Listen! he said.
From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of
distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A
cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west
the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and
Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.
We had better follow this path, I said, northward.
XIV.
IN LONDON.
My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking. He
was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he heard
nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning papers on
Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles on the
planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely
worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.
The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a number
of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram
concluded with the words: Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians
have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed,
seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative
strength of the earth s gravitational energy. On that last text their
leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
Of course all the students in the crammer s biology class, to which my
brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers
puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell
beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of the
pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the _St.
James s Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare fact
of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought to
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