and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the
pit, charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the
common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze.

The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and
Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when
the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so
forth, attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the
Horsell Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at
last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up
after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would
make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a
trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices
along the road in the gloaming. . . .

As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that the cylinder
had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a bicycle to
the post office with a special wire to an evening paper.

As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they
found little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the
spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt,
soon infected by the excitement of the occasion.

By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may
have been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place,
besides those who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer.
There were three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their