The earth all round
it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only
word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent
houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a
hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on
the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the
kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and
ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the
cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating
sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green
vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.
The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on
the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped
shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its
occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I
scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been
convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary
glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of
the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across
the heaped mould near it.
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