stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and
wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the
Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and
houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.
One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly
spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong,
towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a
strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims,
men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling
headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking
and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque
cone of smoke. And then night and extinction nothing but a silent mass
of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of
Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a
last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the necessity
of flight.
XVI.
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the
greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning the stream of
flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round
the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the
shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
northward and eastward. By ten o clock the police organisation, and by
midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing
shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that
swift liquefaction of the social body.
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people
at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were
being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the
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