had been sitting and lay about our feet. Outside the soil was banked high against the house. At the top of the window-frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there it was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range.
As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the body of a Martian standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the scullery.
Abruptly the right interpretation of the things 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 space 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 still in the scullery. I for my pari scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of the kitchen door. I could just see the curate's face, a dim oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a metallic hammering, and then a violent hooting, and then, after a quiet interval, a hissing, like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for the most part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed, if anything, to increase in number as the time wore on. Presently a measured thudding, and a vibration that made everything about us quiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued. Once the light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely dark. For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering, until our tired attention failed. . . .
At last I found myself awake and very hungry. I am inclined to believe we must have been the greater portion of a day before that awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me to action. I told him I was going to seek food, and felt my way towards the pantry. He made me no answer, but so soon as I began eating, the faint noise I made stirred him to action, and I heard him crawling after me.
CHAPTER II
What We Saw From the Ruined House
AFTER eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have dozed again, for when presently I stirred I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room, lying against he triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me.
I could hear a number of voices almost like those of an engine-shed, and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold, and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amidst the broken crockery that littered the floor.
I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our rampart remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway. Vast indeed was the change that we beheld.
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited. The building had vanished completely smashed, pulverized and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations, deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact—"splashed" is the only word—and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsed backwards; the front portion, even on the ground-floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance, the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of carth on every side, save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very verge of the great circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.
The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the further edge of the pit, amidst the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the great Fighting Machines stood, deserted by its occupant, stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit or the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw, busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.
The mechanism it certainly was held my attention first. I. was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called Handling Machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary
