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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.
The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the farther
edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the
great fighting machines, deserted by its occupant, stood stiff and tall
against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder,
although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the
extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on
account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully
across the heaped mould near it.
The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of
those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-machines, and
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the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial
invention. As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider
with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed
levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its
arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number
of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened
the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and
deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it
as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were
coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare
with this. People who have never seen these structures, and have only the
ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such
eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.
I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give
a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study
of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. He presented
them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and
with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing
these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to
warn the reader against the impression they may have created. They were no
more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human
being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them.
At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as
a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the controlling Martian
whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the
equivalent of the crab's cerebral portion. But then I perceived the
resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery integument to that of the other
sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned
upon me. With that realization my interest shifted to those other creatures,
the real Martians. Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the
first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was concealed and
motionless, and under no urgency of action.
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to
conceive. They were huge round bodies -- or, rather, heads -- about four feet
in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils
-- indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had
a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of
fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body -- I scarcely know how to speak
of it -- was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically
an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group
round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in
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