She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and
her engines working.  She headed straight for a second Martian, and
was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear.  Then
with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped
upward.  The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and
in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the
impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing
of cardboard.  My brother shouted involuntarily.  A boiling tumult of
steam hid everything again.