Part 3 - The War of the Worlds Audiobook by H. G. Wells (Book 2 - Chs 1-10)

BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER ONE UNDER FOOT
In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to tell of the
experiences of my brother that all through the last two chapters I and the curate have
been lurking in the empty house at
Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke.
There I will resume.
We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day--the day of the panic--in a
little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke from the rest of the world.
We could do nothing but wait in aching inactivity during those two weary days.
My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife.
I figured her at Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man.
I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off from her, of
all that might happen to her in my absence.
My cousin I knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man
to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly.
What was needed now was not bravery, but circumspection.
My only consolation was to believe that the Martians were moving London-ward and away
from her.
Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful.
I grew very weary and irritable with the curate's perpetual ejaculations; I tired of
the sight of his selfish despair.
After some ineffectual remonstrance I kept away from him, staying in a room--evidently
a children's schoolroom--containing globes, forms, and copybooks.
When he followed me thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in
order to be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.
We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the morning of the
next.
There were signs of people in the next house on Sunday evening--a face at a window
and moving lights, and later the slamming of a door.
But I do not know who these people were, nor what became of them.
We saw nothing of them next day.
The Black Smoke drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house that hid us.
A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a jet of
superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the windows it touched,
and scalded the curate's hand as he fled out of the front room.
When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked out again, the country
northward was as though a black snowstorm had passed over it.
Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an unaccountable redness
mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.
For a time we did not see how this change affected our position, save that we were
relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke.
But later I perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get
away.
So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream of action
returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.
"We are safe here," he repeated; "safe here."
I resolved to leave him--would that I had! Wiser now for the artilleryman's teaching,
I sought out food and drink.
I had found oil and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that
I found in one of the bedrooms.
When it was clear to him that I meant to go alone--had reconciled myself to going
alone--he suddenly roused himself to come.
And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we started about five o'clock,
as I should judge, along the blackened road to Sunbury.
In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in contorted
attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and luggage, all covered
thickly with black dust.
That pall of cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of
Pompeii.
We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange and
unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved to find a
patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift.
We went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro under the chestnuts, and
some men and women hurrying in the distance towards Hampton, and so we came to
Twickenham.
These were the first people we saw. Away across the road the woods beyond Ham
and Petersham were still afire.
Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and there were more people
about here, though none could give us news.
For the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to shift their
quarters.
I have an impression that many of the houses here were still occupied by scared
inhabitants, too frightened even for flight.
Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along the road.
I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded into the road
by the wheels of subsequent carts.
We crossed Richmond Bridge about half past eight.
We hurried across the exposed bridge, of course, but I noticed floating down the
stream a number of red masses, some many feet across.
I did not know what these were--there was no time for scrutiny--and I put a more
horrible interpretation on them than they deserved.
Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had once been smoke, and dead
bodies--a heap near the approach to the station; but we had no glimpse of the
Martians until we were some way towards Barnes.
We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a side street
towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted.
Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond there
was no trace of the Black Smoke.
Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people running, and the
upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in sight over the housetops, not a
hundred yards away from us.
We stood aghast at our danger, and had the Martian looked down we must immediately
have perished.
We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but turned aside and hid in a shed in a
garden. There the curate crouched, weeping
silently, and refusing to stir again.
But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest, and in the twilight
I ventured out again.
I went through a shrubbery, and along a passage beside a big house standing in its
own grounds, and so emerged upon the road towards Kew.
The curate I left in the shed, but he came hurrying after me.
That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did.
For it was manifest the Martians were about us.
No sooner had the curate overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had
seen before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge.
Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green-grey of the
field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian pursued them.
In three strides he was among them, and they ran radiating from his feet in all
directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but
picked them up one by one.
Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind
him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other purpose than
destruction with defeated humanity.
We stood for a moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us
into a walled garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay
there, scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out.
I suppose it was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered courage to start again,
no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along hedgerows and through
plantations, and watching keenly through
the darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who seemed to be
all about us.
In one place we blundered upon a scorched and blackened area, now cooling and ashen,
and a number of scattered dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and
trunks but with their legs and boots mostly
intact; and of dead horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns
and smashed gun carriages. Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction,
but the place was silent and deserted.
Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too dark for us to see into the
side roads of the place.
In Sheen my companion suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided to
try one of the houses.
The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the window, was a small
semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable left in the place but some mouldy
cheese.
There was, however, water to drink; and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful
in our next house-breaking. We then crossed to a place where the road
turns towards Mortlake.
Here there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the pantry of this
domicile we found a store of food--two loaves of bread in a pan, an uncooked
steak, and the half of a ham.
I give this catalogue so precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist
upon this store for the next fortnight.
Bottled beer stood under a shelf, and there were two bags of haricot beans and some
limp lettuces.
This pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this was firewood; there
was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of burgundy, tinned soups
and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.
We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark- -for we dared not strike a light--and ate
bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle.
The curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly enough, for
pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength by eating when the thing
happened that was to imprison us.
"It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding glare of vivid green
light.
Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly visible in green and black, and
vanished again. And then followed such a concussion as I
have never heard before or since.
So close on the heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a
clash of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the
plaster of the ceiling came down upon us,
smashing into a multitude of fragments upon our heads.
I was knocked headlong across the floor against the oven handle and stunned.
I was insensible for a long time, the curate told me, and when I came to we were
in darkness again, and he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from a
cut forehead, was dabbing water over me.
For some time I could not recollect what had happened.
Then things came to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.
"Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper.
At last I answered him. I sat up.
"Don't move," he said.
"The floor is covered with smashed crockery from the dresser.
You can't possibly move without making a noise, and I fancy they are outside."
We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each other breathing.
Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near us, some plaster or broken
brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.
Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.
"That!" said the curate, when presently it happened again.
"Yes," I said.
"But what is it?" "A Martian!" said the curate.
I listened again.
"It was not like the Heat-Ray," I said, and for a time I was inclined to think one of
the great fighting-machines had stumbled against the house, as I had seen one
stumble against the tower of Shepperton Church.
Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or four
hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved.
And then the light filtered in, not through the window, which remained black, but
through a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken bricks in the
wall behind us.
The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for the first time.
The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which flowed over the table
upon which we had been sitting and lay about our feet.
Outside, the soil was banked high against the house.
At the top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe.
The floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards
the house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was evident the
greater part of the house had collapsed.
Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion, pale
green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating
blue and white tiles, and a couple of
coloured supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range.
As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the body of a Martian,
standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still glowing cylinder.
At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as possible out of the
twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the scullery.
Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.
"The fifth cylinder," I whispered, "the fifth shot from Mars, has struck this house
and buried us under the ruins!"
For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered:
"God have mercy upon us!" I heard him presently whimpering to
himself.
Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my part scarce dared
breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of the kitchen door.
I could just see the curate's face, a dim, oval shape, and his collar and cuffs.
Outside there began a metallic hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again,
after a quiet interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine.
These noises, for the most part problematical, continued intermittently,
and seemed if anything to increase in number as time wore on.
Presently a measured thudding and a vibration that made everything about us
quiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued.
Once the light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely
dark.
For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering, until our tired
attention failed. At last I found myself awake and very
hungry.
I am inclined to believe we must have spent the greater portion of a day before that
awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that
it moved me to action.
I told the curate I was going to seek food, and felt my way towards the pantry.
He made me no answer, but so soon as I began eating the faint noise I made stirred
him up and I heard him crawling after me.
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BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER TWO WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED
HOUSE
After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have dozed again, for when
presently I looked round I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with
wearisome persistence.
I whispered for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of the
kitchen.
It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room, lying against the
triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians.
His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me.
I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed; and the place
rocked with that beating thud.
Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and
the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky.
For a minute or so I remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and
stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.
I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass of plaster went
sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact.
I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we crouched
motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our
rampart remained.
The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and by
raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see out of this gap into what
had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway.
Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first
visited.
The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the
blow.
The cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole,
already vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking.
The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the
only word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses.
It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer.
Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been
destroyed completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood
buried now under soil and ruins, closed in
by tons of earth on every side save towards the cylinder.
Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the Martians
were engaged in making.
The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright
green vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.
The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the farther edge
of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel- heaped shrubbery, one of the great
fighting-machines, deserted by its
occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky.
At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient
to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw
busy in the excavation, and on account of
the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped
mould near it. The mechanism it certainly was that held my
attention first.
It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-
machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to
terrestrial invention.
As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed,
agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and
reaching and clutching tentacles about its body.
Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a
number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently
strengthened the walls of the cylinder.
These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of
earth behind it.
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a
machine, in spite of its metallic glitter.
The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but
nothing to compare with this.
People who have never seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined
efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as
myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.
I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a
consecutive account of the war.
The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there
his knowledge ended.
He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and
with an altogether misleading monotony of effect.
The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention
them here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created.
They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human
being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been
much better without them.
At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a
crablike creature with a glittering integument, the controlling Martian whose
delicate tentacles actuated its movements
seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's cerebral portion.
But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery integument to
that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature of this dexterous
workman dawned upon me.
With that realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real
Martians.
Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the first nausea no longer
obscured my observation. Moreover, I was concealed and motionless,
and under no urgency of action.
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.
They were huge round bodies--or, rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each
body having in front of it a face.
This face had no nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense
of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a
kind of fleshy beak.
In the back of this head or body--I scarcely know how to speak of it--was the
single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must
have been almost useless in our dense air.
In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles,
arranged in two bunches of eight each.
These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist,
Professor Howes, the hands.
Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to
raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of
terrestrial conditions, this was impossible.
There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with
some facility.
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost
equally simple.
The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes,
ear, and tactile tentacles.
Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and
its vessels.
The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational
attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
And this was the sum of the Martian organs.
Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion,
which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians.
They were heads--merely heads.
Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest.
Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into
their own veins.
I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place.
But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not
endure even to continue watching.
Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a
human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal.
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I
think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an
intelligent rabbit.
The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if
one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and
the digestive process.
Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning
heterogeneous food into blood.
The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength
and colour our minds.
Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound
gastric glands.
But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and
emotion.
Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly
explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as
provisions from Mars.
These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into
human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of
the silicious sponges) and feeble
musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large
eyes in flinty sockets.
Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were
killed before earth was reached.
It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet
would have broken every bone in their bodies.
And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain further
details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the
reader who is unacquainted with them to
form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours.
Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps.
Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical
extinction was unknown to them.
They had little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem.
On earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they
kept in action.
In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps
the case with the ants.
In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were
absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that
arise from that difference among men.
A young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon earth during
the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially budded off, just as young
lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the fresh-water polyp.
In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has
disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the primitive method.
Among the lower animals, up even to those first cousins of the vertebrated animals,
the Tunicates, the two processes occur side by side, but finally the sexual method
superseded its competitor altogether.
On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case.
It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific
repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final
structure not unlike the actual Martian condition.
His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long-
defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget, and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-
Martian periodical called Punch.
He pointed out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the perfection of
mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical
devices, digestion; that such organs as
hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human
being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of
their steady diminution through the coming ages.
The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity.
Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the
hand, "teacher and agent of the brain." While the rest of the body dwindled, the
hands would grow larger.
There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we have beyond
dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the
organism by the intelligence.
To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not
unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise
to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at
last) at the expense of the rest of the body.
Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence,
without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.
The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures differed from ours was
in what one might have thought a very trivial particular.
Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either
never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago.
A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption,
cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life.
And speaking of the differences between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may
allude here to the curious suggestions of the red weed.
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant
colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint.
At any rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought
with them gave rise in all cases to red- coloured growths.
Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition
with terrestrial forms.
The red creeper was quite a transitory growth, and few people have seen it
growing. For a time, however, the red weed grew with
astonishing vigour and luxuriance.
It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment,
and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our
triangular window.
And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially
wherever there was a stream of water.
The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at
the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours
except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them.
It is commonly supposed that they communicated by sounds and tentacular
gesticulations; this is asserted, for instance, in the able but hastily compiled
pamphlet (written evidently by someone not
an eye-witness of Martian actions) to which I have already alluded, and which, so far,
has been the chief source of information concerning them.
Now no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action as I did.
I take no credit to myself for an accident, but the fact is so.
And I assert that I watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four,
five, and (once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated
operations together without either sound or gesture.
Their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation, and was, I
believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the
suctional operation.
I have a certain claim to at least an elementary knowledge of psychology, and in
this matter I am convinced--as firmly as I am convinced of anything--that the Martians
interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation.
And I have been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions.
Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may
remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the telepathic theory.
The Martians wore no clothing.
Their conceptions of ornament and decorum were necessarily different from ours; and
not only were they evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we
are, but changes of pressure do not seem to
have affected their health at all seriously.
Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other artificial additions to their
bodily resources that their great superiority over man lay.
We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns
and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the
Martians have worked out.
They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their
needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in
the wet.
And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious
fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is
absent--the wheel is absent; among all the
things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels.
One would have at least expected it in locomotion.
And in this connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth Nature has
never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other expedients to its development.
And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain
from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed
pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with
circular motions thereabout confined to one plane.
Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding
parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.
And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their
machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an
elastic sheath; these disks become
polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of
electricity.
In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and
disturbing to the human beholder, was attained.
Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping
out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder.
It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the
sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their
vast journey across space.
While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the sunlight, and noting each
strange detail of their form, the curate reminded me of his presence by pulling
violently at my arm.
I turned to a scowling face, and silent, eloquent lips.
He wanted the slit, which permitted only one of us to peep through; and so I had to
forego watching them for a time while he enjoyed that privilege.
When I looked again, the busy handling- machine had already put together several of
the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the cylinder into a shape having an
unmistakable likeness to its own; and down
on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view, emitting jets of green
vapour and working its way round the pit, excavating and embanking in a methodical
and discriminating manner.
This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the rhythmic shocks that
had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled as it worked.
So far as I could see, the thing was without a directing Martian at all.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER THREE THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT
The arrival of a second fighting-machine drove us from our peephole into the
scullery, for we feared that from his elevation the Martian might see down upon
us behind our barrier.
At a later date we began to feel less in danger of their eyes, for to an eye in the
dazzle of the sunlight outside our refuge must have been blank blackness, but at
first the slightest suggestion of approach
drove us into the scullery in heart- throbbing retreat.
Yet terrible as was the danger we incurred, the attraction of peeping was for both of
us irresistible.
And I recall now with a sort of wonder that, in spite of the infinite danger in
which we were between starvation and a still more terrible death, we could yet
struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight.
We would race across the kitchen in a grotesque way between eagerness and the
dread of making a noise, and strike each other, and thrust and kick, within a few
inches of exposure.
The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions and habits of
thought and action, and our danger and isolation only accentuated the
incompatibility.
At Halliford I had already come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation, his
stupid rigidity of mind.
His endless muttering monologue vitiated every effort I made to think out a line of
action, and drove me at times, thus pent up and intensified, almost to the verge of
craziness.
He was as lacking in restraint as a silly woman.
He would weep for hours together, and I verily believe that to the very end this
spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious.
And I would sit in the darkness unable to keep my mind off him by reason of his
importunities.
He ate more than I did, and it was in vain I pointed out that our only chance of life
was to stop in the house until the Martians had done with their pit, that in that long
patience a time might presently come when we should need food.
He ate and drank impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals.
He slept little.
As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so intensified our
distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and
at last to blows.
That brought him to reason for a time.
But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful
souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even
themselves.
It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but I set them down
that my story may lack nothing.
Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my
brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they
know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men.
But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental
things, will have a wider charity.
And while within we fought out our dark, dim contest of whispers, snatched food and
drink, and gripping hands and blows, without, in the pitiless sunlight of that
terrible June, was the strange wonder, the
unfamiliar routine of the Martians in the pit.
Let me return to those first new experiences of mine.
After a long time I ventured back to the peephole, to find that the new-comers had
been reinforced by the occupants of no fewer than three of the fighting-machines.
These last had brought with them certain fresh appliances that stood in an orderly
manner about the cylinder.
The second handling-machine was now completed, and was busied in serving one of
the novel contrivances the big machine had brought.
This was a body resembling a milk can in its general form, above which oscillated a
pear-shaped receptacle, and from which a stream of white powder flowed into a
circular basin below.
The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of the handling-machine.
With two spatulate hands the handling- machine was digging out and flinging masses
of clay into the pear-shaped receptacle above, while with another arm it
periodically opened a door and removed
rusty and blackened clinkers from the middle part of the machine.
Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the basin along a ribbed channel
towards some receiver that was hidden from me by the mound of bluish dust.
From this unseen receiver a little thread of green smoke rose vertically into the
quiet air.
As I looked, the handling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking, extended,
telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a moment before a mere blunt
projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound of clay.
In another second it had lifted a bar of white aluminium into sight, untarnished as
yet, and shining dazzlingly, and deposited it in a growing stack of bars that stood at
the side of the pit.
Between sunset and starlight this dexterous machine must have made more than a hundred
such bars out of the crude clay, and the mound of bluish dust rose steadily until it
topped the side of the pit.
The contrast between the swift and complex movements of these contrivances and the
inert panting clumsiness of their masters was acute, and for days I had to tell
myself repeatedly that these latter were indeed the living of the two things.
The curate had possession of the slit when the first men were brought to the pit.
I was sitting below, huddled up, listening with all my ears.
He made a sudden movement backward, and I, fearful that we were observed, crouched in
a spasm of terror.
He came sliding down the rubbish and crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate,
gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic.
His gesture suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a little while my curiosity
gave me courage, and I rose up, stepped across him, and clambered up to it.
At first I could see no reason for his frantic behaviour.
The twilight had now come, the stars were little and faint, but the pit was
illuminated by the flickering green fire that came from the aluminium-making.
The whole picture was a flickering scheme of green gleams and shifting rusty black
shadows, strangely trying to the eyes. Over and through it all went the bats,
heeding it not at all.
The sprawling Martians were no longer to be seen, the mound of blue-green powder had
risen to cover them from sight, and a fighting-machine, with its legs contracted,
crumpled, and abbreviated, stood across the corner of the pit.
And then, amid the clangour of the machinery, came a drifting suspicion of
human voices, that I entertained at first only to dismiss.
I crouched, watching this fighting-machine closely, satisfying myself now for the
first time that the hood did indeed contain a Martian.
As the green flames lifted I could see the oily gleam of his integument and the
brightness of his eyes.
And suddenly I heard a yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the
machine to the little cage that hunched upon its back.
Then something--something struggling violently--was lifted high against the sky,
a black, vague enigma against the starlight; and as this black object came
down again, I saw by the green brightness that it was a man.
For an instant he was clearly visible.
He was a stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed; three days before, he must
have been walking the world, a man of considerable consequence.
I could see his staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch chain.
He vanished behind the mound, and for a moment there was silence.
And then began a shrieking and a sustained and cheerful hooting from the Martians.
I slid down the rubbish, struggled to my feet, clapped my hands over my ears, and
bolted into the scullery.
The curate, who had been crouching silently with his arms over his head, looked up as I
passed, cried out quite loudly at my desertion of him, and came running after
me.
That night, as we lurked in the scullery, balanced between our horror and the
terrible fascination this peeping had, although I felt an urgent need of action I
tried in vain to conceive some plan of
escape; but afterwards, during the second day, I was able to consider our position
with great clearness.
The curate, I found, was quite incapable of discussion; this new and culminating
atrocity had robbed him of all vestiges of reason or forethought.
Practically he had already sunk to the level of an animal.
But as the saying goes, I gripped myself with both hands.
It grew upon my mind, once I could face the facts, that terrible as our position was,
there was as yet no justification for absolute despair.
Our chief chance lay in the possibility of the Martians making the pit nothing more
than a temporary encampment.
Or even if they kept it permanently, they might not consider it necessary to guard
it, and a chance of escape might be afforded us.
I also weighed very carefully the possibility of our digging a way out in a
direction away from the pit, but the chances of our emerging within sight of
some sentinel fighting-machine seemed at first too great.
And I should have had to do all the digging myself.
The curate would certainly have failed me.
It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that I saw the lad killed.
It was the only occasion on which I actually saw the Martians feed.
After that experience I avoided the hole in the wall for the better part of a day.
I went into the scullery, removed the door, and spent some hours digging with my
hatchet as silently as possible; but when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep
the loose earth collapsed noisily, and I did not dare continue.
I lost heart, and lay down on the scullery floor for a long time, having no spirit
even to move.
And after that I abandoned altogether the idea of escaping by excavation.
It says much for the impression the Martians had made upon me that at first I
entertained little or no hope of our escape being brought about by their overthrow
through any human effort.
But on the fourth or fifth night I heard a sound like heavy guns.
It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining brightly.
The Martians had taken away the excavating- machine, and, save for a fighting-machine
that stood in the remoter bank of the pit and a handling-machine that was buried out
of my sight in a corner of the pit
immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by them.
Except for the pale glow from the handling- machine and the bars and patches of white
moonlight the pit was in darkness, and, except for the clinking of the handling-
machine, quite still.
That night was a beautiful serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed to have the
sky to herself. I heard a dog howling, and that familiar
sound it was that made me listen.
Then I heard quite distinctly a booming exactly like the sound of great guns.
Six distinct reports I counted, and after a long interval six again.
And that was all.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER FOUR THE DEATH OF THE CURATE
It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the last time, and
presently found myself alone.
Instead of keeping close to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had
gone back into the scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought.
I went back quickly and quietly into the scullery.
In the darkness I heard the curate drinking.
I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a bottle of burgundy.
For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the floor and broke, and
I desisted and rose.
We stood panting and threatening each other.
In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and told him of my determination
to begin a discipline.
I divided the food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days.
I would not let him eat any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to
get at the food.
I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake.
All day and all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and he weeping and
complaining of his immediate hunger.
It was, I know, a night and a day, but to me it seemed--it seems now--an interminable
length of time. And so our widened incompatibility ended at
last in open conflict.
For two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling contests.
There were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times when I cajoled and persuaded
him, and once I tried to bribe him with the last bottle of burgundy, for there was a
rain-water pump from which I could get water.
But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond reason.
He would neither desist from his attacks on the food nor from his noisy babbling to
himself.
The rudimentary precautions to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not
observe.
Slowly I began to realise the complete overthrow of his intelligence, to perceive
that my sole companion in this close and sickly darkness was a man insane.
From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own mind wandered at times.
I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I slept.
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.
On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and nothing I could
do would moderate his speech. "It is just, O God!" he would say, over and
over again.
"It is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid.
We have sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were
trodden in the dust, and I held my peace.
I preached acceptable folly--my God, what folly!--when I should have stood up, though
I died for it, and called upon them to repent--repent!...
Oppressors of the poor and needy...!
The wine press of God!" Then he would suddenly revert to the matter
of the food I withheld from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening.
He began to raise his voice--I prayed him not to.
He perceived a hold on me--he threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon us.
For a time that scared me; but any concession would have shortened our chance
of escape beyond estimating. I defied him, although I felt no assurance
that he might not do this thing.
But that day, at any rate, he did not.
He talked with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part of the eighth and
ninth days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane and always
frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God's service, such as made me pity him.
Then he slept awhile, and began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I must
needs make him desist.
"Be still!" I implored.
He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness near the copper.
"I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have reached the pit, "and
now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this unfaithful city!
Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe!
To the inhabitants of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"
"Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror
lest the Martians should hear us.
"For God's sake----" "Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of
his voice, standing likewise and extending his arms.
"Speak!
The word of the Lord is upon me!" In three strides he was at the door leading
into the kitchen. "I must bear my witness!
I go!
It has already been too long delayed." I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper
hanging to the wall. In a flash I was after him.
I was fierce with fear.
Before he was halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him.
With one last touch of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the
butt.
He went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground.
I stumbled over him and stood panting. He lay still.
Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping plaster, and the
triangular aperture in the wall was darkened.
I looked up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming slowly across the
hole.
One of its gripping limbs curled amid the debris; another limb appeared, feeling its
way over the fallen beams. I stood petrified, staring.
Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the edge of the body the face, as we
may call it, and the large dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic
snake of tentacle came feeling slowly through the hole.
I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the scullery door.
The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more, in the room, and twisting and
turning, with queer sudden movements, this way and that.
For a while I stood fascinated by that slow, fitful advance.
Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the scullery.
I trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright.
I opened the door of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness staring at the
faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening.
Had the Martian seen me?
What was it doing now?
Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and then it tapped
against the wall, or started on its movements with a faint metallic ringing,
like the movements of keys on a split-ring.
Then a heavy body--I knew too well what-- was dragged across the floor of the kitchen
towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the door
and peeped into the kitchen.
In the triangle of bright outer sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a
handling-machine, scrutinizing the curate's head.
I thought at once that it would infer my presence from the mark of the blow I had
given him.
I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to cover myself up as much
as I could, and as noiselessly as possible in the darkness, among the firewood and
coal therein.
Every now and then I paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its tentacles
through the opening again. Then the faint metallic jingle returned.
I traced it slowly feeling over the kitchen.
Presently I heard it nearer--in the scullery, as I judged.
I thought that its length might be insufficient to reach me.
I prayed copiously. It passed, scraping faintly across the
cellar door.
An age of almost intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the
latch! It had found the door!
The Martians understood doors!
It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door opened.
In the darkness I could just see the thing- -like an elephant's trunk more than
anything else--waving towards me and touching and examining the wall, coals,
wood and ceiling.
It was like a black worm swaying its blind head to and fro.
Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot. I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my
hand.
For a time the tentacle was silent. I could have fancied it had been withdrawn.
Presently, with an abrupt click, it gripped something--I thought it had me!--and seemed
to go out of the cellar again.
For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it had taken a lump of coal to
examine.
I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, which had become
cramped, and then listened. I whispered passionate prayers for safety.
Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me again.
Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the walls and tapping the
furniture.
While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar door and closed
it.
I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins rattled and a bottle smashed,
and then came a heavy bump against the cellar door.
Then silence that passed into an infinity of suspense.
Had it gone? At last I decided that it had.
It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day in the close
darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even to crawl out for the drink
for which I craved.
It was the eleventh day before I ventured so far from my security.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER FIVE THE STILLNESS
My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door between the kitchen
and the scullery. But the pantry was empty; every scrap of
food had gone.
Apparently, the Martian had taken it all on the previous day.
At that discovery I despaired for the first time.
I took no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day.
At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed sensibly.
I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of despondent
wretchedness. My mind ran on eating.
I thought I had become deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear
from the pit had ceased absolutely.
I did not feel strong enough to crawl noiselessly to the peephole, or I would
have gone there.
On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the chance of alarming the
Martians, I attacked the creaking rain- water pump that stood by the sink, and got
a couple of glassfuls of blackened and tainted rain water.
I was greatly refreshed by this, and emboldened by the fact that no enquiring
tentacle followed the noise of my pumping.
During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought much of the
curate and of the manner of his death.
On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and thought disjointedly
of eating and of vague impossible plans of escape.
Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death of the curate, or
of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a keen pain that urged me to drink
again and again.
The light that came into the scullery was no longer grey, but red.
To my disordered imagination it seemed the colour of blood.
On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to find that
the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in the wall, turning the
half-light of the place into a crimson- coloured obscurity.
It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious, familiar sequence of
sounds in the kitchen, and, listening, identified it as the snuffing and
scratching of a dog.
Going into the kitchen, I saw a dog's nose peering in through a break among the ruddy
fronds. This greatly surprised me.
At the scent of me he barked shortly.
I thought if I could induce him to come into the place quietly I should be able,
perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in any case, it would be advisable to kill him,
lest his actions attracted the attention of the Martians.
I crept forward, saying "Good dog!" very softly; but he suddenly withdrew his head
and disappeared.
I listened--I was not deaf--but certainly the pit was still.
I heard a sound like the flutter of a bird's wings, and a hoarse croaking, but
that was all.
For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to move aside the
red plants that obscured it.
Once or twice I heard a faint pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and
thither on the sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but that was
all.
At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.
Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought over the skeletons
of the dead the Martians had consumed, there was not a living thing in the pit.
I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes.
All the machinery had gone.
Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one corner, certain bars of
aluminium in another, the black birds, and the skeletons of the killed, the place was
merely an empty circular pit in the sand.
Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound of rubble.
I could see in any direction save behind me, to the north, and neither Martians nor
sign of Martians were to be seen.
The pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish afforded a
practicable slope to the summit of the ruins.
My chance of escape had come.
I began to tremble.
I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate resolution, and with a
heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to the top of the mound in which I had been
buried so long.
I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was
visible.
When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been a straggling
street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed with abundant shady trees.
Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which
spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary
terrestrial growth to dispute their footing.
The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the
still living stems.
The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned; their
walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows and shattered doors.
The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms.
Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling for its refuse.
A number of other birds hopped about among the ruins.
Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men
there were none.
The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement, dazzlingly bright, the sky a
glowing blue.
A gentle breeze kept the red weed that covered every scrap of unoccupied ground
gently swaying. And oh! the sweetness of the air!
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER SIX THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS
For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety.
Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a narrow
intensity only of our immediate security.
I had not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated this
startling vision of unfamiliar things.
I had expected to see Sheen in ruins--I found about me the landscape, weird and
lurid, of another planet.
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the
poor brutes we dominate know only too well.
I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the
work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house.
I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that
oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no
longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.
With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and
empire of man had passed away.
But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my dominant motive
became the hunger of my long and dismal fast.
In the direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch of
garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed.
The density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding.
The wall was some six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not
lift my feet to the crest.
So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled me
to get to the top, and tumble into the garden I coveted.
Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature
carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my
way through scarlet and crimson trees
towards Kew--it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed
with two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength
permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region of the pit.
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which also I devoured,
and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow water, where meadows used
to be.
These fragments of nourishment served only to whet my hunger.
At first I was surprised at this flood in a hot, dry summer, but afterwards I
discovered that it was caused by the tropical exuberance of the red weed.
Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became
gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity.
Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its
swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily choked both those rivers.
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle of this weed,
and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad and shallow stream across
the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham.
As the water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the Thames
valley were for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of
the desolation the Martians had caused was concealed.
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread.
A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria,
presently seized upon it.
Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a
resisting power against bacterial diseases- -they never succumb without a severe
struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead.
The fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle.
They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early
growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.
My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my thirst.
I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed some fronds of red weed;
but they were watery, and had a sickly, metallic taste.
I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to wade securely, although the red
weed impeded my feet a little; but the flood evidently got deeper towards the
river, and I turned back to Mortlake.
I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins of its villas and fences
and lamps, and so presently I got out of this spate and made my way to the hill
going up towards Roehampton and came out on Putney Common.
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of the
familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in a few
score yards I would come upon perfectly
undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors closed, as if
they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if their inhabitants slept within.
The red weed was less abundant; the tall trees along the lane were free from the red
creeper.
I hunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple of
silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.
I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my enfeebled
condition, too fatigued to push on. All this time I saw no human beings, and no
signs of the Martians.
I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried circuitously away
from the advances I made them.
Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons,
picked clean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several
cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep.
But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from
them.
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I think the Heat-Ray
must have been used for some reason.
And in the garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes, sufficient
to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
Putney and the river.
The aspect of the place in the dusk was singularly desolate: blackened trees,
blackened, desolate ruins, and down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-
tinged with the weed.
And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terror to
think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood
there alone, the last man left alive.
Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms dislocated
and removed several yards from the rest of the body.
As I proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind
was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part of the
world.
The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country desolated, seeking food
elsewhere.
Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had
gone northward.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER SEVEN THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL
I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill, sleeping in a
made bed for the first time since my flight to Leatherhead.
I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house--afterwards I
found the front door was on the latch--nor how I ransacked every room for food, until
just on the verge of despair, in what
seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of
pineapple. The place had been already searched and
emptied.
In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked.
The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my
hunger, but filled my pockets.
I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food
in the night.
Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to
window, peering out for some sign of these monsters.
I slept little.
As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a thing I do not remember to
have done since my last argument with the curate.
During all the intervening time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of
vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity.
But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew
clear again, and I thought.
Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of the curate, the
whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of my wife.
The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a
thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality
of remorse.
I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty
blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that.
I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me.
In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes
comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that
moment of wrath and fear.
I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him
crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that
streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge.
We had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of that.
Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford.
But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do.
And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was.
There were no witnesses--all these things I might have concealed.
But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will.
And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate body, I faced
the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife.
For the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became terrible.
I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark.
I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck
her out of being.
Since the night of my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed.
I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was
in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to
face with the darkness of God.
Strange night!
Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out
of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place--a creature scarcely larger, an
inferior animal, a thing that for any
passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed.
Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God.
Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those
witless souls that suffer our dominion.
The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and was fretted
with little golden clouds.
In the road that runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of
poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday
night after the fighting began.
There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb,
Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was
a straw hat trampled into the now hardened
mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of blood-stained glass about the overturned
water trough. My movements were languid, my plans of the
vaguest.
I had an idea of going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest
chance of finding my wife.
Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly, my cousins and she would have
fled thence; but it seemed to me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey
people had fled.
I knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men,
but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done.
I was also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness.
From the corner I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of
Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far.
That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there was no red
weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge of the open, the
sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality.
I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the trees.
I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout resolve to live.
And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling of being watched, I beheld
something crouching amid a clump of bushes.
I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, and it rose up
and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly.
He stood silent and motionless, regarding me.
As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own;
he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert.
Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried
clay and shiny, coaly patches.
His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that
at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower part
of his face.
"Stop!" he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I stopped.
His voice was hoarse. "Where do you come from?" he said.
I thought, surveying him.
"I come from Mortlake," I said. "I was buried near the pit the Martians
made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out and escaped."
"There is no food about here," he said.
"This is my country. All this hill down to the river, and back
to Clapham, and up to the edge of the common.
There is only food for one.
Which way are you going?" I answered slowly.
"I don't know," I said. "I have been buried in the ruins of a house
thirteen or fourteen days.
I don't know what has happened." He looked at me doubtfully, then started,
and looked with a changed expression. "I've no wish to stop about here," said I.
"I think I shall go to Leatherhead, for my wife was there."
He shot out a pointing finger. "It is you," said he; "the man from Woking.
And you weren't killed at Weybridge?"
I recognised him at the same moment. "You are the artilleryman who came into my
garden." "Good luck!" he said.
"We are lucky ones!
Fancy you!" He put out a hand, and I took it.
"I crawled up a drain," he said. "But they didn't kill everyone.
And after they went away I got off towards Walton across the fields.
But---- It's not sixteen days altogether-- and your hair is grey."
He looked over his shoulder suddenly.
"Only a rook," he said. "One gets to know that birds have shadows
these days. This is a bit open.
Let us crawl under those bushes and talk."
"Have you seen any Martians?" I said.
"Since I crawled out----" "They've gone away across London," he said.
"I guess they've got a bigger camp there.
Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights.
It's like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving.
By daylight you can't.
But nearer--I haven't seen them--" (he counted on his fingers) "five days.
Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big.
And the night before last"--he stopped and spoke impressively--"it was just a matter
of lights, but it was something up in the air.
I believe they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly."
I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.
"Fly!"
"Yes," he said, "fly." I went on into a little bower, and sat
down. "It is all over with humanity," I said.
"If they can do that they will simply go round the world."
He nodded. "They will.
But---- It will relieve things over here a bit.
And besides----" He looked at me. "Aren't you satisfied it is up with
humanity?
I am. We're down; we're beat."
I stared.
Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact--a fact perfectly obvious so
soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope; rather, I
had kept a lifelong habit of mind.
He repeated his words, "We're beat." They carried absolute conviction.
"It's all over," he said. "They've lost one--just one.
And they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world.
They've walked over us. The death of that one at Weybridge was an
accident.
And these are only pioneers. They kept on coming.
These green stars--I've seen none these five or six days, but I've no doubt they're
falling somewhere every night.
Nothing's to be done. We're under!
We're beat!" I made him no answer.
I sat staring before me, trying in vain to devise some countervailing thought.
"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's
war between man and ants."
Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.
"After the tenth shot they fired no more-- at least, until the first cylinder came."
"How do you know?" said the artilleryman.
I explained. He thought.
"Something wrong with the gun," he said. "But what if there is?
They'll get it right again.
And even if there's a delay, how can it alter the end?
It's just men and ants.
There's the ants builds their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until
the men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way.
That's what we are now--just ants.
Only----" "Yes," I said.
"We're eatable ants." We sat looking at each other.
"And what will they do with us?"
I said. "That's what I've been thinking," he said;
"that's what I've been thinking. After Weybridge I went south--thinking.
I saw what was up.
Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves.
But I'm not so fond of squealing.
I've been in sight of death once or twice; I'm not an ornamental soldier, and at the
best and worst, death--it's just death. And it's the man that keeps on thinking
comes through.
I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I, 'Food won't last this way,' and I
turned right back. I went for the Martians like a sparrow goes
for man.
All round"--he waved a hand to the horizon- -"they're starving in heaps, bolting,
treading on each other...." He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.
"No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France," he said.
He seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on: "There's food all
about here.
Canned things in shops; wines, spirits, mineral waters; and the water mains and
drains are empty. Well, I was telling you what I was
thinking.
'Here's intelligent things,' I said, 'and it seems they want us for food.
First, they'll smash us up--ships, machines, guns, cities, all the order and
organisation.
All that will go. If we were the size of ants we might pull
through. But we're not.
It's all too bulky to stop.
That's the first certainty.' Eh?"
I assented. "It is; I've thought it out.
Very well, then--next; at present we're caught as we're wanted.
A Martian has only to go a few miles to get a crowd on the run.
And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth, picking houses to pieces and routing among
the wreckage. But they won't keep on doing that.
So soon as they've settled all our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done
all the things they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic,
picking the best and storing us in cages and things.
That's what they will start doing in a bit. Lord!
They haven't begun on us yet.
Don't you see that?" "Not begun!"
I exclaimed. "Not begun.
All that's happened so far is through our not having the sense to keep quiet--
worrying them with guns and such foolery.
And losing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn't any more
safety than where we were. They don't want to bother us yet.
They're making their things--making all the things they couldn't bring with them,
getting things ready for the rest of their people.
Very likely that's why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for fear of hitting
those who are here.
And instead of our rushing about blind, on the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance
of busting them up, we've got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of
affairs.
That's how I figure it out. It isn't quite according to what a man
wants for his species, but it's about what the facts point to.
And that's the principle I acted upon.
Cities, nations, civilisation, progress-- it's all over.
That game's up. We're beat."
"But if that is so, what is there to live for?"
The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.
"There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won't be
any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants.
If it's amusement you're after, I reckon the game is up.
If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or
dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away.
They ain't no further use."
"You mean----" "I mean that men like me are going on
living--for the sake of the breed. I tell you, I'm grim set on living.
And if I'm not mistaken, you'll show what insides you've got, too, before long.
We aren't going to be exterminated.
And I don't mean to be caught either, and tamed and fattened and bred like a
thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those brown creepers!"
"You don't mean to say----"
"I do. I'm going on, under their feet.
I've got it planned; I've thought it out. We men are beat.
We don't know enough.
We've got to learn before we've got a chance.
And we've got to live and keep independent while we learn.
See! That's what has to be done."
I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man's resolution.
"Great God!" cried I. "But you are a man indeed!"
And suddenly I gripped his hand.
"Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining. "I've thought it out, eh?"
"Go on," I said. "Well, those who mean to escape their
catching must get ready.
I'm getting ready. Mind you, it isn't all of us that are made
for wild beasts; and that's what it's got to be.
That's why I watched you.
I had my doubts. You're slender.
I didn't know that it was you, you see, or just how you'd been buried.
All these--the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little
clerks that used to live down that way-- they'd be no good.
They haven't any spirit in them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who
hasn't one or the other--Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?
They just used to skedaddle off to work-- I've seen hundreds of 'em, bit of breakfast
in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear
they'd get dismissed if they didn't;
working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling
back for fear they wouldn't be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for
fear of the back streets, and sleeping with
the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of
money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the
world.
Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents.
And on Sundays--fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits!
Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these.
Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry.
After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come
and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad after a bit.
They'll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.
And the bar loafers, and mashers, and singers--I can imagine them.
I can imagine them," he said, with a sort of sombre gratification.
"There'll be any amount of sentiment and religion loose among them.
There's hundreds of things I saw with my eyes that I've only begun to see clearly
these last few days.
There's lots will take things as they are-- fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by
a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something.
Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing
something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always
make for a sort of do-nothing religion,
very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.
Very likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned
clean inside out.
These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.
And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of--what is it?--eroticism."
He paused.
"Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them to do tricks--
who knows?--get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed.
And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us."
"No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being----"
"What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the artilleryman.
"There's men who'd do it cheerful. What nonsense to pretend there isn't!"
And I succumbed to his conviction.
"If they come after me," he said; "Lord, if they come after me!" and subsided into a
grim meditation. I sat contemplating these things.
I could find nothing to bring against this man's reasoning.
In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual
superiority to his--I, a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes,
and he, a common soldier; and yet he had
already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realised.
"What are you doing?" I said presently.
"What plans have you made?"
He hesitated. "Well, it's like this," he said.
"What have we to do?
We have to invent a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be sufficiently
secure to bring the children up. Yes--wait a bit, and I'll make it clearer
what I think ought to be done.
The tame ones will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they'll be big,
beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid--rubbish!
The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage--degenerate into a sort of big,
savage rat.... You see, how I mean to live is underground.
I've been thinking about the drains.
Of course those who don't know drains think horrible things; but under this London are
miles and miles--hundreds of miles--and a few days rain and London empty will leave
them sweet and clean.
The main drains are big enough and airy enough for anyone.
Then there's cellars, vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may be made to the
drains.
And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see?
And we form a band--able-bodied, clean- minded men.
We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in.
Weaklings go out again." "As you meant me to go?"
"Well--I parleyed, didn't I?"
"We won't quarrel about that. Go on."
"Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want
also--mothers and teachers.
No lackadaisical ladies--no blasted rolling eyes.
We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and
cumbersome and mischievous have to die.
They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die.
It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.
And they can't be happy.
Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it bad.
And in all those places we shall gather. Our district will be London.
And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in the open when the Martians
keep away. Play cricket, perhaps.
That's how we shall save the race.
Eh? It's a possible thing? But saving the race is nothing in itself.
As I say, that's only being rats. It's saving our knowledge and adding to it
is the thing.
There men like you come in. There's books, there's models.
We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels
and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books.
That's where men like you come in.
We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books through.
Especially we must keep up our science-- learn more.
We must watch these Martians.
Some of us must go as spies. When it's all working, perhaps I will.
Get caught, I mean. And the great thing is, we must leave the
Martians alone.
We mustn't even steal. If we get in their way, we clear out.
We must show them we mean no harm. Yes, I know.
But they're intelligent things, and they won't hunt us down if they have all they
want, and think we're just harmless vermin."
The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.
"After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before--Just imagine this:
four or five of their fighting machines suddenly starting off--Heat-Rays right and
left, and not a Martian in 'em.
Not a Martian in 'em, but men--men who have learned the way how.
It may be in my time, even--those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things,
with its Heat-Ray wide and free!
Fancy having it in control! What would it matter if you smashed to
smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that?
I reckon the Martians'll open their beautiful eyes!
Can't you see them, man?
Can't you see them hurrying, hurrying-- puffing and blowing and hooting to their
other mechanical affairs? Something out of gear in every case.
And swish, bang, rattle, swish!
Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has
come back to his own."
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. "We're working well," he said.
He put down his spade.
"Let us knock off a bit" he said. "I think it's time we reconnoitred from the
roof of the house."
I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade; and then
suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so did he at once.
"Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of being here?"
"Taking the air," he said. "I was coming back.
It's safer by night."
"But the work?" "Oh, one can't always work," he said, and
in a flash I saw the man plain. He hesitated, holding his spade.
"We ought to reconnoitre now," he said, "because if any come near they may hear the
spades and drop upon us unawares." I was no longer disposed to object.
We went together to the roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door.
No Martians were to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down
under shelter of the parapet.
From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but we could see
the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and
red.
The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches
stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters.
It was strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for
their propagation.
About us neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees
of arbor-vitae, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the
sunlight.
Beyond Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward
hills.
The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still remained in
London.
"One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric light in order, and there
was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze, crowded with painted and ragged
drunkards, men and women, dancing and shouting till dawn.
A man who was there told me.
And as the day came they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the
Langham and looking down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there.
It must have given some of them a nasty turn.
He came down the road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or
frightened to run away."
Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!
From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plans again.
He grew enthusiastic.
He talked so eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more
than half believed in him again.
But now that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, I could divine
the stress he laid on doing nothing precipitately.
And I noted that now there was no question that he personally was to capture and fight
the great machine. After a time we went down to the cellar.
Neither of us seemed disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I
was nothing loath.
He became suddenly very generous, and when we had eaten he went away and returned with
some excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism glowed.
He was inclined to regard my coming as a great occasion.
"There's some champagne in the cellar," he said.
"We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy," said I.
"No," said he; "I am host today. Champagne! Great God!
We've a heavy enough task before us!
Let us take a rest and gather strength while we may.
Look at these blistered hands!"
And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing cards after we had
eaten.
He taught me euchre, and after dividing London between us, I taking the northern
side and he the southern, we played for parish points.
Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true,
and what is more remarkable, I found the card game and several others we played
extremely interesting.
Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of extermination or appalling
degradation, with no clear prospect before us but the chance of a horrible death, we
could sit following the chance of this
painted pasteboard, and playing the "joker" with vivid delight.
Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough chess games.
When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a lamp.
After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the artilleryman finished the
champagne.
We went on smoking the cigars. He was no longer the energetic regenerator
of his species I had encountered in the morning.
He was still optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism.
I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and
considerable intermittence.
I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of which he had spoken that
blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills. At first I stared unintelligently across
the London valley.
The northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington glowed
redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up and vanished in
the deep blue night.
All the rest of London was black. Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light,
a pale, violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze.
For a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed
from which this faint irradiation proceeded.
With that realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of
things, awoke again.
I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the west, and then gazed
long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.
I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque changes of the
day.
I recalled my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card-
playing. I had a violent revulsion of feeling.
I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism.
My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration.
I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse.
I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to
his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London.
There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my
fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the roof when the late
moon rose.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER EIGHT DEAD LONDON
After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by the High Street
across the bridge to Fulham.
The red weed was tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but
its fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that presently
removed it so swiftly.
At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I found a man lying.
He was as black as a sweep with the black dust, alive, but helplessly and
speechlessly drunk.
I could get nothing from him but curses and furious lunges at my head.
I think I should have stayed by him but for the brutal expression of his face.
There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and it grew thicker in
Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet.
I got food--sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable--in a baker's shop here.
Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I passed a
white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning was an absolute relief.
Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet again.
Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon dead bodies.
I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the Fulham Road.
They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past them.
The black powder covered them over, and softened their outlines.
One or two had been disturbed by dogs.
Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in the City, with
the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds drawn, the desertion, and the
stillness.
In some places plunderers had been at work, but rarely at other than the provision and
wine shops.
A jeweller's window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the thief had
been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay scattered on the pavement.
I did not trouble to touch them.
Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over her
knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed magnum of
champagne formed a pool across the pavement.
She seemed asleep, but she was dead. The farther I penetrated into London, the
profounder grew the stillness.
But it was not so much the stillness of death--it was the stillness of suspense, of
expectation.
At any time the destruction that had already singed the northwestern borders of
the metropolis, and had annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these
houses and leave them smoking ruins.
It was a city condemned and derelict.... In South Kensington the streets were clear
of dead and of black powder. It was near South Kensington that I first
heard the howling.
It crept almost imperceptibly upon my senses.
It was a sobbing alternation of two notes, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on
perpetually.
When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and buildings
seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide down Exhibition
Road.
I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remote
wailing.
It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and
solitude.
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," wailed that superhuman note--great waves of sound
sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tall buildings on each side.
I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the iron gates of Hyde Park.
I had half a mind to break into the Natural History Museum and find my way up to the
summits of the towers, in order to see across the park.
But I decided to keep to the ground, where quick hiding was possible, and so went on
up the Exhibition Road.
All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and still, and my footsteps
echoed against the sides of the houses.
At the top, near the park gate, I came upon a strange sight--a bus overturned, and the
skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for a time, and then
went on to the bridge over the Serpentine.
The voice grew stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above the
housetops on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the northwest.
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to me, from the
district about Regent's Park. The desolating cry worked upon my mind.
The mood that had sustained me passed.
The wailing took possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore,
and now again hungry and thirsty. It was already past noon.
Why was I wandering alone in this city of the dead?
Why was I alone when all London was lying in state, and in its black shroud?
I felt intolerably lonely.
My mind ran on old friends that I had forgotten for years.
I thought of the poisons in the chemists' shops, of the liquors the wine merchants
stored; I recalled the two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared
the city with myself....
I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again were black powder and
several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from the gratings of the cellars of some of
the houses.
I grew very thirsty after the heat of my long walk.
With infinite trouble I managed to break into a public-house and get food and drink.
I was weary after eating, and went into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a
black horsehair sofa I found there. I awoke to find that dismal howling still
in my ears, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla."
It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits and a cheese in the bar--
there was a meat safe, but it contained nothing but maggots--I wandered on through
the silent residential squares to Baker
Street--Portman Square is the only one I can name--and so came out at last upon
Regent's Park.
And as I emerged from the top of Baker Street, I saw far away over the trees in
the clearness of the sunset the hood of the Martian giant from which this howling
proceeded.
I was not terrified. I came upon him as if it were a matter of
course. I watched him for some time, but he did not
move.
He appeared to be standing and yelling, for no reason that I could discover.
I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla,
ulla," confused my mind.
Perhaps I was too tired to be very fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know the
reason of this monotonous crying than afraid.
I turned back away from the park and struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the
park, went along under the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this
stationary, howling Martian from the direction of St. John's Wood.
A couple of hundred yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw,
first a dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in his jaws coming headlong towards
me, and then a pack of starving mongrels in pursuit of him.
He made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a fresh competitor.
As the yelping died away down the silent road, the wailing sound of "Ulla, ulla,
ulla, ulla," reasserted itself. I came upon the wrecked handling-machine
halfway to St. John's Wood station.
At first I thought a house had fallen across the road.
It was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this mechanical
Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted, among the ruins it had
made.
The forepart was shattered. It seemed as if it had driven blindly
straight at the house, and had been overwhelmed in its overthrow.
It seemed to me then that this might have happened by a handling-machine escaping
from the guidance of its Martian.
I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the twilight was now so far
advanced that the blood with which its seat was smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the
Martian that the dogs had left, were invisible to me.
Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards Primrose Hill.
Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second Martian, as motionless as the
first, standing in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent.
A little beyond the ruins about the smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed
again, and found the Regent's Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
As I crossed the bridge, the sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," ceased.
It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees towards the park
were growing black.
All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the
dimness. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was
coming upon me.
But while that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by
virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had upheld
me.
Then suddenly a change, the passing of something--I knew not what--and then a
stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet.
London about me gazed at me spectrally.
The windows in the white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls.
About me my imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving.
Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity.
In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I saw a
contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could not bring myself to go on.
I turned down St. John's Wood Road, and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness
towards Kilburn.
I hid from the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter
in Harrow Road.
But before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I
turned once more towards Regent's Park.
I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw down a long avenue, in the
half-light of the early dawn, the curve of Primrose Hill.
On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a third Martian, erect and
motionless like the others. An insane resolve possessed me.
I would die and end it.
And I would save myself even the trouble of killing myself.
I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light
grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about the hood.
At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the road.
I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's Terrace (I waded breast-high
across a torrent of water that was rushing down from the waterworks towards the Albert
Road), and emerged upon the grass before the rising of the sun.
Great mounds had been heaped about the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of
it--it was the final and largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these
heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky.
Against the sky line an eager dog ran and disappeared.
The thought that had flashed into my mind grew real, grew credible.
I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards
the motionless monster.
Out of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest,
and the interior of the redoubt was below me.
A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge
mounds of material and strange shelter places.
And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now
rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row,
were the Martians--dead!--slain by the
putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain
as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the
humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror
and disaster blinded our minds.
These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--
taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power;
to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause
putrefaction in dead matter, for instance-- our living frames are altogether immune.
But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly
they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.
Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even
as they went to and fro. It was inevitable.
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it
is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as
mighty as they are.
For neither do men live nor die in vain.
Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they
had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as
any death could be.
To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible.
All I knew was that these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were
dead.
For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been
repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.
I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising
sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays.
The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their
power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and
strange out of the shadows towards the light.
A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the
depth of the pit, far below me.
Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-
machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere
when decay and death arrested them.
Death had come not a day too soon.
At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine that would
fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the
overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood
those other two Martians that I had seen overnight, just as death had overtaken
them.
The one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was
the last to die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its
machinery was exhausted.
They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the brightness of the
rising sun.
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting destruction,
stretched the great Mother of Cities.
Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely
imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the splintered spire of
the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky, and here and there some facet in
the great wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with a white intensity.
Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses; westward the great
city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park,
the Langham Hotel, the dome of the Albert
Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came out
clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond.
Far away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace
glittered like two silver rods.
The dome of St. Paul's was dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first
time, by a huge gaping cavity on its western side.
And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent
and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the
innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to
build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it
all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still
live in the streets, and this dear vast
dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that was
near akin to tears. The torment was over.
Even that day the healing would begin.
The survivors of the people scattered over the country--leaderless, lawless, foodless,
like sheep without a shepherd--the thousands who had fled by sea, would begin
to return; the pulse of life, growing
stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the
vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of
the destroyer was stayed.
All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismally
at the sunlit grass of the hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of
the restorers and ringing with the tapping of their trowels.
At the thought I extended my hands towards the sky and began thanking God.
In a year, thought I--in a year...
With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife, and the old life of
hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER NINE WRECKAGE
And now comes the strangest thing in my story.
Yet, perhaps, it is not altogether strange.
I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly, all that I did that day until the time that
I stood weeping and praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill.
And then I forget.
Of the next three days I know nothing.
I have learned since that, so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian
overthrow, several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the previous
night.
One man--the first--had gone to St. Martin's-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered
in the cabmen's hut, had contrived to telegraph to Paris.
Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the world; a thousand cities, chilled by
ghastly apprehensions, suddenly flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it
in Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester,
Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon the verge of the pit.
Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard, shouting and staying their work to
shake hands and shout, were making up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend
upon London.
The church bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news,
until all England was bell-ringing.
Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting
of unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair.
And for the food!
Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat
were tearing to our relief. All the shipping in the world seemed going
Londonward in those days.
But of all this I have no memory. I drifted--a demented man.
I found myself in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day
wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's Wood.
They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about "The Last Man
Left Alive! Hurrah!
The Last Man Left Alive!"
Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as
I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give here,
nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and protected me from myself.
Apparently they had learned something of my story from me during the days of my lapse.
Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to me what they had
learned of the fate of Leatherhead.
Two days after I was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a
Martian.
He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any provocation, as a boy
might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power.
I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me.
I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bore with me.
I remained with them four days after my recovery.
All that time I felt a vague, a growing craving to look once more on whatever
remained of the little life that seemed so happy and bright in my past.
It was a mere hopeless desire to feast upon my misery.
They dissuaded me. They did all they could to divert me from
this morbidity.
But at last I could resist the impulse no longer, and, promising faithfully to return
to them, and parting, as I will confess, from these four-day friends with tears, I
went out again into the streets that had lately been so dark and strange and empty.
Already they were busy with returning people; in places even there were shops
open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.
I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my melancholy
pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the streets and vivid the moving
life about me.
So many people were abroad everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it
seemed incredible that any great proportion of the population could have been slain.
But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I met, how shaggy the
hair of the men, how large and bright their eyes, and that every other man still wore
his dirty rags.
Their faces seemed all with one of two expressions--a leaping exultation and
energy or a grim resolution. Save for the expression of the faces,
London seemed a city of tramps.
The vestries were indiscriminately distributing bread sent us by the French
government. The ribs of the few horses showed dismally.
Haggard special constables with white badges stood at the corners of every
street.
I saw little of the mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached Wellington Street,
and there I saw the red weed clambering over the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge.
At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque
time--a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a
stick that kept it in place.
It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication--the Daily Mail.
I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.
Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused
himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page.
The matter he printed was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found its
way back.
I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian
mechanisms had yielded astonishing results.
Among other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that
the "Secret of Flying," was discovered. At Waterloo I found the free trains that
were taking people to their homes.
The first rush was already over. There were few people in the train, and I
was in no mood for casual conversation.
I got a compartment to myself, and sat with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit
devastation that flowed past the windows.
And just outside the terminus the train jolted over temporary rails, and on either
side of the railway the houses were blackened ruins.
To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy with powder of the Black Smoke, in
spite of two days of thunderstorms and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had
been wrecked again; there were hundreds of
out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side with the customary navvies, and we
were jolted over a hasty relaying.
All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt and unfamiliar;
Wimbledon particularly had suffered.
Walton, by virtue of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place
along the line.
The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped mass of red weed, in
appearance between butcher's meat and pickled cabbage.
The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons of the red
climber.
Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in certain nursery grounds, were the heaped
masses of earth about the sixth cylinder.
A number of people were standing about it, and some sappers were busy in the midst of
it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack, flapping
cheerfully in the morning breeze.
The nursery grounds were everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid
colour cut with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye.
One's gaze went with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the
foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.
The line on the London side of Woking station was still undergoing repair, so I
descended at Byfleet station and took the road to Maybury, past the place where I and
the artilleryman had talked to the hussars,
and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in the thunderstorm.
Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find, among a tangle of red fronds, the
warped and broken dog cart with the whitened bones of the horse scattered and
gnawed.
For a time I stood regarding these vestiges....
Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here and there, to
find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found burial, and so came home past
the College Arms.
A man standing at an open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded immediately.
The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening slowly as I approached.
It slammed again.
The curtains of my study fluttered out of the open window from which I and the
artilleryman had watched the dawn. No one had closed it since.
The smashed bushes were just as I had left them nearly four weeks ago.
I stumbled into the hall, and the house felt empty.
The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had crouched, soaked to
the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the catastrophe.
Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.
I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table still, with the
selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the
opening of the cylinder.
For a space I stood reading over my abandoned arguments.
It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the
civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: "In about
two hundred years," I had written, "we may expect----" The sentence ended abruptly.
I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and
how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy.
I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had
listened to his odd story of "Men from Mars."
I came down and went into the dining room.
There were the mutton and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle
overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them.
My home was desolate.
I perceived the folly of the faint hope I had cherished so long.
And then a strange thing occurred. "It is no use," said a voice.
"The house is deserted.
No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to torment yourself.
No one escaped but you." I was startled.
Had I spoken my thought aloud?
I turned, and the French window was open behind me.
I made a step to it, and stood looking out.
And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and afraid, were my cousin and
my wife--my wife white and tearless. She gave a faint cry.
"I came," she said.
"I knew--knew----" She put her hand to her throat--swayed.
I made a step forward, and caught her in my arms.
>
BOOK TWO THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS CHAPTER TEN THE EPILOGUE
I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am able
to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions which are still
unsettled.
In one respect I shall certainly provoke criticism.
My particular province is speculative philosophy.
My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but it seems to
me that Carver's suggestions as to the reason of the rapid death of the Martians
is so probable as to be regarded almost as a proven conclusion.
I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war,
no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found.
That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they
perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the putrefactive process.
But probable as this seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.
Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with
such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle.
The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have
disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter.
Spectrum analysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an
unknown element with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is
possible that it combines with argon to
form a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the
blood.
But such unproven speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general
reader, to whom this story is addressed.
None of the brown scum that drifted down the Thames after the destruction of
Shepperton was examined at the time, and now none is forthcoming.
The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the prowling dogs
had left such an examination possible, I have already given.
But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost complete specimen in
spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made
from it; and beyond that the interest of
their physiology and structure is purely scientific.
A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility of another attack from
the Martians.
I do not think that nearly enough attention is being given to this aspect of the
matter.
At present the planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to
opposition I, for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure.
In any case, we should be prepared.
It seems to me that it should be possible to define the position of the gun from
which the shots are discharged, to keep a sustained watch upon this part of the
planet, and to anticipate the arrival of the next attack.
In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery before
it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they might be butchered by
means of guns so soon as the screw opened.
It seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure of their first
surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually
succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus.
Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say,
Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus.
Subsequently 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 disk.
One needs to see the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully
their remarkable resemblance in character.
At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human
future must be greatly modified by these events.
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure
abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may
come upon us suddenly out of space.
It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not
without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in
the future which is the most fruitful
source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it
has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.
It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the fate of
these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they
have found a securer settlement.
Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of the
eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting
stars, will bring with them as they fall an
unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated.
Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the
deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere.
Now we see further.
If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is
impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth
uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it
may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and
caught our sister planet within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading
slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate
vastness of sidereal space.
But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the
destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve.
To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.
I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt
and insecurity in my mind.
I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley
below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and
desolate.
I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart,
a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and
suddenly they become vague and unreal, and
I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence.
Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted
bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten.
They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at
last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it
comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets
that I have seen silent and wretched, going
to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body.
And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before
writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through
the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing
at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the
flower beds on the hill, to see the sight- seers about the Martian machine that stands
there still, to hear the tumult of playing
children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and
silent, under the dawn of that last great day....
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have
counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
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