irds, 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