with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when
decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At
the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine
that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh
that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose
Hill.
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now
in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight,
just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been
crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice
had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted.
They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the
brightness of the rising sun.
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting
destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only
seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine
the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the
splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky,
and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught
the light and glared with a white intensity.
Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;
westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians,
the green waves of Regent s Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the
Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the
Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged
ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the
Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two
silver rods. The dome of St. Paul s was dark against the sunrise, and
injured, I saw for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on its
western side.
And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes
and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this
human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung
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