struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went along under
the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling
Martian from the direction of St. John s Wood. A couple of hundred
yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a
dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in his jaws coming headlong
towards me, and then a pack of starving mongrels in pursuit of him. He
made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a
fresh competitor. As the yelping died away down the silent road, the
wailing sound of Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla, reasserted itself.
I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John s Wood
station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was
only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this
mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and
twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It
seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been
overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have
happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its
Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the
twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat was
smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left,
were invisible to me.
Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards
Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second
Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the
Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the
smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the
Regent s Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
As I crossed the bridge, the sound of Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla, ceased.
It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees
towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed
clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by
virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about
me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something I
148