It seemed to me that the pit hadIn a few minutes there was, so far as the
been enlarged, and ever and again puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up
and out of it towards the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke,
and vanished.
soldier could see, not a living thing left upon the common, 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 a time and then
become still. The giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses
until the last; then in a moment the Heat-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.
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City
followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began to crawl very
cautiously across the hot heather 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 wall as 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.
getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in trenches and
cellars, and many of the survivors had made 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 calmer telling me and trying to make me see the
things he had seen. He had eaten no food since midday, he told me early in
his narrative, and I found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought
it into the room. 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.
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skulking along towards Maybury">
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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 blasted and blackened trees that
the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless
light of dawn. Yet here and 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 the metallic giants stood about the
pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the desolation
they had made.
Beyond were the pillars of fire
about Chobham. They became pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch
of day.
As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from
the window from which we had watched the Martians, and went very quietly
downstairs.
The enormous broad tires of the
chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from
the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some
huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural
growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The
green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low
and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder.
We
traversed a trackless waste of moss which, bending to the pressure of
broad tire or padded foot, rose up again behind us, leaving no sign that
we had passed. We might indeed have been the wraiths of the departed dead
upon the dead sea of that dying planet for all the sound or sign we made
in passing. It was the first march of a large body of men and animals I
had ever witnessed which raised no dust and left no spoor; for there is no
dust upon Mars except in the cultivated districts during the winter
months, and even then the absence of high winds renders it almost
unnoticeable.
We camped that night at the foot of
the hills we had been approaching for two days and which marked the
southern boundary of this particular sea. Our animals had been two days
without drink, nor had they had water for nearly two months, not since
shortly after leaving Thark; but, as Tars Tarkas explained to me, they
require but little and can live almost indefinitely upon the moss which
covers Barsoom, and which, he told me, holds in its tiny stems sufficient
moisture to meet the limited demands of the animals.
milk I sought out Sola, whom I found working by the light of a torch upon
some of Tars Tarkas' trappings.[right-post] She looked up at my approach,
her face lighting with pleasure and with welcome.