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that vast sentinel shape. And in the back 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
through the 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.
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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 and stare towards Sunbury. As I did so 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 the curate, 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 to spring upon him;
but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of the Martian grew smaller 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 became 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 crescent I 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 than five 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 a huge 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
first tumultuous uprush and outflow of 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 even as I have heard the carbonic-acid gas that pours from
volcanic clefts is wont to do. 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
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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 of the nature of this substance.
Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the black smoke
clung so closely to the ground, even before its precipitation, that fifty feet
up in the air, on the roofs and upper 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 its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church spire
and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky
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