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.

Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the
splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear
sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs
caught the light and glared with a white intensity.

Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;
westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the
Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the Langham Hotel, the
dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant
mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the
sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far
away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal
Palace glittered like two silver rods. The dome of St. Paul's was
dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, by a
huge gaping cavity on its western side.

And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous
hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to
build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that
had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled
back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast
dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of
emotion that was near akin to tears.

The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The
survivors of the people scattered over the country--leaderless,
lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd--the thousands who
had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing
stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour
across the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of
the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened
skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the
hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and
ringing with the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended
my hands towards the sky and began thanking God. In a year, thought
I--in a year. . .

With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife, and
the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.



CHAPTER NINE

WRECKAGE


And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is
not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly,
all that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping and
praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I forget.

Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that,
so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow,
several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the
previous night. One man--the first--had gone to St. Martin's-le-Grand,
and, while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, had contrived to
telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the
world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly
flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it in Dublin,
Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon the
verge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard,
shouting and staying their work to shake hands and shout, were making
up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church
bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news,
until all England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles, lean-faced,
unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of unhoped
deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair. And for
the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the
Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All the
shipping in the world seemed going Londonward in those days. But of
all this I have no memory. I drifted--a demented man. I found myself
in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day
wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's Wood.
They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about
"The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!" Troubled
as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as
I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give
here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and
protected me from myself. Apparently they had learned something of my
story from me during the days of my lapse.

Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to me
what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after I
was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a
Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any
provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness


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