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even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his
rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and
wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their
tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows
towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the
bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across
the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great
flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser
atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a
day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the
huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the
tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned
seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed
now in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen
overnight, just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even
as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to
die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its
machinery was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripod towers
of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun.
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting
destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only
seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine
the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
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