was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this

mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and

twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It

seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been

overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might

have happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its

Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the

twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat

was smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had

left, were invisible to me.

Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards

Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second

Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the

Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the

smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the

Regent's Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.

As I crossed the bridge, the sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,"

ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a

thunderclap.

The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees

towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed

clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while

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The War of the Worlds