of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at the water.
And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains
running slowly one after the other without signal or order trains
swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the
engines going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother
supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the
furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini
impossible.
Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the
violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.
They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and
none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came
hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from
unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my
brother had come.
XVII.
THE THUNDER CHILD .
Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have
annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly
through the home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but
also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to
Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and
Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have hung that
June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every
northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets
would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot
a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at
length in the last chapter my brother s account of the road through
Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming
of black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the
history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered
together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia
has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was
92