I listened I was not deaf but certainly the pit was still. I heard a
sound like the flutter of a bird s wings, and a hoarse croaking, but
that was all.
For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to move
aside the red plants that obscured it. Once or twice I heard a faint
pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and thither on the
sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but that was
all. At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.
Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought over
the skeletons of the dead the Martians had consumed, there was not a
living thing in the pit.
I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the machinery had
gone. Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one corner,
certain bars of aluminium in another, the black birds, and the
skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty circular pit in
the sand.
Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the
mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the
north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The
pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish
afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of
escape had come. I began to tremble.
I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate resolution,
and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to the top of the
mound in which I had been buried so long.
I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was visible.
When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been a
straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed
with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork,
clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped
plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute
their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a
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