BOOK TWO: THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 2: WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE
After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I
must have dozed again, for when presently I looked round I
was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome
persistence. I whispered for the curate several times, and at
last felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room, lying against
the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians. His
shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me.
I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an
engine shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud.
Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a
tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil
evening sky. For a minute or so I remained watching the
curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with
extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.
I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that
a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a
loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out,
and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I turned
to see how much of our rampart remained. The detachment
of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and
by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see
out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburban
roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst
of the house we had first visited. The building had vanished,
completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow.
The cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations--deep
in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I had
looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed
under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only word
--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent
houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent
blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the
front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed
completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped,
and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by
tons of earth on every side save towards the cylinder. Over
that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy
beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and
again a bright green vapour drove up like a veil across our
peephole.
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