And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fum- bling over it, SWISHcomes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone of assurance and courage he assumed, com- pletely dominated my mind. Ibelieved unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks me sus- ceptible and foolish must contrast his position, reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where he had made his lair. It was the coal cellar of the place, and when I saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney Hill--I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But I believed in him sufficiently to work with him all that morning until past midday at his digging. We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed against the kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock- turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady labour. As we worked, Iturned his project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.
"We're working well," he said. He put down his spade. "Let us knock off a bit" he said. "I think it's time we recon- noitred from the roof of the house."I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade;and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so did he at once.
"Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of being here?""Taking the air," he said. "I was coming back. It's safer by night.""But the work?"
"Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw the man plain.
He hesitated, holding his spade. "We ought to reconnoitre now," he said, "because if any come near they may hear the spades and drop upon us unawares."I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians were to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under shelter of the parapet.
From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for their propagation.
About us neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor- vitae, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward hills.
The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still remained in London.