breast augmentation edmond ok

book two the earth under the martianschapter one under foot in the first book i have wandered so muchfrom my own adventures to tell of the experiences of my brother that all throughthe last two chapters i and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at halliford whither we fled to escape theblack smoke. there i will resume. we stopped there all sunday night and allthe next day--the day of the panic--in a little island of daylight, cut off by theblack smoke from the rest of the world. we could do nothing but wait in achinginactivity during those two weary days.

my mind was occupied by anxiety for mywife. i figured her at leatherhead, terrified, indanger, mourning me already as a dead man. i paced the rooms and cried aloud when ithought 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 anyemergency, but he was not the sort of man to realise danger quickly, to risepromptly. what was needed now was not bravery, butcircumspection. my only consolation was to believe that themartians were moving london-ward and away from her.

such vague anxieties keep the mindsensitive and painful. i grew very weary and irritable with thecurate's perpetual ejaculations; i tired of the sight of his selfish despair. after some ineffectual remonstrance i keptaway from him, staying in a room--evidently a children's schoolroom--containing globes,forms, and copybooks. when he followed me thither, i went to abox 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 blacksmoke all that day and the morning of the next.

there were signs of people in the nexthouse on sunday evening--a face at a window and moving lights, and later the slammingof 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 riverwardall through monday morning, creeping nearer and nearer to us, driving at last along theroadway outside the house that hid us. a martian came across the fields aboutmidday, laying the stuff with a jet of superheated steam that hissed against thewalls, smashed all the windows it touched, and scalded the curate's hand as he fledout of the front room.

when at last we crept across the soddenrooms and looked out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstormhad passed over it. looking towards the river, we wereastonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorchedmeadows. for a time we did not see how this changeaffected our position, save that we were relieved of our fear of the black smoke. but later i perceived that we were nolonger hemmed in, that now we might get away. so soon as i realised that the way ofescape was open, my dream of action

returned.but the curate was lethargic, unreasonable. "we are safe here," he repeated; "safehere." 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, andi 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 goalone--had reconciled myself to going alone--he suddenly roused himself to come. and all being quiet throughout theafternoon, we started about five o'clock,

as i should judge, along the blackened roadto sunbury. in sunbury, and at intervals along theroad, 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 thinkof what i had read of the destruction of pompeii. we got to hampton court withoutmisadventure, our minds full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at hamptoncourt our eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped thesuffocating drift.

we went through bushey park, with its deergoing to and fro under the chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distancetowards 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-rayor 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 thehouses here were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even forflight. here too the evidence of a hasty rout wasabundant along the road. i remember most vividly three smashedbicycles in a heap, pounded into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. we crossed richmond bridge about half pasteight. we hurried across the exposed bridge, ofcourse, but i noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses, some manyfeet across. i did not know what these were--there wasno time for scrutiny--and i put a more

horrible interpretation on them than theydeserved. here again on the surrey side were blackdust that had once been smoke, and dead bodies--a heap near the approach to thestation; but we had no glimpse of the martians until we were some way towardsbarnes. we saw in the blackened distance a group ofthree people running down a side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemeddeserted. up the hill richmond town was burningbriskly; outside the town of richmond there was no trace of the black smoke. then suddenly, as we approached kew, came anumber of people running, and the

upperworks of a martian fighting-machineloomed in sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. we stood aghast at our danger, and had themartian looked down we must immediately have perished. we were so terrified that we dared not goon, 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 leatherheadwould not let me rest, and in the twilight i ventured out again.

i went through a shrubbery, and along apassage beside a big house standing in its own grounds, and so emerged upon the roadtowards kew. the curate i left in the shed, but he camehurrying after me. that second start was the most foolhardything i ever did. for it was manifest the martians were aboutus. no sooner had the curate overtaken me thanwe saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before or another, far away across themeadows in the direction of kew lodge. four or five little black figures hurriedbefore it across the green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident thismartian pursued them.

in three strides he was among them, andthey 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 greatmetallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman's basket hangs overhis shoulder. it was the first time i realised that themartians might have any other purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. we stood for a moment petrified, thenturned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled garden, fell into, ratherthan found, a fortunate ditch, and lay

there, scarce daring to whisper to eachother until the stars were out. i suppose it was nearly eleven o'clockbefore we gathered courage to start again, no longer venturing into the road, butsneaking along hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the darkness, he on the right and i on theleft, for the martians, who seemed to be all about us. in one place we blundered upon a scorchedand blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered dead bodies ofmen, 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 thenight was too dark for us to see into the side roads of the place. in sheen my companion suddenly complainedof faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one of the houses. the first house we entered, after a littledifficulty with the window, was a small semi-detached villa, and i found nothingeatable left in the place but some mouldy

cheese. there was, however, water to drink; and itook 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 awalled garden, and in the pantry of this domicile we found a store of food--twoloaves 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 therewere two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces. this pantry opened into a kind of wash-upkitchen, and in this was firewood; there was also a cupboard, in which we foundnearly 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 thesame bottle. the curate, who was still timorous andrestless, was now, oddly enough, for pushing on, and i was urging him to keep uphis strength by eating when the thing

happened that was to imprison us. "it can't be midnight yet," i said, andthen 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 seeminstantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash of glass, a crash and rattle offalling masonry all about us, and the plaster of the ceiling came down upon us,

smashing into a multitude of fragments uponour heads. i was knocked headlong across the flooragainst the oven handle and stunned. i was insensible for a long time, thecurate 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 whathad happened. then things came to me slowly.a bruise on my temple asserted itself. "are you better?" asked the curate in awhisper. at last i answered him.i sat up.

"don't move," he said. "the floor is covered with smashed crockeryfrom the dresser. you can't possibly move without making anoise, and i fancy they are outside." we both sat quite silent, so that we couldscarcely hear each other breathing. everything seemed deadly still, but oncesomething 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 ithappened 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, andfor a time i was inclined to think one of the great fighting-machines had stumbledagainst the house, as i had seen one stumble against the tower of sheppertonchurch. our situation was so strange andincomprehensible that for three or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcelymoved. and then the light filtered in, not throughthe window, which remained black, but through a triangular aperture between abeam and a heap of broken bricks in the

wall behind us. the interior of the kitchen we now sawgreyly for the first time. the window had been burst in by a mass ofgarden mould, which flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting and layabout our feet. outside, the soil was banked high againstthe house. at the top of the window frame we could seean uprooted drainpipe. the floor was littered with smashedhardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house was broken into, and since thedaylight shone in there, it was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed.

contrasting vividly with this ruin was theneat dresser, stained in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of copper and tinvessels below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements fluttering from thewalls above the kitchen range. as the dawn grew clearer, we saw throughthe gap in the wall the body of a martian, standing sentinel, i suppose, over thestill glowing cylinder. at the sight of that we crawled ascircumspectly as possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darknessof the scullery. abruptly the right interpretation dawnedupon my mind.

"the fifth cylinder," i whispered, "thefifth shot from mars, has struck this house and buried us under the ruins!" for a time the curate was silent, and thenhe whispered: "god have mercy upon us!"i heard him presently whimpering to himself. save for that sound we lay quite still inthe scullery; i for my part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on thefaint 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 thehissing of an engine. these noises, for the most partproblematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if anything to increase innumber as time wore on. presently a measured thudding and avibration that made everything about us quiver and the vessels in the pantry ringand shift, began and continued. once the light was eclipsed, and theghostly 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 spentthe 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 ibegan eating the faint noise i made stirred him up and i heard him crawling after me. > book two the earth under the martianschapter 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 himacross the room, lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon themartians. his shoulders were hunched, so that hishead was hidden from me.

i could hear a number of noises almost likethose in an engine shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. through the aperture in the wall i couldsee 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 thecurate, and then i advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amid the brokencrockery that littered the floor. i touched the curate's leg, and he startedso violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loudimpact. i gripped his arm, fearing he might cryout, 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 avertical slit open in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam iwas able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburbanroadway. vast, indeed, was the change that webeheld. the fifth cylinder must have fallen rightinto the midst of the house we had first visited. the building had vanished, completelysmashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the

blow. the cylinder lay now far beneath theoriginal foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit i hadlooked into at woking. the earth all round it had splashed underthat tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only word--and lay in heaped piles that hidthe masses of the adjacent houses. it had behaved exactly like mud under theviolent blow of a hammer. our house had collapsed backward; the frontportion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance thekitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in

by tons of earth on every side save towardsthe cylinder. over that aspect we hung now on the veryedge of the great circular pit the martians were engaged in making. the heavy beating sound was evidently justbehind us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like a veil acrossour peephole. the cylinder was already opened in thecentre 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 theevening sky.

at first i scarcely noticed the pit and thecylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of theextraordinary glittering mechanism i saw busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawlingslowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.the mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. it was one of those complicated fabricsthat have since been called handling- machines, and the study of which hasalready given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention.

as it dawned upon me first, it presented asort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinarynumber of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about itsbody. most of its arms were retracted, but withthree long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars whichlined the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. these, as it extracted them, were liftedout and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it. its motion was so swift, complex, andperfect that at first i did not see it as a

machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. the fighting-machines were coordinated andanimated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. people who have never seen thesestructures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfectdescriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise thatliving quality. i recall particularly the illustration ofone of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. the artist had evidently made a hasty studyof 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 ofeffect. the pamphlet containing these renderingshad a considerable vogue, and i mention them here simply to warn the reader againstthe impression they may have created. they were no more like the martians i sawin 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 didnot impress me as a machine, but as a

crablike creature with a glitteringintegument, the controlling martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent of thecrab's cerebral portion. but then i perceived the resemblance of itsgrey-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 shiftedto those other creatures, the real martians. already i had had a transient impression ofthese, 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 unearthlycreatures 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, themartians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very largedark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. in the back of this head or body--iscarcely know how to speak of it--was the

single tight tympanic surface, since knownto be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. in a group round the mouth were sixteenslender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. these bunches have since been named ratheraptly, by that distinguished anatomist, professor howes, the hands. even as i saw these martians for the firsttime they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but ofcourse, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this wasimpossible.

there is reason to suppose that on marsthey may have progressed upon them with some facility. the internal anatomy, i may remark here, asdissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. the greater part of the structure was thebrain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. besides this were the bulky lungs, intowhich the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. the pulmonary distress caused by the denseratmosphere and greater gravitational

attraction was only too evident in theconvulsive 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, didnot 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 bloodof other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. i have myself seen this being done, as ishall mention in its place.

but, squeamish as i may seem, i cannotbring myself to describe what i could not endure even to continue watching. let it suffice to say, blood obtained froma still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of alittle pipette into the recipient canal. the bare idea of this is no doubt horriblyrepulsive to us, but at the same time i think that we should remember how repulsiveour carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit. the physiological advantages of thepractice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of humantime and energy occasioned by eating and

the digestive process. our bodies are half made up of glands andtubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. the digestive processes and their reactionupon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds. men go happy or miserable as they havehealthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. but the martians were lifted above allthese organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.

their undeniable preference for men astheir source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains ofthe victims they had brought with them as provisions from mars. these creatures, to judge from theshrivelled 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 highand having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. two or three of these seem to have beenbrought in each cylinder, and all were

killed before earth was reached. it was just as well for them, for the mereattempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in theirbodies. and while i am engaged in this description,i may add in this place certain further details which, although they were not allevident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensivecreatures. in three other points their physiologydiffered strangely from ours. their organisms did not sleep, any morethan the heart of man sleeps.

since they had no extensive muscularmechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them. they had little or no sense of fatigue, itwould seem. on earth they could never have movedwithout effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. in twenty-four hours they did twenty-fourhours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants. in the next place, wonderful as it seems ina sexual world, the martians were absolutely without sex, and thereforewithout any of the tumultuous emotions that

arise from that difference among men. a young martian, there can now be nodispute, was really born upon earth during the war, and it was found attached to itsparent, partially budded off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the younganimals in the fresh-water polyp. in man, in all the higher terrestrialanimals, such a method of increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it wascertainly the primitive method. among the lower animals, up even to thosefirst cousins of the vertebrated animals, the tunicates, the two processes occur sideby side, but finally the sexual method superseded its competitor altogether.

on mars, however, just the reverse hasapparently been the case. it is worthy of remark that a certainspeculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the martianinvasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual martiancondition. his prophecy, i remember, appeared innovember 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 ultimatelysupersede limbs; the perfection of chemical

devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chinwere no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of naturalselection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the comingages. the brain alone remained a cardinalnecessity. only one other part of the body had astrong 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 asuppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. to me it is quite credible that themartians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual developmentof brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of thebody. without the body the brain would, ofcourse, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum ofthe human being. the last salient point in which the systemsof these creatures differed from ours was

in what one might have thought a verytrivial particular. micro-organisms, which cause so muchdisease and pain on earth, have either never appeared upon mars or martiansanitary science eliminated them ages ago. a hundred diseases, all the fevers andcontagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities,never enter the scheme of their life. and speaking of the differences between thelife on mars and terrestrial life, i may allude here to the curious suggestions ofthe 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 transitorygrowth, 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 thethird or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed acarmine fringe to the edges of our

triangular window. and afterwards i found it broadcastthroughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water. the martians had what appears to have beenan auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with avisual range not very different from ours except that, according to philips, blue andviolet were as black to them. it is commonly supposed that theycommunicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is asserted, forinstance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet (written evidently by someone not

an eye-witness of martian actions) to whichi have already alluded, and which, so far, has been the chief source of informationconcerning them. now no surviving human being saw so much ofthe 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 closelytime after time, and that i have seen four, five, and (once) six of them sluggishlyperforming the most elaborately complicated operations together without either sound orgesture. their peculiar hooting invariably precededfeeding; it had no modulation, and was, i believe, in no sense a signal, but merelythe expiration of air preparatory to the

suctional operation. i have a certain claim to at least anelementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter i am convinced--as firmly as iam convinced of anything--that the martians interchanged thoughts without any physicalintermediation. and i have been convinced of this in spiteof strong preconceptions. before the martian invasion, as anoccasional reader here or there may remember, i had written with some littlevehemence against the telepathic theory. the martians wore no clothing. their conceptions of ornament and decorumwere necessarily different from ours; and

not only were they evidently much lesssensible of changes of temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health at allseriously. yet though they wore no clothing, it was inthe other artificial additions to their bodily resources that their greatsuperiority 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 thebeginning 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 andtake a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. and of their appliances, perhaps nothing ismore wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature ofalmost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is notrace or suggestion of their use of wheels. one would have at least expected it inlocomotion. and in this connection it is curious toremark that even on this earth nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferredother expedients to its development.

and not only did the martians either notknow of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatussingularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to oneplane. almost all the joints of the machinerypresent a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifullycurved friction bearings. and while upon this matter of detail, it isremarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by asort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become

polarised and drawn closely and powerfullytogether when traversed by a current of electricity. in this way the curious parallelism toanimal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, wasattained. such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablikehandling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, i watched unpacking thecylinder. it seemed infinitely more alive than theactual martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectualtentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.

while i was still watching their sluggishmotions in the sunlight, and noting each strange detail of their form, the curatereminded 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 onlyone of us to peep through; and so i had to forego watching them for a time while heenjoyed that privilege. when i looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out ofthe cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and down

on the left a busy little digging mechanismhad 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 regularbeating 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 waswithout a directing martian at all. book two the earth under the martianschapter three the days of imprisonment the arrival of a second fighting-machinedrove us from our peephole into the scullery, for we feared that from hiselevation the martian might see down upon

us behind our barrier. at a later date we began to feel less indanger of their eyes, for to an eye in the dazzle of the sunlight outside our refugemust 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 wonderthat, in spite of the infinite danger in which we were between starvation and astill more terrible death, we could yet

struggle bitterly for that horribleprivilege of sight. we would race across the kitchen in agrotesque way between eagerness and the dread of making a noise, and strike eachother, and thrust and kick, within a few inches of exposure. the fact is that we had absolutelyincompatible dispositions and habits of thought and action, and our danger andisolation only accentuated the incompatibility. at halliford i had already come to hate thecurate's trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid rigidity of mind.

his endless muttering monologue vitiatedevery effort i made to think out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent upand intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. he was as lacking in restraint as a sillywoman. he would weep for hours together, and iverily believe that to the very end this spoiled child of life thought his weaktears in some way efficacious. and i would sit in the darkness unable tokeep my mind off him by reason of his importunities. he ate more than i did, and it was in vaini pointed out that our only chance of life

was to stop in the house until the martianshad done with their pit, that in that long patience a time might presently come whenwe should need food. he ate and drank impulsively in heavy mealsat long intervals. he slept little. as the days wore on, his utter carelessnessof any consideration so intensified our distress and danger that i had, much as iloathed 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 faceneither god nor man, who face not even themselves. it is disagreeable for me to recall andwrite these things, but i set them down that my story may lack nothing. those who have escaped the dark andterrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our finaltragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but notwhat 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 thepit. let me return to those first newexperiences of mine. after a long time i ventured back to thepeephole, to find that the new-comers had been reinforced by the occupants of nofewer than three of the fighting-machines. these last had brought with them certainfresh appliances that stood in an orderly manner about the cylinder.

the second handling-machine was nowcompleted, and was busied in serving one of the novel contrivances the big machine hadbrought. this was a body resembling a milk can inits general form, above which oscillated a pear-shaped receptacle, and from which astream of white powder flowed into a circular basin below. the oscillatory motion was imparted to thisby 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 receptacleabove, while with another arm it periodically opened a door and removed

rusty and blackened clinkers from themiddle part of the machine. another steely tentacle directed the powderfrom the basin along a ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden fromme by the mound of bluish dust. from this unseen receiver a little threadof green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. as i looked, the handling-machine, with afaint and musical clinking, extended, telescopic fashion, a tentacle that hadbeen a moment before a mere blunt projection, until its end was hidden behindthe mound of clay. in another second it had lifted a bar ofwhite aluminium into sight, untarnished as

yet, and shining dazzlingly, and depositedit in a growing stack of bars that stood at the side of the pit. between sunset and starlight this dexterousmachine must have made more than a hundred such bars out of the crude clay, and themound of bluish dust rose steadily until it topped the side of the pit. the contrast between the swift and complexmovements of these contrivances and the inert panting clumsiness of their masterswas acute, and for days i had to tell myself repeatedly that these latter wereindeed the living of the two things. the curate had possession of the slit whenthe first men were brought to the pit.

i was sitting below, huddled up, listeningwith 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 creptbeside me in the darkness, inarticulate, gesticulating, and for a moment i sharedhis panic. his gesture suggested a resignation of theslit, and after a little while my curiosity gave me courage, and i rose up, steppedacross him, and clambered up to it. at first i could see no reason for hisfrantic behaviour. the twilight had now come, the stars werelittle and faint, but the pit was

illuminated by the flickering green firethat came from the aluminium-making. the whole picture was a flickering schemeof 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 beseen, the mound of blue-green powder had risen to cover them from sight, and afighting-machine, with its legs contracted, crumpled, and abbreviated, stood across thecorner of the pit. and then, amid the clangour of themachinery, came a drifting suspicion of human voices, that i entertained at firstonly to dismiss.

i crouched, watching this fighting-machineclosely, satisfying myself now for the first time that the hood did indeed containa martian. as the green flames lifted i could see theoily gleam of his integument and the brightness of his eyes. and suddenly i heard a yell, and saw a longtentacle reaching over the shoulder of the machine to the little cage that hunchedupon its back. then something--something strugglingviolently--was lifted high against the sky, a black, vague enigma against thestarlight; and as this black object came down again, i saw by the green brightnessthat 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 ofconsiderable consequence. i could see his staring eyes and gleams oflight on his studs and watch chain. he vanished behind the mound, and for amoment there was silence. and then began a shrieking and a sustainedand cheerful hooting from the martians. i slid down the rubbish, struggled to myfeet, clapped my hands over my ears, and bolted into the scullery. the curate, who had been crouching silentlywith his arms over his head, looked up as i

passed, cried out quite loudly at mydesertion 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 secondday, i was able to consider our position with great clearness. the curate, i found, was quite incapable ofdiscussion; this new and culminating atrocity had robbed him of all vestiges ofreason or forethought.

practically he had already sunk to thelevel of an animal. but as the saying goes, i gripped myselfwith both hands. it grew upon my mind, once i could face thefacts, that terrible as our position was, there was as yet no justification forabsolute despair. our chief chance lay in the possibility ofthe martians making the pit nothing more than a temporary encampment. or even if they kept it permanently, theymight not consider it necessary to guard it, and a chance of escape might beafforded us. i also weighed very carefully thepossibility of our digging a way out in a

direction away from the pit, but thechances of our emerging within sight of some sentinel fighting-machine seemed atfirst too great. and i should have had to do all the diggingmyself. the curate would certainly have failed me. it was on the third day, if my memoryserves me right, that i saw the lad killed. it was the only occasion on which iactually saw the martians feed. after that experience i avoided the hole inthe 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 ihad made a hole about a couple of feet deep

the loose earth collapsed noisily, and idid not dare continue. i lost heart, and lay down on the sculleryfloor for a long time, having no spirit even to move. and after that i abandoned altogether theidea of escaping by excavation. it says much for the impression themartians had made upon me that at first i entertained little or no hope of our escapebeing brought about by their overthrow through any human effort. but on the fourth or fifth night i heard asound like heavy guns. it was very late in the night, and the moonwas shining brightly.

the martians had taken away the excavating-machine, and, save for a fighting-machine that stood in the remoter bank of the pitand a handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a corner of the pit immediately beneath my peephole, the placewas 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; savefor 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 boomingexactly like the sound of great guns. six distinct reports i counted, and after along interval six again. and that was all. book two the earth under the martianschapter four the death of the curate it was on the sixth day of our imprisonmentthat i peeped for the last time, and presently found myself alone. instead of keeping close to me and tryingto 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 thescullery. in the darkness i heard the curatedrinking. i snatched in the darkness, and my fingerscaught 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 eachother. in the end i planted myself between him andthe food, and told him of my determination to begin a discipline. i divided the food in the pantry, intorations 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 wasawake. 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 tome 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 inundertones and wrestling contests.

there were times when i beat and kicked himmadly, times when i cajoled and persuaded him, and once i tried to bribe him with thelast bottle of burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which i could getwater. but neither force nor kindness availed; hewas indeed beyond reason. he would neither desist from his attacks onthe food nor from his noisy babbling to the rudimentary precautions to keep ourimprisonment endurable he would not observe. slowly i began to realise the completeoverthrow of his intelligence, to perceive that my sole companion in this close andsickly darkness was a man insane.

from certain vague memories i am inclinedto think my own mind wandered at times. i had strange and hideous dreams whenever islept. it sounds paradoxical, but i am inclined tothink that the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me asane man. on the eighth day he began to talk aloudinstead 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, whatfolly!--when i should have stood up, though i died for it, and called upon them torepent--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 himnot to. he perceived a hold on me--he threatened hewould shout and bring the martians upon us. for a time that scared me; but anyconcession 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, mingledwith a torrent of half-sane and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham ofgod's service, such as made me pity him. then he slept awhile, and began again withrenewed strength, so loudly that i must needs make him desist. "be still!"i implored.

he rose to his knees, for he had beensitting in the darkness near the copper. "i have been still too long," he said, in atone 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 reasonof 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 extendinghis 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 ihad overtaken him. with one last touch of humanity i turnedthe blade back and struck him with the

butt. he went headlong forward and lay stretchedon the ground. i stumbled over him and stood panting.he lay still. suddenly i heard a noise without, the runand smash of slipping plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall wasdarkened. i looked up and saw the lower surface of ahandling-machine coming slowly across the hole. one of its gripping limbs curled amid thedebris; another limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams.i stood petrified, staring.

then i saw through a sort of glass platenear the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes of amartian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came feeling slowlythrough the hole. i turned by an effort, stumbled over thecurate, and stopped at the scullery door. the tentacle was now some way, two yards ormore, in the room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements, thisway and that. for a while i stood fascinated by thatslow, fitful advance. then, with a faint, hoarse cry, i forcedmyself across the scullery. i trembled violently; i could scarcelystand upright.

i opened the door of the coal cellar, andstood there in the darkness staring at the faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, andlistening. had the martian seen me? what was it doing now? something was moving to and fro there, veryquietly; every now and then it tapped against the wall, or started on itsmovements 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 isaw the martian, in its briareus of a handling-machine, scrutinizing the curate'shead. i thought at once that it would infer mypresence from the mark of the blow i had given him. i crept back to the coal cellar, shut thedoor, and began to cover myself up as much as i could, and as noiselessly as possiblein the darkness, among the firewood and coal therein. every now and then i paused, rigid, to hearif the martian had thrust its tentacles

through the opening again.then the faint metallic jingle returned. i traced it slowly feeling over thekitchen. presently i heard it nearer--in thescullery, as i judged. i thought that its length might beinsufficient to reach me. i prayed copiously.it passed, scraping faintly across the cellar door. an age of almost intolerable suspenseintervened; 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 andtouching and examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. it was like a black worm swaying its blindhead 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 grippedsomething--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 slightlyshifting my position, which had become cramped, and then listened.i whispered passionate prayers for safety. then i heard the slow, deliberate soundcreeping towards me again. slowly, slowly it drew near, scratchingagainst the walls and tapping the furniture. while i was still doubtful, it rappedsmartly against the cellar door and closed

it. i heard it go into the pantry, and thebiscuit-tins rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against thecellar door. then silence that passed into an infinityof suspense. had it gone?at last i decided that it had. it came into the scullery no more; but ilay 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 venturedso far from my security.

book two the earth under the martianschapter five the stillness my first act before i went into the pantrywas 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 onthe previous day. at that discovery i despaired for the firsttime. i took no food, or no drink either, on theeleventh or the twelfth day. at first my mouth and throat were parched,and my strength ebbed sensibly. i sat about in the darkness of thescullery, in a state of despondent

wretchedness.my mind ran on eating. i thought i had become deaf, for the noisesof movement i had been accustomed to hear from the pit had ceased absolutely. i did not feel strong enough to crawlnoiselessly to the peephole, or i would have gone there. on the twelfth day my throat was so painfulthat, 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 andtainted rain water. i was greatly refreshed by this, andemboldened 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 morewater, and dozed and thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans ofescape. whenever i dozed i dreamt of horriblephantasms, 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 wasno longer grey, but red.

to my disordered imagination it seemed thecolour of blood. on the fourteenth day i went into thekitchen, and i was surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown rightacross 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 iheard 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 nosepeering 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 comeinto the place quietly i should be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in anycase, it would be advisable to kill him, lest his actions attracted the attention ofthe martians. i crept forward, saying "good dog!" verysoftly; but he suddenly withdrew his head and disappeared. i listened--i was not deaf--but certainlythe pit was still. i heard a sound like the flutter of abird's wings, and a hoarse croaking, but that was all.

for a long while i lay close to thepeephole, but not daring to move aside the red plants that obscured it. once or twice i heard a faint pitter-patterlike the feet of the dog going hither and thither on the sand far below me, and therewere more birdlike sounds, but that was all. at length, encouraged by the silence, ilooked out. except in the corner, where a multitude ofcrows 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 myeyes.

all the machinery had gone. save for the big mound of greyish-bluepowder in one corner, certain bars of aluminium in another, the black birds, andthe skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty circular pit in the sand. slowly i thrust myself out through the redweed, and stood upon the mound of rubble. i could see in any direction save behindme, to the north, and neither martians nor sign of martians were to be seen. the pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but alittle way along the rubbish afforded a practicable slope to the summit of theruins.

my chance of escape had come. i began to tremble. i hesitated for some time, and then, in agust of desperate resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, i scrambledto 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 inthe 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 smashedbrickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shapedplants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute theirfooting. the trees near me were dead and brown, butfurther a network of red thread scaled the still living stems. the neighbouring houses had all beenwrecked, 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 theirroofless rooms. below me was the great pit, with the crowsstruggling for its refuse.

a number of other birds hopped about amongthe ruins. far away i saw a gaunt cat slinkcrouchingly along a wall, but traces of men there were none. the day seemed, by contrast with my recentconfinement, dazzlingly bright, the sky a glowing blue. a gentle breeze kept the red weed thatcovered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying.and oh! the sweetness of the air! book two the earth under the martianschapter six the work of fifteen days for some time i stood tottering on themound regardless of my safety.

within that noisome den from which i hademerged i had thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. i had not realised what had been happeningto the world, had not anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. i had expected to see sheen in ruins--ifound about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet. for that moment i touched an emotion beyondthe common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. i felt as a rabbit might feel returning tohis burrow and suddenly confronted by the

work of a dozen busy navvies digging thefoundations of a house. i felt the first inkling of a thing thatpresently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense ofdethronement, a persuasion that i was no longer a master, but an animal among theanimals, under the martian heel. with us it would be as with them, to lurkand watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away. but so soon as this strangeness had beenrealised it passed, and my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismalfast. 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 areassuring sense of hiding. the wall was some six feet high, and when iattempted to clamber it i found i could not lift my feet to the crest. so i went along by the side of it, and cameto a corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into thegarden i coveted. here i found some young onions, a couple ofgladiolus 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 anavenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and tolimp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthlyregion of the pit. some way farther, in a grassy place, was agroup of mushrooms which also i devoured, and then i came upon a brown sheet offlowing shallow water, where meadows used to be. these fragments of nourishment served onlyto whet my hunger. at first i was surprised at this flood in ahot, dry summer, but afterwards i

discovered that it was caused by thetropical exuberance of the red weed. directly this extraordinary growthencountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. its seeds were simply poured down into thewater of the wey and thames, and its swiftly growing and titanic water frondsspeedily choked both those rivers. at putney, as i afterwards saw, the bridgewas almost lost in a tangle of this weed, and at richmond, too, the thames waterpoured 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 redswamp, whose margin i explored, and much of the desolation the martians had caused wasconcealed. in the end the red weed succumbed almost asquickly 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, allterrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like athing already dead. the fronds became bleached, and thenshrivelled and brittle.

they broke off at the least touch, and thewaters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out tosea. 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 animpulse, gnawed some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,metallic taste. i found the water was sufficiently shallowfor me to wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but theflood evidently got deeper towards the river, and i turned back to mortlake. i managed to make out the road by means ofoccasional ruins of its villas and fences

and lamps, and so presently i got out ofthis spate and made my way to the hill going up towards roehampton and came out onputney common. here the scenery changed from the strangeand unfamiliar to the wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited thedevastation of a cyclone, and in a few score yards i would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with theirblinds 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 talltrees along the lane were free from the red creeper.

i hunted for food among the trees, findingnothing, and i also raided a couple of silent houses, but they had already beenbroken into and ransacked. i rested for the remainder of the daylightin 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-lookingdogs, but both hurried circuitously away from the advances i made them. near roehampton i had seen two humanskeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean--and in the wood by me i foundthe crushed and scattered bones of several

cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. but though i gnawed parts of these in mymouth, there was nothing to be got from them. after sunset i struggled on along the roadtowards putney, where i think the heat-ray must have been used for some reason. and in the garden beyond roehampton i got aquantity 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 wassingularly desolate: blackened trees,

blackened, desolate ruins, and down thehill 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 changehad come. for a time i believed that mankind had beenswept out of existence, and that i stood there alone, the last man left alive. hard by the top of putney hill i came uponanother skeleton, with the arms dislocated and removed several yards from the rest ofthe body. as i proceeded i became more and moreconvinced 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 andleft the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. perhaps even now they were destroyingberlin or paris, or it might be they had gone northward. book two the earth under the martianschapter seven the man on putney hill i spent that night in the inn that standsat the top of putney hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flightto leatherhead.

i will not tell the needless trouble i hadbreaking into that house--afterwards i found the front door was on the latch--norhow i ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, ifound a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple.the place had been already searched and emptied. in the bar i afterwards found some biscuitsand sandwiches that had been overlooked. the latter i could not eat, they were toorotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets.

i lit no lamps, fearing some martian mightcome beating that part of london for food in the night. before i went to bed i had an interval ofrestlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering out for some sign of thesemonsters. i slept little. as i lay in bed i found myself thinkingconsecutively--a thing i do not remember to have done since my last argument with thecurate. during all the intervening time my mentalcondition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupidreceptivity.

but in the night my brain, reinforced, isuppose, by the food i had eaten, grew clear again, and i thought. three things struggled for possession of mymind: the killing of the curate, the whereabouts of the martians, and thepossible fate of my wife. the former gave me no sensation of horroror remorse to recall; i saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitelydisagreeable 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 ofaccidents leading inevitably to that.

i felt no condemnation; yet the memory,static, unprogressive, haunted me. in the silence of the night, with thatsense 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 conversationfrom 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--grimchance had taken no heed of that. had i foreseen, i should have left him athalliford.

but i did not foresee; and crime is toforesee and do. and i set this down as i have set all thisstory down, as it was. there were no witnesses--all these things imight have concealed. but i set it down, and the reader must formhis judgment as he will. and when, by an effort, i had set asidethat picture of a prostrate body, i faced the problem of the martians and the fate ofmy wife. for the former i had no data; i couldimagine a hundred things, and so, unhappily, i could for the latter.and suddenly that night became terrible. i found myself sitting up in bed, staringat the dark.

i found myself praying that the heat-raymight have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. since the night of my return fromleatherhead i had not prayed. i had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, hadprayed 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 hadcome, i, who had talked with god, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hidingplace--a creature scarcely larger, an

inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be huntedand killed. perhaps they also prayed confidently togod. 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 theeastern sky glowed pink, and was fretted with little golden clouds. in the road that runs from the top ofputney hill to wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent thatmust have poured londonward on the sunday

night after the fighting began. there was a little two-wheeled cartinscribed with the name of thomas lobb, greengrocer, new malden, with a smashedwheel 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 ofblood-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 themsuddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me i mightfind or learn there whither the surrey people had fled. i knew i wanted to find my wife, that myheart ached for her and the world of men, but i had no clear idea how the findingmight be done. i was also sharply aware now of my intenseloneliness. from the corner i went, under cover of athicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of wimbledon common, stretching wide and far. that dark expanse was lit in patches byyellow 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 andvitality. i came upon a busy swarm of little frogs ina swampy place among the trees. i stopped to look at them, drawing a lessonfrom their stout resolve to live. and presently, turning suddenly, with anodd 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, regardingme.

as i drew nearer i perceived he was dressedin clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had beendragged through a culvert. nearer, i distinguished the green slime ofditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. his black hair fell over his eyes, and hisface 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 tenyards 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 thecommon. 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 mywife 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 towardswalton 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 glareyou can just see them moving. by daylight you can't. but nearer--i haven't seen them--" (hecounted on his fingers) "five days. then i saw a couple across hammersmith waycarrying something big. and the night before last"--he stopped andspoke impressively--"it was just a matter of lights, but it was something up in theair.

i believe they've built a flying-machine,and are learning to fly." i stopped, on hands and knees, for we hadcome 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 goround the world." he nodded."they will. but---- it will relieve things over here abit. 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 arrivedat 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 andcrippled 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 thesefive 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 todevise 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 theobservatory. "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 italter the end? it's just men and ants.

there's the ants builds their cities, livetheir lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the way, and thenthey 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 itsquealing 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 awayto 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, 'andit 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'recaught as we're wanted. a martian has only to go a few miles to geta 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 andships, 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 cagesand 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 ournot having the sense to keep quiet--

worrying them with guns and such foolery. and losing our heads, and rushing off incrowds 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 thethings they couldn't bring with them, getting things ready for the rest of theirpeople. very likely that's why the cylinders havestopped for a bit, for fear of hitting those who are here. and instead of our rushing about blind, onthe howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up, we've got to fixourselves 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 whatthe 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 livefor?" the artilleryman looked at me for a moment. "there won't be any more blessed concertsfor a million years or so; there won't be

any royal academy of arts, and no nicelittle feeds at restaurants. if it's amusement you're after, i reckonthe game is up. if you've got any drawing-room manners or adislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'emaway. 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 whatinsides you've got, too, before long. we aren't going to be exterminated.

and i don't mean to be caught either, andtamed 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 achance. and we've got to live and keep independentwhile we learn. see! that's what has to be done."

i stared, astonished, and stirredprofoundly 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 gotto be. that's why i watched you.

i had my doubts.you're slender. i didn't know that it was you, you see, orjust how you'd been buried. all these--the sort of people that lived inthese 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 prouddreams 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 catchtheir little season-ticket train, for fear they'd get dismissed if they didn't;

working at businesses they were afraid totake the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in time fordinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because theywanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in theirone little miserable skedaddle through the lives insured and a bit invested for fearof accidents. and on sundays--fear of the hereafter.as if hell was built for rabbits! well, the martians will just be a godsendto these. nice roomy cages, fattening food, carefulbreeding, no worry.

after a week or so chasing about the fieldsand 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 therewere martians to take care of them. and the bar loafers, and mashers, andsingers--i can imagine them. i can imagine them," he said, with a sortof sombre gratification. "there'll be any amount of sentiment andreligion loose among them. there's hundreds of things i saw with myeyes 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, andthat they ought to be doing something. now whenever things are so that a lot ofpeople feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weakwith a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit topersecution 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 andhymns and piety. and those of a less simple sort will workin a bit of--what is it?--eroticism."

he paused. "very likely these martians will make petsof some of them; train them to do tricks-- who knows?--get sentimental over the petboy who grew up and had to be killed. and some, maybe, they will train to huntus." "no," i cried, "that's impossible!no human being----" "what's the good of going on with suchlies?" 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, ifthey come after me!" and subsided into a

grim meditation.i sat contemplating these things. i could find nothing to bring against thisman's reasoning. in the days before the invasion no onewould have questioned my intellectual superiority to his--i, a professed andrecognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that i hadscarcely 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 mencan 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 gosavage--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 thinkhorrible things; but under this london are miles and miles--hundreds of miles--and afew days rain and london empty will leave them sweet and clean. the main drains are big enough and airyenough for anyone. then there's cellars, vaults, stores, fromwhich 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 thatdrifts 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 rollingeyes. 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, tolive and taint the race. and they can't be happy. moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it'sthe 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, sciencebooks. that's where men like you come in. we must go to the british museum and pickall 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 theywon't hunt us down if they have all they want, and think we're just harmlessvermin." the artilleryman paused and laid a brownhand upon my arm. "after all, it may not be so much we mayhave to learn before--just imagine this: four or five of their fighting machinessuddenly starting off--heat-rays right and

left, and not a martian in 'em. not a martian in 'em, but men--men who havelearned 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 abust like that? i reckon the martians'll open theirbeautiful 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, swishcomes the heat-ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own." for a while the imaginative daring of theartilleryman, and the tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated mymind. i believed unhesitatingly both in hisforecast 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 thoughtsabout his subject, and mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening,distracted by apprehension. we talked in this manner through the earlymorning time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky formartians, hurried precipitately to the house on putney hill where he had made hislair. it was the coal cellar of the place, andwhen i saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten yardslong, which he designed to reach to the main drain on putney hill--i had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams andhis powers.

such a hole i could have dug in a day. but i believed in him sufficiently to workwith 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 achingstrangeness of the world in this steady labour. as we worked, i turned his project over inmy mind, and presently objections and

doubts began to arise; but i worked thereall the morning, so glad was i to find myself with a purpose again. after working an hour i began to speculateon the distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had ofmissing it altogether. my immediate trouble was why we should digthis long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of themanholes, and work back to the house. it seemed to me, too, that the house wasinconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of tunnel. and just as i was beginning to face thesethings, 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 littlehesitation 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," isaid, "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 aladder peeping out of the roof door. no martians were to be seen, and weventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under shelter of the parapet. from this position a shrubbery hid thegreater 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 aboutthe old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set withshrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. it was strange how entirely dependent boththese 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 andhydrangeas, 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 thesort of people who still remained in london. "one night last week," he said, "some foolsgot the electric light in order, and there was all regent street and the circusablaze, crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing andshouting till dawn. a man who was there told me. and as the day came they became aware of afighting-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 nastyturn. he came down the road towards them, andpicked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened to run away." grotesque gleam of a time no history willever fully describe! from that, in answer to my questions, hecame round to his grandiose plans again. he grew enthusiastic. he talked so eloquently of the possibilityof capturing a fighting-machine that i more than half believed in him again. but now that i was beginning to understandsomething of his quality, i could divine

the stress he laid on doing nothingprecipitately. and i noted that now there was no questionthat 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 resumedigging, and when he suggested a meal, i was nothing loath. he became suddenly very generous, and whenwe 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 agreat occasion. "there's some champagne in the cellar," hesaid.

"we can dig better on this thames-sideburgundy," 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 strengthwhile we may. look at these blistered hands!" and pursuant to this idea of a holiday, heinsisted upon playing cards after we had eaten. he taught me euchre, and after dividinglondon between us, i taking the northern side and he the southern, we played forparish points.

grotesque and foolish as this will seem tothe sober reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, i found thecard game and several others we played extremely interesting. strange mind of man! that, with our speciesupon the edge of extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect beforeus 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 beathim at three tough chess games. when dark came we decided to take the risk,and lit a lamp.

after an interminable string of games, wesupped, 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 themorning. he was still optimistic, but it was a lesskinetic, 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 lookat 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 indarkness; the fires near kensington glowed redly, and now and then an orange-redtongue 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, andthen i knew that it must be the red weed from which this faint irradiationproceeded. with that realisation my dormant sense ofwonder, 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 ofhampstead 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 themidnight prayer to the foolish card- playing.i had a violent revulsion of feeling. i remember i flung away the cigar with acertain wasteful symbolism. my folly came to me with glaringexaggeration.

i seemed a traitor to my wife and to mykind; i was filled with remorse. i resolved to leave this strangeundisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on intolondon. there, it seemed to me, i had the bestchance 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 martianschapter eight dead london after i had parted from the artilleryman, iwent 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 patchesby the spreading disease that presently removed it so swiftly. at the corner of the lane that runs toputney bridge station i found a man lying. he was as black as a sweep with the blackdust, alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. i could get nothing from him but curses andfurious lunges at my head. i think i should have stayed by him but forthe brutal expression of his face. there was black dust along the roadway fromthe bridge onwards, and it grew thicker in

fulham.the streets were horribly quiet. i got food--sour, hard, and mouldy, butquite eatable--in a baker's shop here. some way towards walham green the streetsbecame clear of powder, and i passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noiseof the burning was an absolute relief. going on towards brompton, the streets werequiet again. here i came once more upon the black powderin the streets and upon dead bodies. i saw altogether about a dozen in thelength of the fulham road. they had been dead many days, so that ihurried quickly past them. the black powder covered them over, andsoftened their outlines.

one or two had been disturbed by dogs. where there was no black powder, it wascuriously like a sunday in the city, with the closed shops, the houses locked up andthe 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 inone place, but apparently the thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chainsand a watch lay scattered on the pavement. i did not trouble to touch them.

farther on was a tattered woman in a heapon a doorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled down her rustybrown dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool across thepavement. 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 ofdeath--it was the stillness of suspense, of expectation. at any time the destruction that hadalready singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had annihilated ealingand 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 mysenses. it was a sobbing alternation of two notes,"ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on perpetually. when i passed streets that ran northward itgrew 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 kensingtongardens, wondering at this strange, remote wailing. it was as if that mighty desert of houseshad found a voice for its fear and solitude. "ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," wailed thatsuperhuman note--great waves of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway,between the tall buildings on each side. i turned northwards, marvelling, towardsthe iron gates of hyde park. i had half a mind to break into the naturalhistory museum and find my way up to the

summits of the towers, in order to seeacross the park. but i decided to keep to the ground, wherequick hiding was possible, and so went on up the exhibition road. all the large mansions on each side of theroad were empty and still, and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. at the top, near the park gate, i came upona 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 ofthe dead? why was i alone when all london was lyingin state, and in its black shroud? i felt intolerably lonely.

my mind ran on old friends that i hadforgotten for years. i thought of the poisons in the chemists'shops, of the liquors the wine merchants stored; i recalled the two sodden creaturesof despair, who so far as i knew, shared the city with myself.... i came into oxford street by the marblearch, and here again were black powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous smellfrom the gratings of the cellars of some of the houses. i grew very thirsty after the heat of mylong walk. with infinite trouble i managed to breakinto a public-house and get food and drink.

i was weary after eating, and went into theparlour 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 outsome biscuits and a cheese in the bar-- there was a meat safe, but it containednothing but maggots--i wandered on through the silent residential squares to baker street--portman square is the only one ican name--and so came out at last upon regent's park. and as i emerged from the top of bakerstreet, i saw far away over the trees in

the clearness of the sunset the hood of themartian 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, forno 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 thanafraid. i turned back away from the park and struckinto park road, intending to skirt the park, went along under the shelter of theterraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling martian from thedirection of st. john's wood. a couple of hundred yards out of bakerstreet i heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a dog with a piece of putrescent redmeat in his jaws coming headlong towards me, and then a pack of starving mongrels inpursuit of him. he made a wide curve to avoid me, as thoughhe feared i might prove a fresh competitor. as the yelping died away down the silentroad, 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 fallenacross the road. it was only as i clambered among the ruinsthat i saw, with a start, this mechanical samson lying, with its tentacles bent andsmashed 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 beenoverwhelmed in its overthrow. it seemed to me then that this might havehappened by a handling-machine escaping

from the guidance of its martian. i could not clamber among the ruins to seeit, and the twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seatwas smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the martian that the dogs had left, wereinvisible to me. wondering still more at all that i hadseen, i pushed on towards primrose hill. far away, through a gap in the trees, i sawa second martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards thezoological gardens, and silent. a little beyond the ruins about the smashedhandling-machine i came upon the red weed again, and found the regent's canal, aspongy 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 andtall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing black. all about me the red weed clambered amongthe 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

then suddenly a change, the passing ofsomething--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 likethe eye sockets of skulls. about me my imagination found a thousandnoiseless enemies moving. terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. in front of me the road became pitchy blackas 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 ranheadlong from this unendurable stillness

towards kilburn. i hid from the night and the silence, untillong 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, andpresently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, the curve ofprimrose hill. on the summit, towering up to the fadingstars, 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 ofkilling 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 birdswas circling and clustering about the hood. at that my heart gave a bound, and i beganrunning along the road. i hurried through the red weed that chokedst. edmund's terrace (i waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushingdown from the waterworks towards the albert road), and emerged upon the grass beforethe rising of the sun. great mounds had been heaped about thecrest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of

it--it was the final and largest place themartians had made--and from behind these heaps there rose a thin smoke against thesky. against the sky line an eager dog ran anddisappeared. the thought that had flashed into my mindgrew real, grew credible. i felt no fear, only a wild, tremblingexultation, 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 theearthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was belowme.

a mighty space it was, with giganticmachines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelterplaces. and scattered about it, some in theiroverturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen ofthem stark and silent and laid in a row, were the martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria againstwhich 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 andmany men might have foreseen had not terror

and disaster blinded our minds. these germs of disease have taken toll ofhumanity since the beginning of things-- taken toll of our prehuman ancestors sincelife began here. but by virtue of this natural selection ofour kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without astruggle, 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, anddirectly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic alliesbegan to work their overthrow. already when i watched them they wereirrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even

as they went to and fro.it was inevitable. by the toll of a billion deaths man hasbought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would stillbe 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, nearlyfifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that musthave seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. to me also at that time this death wasincomprehensible.

all i knew was that these things that hadbeen alive and so terrible to men were dead. for a moment i believed that thedestruction of sennacherib had been repeated, that god had repented, that theangel of death had slain them in the night. i stood staring into the pit, and my heartlightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me withhis rays. the pit was still in darkness; the mightyengines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in theirtortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards thelight.

a multitude of dogs, i could hear, foughtover the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. across the pit on its farther lip, flat andvast and strange, lay the great flying- machine with which they had beenexperimenting 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 lookedup at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered redshreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of primrosehill.

i turned and looked down the slope of thehill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two martians that i had seenovernight, just as death had overtaken the one had died, even as it had beencrying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice had gone onperpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted. they glittered now, harmless tripod towersof shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun. all about the pit, and saved as by amiracle from everlasting destruction, stretched the great mother of cities.

those who have only seen london veiled inher sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty ofthe silent wilderness of houses. eastward, over the blackened ruins of thealbert terrace and the splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in aclear sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught thelight and glared with a white intensity. northward were kilburn and hampsted, blueand crowded with houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond themartians, the green waves of regent's park, the langham hotel, the dome of the albert hall, the imperial institute, and the giantmansions of the brompton road came out

clear and little in the sunrise, the jaggedruins 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 thesunrise, and injured, i saw for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on itswestern side. and as i looked at this wide expanse ofhouses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as i thought of themultitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift andruthless destruction that had hung over it

all; when i realised that the shadow hadbeen rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more alive andpowerful, 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 overthe country--leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd--thethousands who had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, would beat again inthe empty streets and pour across the

vacant squares.whatever destruction was done, the hand of the destroyer was stayed. all the gaunt wrecks, the blackenedskeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the hill, wouldpresently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and ringing with the tappingof their trowels. at the thought i extended my hands towardsthe sky and began thanking god. in a year, thought i--in a year... with overwhelming force came the thought ofmyself, of my wife, and the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceasedfor ever.

book two the earth under the martianschapter nine wreckage and now comes the strangest thing in mystory. 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 thesummit of primrose hill. and then i forget. of the next three days i know nothing. i have learned since that, so far from mybeing the first discoverer of the martian overthrow, several such wanderers as myselfhad 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 totelegraph to paris. thence the joyful news had flashed all overthe world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly flashedinto frantic illuminations; they knew of it in dublin, edinburgh, manchester, birmingham, at the time when i stood uponthe verge of the pit. already men, weeping with joy, as i haveheard, shouting and staying their work to shake hands and shout, were making uptrains, even as near as crewe, to descend

upon london. the church bells that had ceased afortnight 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 thestreets of st. john's wood. they have told me since that i was singingsome insane doggerel about "the last man left alive!hurrah! the last man left alive!" troubled as they were with their ownaffairs, these people, whose name, much as i would like to express my gratitude tothem, i may not even give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me,sheltered me, and protected me from myself.

apparently they had learned something of mystory from me during the days of my lapse. very gently, when my mind was assuredagain, did they break to me what they had learned of the fate of leatherhead. two days after i was imprisoned it had beendestroyed, with every soul in it, by a martian. he had swept it out of existence, as itseemed, without any provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the merewantonness of power. i was a lonely man, and they were very kindto me. i was a lonely man and a sad one, and theybore with me.

i remained with them four days after myrecovery. all that time i felt a vague, a growingcraving to look once more on whatever remained of the little life that seemed sohappy and bright in my past. it was a mere hopeless desire to feast uponmy misery. they dissuaded me.they did all they could to divert me from this morbidity. but at last i could resist the impulse nolonger, 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 hadlately been so dark and strange and empty.

already they were busy with returningpeople; in places even there were shops open, and i saw a drinking fountain runningwater. i remember how mockingly bright the dayseemed 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 proportionof the population could have been slain. but then i noticed how yellow were theskins of the people i met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright theireyes, and that every other man still wore

his dirty rags. their faces seemed all with one of twoexpressions--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 indiscriminatelydistributing bread sent us by the french government.the ribs of the few horses showed dismally. haggard special constables with whitebadges stood at the corners of every street. i saw little of the mischief wrought by themartians until i reached wellington street,

and there i saw the red weed clamberingover the buttresses of waterloo bridge. at the corner of the bridge, too, i saw oneof the common contrasts of that grotesque time--a sheet of paper flaunting against athicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. it was the placard of the first newspaperto resume publication--the daily mail. i bought a copy for a blackened shilling ifound in my pocket. most of it was in blank, but the solitarycompositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme ofadvertisement stereo on the back page. the matter he printed was emotional; thenews organisation had not as yet found its

way back. i learned nothing fresh except that alreadyin one week the examination of the martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. among other things, the article assured mewhat 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 withfolded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit

devastation that flowed past the windows. and just outside the terminus the trainjolted over temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses wereblackened ruins. to clapham junction the face of london wasgrimy with powder of the black smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms andrain, and at clapham junction the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working sideby side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty relaying. all down the line from there the aspect ofthe country was gaunt and unfamiliar;

wimbledon particularly had suffered. walton, by virtue of its unburned pinewoods, 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 andpickled 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 crimsonwith the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut with purple shadows, and verypainful to the eye. one's gaze went with infinite relief fromthe scorched greys and sullen reds of the foreground to the blue-green softness ofthe eastward hills. the line on the london side of wokingstation was still undergoing repair, so i descended at byfleet station and took theroad to maybury, past the place where i and

the artilleryman had talked to the hussars, and on by the spot where the martian hadappeared to me in the thunderstorm. here, moved by curiosity, i turned aside tofind, among a tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with thewhitened bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. for a time i stood regarding thesevestiges.... then i returned through the pine wood,neck-high with red weed here and there, to find the landlord of the spotted dog hadalready found burial, and so came home past the college arms.

a man standing at an open cottage doorgreeted me by name as i passed. i looked at my house with a quick flash ofhope that faded immediately. the door had been forced; it was unfast andwas opening slowly as i approached. it slammed again. the curtains of my study fluttered out ofthe 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 leftthem nearly four weeks ago. i stumbled into the hall, and the housefelt empty. the stair carpet was ruffled anddiscoloured where i had crouched, soaked to

the skin from the thunderstorm the night ofthe catastrophe. our muddy footsteps i saw still went up thestairs. i followed them to my study, and foundlying on my writing-table still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet ofwork i had left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. for a space i stood reading over myabandoned arguments. it was a paper on the probable developmentof moral ideas with the development of the civilising process; and the last sentencewas the opening of a prophecy: "in about two hundred years," i had written, "we mayexpect----" the sentence ended abruptly.

i remembered my inability to fix my mindthat morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how i had broken off to get my dailychronicle from the newsboy. i remembered how i went down to the gardengate as he came along, and how i had listened to his odd story of "men frommars." i came down and went into the dining room. there were the mutton and the bread, bothfar gone now in decay, and a beer bottle overturned, just as i and the artillerymanhad left them. my home was desolate. i perceived the folly of the faint hope ihad 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 openbehind me. i made a step to it, and stood looking out. and there, amazed and afraid, even as istood 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 myarms. book two the earth under the martianschapter ten the epilogue i cannot but regret, now that i amconcluding my story, how little i am able to contribute to the discussion of the manydebatable questions which are still unsettled. in one respect i shall certainly provokecriticism. my particular province is speculativephilosophy.

my knowledge of comparative physiology isconfined to a book or two, but it seems to me that carver's suggestions as to thereason of the rapid death of the martians is so probable as to be regarded almost asa proven conclusion. i have assumed that in the body of mynarrative. at any rate, in all the bodies of themartians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known asterrestrial species were found. that they did not bury any of their dead,and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entireignorance of the putrefactive process. but probable as this seems, it is by nomeans a proven conclusion.

neither is the composition of the blacksmoke known, which the martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator ofthe heat-rays remains a puzzle. the terrible disasters at the ealing andsouth kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for furtherinvestigations upon the latter. spectrum analysis of the black powderpoints unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group ofthree lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once withdeadly effect upon some constituent in the blood.

but such unproven speculations willscarcely be of interest to the general reader, to whom this story is addressed. none of the brown scum that drifted downthe thames after the destruction of shepperton was examined at the time, andnow none is forthcoming. the results of an anatomical examination ofthe martians, so far as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, ihave already given. but everyone is familiar with themagnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits at the natural history museum, andthe countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of

their physiology and structure is purelyscientific. a question of graver and universal interestis the possibility of another attack from the martians. i do not think that nearly enough attentionis being given to this aspect of the matter. at present the planet mars is inconjunction, but with every return to opposition i, for one, anticipate a renewalof their adventure. in any case, we should be prepared. it seems to me that it should be possibleto define the position of the gun from

which the shots are discharged, to keep asustained watch upon this part of the planet, and to anticipate the arrival ofthe next attack. in that case the cylinder might bedestroyed with dynamite or artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the martiansto 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 vastadvantage in the failure of their first surprise.possibly they see it in the same light. lessing has advanced excellent reasons forsupposing that the martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on theplanet venus.

seven months ago now, venus and mars werein alignment with the sun; that is to say, mars was in opposition from the point ofview of an observer on venus. subsequently a peculiar luminous andsinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almostsimultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected upona photograph of the martian disk. one needs to see the drawings of theseappearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in character. at any rate, whether we expect anotherinvasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by theseevents.

we have learned now that we cannot regardthis planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for man; we can neveranticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. it may be that in the larger design of theuniverse this invasion from mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; ithas robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to humanscience it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception ofthe commonweal of mankind. it may be that across the immensity ofspace the martians have watched the fate of

these pioneers of theirs and learned theirlesson, and that on the planet venus they have found a securer settlement. be that as it may, for many years yet therewill certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the martian disk, andthose fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons ofmen. the broadening of men's views that hasresulted can scarcely be exaggerated. before the cylinder fell there was ageneral persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond thepetty surface of our minute sphere.

now we see further. if the martians can reach venus, there isno reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slowcooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that hasbegun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils. dim and wonderful is the vision i haveconjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of thesolar 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 areprieve. to them, and not to us, perhaps, is thefuture ordained. i must confess the stress and danger of thetime have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. i sit in my study writing by lamplight, andsuddenly i see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feelthe house behind and about me empty and desolate. i go out into the byfleet road, andvehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart,

a cabful of visitors, a workman on abicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and i hurry again with the artilleryman throughthe hot, brooding silence. of a night i see the black powder darkeningthe silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they riseupon 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 thedarkness of the night. i go to london and see the busy multitudesin fleet street and the strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but theghosts of the past, haunting the streets

that i have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, themockery of life in a galvanised body. and strange, too, it is to stand onprimrose hill, as i did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the greatprovince of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to seethe 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 sawit all bright and clear-cut, hard and

silent, under the dawn of that last greatday.... and strangest of all is it to hold mywife's hand again, and to think that i have counted her, and that she has counted me,among the dead.