Quotation from: The War of the Worlds

Written by: H. G. Wells


For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the
tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny
and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader
who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position,
reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine,
crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by
apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning
time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky
for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where
he had made his lair. It was the coal cellar of the place, and when I
saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten
yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney
Hill--I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his
powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But I believed in him
sufficiently to work with him all that morning until past midday at
his digging. We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed
against the kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of
mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a
curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady
labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and
presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all
the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After
working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go
before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it
altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long
tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of
the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that
the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of
tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things, the
artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

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