Page 2 of 5
More Books
More by this Author
|
A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon
as they began to move, and warned the waiting batteries
about Ditton and Esher. 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.
|