Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after
about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a
flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth
has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the
Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating patches,
spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured
its more familiar features.

Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular
notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes
upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical _Punch_, I remember, made a happy
use of it in the political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those
missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by
hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seems to me now almost
incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men
could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember how
jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the
illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter times
scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century
papers. For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the
bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable
developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000
miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I
explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a
bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many
telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of
excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing
music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the
people went to bed. From the railway station in the distance came the
sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into
melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the
red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the
sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.

II.

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