. The Martians did not show an inch of themselves. They seemed busy in their pit, and there was a sound of hammering and an almost continuous streamer of smoke.Apparently they were busy getting ready for a struggle. "Fresh attempts have been made to signal, but without success," was the stereotypedformula of the papers. A sapper told me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag ona long pole. The Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the lowing of a cow. I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs. About three o'clock there began the thud of a gun at measured intervals from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned that the smouldering pine wood into which the second cylinder had fallen was being shelled, in the hope of destroying that object before it opened. It was only about five, however, that a field gunreached Chobham for use against the first body of Martians. About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in thesummerhouse talking vigorouslyabout the battle that was lowering upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after a gust of firing. Close onthe heels of that came a violent rattling crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out uponthe lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle ofthe mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came clattering down thetiles and made a heap of broken red fragments upon theflower bed by my study window. I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of Maybury Hill must be within range of the Martians' Heat-Ray now that the collegewas cleared out of the way. At that I gripped my wife's arm, and without ceremony ran her out into the road. ThenI fetched out the servant, telling her I would go upstairs myself for the box she was clamouring for. "We can't possibly stay here," I said; and as I spoke the firing reopened for a moment upon the common. "But where are we to go?" saidmy wife in terror. I thought perplexed. Then I remembered her cousins at Leatherhead. "Leatherhead!" I shouted abovethe sudden noise. She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out of their houses, astonished. "How are we to get to Leatherhead?" she said. Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway bridge; three galloped through the open gates of the OrientalCollege; two others dismounted, and began runningfrom house to house. The sun, shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees, seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything. "Stop here," said I; "you are safe here"; and I started off at once for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a !horse and dog cart. I ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of thehill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what was going on behind his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to him."I must have a pound," said the landlord, "and I've no one to drive it." ""I'll give you two," said I, over the stranger's shoulder. "What for?" "And I'll bring it back by midnight," I said. "Lord!" said the landlord; "what's the hurry? I'm selling my bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What's going on now?" I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured the dog cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the !landlord should leave his. I tookcare to have the cart there and then, drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge of my wife and servant, rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate as we had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house were burning while I did this, and the palings up the road glowed red. While I was occupied in this way, one of the dismounted hussars came running up. He was goingfrom house to house, warning people to leave. He was going on as I came out of my front door, lugging my treasures, done up in a tablecloth. I shouted after him: "What news?" He turned, stared, bawled something about "crawling out in a thing like a dish cover," and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest. A sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a moment. I ran to my neighbour's door and rapped tosatisfy myself of what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had locked up their house.I went in again, according to my promise, to get my servant's box, lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail of the dog cart, and then caught the reins and jumped up into the driver's seat beside my wife. In another moment we were clear of the smoke and noise, and spankingdown the opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old Woking. In front was a quiet sunny landscape, a wheat field aheadon either side of the road, andthe Maybury Inn with its swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot with threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke already extended far away to the eastand west--to the Byfleet pinewoods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The road was dotted with people running towards us. And very faint now, but very distinct through the hot, quiet air, oneheard the whirr of a machine-gun that was presently stilled, and an intermittent cracking of rifles.Apparently the Martians were setting fire to everything within range of their Heat-Ray. I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my attention to the horse. When Ilooked back again the second hill had hidden the black smoke. I slashed the horse withthe whip, and gave him a looserein until Woking and Send lay between us and that quiveringtumult. I overtook and passed the doctor between Woking and Send. CHAPTER TEN IN THE STORM Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges on either side were sweet and gay with multitudesof dog-roses. The heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury Hillceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful and still. We gotto Leatherhead without misadventure about nine o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest while I took supper with my cousins and commended my wife to their care. My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed with !forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out that the Martians were tied tothe Pit by sheer heaviness, and at the utmost could but !crawl a little out of it; but sheanswered only in monosyllables.Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night. Would that I had! Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted. For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. Something very like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community had got into my blood, and in my heart I was not so very sorry that I had to return to Maybury that night. I was even!afraid that that last fusillade Ihad heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from Mars. I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death. It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was unexpectedly dark; to me,walking out of the lighted passage of my cousins' house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as the day. Overhead the clouds weredriving fast, albeit not a breath stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins' man lit both lamps. Happily, I knew theroad intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway, and watched me until I jumpedup into the dog cart. Then abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side wishing me good hap. !I was a little depressed at firstwith the contagion of my wife's fears, but very soon mythoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening's fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the sky. The driving clouds of the gatheringthunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke. Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the village showed not a sign of life; but Inarrowly escaped an accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with their backs to me. They said nothing to meas I passed. I do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know if the silent houses Ipassed on my way were sleeping securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the night. From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the Wey, and the redglare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare cameinto view again, and the treesabout me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its tree-tops and roofs black and sharp against the red. Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and "falling into the field to my left.It was the third falling star! Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced out the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like a rocketoverhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and bolted. A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling accompaniment, sounded morelike the working of a gigantic electric machine than the usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was blinding and confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the slope. At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. Itwas an elusive vision--a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object cameout clear and sharp and bright.And this Thing I saw! How can Idescribe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it,and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with twofeet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as itseemed, with the next flash, ahundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a greatbody of machinery on a tripod stand. Then suddenly the trees in thepine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as itseemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to meet it! At the sight of the second monster my nerve wentaltogether. Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse's head hard round to theright and in another moment the dog cart had heeled over upon the horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell heavily into a shallow pool of water. I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in the water, under aclump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his neck was broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of!the wheel still spinning slowly. In another moment the colossalmechanism went striding by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford. Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind themain body was a huge mass ofwhite metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs asthe monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone. So much I saw then, all vaguelyfor the flickering of the "lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black shadows. As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the thunder--"Aloo! Aloo!"--and in another minute it was with its companion, halfa mile away, stooping over something in the field. I have no doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they had fired at us from Mars. For some minutes I lay there inthe rain and darkness watching, by the intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now beginning, and as it came and went their figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness again. Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night swallowed them up. I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It wassome time before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a driericers were tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jy&p c 'r & (B c )9 c *%E c +T0 c ,]; -_;' position, or think at all of my imminent peril. Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter's hut of wood, surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at last, and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I madea run for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not makethe people hear (if there were any people inside), and after atime I desisted, and, availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeded in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine woods towards Maybury. Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own house. I walked among the trees tryingto find the footpath. It was very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage. If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen I should have immediatelyworked my way round through Byfleet to Street Cobham, andso gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead. But that night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical wretchedness, prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and blinded by the storm. I had a vague idea of going onto my own house, and that was as much motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a ditch and bruised my knees against a plank, and finally splashed out into the lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in the darkness a man blundered into me and sent mereeling back. He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the stress of the storm just at this placethat I had the hardest task to win my way up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left and worked my way along its palings. Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair of boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next flash. When it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply butnot shabbily dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the fence, as though he had !been flung violently against it. Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before touched a dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his heart. He was quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The lightning flashed for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken. I stepped over him gingerly andpushed on up the hill. I made my way by the police station and the College Arms towards my own house. Nothing was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beatingup against the drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a dark heap lay in the road. Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them. I let myself in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot ofthe staircase, and sat down. My imagination was full of those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against the fence. I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall, shivering violently. CHAPTER ELEVEN AT THE WINDOW I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trickof exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that Iwas cold and wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, went intothe dining room and drank some whiskey, and then I was moved to change my clothes. After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I do not know. The window of my study looks overthe trees and the railway towards Horsell Common. In thehurry of our departure this window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, bycontrast with the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the room seemed impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway. The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about the sand pits was visible. Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro. It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on fire--a broadhillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying andwrithing with the gusts of thedying storm, and throwing a red reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing,nor the clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied upon. Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of it danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. Asharp, resinous tang of burning was in the air. I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window.As I did so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to the houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along the Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black heap and a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow oblongs. Then I perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part smashed and on fire, the hinder carriages still upon the rails. Between these three main centres of light--the houses, the train, and the burning county towards Chobham--stretched irregular patches of dark country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteriesat night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking station a number of black figures hurrying one after the other across the line. And this was the little world inwhich I had been living securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in !the last seven hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned mydesk chair to the window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic black things that were going to and fro in the glare about the sand pits. They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what theycould be. Were they intelligentmechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling,directing, using, much as a !man's brain sits and rules in hisbody? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time inmy life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal. The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the burning land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping into the west, when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight scraping at thefence, and rousing myself fromthe lethargy that had fallen upon me, I looked down and saw him dimly, clambering overthe palings. At the sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned outof the window eagerly. "Hist!" said I, in a whisper. He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and across the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped softly. "Who's there?" he said, also whispering, standing under thewindow and peering up. "Where are you going?" I asked. "God knows." "Are you trying to hide?" "That's it." "Come into the house," I said. I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the door again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat was unbuttoned. "My God!" he said, as I drew him in. "What has happened?" I asked. "What hasn't?" In the obscurityI could see he made a gesture of despair. "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out," he repeated again and again. He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room. "Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a stiff dose. He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, puthis head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in a perfect passionof emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering. It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer my questions, and thenhe answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was a driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven. At that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second cylinder under cover of a metal shield. Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the first of the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command !the sand pits, and its arrival itwas that had precipitated the action. As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there wasfire all about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of charred dead men and dead horses. "I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter of a horse atop of me.We'd been wiped out. And the smell-- good God! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I !felt better. Just like parade it had been a minute before--then stumble, bang, swish!" "Wiped out!" he said. He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out furtively across the common. The Cardigan men hadtried a rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence. Then the monster had risen to its feet and had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out ofthe funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray. In a few minutes there was, sofar as the soldier could see, not a living thing left upon thecommon, and every bush and tree upon it that was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He heard the Martians rattle for atime and then become still. Thegiant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses until the last; then in a moment theHeat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit. The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began to crawl very cautiously across the hotheather ash towards Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became ejaculatory. The place was impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there,frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded. He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorching heaps of broken wallas one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this one pursue a man, catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his head against the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway embankment. Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the hope of getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors hadmade off towards Woking village and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he found one of the water mains near the railway arch smashed,and the water bubbling out like a spring upon the road. That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmertelling me and trying to make me see the things he had seen.He had eaten no food since midday, he told me early in hisnarrative, and I found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into theroom. We lit no lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose trees outside the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of men or animals had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face, blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine was also. When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blastedand blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. Yet hereand there some object had had the luck to escape--a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal.And shining with the growing light of the east, three of themetallic giants stood about the pit, their cowls rotating asthough they were surveying the desolation they had made. It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again puffs of vivid greenvapour streamed up and out ofit towards the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished. Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day. CHAPTER TWELVE WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which we had watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs. The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in. He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoinhis battery--No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once to Leatherhead;and so greatly had the strength of the Martians impressed me that I had determined to take my wife toNewhaven, and go with her out of the country forthwith. For I already perceived clearly that the country about Londonmust inevitably be the scene of a disastrous struggle beforesuch creatures as these could be destroyed. Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me: "It's no kindness to the right sort of wife," he s were tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj.P c /j c 09 c 1 c 2+ c 36P said, "to make her a widow"; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him. Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead. I should have started at once, but my companion had been inactive service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the house for a flask, which he filled with whiskey; and we lined every available pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then we crept out of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the ill- made road by which I had come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead bythe Heat-Ray; and here and there were things that people had dropped--a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and thelike poor valuables. At the corner turning up towards the "post office a little cart, filled with boxes and furniture, and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A cash box had been hastily smashed open andthrown under the debris. Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the houses had suffered very greatly here. TheHeat-Ray had shaved the chimney tops and passed. Yet,save ourselves, there did not seem to be a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had escaped, Isuppose, by way of the Old Woking road--the road I had taken when I drove to Leatherhead--or they had hidden. We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill. We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins ofwoods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage instead of green. On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it had failed to secure its footing. In one placethe woodmen had been at work on Saturday; trees, felledand freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing, with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was a temporary hut, deserted. Therewas not a breath of wind this morning, and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as we hurried along I and the artilleryman talked in whispers and looked now and again overour shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen. After a time we drew near theroad, and as we did so we heard the clatter of hoofs andsaw through the tree stems three cavalry soldiers riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they halted while we hurried towards them.It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the artilleryman told me was a heliograph. "You are the first men I've seen coming this way this morning," said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?" His voice and face were eager.The men behind him stared curiously. The artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and saluted. "Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to !rejoin battery, sir. You'll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about half a mile along this road." "What the dickens are they like?" asked the lieutenant. "Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like 'luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir." "Get out!" said the lieutenant. "What confounded nonsense!" "You'll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire and strikes you dead." "What d'ye mean--a gun?" "No, sir," and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the Heat- Ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me. I was stillstanding on the bank by the side of the road. "It's perfectly true," I said. "Well," said the lieutenant, "I suppose it's my business to see it too. Look here"--to the artilleryman--"we're detailed here clearing people out of their houses. You'd better go along and report yourself to Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He's at Weybridge. Know the way?" !"I do," I said; and he turned hishorse southward again. "Half a mile, you say?" said he."At most," I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. He thanked me androde on, and we saw them no more. Farther along we came upon a group of three women and twochildren in the road, busy clearing out a labourer's cottage. They had got hold of a little hand truck, and were piling it up with unclean- looking bundles and shabby furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk tous as we passed. By Byfleet station we emergedfrom the pine trees, and foundthe country calm and peacefulunder the morning sunlight. Wewere far beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge over the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day would have seemed very like any other Sunday. Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road to Addlestone, and suddenly through the gateof a field we saw, across a stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like distance. The men stood almost as if under inspection. ""That's good!" said I. "They will get one fair shot, at any rate." The artilleryman hesitated at the gate. "I shall go on," he said. Farther on towards Weybridge,just over the bridge, there were a number of men in whitefatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more guns behind. "It's bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow," said the artilleryman. "They 'aven't seen that fire-beam yet." The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over the treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now and again to stare in the same direction. Byfleet was in a tumult; peoplepacking, and a score of hussars, some of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village street. There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently sabbatical tohave assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having the greatest difficulty in making them realise the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with the corporal who would leave thembehind. I stopped and gripped his arm. "Do you know what's over there?" I said, pointing at the pine tops that hid the Martians. "Eh?" said he, turning. "I was explainin' these is vallyble." "Death!" I shouted. "Death is coming! Death!" and leaving himto digest that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At the corner I looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely over the trees. No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were established; the whole place was in such confusion asI had never seen in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants ofthe place, men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed, were packing, river-side loafers energetically helping, children excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted at this astonishing variation of their Sunday experiences. In the midst of it all the worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an early celebration, and his bell was jangling out above the excitement. I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain, made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols ofsoldiers--here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white-- were warning people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as the firing began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing crowd of people had assembled in and about the railway station, andthe swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages.The ordinary traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage of troopsand guns to Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage struggle occurred for places in the special trains that were put on at a later hour. We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames join. Part of the time we spenthelping two old women to packa little cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this pointboats are to be hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton Church--it has been replaced by a spire--roseabove the trees. Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more people than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross. People came panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife were even carrying asmall outhouse door between them, with some of their household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get away from Shepperton station. There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting.The idea people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply formidable human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be certainly destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would glance nervously across the Wey, at the meadows towardsChertsey, but everything over there was still. Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, everything was quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The people who landed there from the boats went tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat had just made a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of the inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering to help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited hours. "What's that?" cried a boatman, and "Shut up, you fool!" said a man near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from thedirection of Chertsey, a muffled thud--the sound of a gun. The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the chorus,firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, nearus and yet invisible to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding unconcernedly for the most !part, and silvery pollard willowsmotionless in the warm sunlight. !"The sojers'll stop 'em," said a woman beside me, doubtfully. Ahaziness rose over the treetops. Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a puff of smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the ground heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air, smashing two or three windows in the houses near, and leaving us astonished. "Here they are!" shouted a man!in a blue jersey. "Yonder! D'yer see them? Yonder!" Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards !the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds. Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Theirarmoured bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge casehigh in the air, and the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote towards Chertsey,and struck the town. At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near the water's edge seemed to me to be for amoment horror-struck. There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a movement of feet--a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent me staggering with a blow from the corner ofhis burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed past me. I turned with the rushof the people, but I was not too terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get under water! Thatwas it! "Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded. I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. Peoplewere landing hastily on both sides of the river. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When, half suffocated,I raised my head above water, the Martian's hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of the Heat-Ray. In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther bank, and in another moment it had !raised itself to its full height again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, hadbeen hidden behind the !outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last closeupon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was alreadyraising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the first shellburst six yards above the hood. I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to dodge, the fourth shell. The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal. "Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer. I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation. The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer heedingits steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now "rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain andsplashed to the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in astraight line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done, swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into the river out of my sight. ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jywBwB4` c 5=  V 6V c 7 c 8)6 c 94R :<A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky.As the camera of the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost scaldinglyhot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian's collapse. For a moment I heeded nothingof the heat, forgot the patentneed of self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight downstream, lying acrossthe river, and for the most part submerged. Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, andthrough the tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning thewater and flinging a splash andspray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these movements, it was as if some wounded thing were strugglingfor its life amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid were spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine. My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a !furious yelling, like that of thething called a siren in our manufacturing towns. A man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me and pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The Shepperton gunsspoke this time unavailingly. At that I ducked at once underwater, and, holding my breath until movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly growing hotter. When for a moment I raised myhead to take breath and throwthe hair and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white fog that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was deafening. Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey,magnified by the mist. They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing, tumultuous ruins of their comrade. The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of theHeat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way and that. The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of noises--the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Raywent to and fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that gaveplace at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro. For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost boiling water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through the reek I could see the peoplewho had been with me in the river scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through grass from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter dismay on the towing path. Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and downthe towing path, licking off the people who ran this way and that, and came down to the water's edge not fifty yards from where I stood. It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in !its track rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I turned shoreward. In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded, agonised, I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had my foot stumbled, it would have !been the end. I fell helplessly, in full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly spit that runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. I expected nothing but death. I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming downwithin a score of yards of my head, driving straight into theloose gravel, whirling it this way and that and lifting again;of a long suspense, and then of the four carrying the debrisof their comrade between them, now clear and then presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle I had escaped. CHAPTER THIRTEEN HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE 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 debris 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 advanceof 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 powerof 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 theMartian encampment on HorsellCommon, through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine spinneys, crawledthe 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 EpsomDowns. 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, verysmall and remote, drifting down- stream; and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gainedit, and so escaped out of thatdestruction. There were no oars in the boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well asmy 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 hurryingacross 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 ofan 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 onhis 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 handand spoke in almost a complaining tone. "Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service wasover, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain forthe 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. Forhalf 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 totake his measure. The tremendous tragedy in which he had been involved--it was evident he was a fugitive fromWeybridge--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 ofthe end," he said, interruptingme. "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 moresane 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 heliographsignalling--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 dullresonance of distant guns anda remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High inthe 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." CHAPTER FOURTEEN IN LONDON 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 ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jy;P c<C 6 c=y c>! c?~, c@z7Gmoved from the pit into whichthey 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, towhich my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. Theafternoon papers puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing totell beyond the movements of troops about the common, andthe burning of the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE, in anextra-special edition, announced the bare fact of the interruption of telegraphiccommunication. 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 thedescription 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 beforethey were killed. He dispatcheda telegram, which never reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the eveningat 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 helearned, 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 anythingfurther 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, thaton 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 didnot 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 inthe Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much amatter of course in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors: "About seven o'clock last nightthe 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 beengalloping into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevailsin 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 thearmoured 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 practicallynothing more to tell people until late in the afternoon, when the authorities gave thepress agencies the news in their possession. It was stated that the people of Walton andWeybridge, and all the districtwere 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 inthe 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, butwe 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 stationwas 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 thepublic 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 camedrifting 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 ofreddish-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 brothermet 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 theMartians! London in Danger!" Hehad 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 mechanicalbodies; and that they could move swiftly and smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could not standagainst 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 beenseen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been destroyed. Inthe 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 dispatch 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 avast or rapid concentration ofmilitary 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 wasexhorted to avoid and discourage panic. No doubt theMartians were strange and terrible in the extreme, but atthe outside there could not bemore 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 forthe 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 ofcomment. 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 flutteringout the pink sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voicesof 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 mapsof Surrey to the glass. Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand, my brother saw someof 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 atthem 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 ofthose 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 hada 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. Mybrother 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 entirelydestroyed 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 strongfeeling in the streets that theauthorities 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 thosesilent, 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-nightpromenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along theedge 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 littleoppressive; the sound of guns continued intermittently, and ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jywBwBA` cB cCLD cE! cF, cG7Bafter 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. Hereturned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, andwas 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 whetherday had come or the world gone mad. Then he jumped outof bed and ran to the window. His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up anddown 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 beingshouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammeringat 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 darknessinto yellow illumination. Up the street came galloping aclosed 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 intoEuston. For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and deliveringtheir incomprehensible message. Then the door behindhim opened, and the man who lodged across the landing camein, 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 ofa 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 menselling 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 andnorthward 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 blewthrough the streets. It was thedawn 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 theearly dawn. The flying people on foot and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he heard peoplecrying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of sucha 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 catastrophicdispatch 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. CHAPTER FIFTEEN WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was watchingthe fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green smoke. But three certainly came out about eight o'clock and, advancing slowly and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards Ripley and Weybridge,and so came in sight of the expectant batteries against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow. They communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up and down the scale from one note to another. It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George's Hill that we had heardat Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners, unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never tohave been placed in such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns, stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed. The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or ofa better mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns as deliberately as ifthey had been on parade, and fired at about a thousand yards' range. The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a few paces, stagger,and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the guns were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glitteringgiant, answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of the second volleyflew wide of the Martian on the ground, and, simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to bear on the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all about the guns flashed into fire, andonly one or two of the men who were already running overthe crest of the hill escaped. After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained absolutely stationaryfor the next half hour. The Martian who had been overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure, oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and apparently engagedin the repair of his support. About nine he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees again. It was a few minutes past ninethat night when these three sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between St.George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of Ripley. A dozen rockets sprang out ofthe hills before them so soon as they began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and Esher. At thesame time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with tubes, crossed theriver, and two of them, black against the western sky, cameinto sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their height. At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad ditch by the side of theroad. He looked back, saw what I was doing, and turned to join me. The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away towards Staines. The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their positions in the huge crescent about their "cylinders in absolute silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon,the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy !glare from St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill. But facing that crescent everywhere--at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees or village houses gave sufficient cover--the guns were waiting.The signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and vanished, and the spirit of all those watchingbatteries rose to a tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a thunderous fury of battle. No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle--how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should thefurious unanimity of onslaughtin a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that vast sentinel shape. And in theback of my mind was the sense of all the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward.Had they prepared pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their mighty province of houses? Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching and peering throughthe hedge, came a sound like the distant concussion of a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the Martian beside us raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. There was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation. I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber up into the hedge andstare towards Sunbury. As I didso a second report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low beneath. And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence was restored; the minute lengthened to three. "What has happened?" said thecurate, standing up beside me."Heaven knows!" said I. A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion, Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery tospring upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grewsmaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared. Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen. Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But the earthly artillery made no reply. Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the twilight. Each of the Martians,standing in the great crescentI have described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only one of these, some two--as in the case of the one we had seen; the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer thanfive at that time. These canisters smashed on striking the ground--they did not explode--and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in ahuge and ebony cumulus cloud,a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that, after the firsttumultuous uprush and outflowof its impact, it sank down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the valleys and ditches and watercourses evenas I have heard the carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to and ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jyH`7 cI cJmaK cL# cM}. cN:9(8do. And where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do.It hung together in banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of dust. Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum is concerned, !we are still entirely ignorant ofthe nature of this substance. Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, theblack smoke clung so closely tothe ground, even before its precipitation, that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs andupper stories of high houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its poison altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton. The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the strangeness of itscoiling flow, and how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-blackexpanse, with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight. But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was allowed to remain until it sank of its own accordinto the ground. As a rule the Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air of it again by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it. This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford, whither we had returned. From there we could see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled, and we heard the sound of thehuge siege guns that had beenput in position there. These continued intermittently for the space of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow. Then the fourth cylinder fell--a brilliant green meteor--as I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before the black vapour could overwhelm the gunners. So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps' nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the Londonward country. The hornsof the crescent slowly moved apart, until at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian at St. George's Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery the ghost of a chanceagainst them. Wherever there was a possibility of guns beinglaid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour was discharged, and where theguns were openly displayed theHeat-Ray was brought to bear.By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park and the glare of KingstonHill threw their light upon a network of black smoke, blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and extending as far as the eye could reach. And through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned theirhissing steam jets this way and that. They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had but a limitedsupply of material for its production or because they did not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they certainly succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to their movements. After that nobody of men would stand against them, so hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crewsof the torpedo-boats and destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operation men ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and pitfalls, and even in that theirenergies were frantic and spasmodic. One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burnedand wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of theshots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and houses andsmashing amid the neighbouring fields. One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings ofthat blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then nightand extinction--nothing but asilent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead. Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity of flight. CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE EXODUS FROM LONDON So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning--the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body. All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday,and trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing- room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more fromLiverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they werecalled out to protect. And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokersrefused to return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the northward-running roads. By midday a Martian hadbeen seen at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thamesand across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in its sluggish advance. Another bankdrove over Ealing, and surrounded a little island of !survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape. After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk Farm--the engines of the trains that hadloaded in the goods yard therePLOUGHED through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowdfrom crushing the driver against his furnace--my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in thesack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in draggingit through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist.The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, andmy brother struck into Belsize Road. So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead ofthe crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious, wondering. He was passed by a number ofcyclists, some horsemen, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the machine became unridable. He left it bythe roadside and trudged through the village. There wereshops half opened in the main street of the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorwaysand windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of fugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an inn. For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my brother, seemed !inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news of the invaders from Mars. At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on cycles, but there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans. It was perhaps a vague idea ofmaking his way to Chelmsford,where some friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strike into a quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a !stile, and, crossing it, followeda footpath northeastward. He passed near several farmhouses and some little places whose names he did notlearn. He saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he happened upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them just in time to savethem. He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, sawa couple of men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they hadbeen driving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened pony's head. One ofthe ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand. My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned towards him, and my brother, realising from his antagonist's face that a fight was unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him forthwith and sent him down against the wheel of the chaise. It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the slender lady'sarm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, and the man he held wrenchedhimself free and made off down the lane in the direction from which he had come. Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the horse's head, andbecame aware of the chaise receding from him down the lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in itlooking back. The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he stopped him witha blow in the face. Then, realising that he was deserted,he dodged round and made offdown the lane after the chaise, with the sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now,following remotely. Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong, and he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of antagonists again. He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat whenshe and her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards' distance, narrowly missing my brother. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and his companion followed him, cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in sight down the lane, where the third man lay insensible. "Take this!" said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her revolver. "Go back to the chaise," said my brother, wiping the blood from his split lip. She turned without a word--they were both panting--and they went back to where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony. The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brotherlooked again they were retreating. ""I'll sit here," said my brother, "if I may"; and he got upon theempty front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder. "Give me the reins," she said, and laid the whip along the pony's side. In another momenta bend in the road hid the three men from my brother's eyes. So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with a cut mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an unknown lane with these two women. He learned they were the wifeand the younger sister of a surgeon living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of the Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women--their servant had leftthem two days before--packed some provisions, put his revolver under the seat--luckily for mybrother--and told them to drive on to Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the place, and so they had come into this side lane. That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay with them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the revolver--a weapon strange to him--in order to give them confidence.They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became happy inthe hedge. He told them of hisown escape out of London, and all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The sun crept higher in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane, and of these my brother gathered such news ashe could. Every broken answer he had deepened his impression of the great disaster that had come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity for prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them. "We have money," said the slender woman, and hesitated. Her eyes met my brother's, and her hesitation ended. "So have I," said my brother. She explained that they had asmuch as thirty pounds in gold, besides a five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a train atSt. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains, and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and thence escaping from the country altogether. Mrs. Elphinstone--that was thename of the woman in white--would listen to no and ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jyO` cPR cQ cR*! cS+ cT69U<reasoning, and kept calling upon "George"; but her sister-in-law was astonishinglyquiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony tosave it as much as possible. Asthe sun crept up the sky the day became excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so that they travelledonly very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced towards Barneta tumultuous murmuring grew stronger. They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on foot, hiseyes on the ground. They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back. As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the south of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small portmanteau in theother. Then round the corner of the lane, from between thevillas that guarded it at its confluence with the high road,came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls, East End factory girls, and a coupleof little children crowded in the cart. "This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?"asked the driver, wild-eyed, white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the left, he whippedup at once without the formality of thanks. My brother noticed a pale greysmoke or haze rising among the houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of a terrace beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads. "Good heavens!" cried Mrs. Elphinstone. "What is this you are driving us into?" My brother stopped. For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description. "Way!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make way!" It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, !a little way up the road a villa was burning and sending rollingmasses of black smoke across the road to add to the confusion. Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and weeping. Alost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my brother's threat. So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude that was swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust. "Go on! Go on!" cried the voices. "Way! Way!" One man's hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood at the pony's !head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane. Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine that host.It had no character of its own.The figures poured out past the corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the lane. Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another. The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that dartedforward every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the villas. "Push on!" was the cry. "Push on! They are coming!" In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the SalvationArmy, gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, "Eternity! Eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother could hear himlong after he was lost to sightin the dust. Some of the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at theirhorses and quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances.The horses' bits were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot. There were cabs, carriages, shop cars, waggons, beyond counting; a mail cart, a road-cleaner's cart marked "Vestry of St. Pancras," a hugetimber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer's dray rumbledby with its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood. "Clear the way!" cried the voices. "Clear the way!" "Eter-nity! Eter-nity!" came echoing down the road. There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With manyof these came men, sometimeshelpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting theirway along, wretched, unkemptmen, clothed like clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a nightshirt with acoat thrown over it. But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them. Atumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken thathis knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips blackand cracked. They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries oneheard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices of most ofthem were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain: "Way! Way! The Martians are coming!" Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet akind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little way downthe lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He wasa lucky man to have friends. A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthyblack frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his boot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and hobbled on !again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping. "I can't go on! I can't go on!" My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to MissElphinstone. So soon as my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened. "Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her voice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from mybrother, crying "Mother!" "They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past along the lane. "Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and my brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane. The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother pushed the pony and chaise back into thehedge, and the man drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneaththe privet hedge. One of the men came running to my brother. "Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and "very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick." "Lord Garrick!" said my brother;"the Chief Justice?" "The water?" he said. "There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people." The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of thecorner house. "Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are coming! Go on!" Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle- faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother's eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck theground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly. "Way!" cried the men all about him. "Make way!" So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse's hoofs. "Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried to clutch the bit of the horse. Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch's back. The driver of the cart slashed his whip atmy brother, who ran round behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My brother stood up and yelledat the next driver, and a man on a black horse came to his assistance. "Get him out of the road," saidhe; and, clutching the man's collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angry voices behind. "Way! Way!" There was a smash as the poleof a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brotherlooked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar. There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggering sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother's foot by a hair's breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it. He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little !child, with all a child's want ofsympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay blackand still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and began turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said and they went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly whiteand drawn, and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering. Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white and pale, and her sister-in-law satweeping, too wretched even to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they hadretreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly resolute. "We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again. For the second time that day !this girl proved her quality. To force their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward by the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across his face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her. "Point the revolver at the manbehind," he said, giving it to her, "if he presses us too hard.No!--point it at his horse." Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across the road. But oncein the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become a partof that dusty rout. They sweptthrough Chipping Barnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din andconfusion indescribable; but inand beyond the town the roadforks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress. They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to comeat the water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains running slowly one after the other without signal or order-- trains swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini impossible. Near this place they halted forthe rest of the afternoon, for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them. They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening manypeople came hurrying along theroad nearby their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my brother had come. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE "THUNDER CHILD" 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 northwardand eastward road running outof the tangled maze of streetswould have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human and ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jyVP cWV cXF cY^! cZ{, c[q7Gagony 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 beforein the history of the world hadsuch a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would havebeen 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 thenetwork 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 outramifications 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 wouldspread itself upon blotting paper. And beyond, over the blue hillsthat 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 theirsteam jets when it had servedits 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 suffocatedby the Black Smoke. Until about midday the Pool ofLondon was an astonishing scene. Steamboats and !shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous sumsof money offered by fugitives,and it is said that many who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and drowned. Aboutone 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 Martianappeared 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 theswarming 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 theurgent need of provisions. As they grew hungry the rights ofproperty 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 preparedto be used in automatic mines across the Midland counties. He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the desertions of thefirst 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 Millsin a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders. People were watching for Martians here from the churchtowers. 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 afew furtive plunderers huntingfor 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 lasttowards 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 offilthy 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 adense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which alsoextended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon. About a couple of miles out layan ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the ram THUNDER CHILD. It wasthe only warship in sight, but far away to the right over thesmooth surface of the sea--for that day there was adead 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, poorwoman, to imagine that the French and the Martians mightprove 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 ofscore 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 ofsmoke 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 aMartian 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 topof 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 steamerand 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 towardsthe 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 spiteof the throbbing exertions of the engines of the little paddle-boat, 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 crescentof shipping already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship passing behind another, another coming roundfrom 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 ofthe 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, atrampling of feet, and a cheerthat 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 thetorpedo 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 atthe 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 CHILD fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled herto 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 Martianlowered his tube and discharged a canister of the !black gas at the ironclad. It hither larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfoldingtorrent 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. Heheld 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 the THUNDER 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 steeringgear, it seems, was intact andher engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundred yards of him when theHeat-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 ere tures, or rather Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jywBwB\`r c] ^  c_ c` ca+ cb6Rher 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 endrang with frantic cheering that was taken up first by oneand then by all in the crowdingmultitude 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 theironclads 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 wasscattering to the northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and thesteamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and passed into the thickeninghaze 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 ofsmoke rose slanting and barredthe 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 intosight. 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 intothe grey mystery of the night.And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land. BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER ONE UNDER FOOT 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 havebeen 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 nothingbut 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 alreadyas 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 movingLondon-ward and away from her. Such vague anxieties keepthe mind sensitive and painful.I grew very weary and irritablewith the curate's perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I kept away fromhim, staying in a room--evidently a children's schoolroom--containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed me thither, Iwent to a box room at the topof the house and, in order to be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in. We were hopelessly hemmed inby 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, andlater the slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what becameof 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 thestuff with a jet of superheated steam that hissedagainst 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 howthis 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 asI realised that the way of escape was open, my dream ofaction 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 foundin 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 thinkof what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We gotto Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full ofstrange 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 BusheyPark, 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 onthem than they deserved. Hereagain on the Surrey side were black dust that had once beensmoke, and dead bodies--a heap near the approach to thestation; but we had no glimpseof 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. Wewere 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 alonga 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 behindhim, 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 turnedand fled through a gate behindus 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 Ion the left, for the Martians, who seemed to be all about us.In one place we blundered upona 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 escapeddestruction, but the place wassilent 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 beuseful in our next house-breaking. 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 andsome limp lettuces. This pantryopened into a kind of wash-upkitchen, 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 byeating when the thing happened that was to imprisonus. "It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blindingglare 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 closeon 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 indarkness again, and he, with aface 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 asserteditself. "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. Youcan'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, asI had seen one stumble againstthe 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 greylyfor 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 thedaylight shone in there, it wasevident 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 blueand white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from the walls abovethe 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 Hj48ڃ~Hj486Hj4 4jyc`/dD ce/ cf. cg&& chB1 ci#