But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its
interplanetary flight; every twenty-four hours brought them
reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval authorities, now
fully alive to the tremendous power of their antagonists, worked with
furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun came into position until,
before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villas on the
hilly slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black
muzzle. And through the charred and desolated area--perhaps twenty
square miles altogether--that encircled the Martian encampment on
Horsell Common, through charred and ruined villages among the green
trees, through the blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a
day ago pine spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs
that were presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But
the Martians now understood our command of artillery and the danger of
human proximity, and not a man ventured within a mile of either
cylinder, save at the price of his life.
It would seem that these giants spent the earlier part of the
afternoon in going to and fro, transferring everything from the second
and third cylinders--the second in Addlestone Golf Links and the third
at Pyrford--to their original pit on Horsell Common.
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