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 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 co-ordinated 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.
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to
me, from the district about Regent's Park. The desolating cry worked
upon my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing
took possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and
now again hungry and thirsty.
An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I
would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on
recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the
light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and
clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began
running along the road.
