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 foo