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The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful
story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked
down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village
rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and
a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched,
the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the
distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs, green
trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, out-houses,
and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.
But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour
was allowed to remain until it sank of its own accord into
the ground. As a rule the Martians, when it had served its
purpose, cleared the air of it again by wading into it and
directing a jet of steam upon it.
This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw
in the starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper
Halliford, whither we had returned. From there we could
see the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill
going to and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled, and
we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put
in position there. These continued intermittently for the space
of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible
Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams
of the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright
red glow.
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