War of the Worlds - Bk1, Ch10 (The War of the Worlds)

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04War of the Worlds by H.

05G.

06Wells Book 1.

07Chapter 10.

08In the Storm Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill.

09The scent of hay was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyreford, and the hedges on either side were sweet and gay, with multitudes of dog roses.

10The heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful and still.

11We got to 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.

12My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil.

13I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the utmost could not but crawl a little out of it.

14But she only answered in monosyllables.

15Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night.

16Would that I had!

17Her face, I remember, was very white as we parted.

18For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day.

19Something 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.

20I was even afraid that the last fusillade that I heard might mean the extermination of our invaders from Mars.

21I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death.

22It was nearly eleven when I started to return.

23The night was unexpectedly dark to me.

24Walking out of the lighted passage of my cousin's house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close as the day.

25Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a breath stirred the shrubs about us.

26My cousin's man lit both lamps.

27Happily, I knew the road intimately.

28My wife stood in the light of the doorway, and watched me until I jumped up into the dog-cart.

29Then abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side wishing me good hap.

30I was a little depressed at first, with the contagion of my wife's fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians.

31At that time I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening's fighting.

32I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated the conflict.

33As 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.

34The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.

35Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the village showed not a sign of life.

36But I narrowly escaped an accident at the corner of the road to Pyreford, where a knot of people stood with their backs to me.

37They said nothing to me as I passed.

38I do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the terror of the night.

39From Ripley until I came through Pyreford, I was in the valley of the way, and the red glare was hidden from me.

40As I ascended the little hill beyond Pyreford Church, the glare came into view again, and the trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was upon me.

41Then I heard midnight peeling out from Pyreford Church behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its treetops and roofs black and sharp against the road.

42Even as I beheld this, a lurid green glare lit the road about me, and showed the distant woods towards Adelston.

43I felt a tug at the reins.

44I 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.

45It was the third falling star.

46Close on its apparition, and blindingly violent by contrast, danced out of the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst like a rocket overhead.

47The horse took the bit between its teeth and bolted.

48A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this we clattered.

49Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever seen.

50The thunder-claps, treading one on the heels of another, and with a strange crackling accompaniment, sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the usual detonating reverberations.

51The flickering light was blinding and confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the slope.

52At 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.

53At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement.

54It was an elusive vision.

55It was an elusive vision.

56A 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 came out clear and sharp and bright.

57And this thing I saw, how can I describe it?

58A 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.

59A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air to vanish and reappear, almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash a hundred yards nearer.

60Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground?

61That was the impression these instant flashes gave, but instead of a milking stool, imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

62Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds were parted by a man thrusting through them.

63They were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me.

64And I was galloping hard to meet it.

65At the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether.

66Not stopping to look round again, I wrenched the horse's head hard round to the right, and in another moment the dog-cart had heeled over upon the horse.

67The shaft smashed noisily, and I was flung sideways and fell heavily into a shallow pool of water.

68I crawled out immediately and crouched, my feet still in the water, under a clump of furs.

69The horse lay motionless, his neck was broken, poor brute, and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bull of the overturned dog-cart and the silhouette of the wheel still spinning slowly.

70In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding by me and passed uphill towards Pyreford.

71Seen nearer the thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way.

72Machine it was, with a ringing metal pace and long, flexible, glittering tentacles, one of which gripped a young pine tree, swinging and rattling about its strange body.

73It 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.

74Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me, and in an instant it was gone.

75So much I saw then, all vaguely from the flickering of the lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black shadows.

76As it passed it set up an exultant, deafening howl that drowned the thunder.

77Hello!

78Hello!

79And in another minute it was with its companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in the field.

80I have no doubt this thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they had fired at us from Mars.

81For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness, watching, by the intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving about in the distance over the hedgetops.

82A thin hail was now beginning, and as it came and went their figures grew misty, and then flashed into clearness again.

83Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night swallowed them up.

84I was soaked with hail above, and puddle water below.

85It was some time before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the bank to a drier position, or think at all about my imminent peril.

86Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter's hut of wood, surrounded by a patch of potato garden.

87I struggled to my feet at last, and crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a run for this.

88I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people here, if there were any people inside, and after a time I desisted, and availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, succeeding in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into the pine woods towards Maybury.

89Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own house.

90I walked among the trees, trying to find the footpath.

91It 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.

92If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things that I had seen, I should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet, to Street Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead.

93But 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.

94I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as much motive as I had.

95I 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.

96I say splashed, for the storm water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent.

97There in the darkness, a man blundered into me, and sent me reeling back.

98He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him.

99So heavy was the stress of the storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to win my way up the hill.

100I went close up to the fence on the left and worked my way along its palings.

101Near 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.

102Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the flicker of light had passed.

103I stood over him waiting for the next flash.

104When it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply, but not shabbily dressed.

105His head was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the fence, as though he had been flung violently against it.

106Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who has never before touched a dead body, I stooped and turned over him to feel for his heart.

107He was quite dead.

108Apparently his neck had been broken.

109The lightning flashed for a third time, and his face leapt upon me.

110I sprang to my feet.

111It was the landlord of the spotted dog, whose conveyance I had taken.

112I stepped over him gingerly, and pushed up the hill.

113I made my way by the police station and the college arms towards my own house.

114Nothing was burning on the hillside, though from the common there still came a red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the drenching hail.

115So far as I could see by the flashes, the houses about me were mostly uninjured.

116By the college arms, a deep heap lay in the road.

117Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the sound of feet, but I had not the courage to shout or go to them.

118I let myself in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down.

119My imagination was full of those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against the fence.

120I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall, shivering violently.

121End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10 End of Chapter 10