smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and the gathering night
had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards
Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly
come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and
then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such
summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.
Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I perceived a
third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.
Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast,
marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and
then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But
the earthly artillery made no reply.
Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was
to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the
twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have
described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a
huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other
possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only
one of these, some two as in the case of the one we had seen; the one
at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time.
These canisters smashed on striking the ground they did not explode and
incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour,
coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous
hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country.
And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was
death to all that breathes.
It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so that,
after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it sank
down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather
liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into the
valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the
carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And
where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface
would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and
made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a
strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could
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