Chapter 3 - On Horsell Common
The narrator arrives at the crash site and notes that a substantial gathering has formed around the crater, all observing the strange foreign object protruding from the centre. The narrator himself now looks upon the object and also notes that it is not moving but he also observes that there is a distinction between the main body of the cylinder and the cap. The narrator, unlike Ogilvy, ponders that the object must be full of information from Mars, and not beings.
The narrator then returns home, unable to wait for any other development, but quickly returns the next day when he reads that a message has been received from Mars. When the narrator arrives back at Horsell Common, he sees Ogilvy, Henderson, Stent (another astronomer), and a few other working chaps. Ogilvy then requests that the narrator contact Lord Hilton, who owns the property, and ask him to remove all of the onlookers as they are halting and confusing progress.
Ogilvy and the others are attempting to excavate what remains of the cylinder. The narrator agrees and discovers that Lord Hilton will be arriving soon via train and therefore he sets off to the train station to meet him.
War of The Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own… Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
H.G Wells (1898)