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BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS . I . UNDER FOOT . In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke . There I will resume . We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day — the day of the panic — in a little island of daylight , cut off by the Black Smoke from the rest of the world . We could do nothing but wait in aching inactivity during those two weary days . My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife . I figured her at Leatherhead , terrified , in danger , mourning me already as a dead man . I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off from her , of all that might happen to her in my absence . My cousin I knew was brave enough for any emergency , but he was not the sort of man to realise danger quickly , to rise promptly . What was needed now was not bravery , but circumspection . My only consolation was to believe that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her . Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful . I grew very weary and irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejaculations ; I tired of the sight of his selfish despair . After some ineffectual remonstrance I kept away from him , staying in a room — evidently a children’s schoolroom — containing globes , forms , and copybooks . When he followed me thither , I went to a box room at the top of the house and , in order to be alone with my aching miseries , locked myself in . We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the morning of the next . There were signs of people in the next house on Sunday evening — a face at a window and moving lights , and later the slamming of a door . But I do not know who these people were , nor what became of them . We saw nothing of them next day . The Black Smoke drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning , creeping nearer and nearer to us , driving at last along the roadway outside the house that hid us . A Martian came across the fields about midday , laying the stuff with a jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls , smashed all the windows it touched , and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the front room . When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked out again , the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had passed over it . Looking towards the river , we were astonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows .
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