The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It 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 number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching
and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were
retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of
rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently
strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them,
were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not
see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The
fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary
pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen
these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or
the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon,
scarcely realise that living quality.
I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to
give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a
hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge
ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either
flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of
effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable
vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against the
impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I
saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the
pamphlet would have been much better without them.
At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine,
but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the
controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements
seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab s cerebral portion. But
then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery
integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true
nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that realisation
my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
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