Night drive into the storm

1 A still golden June evening on the white road to Leatherhead.

2 On the road to Leatherhead, the narrator's wife sits silent and very white beside him

3 In a lamplit Leatherhead doorway, the narrator's pale wife watches him drive off

4 Beyond Ockham, a lone dog cart drives along a black road toward a blood-red glow

5 Beyond Pyrford, a thread of green fire plunges into the field beside the dog cart

6 A lightning flash reveals the first Martian fighting-machine over the Maybury Hill heath

7 The bolting horse carries the dog cart toward a second tripod bursting from the pines

8 The narrator panics at the sight of the second tripod and wrenches the horse round.

9 Lightning shows a Martian tripod striding across the road, a young pine in one tentacle

10 Lightning shows the dead landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose cart the narrator wrecked

11 Soaked and shaking, the narrator sits curled at the foot of his dark staircase