Free The White Mountains (The Tripods) by John Christopher Page A

carriages without horses. I am sure.”
    “Pushed by one of your big kettles, maybe!” Henry said.
    Beanpole stared at it. He said, quite seriously, “Perhaps you are right.”
    Some of the buildings had fallen down, from age and weathering, and in places many—whole rows sometimes—had been flattened, crushed, it seemed, by a hammer from the sky. But a great number were more or less intact, and eventually we ventured inside one. It had been a shop, plainly, but of enormous size. There were tins everywhere, some still piled on shelves, but most of them scattered on the floor. I picked one up. It had paper around it, with a faded picture of plums. Other tins had pictures, too—fruit, vegetables, bowls of soup. They had held food. It was reasonable enough: with so many people living together, and no land to till, food would have had to be brought to them in containers, just as my mother bottled things in summer for winter use. The tins had rusted, in some places right through, showing a dried-up indistinguishable mess inside.
    There were thousands of shops, and we looked in many of them. Their contents amazed us. Great bolts of mildewed cloth, still showing weird colors and patterns; row on row of crumbling cardboard boxes, full of rotting leather shoes; musical instruments, a few familiar but most incredibly weird; figures of women, made from a strange hard substance, clothed in the tattered remnants of dresses. And a place full of bottles, which Beanpole told us was wine. He broke the top off one, and we tasted it but pulled faces at the sourness: it had gone bad long ago. We picked up some things and took them with us: a knife, a small axe with an edge that was rusted but could be sharpened, a kind of flask made of translucent blue material, very light in weight, which would carry water better than the flasks Henry and I had got from Captain Curtis, candles … things like that.
    But the shop that filled me with awe was quite small. It was tucked away between two much bigger ones, and as well as the usual broken glass it had a barrier of warped and rusted metal in front of it. When I looked in, it was like Aladdin’s cave. There were gold rings, set with diamonds and other stones, brooches, necklaces, bangles. And perhaps a score of Watches!
    I picked one out. It was gold, too, and had a heavy gold bracelet, which expanded when I put my fingers inside and stretched them; so that it would be made large enough to go over your hand and would then lie snug on your wrist. Or on a thicker wrist than mine. It was loose when I put it on, so I pushed it higher up my arm. It would not go, of course, but it was a Watch. Theother two were exploring on the other side of the street. I thought of calling them, and then decided against it.
    It was not just that I did not want them to have a Watch like mine, though that was part of it. There was also the memory of my struggle with Henry over my father’s Watch, when Jack had helped me to get it off him. And this, I think, was sparked by something less definite, a feeling of discontent. My dislike for Henry had been thrust into the background by the difficulties and dangers which we encountered together and shared. When Beanpole joined us, I had talked to him more, and he had responded: Henry, to some extent, had been left out of things. I had realized this and, I am afraid, been complacent about it.
    Today, though, particularly since we had come into the great-city, I had become aware of a change. It was nothing clearcut; just that Henry talked more to Beanpole, that Beanpole directed more of his own remarks to Henry—that there had been a shift, in fact, from it being a matter of Beanpole and myself, with Henry a little bit out of things, to a situation in which I was, to some extent, the excluded one. So it had happened that I had found this shop, with the jewels and the Watches, having left them discussing a strange machine they had found which had four rows of small white buttons