Читать книгу The War of the Worlds / Война миров. Уровень 2 - Герберт Уэллс, Герберт Джордж Уэллс - Страница 5

When I returned, the sun was setting. People were hurrying from the direction of Woking, and very few persons were returning. The crowd about the pit grew bigger, and stood out against the lemon yellow of the sky – a couple of hundred people, perhaps. As I drew nearer I heard Stent’s voice:

“Keep back! Keep back!”

“It’s moving,” a boy said to me; “screwing and screwing. I don’t like it. I’ll go home.”

I went on to the crowd. There were two or three hundred people there.

“He’s fallen in the pit!” cried someone.

“Keep back!”

Everyone was greatly excited. I heard a peculiar humming sound from the pit. I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking. He was standing on the cylinder and trying to get out of the hole. Suddenly the screw came out. For a moment the circular cavity seemed perfectly black.

A sudden chill came over me. There was a loud shriek from a woman behind. I saw horror on the faces of the people. The crowd moved backwards.

Tentacles were now projecting from the cylinder. The shopman was still on the edge of the pit. The people on the other side of the pit ran off. Stent was among them. I looked again at the cylinder in terror.

A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

The head of the thing was rounded and had a “face”. Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim that dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder. Another swayed in the air.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine its strange and horrible appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the lower lip, the quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes – were vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Suddenly the monster vanished. It toppled over the brim of the cylinder and fell into the pit. Soon another of these creatures appeared darkly in the deep shadow of the aperture[11].

I turned and ran madly to the trees. There, among some young pine-trees and bushes, I stopped. What will follow next? The people were standing like myself in terror, and staring at these creatures. And then I saw a round, black object. It was bobbing up and down on the edge of the pit. It was the head of the shopman. Now he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he slipped back until only his head was visible. Suddenly he vanished, and I heard a faint shriek. I had a momentary impulse to go back and help him.

The deep pit and the heap of sand hid the cylinder and we could not see what was going on.