Читать книгу The War of the Worlds / Война миров. Уровень 2 - Герберт Уэллс, Герберт Джордж Уэллс - Страница 3

Then came the night of the first falling star. We saw it early in the morning, it was rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere.

I was at home at that hour. I was writing in my study. Poor Ogilvy rose very early. He wanted to find the meteorite. And he found it, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand-pits[4]. The sand and gravel around the enormous hole formed heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.

The Thing itself lay in sand, amidst the splinters of a fir tree. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. Ogilvy approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape. It was a cylinder, still very hot from its flight through the air. Ogilvy heard a stirring noise within it and realised that the cylinder was hollow. And then he saw that, very slowly, the circular top of the cylinder started rotating on its body. The muffled sound was still coming from inside it.

“Good heavens![5]” said Ogilvy. “There’s a man in it! And he tries to escape!”

He linked the Thing with the flash upon Mars.

He went forward to the cylinder. He stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and ran away wildly into Woking. It was about six o’clock.

Ogilvy met a wagoner and tried to tell him everything. But the man simply drove away. That sobered Ogilvy a little. When he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings[6].

“Henderson,” he called, “you saw that shooting star last night? It’s out on Horsell Common now.”

“Good Lord!” said Henderson. “A meteorite! That’s good.”

“But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s a cylinder – an artificial cylinder! And there’s something inside.”

“What’s that?” Henderson asked.

Ogilvy told him all. Henderson came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the cylinder. The cylinder was still lying in the same position. But the sounds inside ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between the top and the body of the cylinder.

They listened and rapped on the metal with a stick. They got no response. So they both concluded the man or men inside were dead.

They went off back to the town again to get help. They were covered with sand and excited. Henderson went to the railway station at once, in order to telegraph the news to London.

By eight o’clock many boys and unemployed men already started to talk about the “dead men from Mars.” I went out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand-pits.