At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly armed with
tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against the western
sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily and
painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They
moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a milky mist covered the
fields and rose to a third of their height.
At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I turned
aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the broad
ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,
and turned to join me.
The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the
remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away
towards Staines.
The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their
positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still.
To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
same effect the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling
night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow
of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George s Hill and the
woods of Painshill.
But facing that crescent everywhere at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,
Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across
the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees
or village houses gave sufficient cover the guns were waiting. The
signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and
vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a
tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of
fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns
glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a
thunderous fury of battle.
No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant
minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle how much they
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