The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (best large ereader TXT) 📖

creatures the crowd

near the water’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck.

There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse

murmur and a movement of feet—a splashing from the water. A man, too

frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung

round and sent me staggering with a blow from the corner of his

burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed past me. I

turned with the rush of the people, but I was not too terrified for

thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get under water!

That was it!

 

“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.

 

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian,

rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water.

Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping

out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and

slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet

scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a

couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the

surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the

river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing

hastily on both sides of the river. But the Martian machine took no

more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that

than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his

foot has kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water,

the Martian’s hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing

across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have

been the generator of the Heat-Ray.

 

In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading

halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther

bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full height

again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns

which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind the

outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near

concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The

monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the

first shell burst six yards above the hood.

 

I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of the

other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer

incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the

body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to

dodge, the fourth shell.

 

The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged,

flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh

and glittering metal.

 

“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

 

I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me. I

could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.

 

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did

not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer

heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now

rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living

intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to

the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate

device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight

line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton

Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have

done, swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force

into the river out of my sight.

 

A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam,

mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of

the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into

steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but

almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw

people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting

faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian’s collapse.

 

For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need

of self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water,

pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the

bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the

confusion of the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight

downstream, lying across the river, and for the most part submerged.

 

Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through

the tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and

vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash

and spray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and

struck like living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness of

these movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling for

its life amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown fluid

were spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.

 

My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious

yelling, like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing

towns. A man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to me

and pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing with

gigantic strides down the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey.

The Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.

 

At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath until

movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the surface as

long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and rapidly

growing hotter.

 

When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the

hair and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white

fog that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was

deafening. Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey, magnified

by the mist. They had passed by me, and two were stooping over the

frothing, tumultuous ruins of their comrade.

 

The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two

hundred yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of

the Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote down this way

and that.

 

The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of

noises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling

houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the

crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to

mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and

fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent

white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The

nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint

and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.

 

For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost

boiling water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape. Through

the reek I could see the people who had been with me in the river

scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like little frogs

hurrying through grass from the advance of a man, or running to and

fro in utter dismay on the towing path.

 

Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping

towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and

darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray

flickered up and down the towing path, licking off the people who ran

this way and that, and came down to the water’s edge not fifty yards

from where I stood. It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the

water in its track rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I

turned shoreward.

 

In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point had

rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded,

agonised, I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the

shore. Had my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell

helplessly, in full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare

gravelly spit that runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames.

I expected nothing but death.

 

I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within a

score of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel,

whirling it this way and that and lifting again; of a long suspense,

and then of the four carrying the debris of their comrade between

them, now clear and then presently faint through a veil of smoke,

receding interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of

river and meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by a miracle

I had escaped.