BOOK TWO: THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 1: UNDER FOOT
(continued)
"Don't move," he said. "The floor is covered with smashed
crockery from the dresser. You can't possibly move without
making a noise, and I fancy THEY are outside."
We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear
each other breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but
once something near us, some plaster or broken brickwork,
slid down with a rumbling sound. Outside and very near was
an intermittent, metallic rattle.
"That!" said the curate, when presently it happened
again.
"Yes," I said. "But what is it?"
"A Martian!" said the curate.
I listened again.
"It was not like the Heat-Ray," I said, and for a time I was
inclined to think one of the great fighting-machines had
stumbled against the house, as I had seen one stumble against
the tower of Shepperton Church.
Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for
three or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved.
And then the light filtered in, not through the window, which
remained black, but through a triangular aperture between
a beam and a heap of broken bricks in the wall behind us.
The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for the first
time.
The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould,
which flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting
and lay about our feet. Outside, the soil was banked high
against the house. At the top of the window frame we could
see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered with
smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house
was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was
evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained
in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of copper and
tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white
tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from the
walls above the kitchen range.
|