📔 The War of the Worlds

"What the dickens does it all mean? The Martians can't get out of their pit, can they?"

It hung together in banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving reluctantly before the wind[.]

The multitudinous shouting confused his ears.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of their appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, [...]

It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man.

The tremendous tragedy in which he had been involved - it was evident he was a fugitive from Weybridge - had driven him to the very verge of his reason.

All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable, at work upon the machines they were making ready, and ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the starlit sky.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan [a torpedo ram warship] at the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged.

[A] peculiar luminous and sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disc.

The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.