The War of the Worlds

by Herbert G. Wells

T

he fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverized and dispersed by the blow. The cylin­der lay now far beneath the original foundations, deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact—"splashed" is the only word—and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance, the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side, save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind us, end ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like a veil across our peep-hole.

            The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the further edge of the pit, amidst the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the great fighting machines stood, de­serted by its occupant, stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordi­nary glittering mechanism I saw, busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.

            The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates and bars which lined the cov­ering of, and apparently strengthened the walls of, the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.

Notes and exercises:

1.   Remember that the following words are spelt with a “y”:

cylinder	rhythm	symphony	nymph	mystery	cynic	sycophant
crystal	symmetry	system	hymn	syringe	abyss	synonym
symbol	sympathy	syntax	myth	Cyril	syllable	mysterious

2.         The digraph “gh” is not pronounced in the following words:

fight	drought	might	borough	slough	brougham
fighter	tight	though	neigh	caught	throughout
sigh	taught	sought	although	naughty	neighbour
high	night	blight	dough	sleigh	haughty
right	sight	sleight	bough	weigh	daughter
bought	light	straight	plough	weight	thoroughfare
highlight	slight	playwright	sough	ought	thorough
height	fright	brought	fought	heighten	nightingale

3.   The suffixes “–ise” and “–ize” are used in the formation of verbs. The following words are spelt with “–ise”:

advertise	excise	incise	surmise	disguise	compromise
apprise	demise	exercise	surprise	enterprise	merchandise
chastise	despise	franchise	comprise	prise	advise
devise	improvise	premise	supervise	circumcise	customise

4.   Finish the following words by adding “–ise”, “–ize”, or “–yse”:

anal...	civil...	agon...	adv...	improv...
exerc...	surpr...	enterpr...	compr...	comprom...
dem...	rev...	prem...	dev...	superv...

a clever disgu...	exc...d parts in a book	to be right in surm...
an improv...d meal	anal...d sentence	to advert... goods
jeopard...d life	to exerc... one’s rights	urban...d areas

5.         Spell the words given in phonetic transcription:

a)       It’s [kwait] clear that it is necessary to keep [kwai¶] for a time after dinner.

b)      When I came up to him for a [fo:(r)q] time there were already [´fo:(r)ti] fishes in the bucket. He told me that the [nainq] fish he [ko:t] was a large pike.

c)       The [´biskits] I [bo:t] were so fresh that we [i´mi:di¶tli] [eit] them.

d)      [´ænt¶ni] was [´berid] at sea.

e)       The landlady [¶´mitid] giving him tea [¶n´til] he said he would no longer put up with it.

f)        Howard is [´laiih] on the [kautò] because he has a terrible [´hedeik].

g)      You should [si:z] the opportunity to make his [¶´kweint¶ns].

h)       The [´kofih] of the people in the hall made it impossible to hear the [spi: tò].

6.         Word study:

pulverize    to grind or be ground into powder

scullery      a room in a large house next to the kitchen where dishes, pots, etc. are washed up

tentacle      long, slender, flexible, snake-like, boneless growth on the head or round the mouth of certain animals used for touching, feeling, holding, moving, etc.

7.   Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

Handling Machines, handle with care, to handle a gun, he is hard to handle, to be roughly handled, to handle others, rough handling, a handle to one’s name (a title): I knew Sir John long before he had a handle to his name.