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 amid 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,
pulverised, 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 backward; 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 earth on every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we
hung now on the very edge 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
farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery,
one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its occupant, stood
stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the
pit and 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.
108