e planet, "as
flaming gases rushed out of a gun."

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there
was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily
Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest
dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of
the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer,
at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess
of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
scrutiny of the red planet.

In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that
vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed
lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the
steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in
the roof--an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.
Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the
telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet
swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and
small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly
flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery
warm--a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this
was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that
kept the planet in view.

As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
millions of miles it was from us--more than forty millions of miles of
void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust
of the material universe swims.

Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness
looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far
profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small,
flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible
distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles,
came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so
much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of
it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
missile.

That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the