s, upon a cloud, for a
milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their height.

At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I
turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the
broad ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was
doing, and turned to join me.

The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury, the
remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star, away
towards Staines.

The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up
their positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so
still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had
precisely the same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary possession
of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the
stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St.
George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.

But facing that crescent everywhere--at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton,
Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across
the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees
or village houses gave sufficient cover--the guns were waiting. The
signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night and
vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a
tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of
fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns
glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a
thunderous fury of battle.

No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those
vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle--how
much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions
were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret
our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady
investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of
onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might
exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A
hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched that
vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense of all
the huge unkn