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At last I found myself awake and very hungry . I am inclined to believe we must have spent the greater portion of a day before that awakening . My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me to action . I told the curate I was going to seek food , and felt my way towards the pantry . He made me no answer , but so soon as I began eating the faint noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling after me . II . WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE . After eating we crept back to the scullery , and there I must have dozed again , for when presently I looked round I was alone . The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence . I whispered for the curate several times , and at last felt my way to the door of the kitchen . It was still daylight , and I perceived him across the room , lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians . His shoulders were hunched , so that his head was hidden from me . I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed ; and the place rocked with that beating thud . Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky . For a minute or so I remained watching the curate , and then I advanced , crouching and stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor . I touched the curate’s leg , and he started so violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact . I gripped his arm , fearing he might cry out , and for a long time we crouched motionless . Then I turned to see how much of our rampart remained . The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris , and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway . Vast , indeed , was the change that we beheld . The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited . The building had vanished , completely smashed , pulverised , and dispersed by the blow . The cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations — deep in a hole , already vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking . 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 .
Назад Сторінка 79 з 121 Сторінка 79 з 121 Вперед Читайте далі з перекладом Створіть безкоштовний акаунт: 7 днів Pro, далі 20 перекладів слів на день або платний тариф.
