# Beginning of H. G. Well's "War of the Worlds"
# From the Gutemberg Project archives.
# (The first paragraph has two intentional typos.)
# Last edited on 1998-07-09 18:23:58 by stolfi

   No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly
and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their
various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps
almost as narrowly as a mun with a microscope might scrutinise
the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a
drop of water.  With infinite complacency men went to and
fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter.  It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same.  No one gave
a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human
danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as impossible or improbable.  It is curious to recall
some of the mental habyts of those departed days.  At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary
enterprise.  Yet across the gulf of space, minds that
are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,
intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their
plans against us.  And early in the twentieth century came
the great disillusionment.

   The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles,
and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half
of that received by this world.  It must be, if the nebular
hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long
before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
must have begun its course.  The fact that it is scarcely
one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated
its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin.  It
has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of
animated existence.

   Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed
any idea that intelligent life might have developed
there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level.  Nor was
it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth,
with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more
distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.

   The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet
has already gone far indeed with our neighbour.  Its physical
condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that
even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely
approaches that of our coldest winter.  Its air is much more
attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover
but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge
snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
inundate its temperate zones.  That last stage of exhaustion,
which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a presentday
problem for the inhabitants of Mars.  The immediate
pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged
their powers, and hardened their hearts.  And looking across
space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have
scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope,
our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with
water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with
glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches
of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

   And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must
be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys
and lemurs to us.  The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would
seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars.
Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard
as inferior animals.  To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
creeps upon them.

   And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember
what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has
wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison
and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.  The Tasmanians,
in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants,
in the space of fifty years.  Are we such apostles of
mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?

   The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with
amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently
far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations
with a well-nigh perfect unanimity.  Had our instruments
permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble
far back in the nineteenth century.  Men like Schiaparelli
watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless
centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to
interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they
mapped so well.  All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready.

   During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on
the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory,
then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.  English
readers heard of it first in the issue of NATURE dated August 2.
I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the
casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet,
from which their shots were fired at us.  Peculiar markings, as
yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak
during the next two oppositions.

   The storm burst upon us six years ago now.  As Mars
approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the
astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence
of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet.
It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the
spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a
mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an
enormous velocity towards this earth.  This jet of fire had
become invisible about a quarter past twelve.  He compared
it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted
out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."

   A singularly appropriate phrase it proved.  Yet the next day
there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in
the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and the world went in ignorance of one
of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race.
I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met
Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw.  He was
immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings
invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
scrutiny of the red planet.

   In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember
that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory,
the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor
in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope,
the little slit in the roof--an oblong profundity with
the stardust streaked across it.  Ogilvy moved about, invisible
but audible.  Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle
of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the
field.  It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and
still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly
flattened from the perfect round.  But so little it was, so
silvery warm--a pin's-head of light!  It was as if it quivered,
but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity
of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

   As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller
and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye
was tired.  Forty millions of miles it was from us--more than
forty millions of miles of void.  Few people realise the immensity
of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe
swims.

   Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of
light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around
it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space.  You know
how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night.  In a telescope
it seems far profounder.  And invisible to me because
it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards
me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute
by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were
sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and
calamity and death to the earth.  I never dreamed of it then
as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
missile.

   That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from
the distant planet.  I saw it.  A reddish flash at the edge, the
slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer
struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my
place.  The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I went
stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness,
to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy
exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

   That night another invisible missile started on its way to
the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four
hours after the first one.  I remember how I sat on the table
there in the blackness, with patches of green and crimson
swimming before my eyes.  I wished I had a light to smoke
by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had
seen and all that it would presently bring me.  Ogilvy watched
till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and
walked over to his house.  Down below in the darkness were
Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people,
sleeping in peace.

   He was full of speculation that night about the condition
of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants
who were signalling us.  His idea was that meteorites
might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that
a huge volcanic explosion was in progress.  He pointed out
to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken
the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

   "The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a
million to one," he said.

   Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the
night after about midnight, and again the night after; and
so for ten nights, a flame each night.  Why the shots ceased
after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain.
It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience.
Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating
patches, spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere
and obscured its more familiar features.

   Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at
last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere
concerning the volcanoes upon Mars.  The seriocomic periodical
PUNCH, I remember, made a happy use of it in the
political cartoon.  And, all unsuspected, those missiles the
Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of
space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer.  It
seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with
that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their
petty concerns as they did.  I remember how jubilant Markham
was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the
illustrated paper he edited in those days.  People in these
latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise
of our nineteenth-century papers.  For my own part, I was
much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy
upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments
of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

   One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been
10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife.  It
was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to
her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping
zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed.
It was a warm night.  Coming home, a party of excursionists
from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing
music.  There were lights in the upper windows of the houses
as the people went to bed.  From the railway station in the
distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and
rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance.  My
wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and
yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky.
It seemed so safe and tranquil.




Then came the night of the first falling star.  It was seen
early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a
line of flame high in the atmosphere.  Hundreds must have
seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star.  Albin described
it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed
for some seconds.  Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites,
stated that the height of its first appearance was about
ninety or one hundred miles.  It seemed to him that it fell
to earth about one hundred miles east of him.

   I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and
although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and
the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at
the night sky), I saw nothing of it.  Yet this strangest of all
things that ever came to earth from outer space must have
fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only
looked up as it passed.  Some of those who saw its flight say
it travelled with a hissing sound.  I myself heard nothing
of that.  Many people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex
must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought
that another meteorite had descended.  No one seems to have
troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

   But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen
the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay
somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and
Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it.  Find it he did,
soon after dawn, and not far from the sand pits.  An enormous
hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the
sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction
over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away.
The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke
rose against the dawn.

   The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst
the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments
in its descent.  The uncovered part had the appearance
of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a
thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation.  It had a diameter of
about thirty yards.  He approached the mass, surprised at
the size and more so at the shape, since most meteorites
are rounded more or less completely.  It was, however, still
so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near
approach.  A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to
the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had
not occurred to him that it might be hollow.

   He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the
Thing had made for itself, staring at its strange appearance,
astonished chiefly at its unusual shape and colour, and
dimly perceiving even then some evidence of design in its
arrival.  The early morning was wonderfully still, and the sun,
just clearing the pine trees towards Weybridge, was already
warm.  He did not remember hearing any birds that morning,
there was certainly no breeze stirring, and the only sounds
were the faint movements from within the cindery cylinder.
He was all alone on the common.

   Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the
grey clinker, the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite,
was falling off the circular edge of the end.  It was dropping
off in flakes and raining down upon the sand.  A large piece
suddenly came off and fell with a sharp noise that brought
his heart into his mouth.

   For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and,
although the heat was excessive, he clambered down into
the pit close to the bulk to see the Thing more clearly.  He
fancied even then that the cooling of the body might account
for this, but what disturbed that idea was the fact that the
ash was falling only from the end of the cylinder.

   And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top
of the cylinder was rotating on its body.  It was such a
gradual movement that he discovered it only through noticing
that a black mark that had been near him five minutes ago
was now at the other side of the circumference.  Even then
he scarcely understood what this indicated, until he heard a
muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk forward
an inch or so.  Then the thing came upon him in a flash.  The
cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed
out!  Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!

   "Good heavens!" said Ogilvy.  "There's a man in it--men
in it!  Half roasted to death!  Trying to escape!"

   At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing
with the flash upon Mars.

   The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to
him that he forgot the heat and went forward to the cylinder
to help turn.  But luckily the dull radiation arrested him before
he could burn his hands on the still-glowing metal.  At that
he stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out
of the pit, and set off running wildly into Woking.  The time
then must have been somewhere about six o'clock.  He met a
waggoner and tried to make him understand, but the tale
he told and his appearance were so wild--his hat had fallen
off in the pit--that the man simply drove on.  He was equally
unsuccessful with the potman who was just unlocking the
doors of the public-house by Horsell Bridge.  The fellow
thought he was a lunatic at large and made an unsuccessful
attempt to shut him into the taproom.  That sobered him a
little; and when he saw Henderson, the London journalist,
in his garden, he called over the palings and made himself
understood.

   "Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting star last
night?"

   "Well?" said Henderson.

   "It's out on Horsell Common now."

   "Good Lord!" said Henderson.  "Fallen meteorite!  That's
good."

   "But it's something more than a meteorite.  It's a cylinder
--an artificial cylinder, man!  And there's something inside."

   Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

   "What's that?" he said.  He was deaf in one ear.

   Ogilvy told him all that he had seen.  Henderson was a
minute or so taking it in.  Then he dropped his spade, snatched
up his jacket, and came out into the road.  The two men
hurried back at once to the common, and found the cylinder
still lying in the same position.  But now the sounds inside
had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal showed between
the top and the body of the cylinder.  Air was either entering
or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.

   They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a
stick, and, meeting with no response, they both concluded
the man or men inside must be insensible or dead.

   Of course the two were quite unable to do anything.  They
shouted consolation and promises, and went off back to the
town again to get help.  One can imagine them, covered
with sand, excited and disordered, running up the little
street in the bright sunlight just as the shop folks were
taking down their shutters and people were opening their
bedroom windows.  Henderson went into the railway station
at once, in order to telegraph the news to London.  The
newspaper articles had prepared men's minds for the reception
of the idea.

   By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men
had already started for the common to see the "dead men from
Mars."  That was the form the story took.  I heard of it first
from my newspaper boy about a quarter to nine when I went out
to get my DAILY CHRONICLE.  I was naturally startled, and
lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge
to the sand pits.


I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding
the huge hole in which the cylinder lay.  I have
already described the appearance of that colossal bulk, embedded
in the ground.  The turf and gravel about it seemed
charred as if by a sudden explosion.  No doubt its impact
had caused a flash of fire.  Henderson and Ogilvy were not
there.  I think they perceived that nothing was to be done for
the present, and had gone away to breakfast at Henderson's
house.

   There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the
Pit, with their feet dangling, and amusing themselves--until
I stopped them--by throwing stones at the giant mass.
After I had spoken to them about it, they began playing at
"touch" in and out of the group of bystanders.

   Among these were a couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener
I employed sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg the
butcher and his little boy, and two or three loafers and golf
caddies who were accustomed to hang about the railway
station.  There was very little talking.  Few of the common
people in England had anything but the vaguest astronomical
ideas in those days.  Most of them were staring quietly at
the big tablelike end of the cylinder, which was still as
Ogilvy and Henderson had left it.  I fancy the popular expectation
of a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at
this inanimate bulk.  Some went away while I was there, and
other people came.  I clambered into the pit and fancied I
heard a faint movement under my feet.  The top had certainly
ceased to rotate.

   It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness
of this object was at all evident to me.  At the first glance
it was really no more exciting than an overturned carriage
or a tree blown across the road.  Not so much so, indeed.  It
looked like a rusty gas float.  It required a certain amount of
scientific education to perceive that the grey scale of the
Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white metal
that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder
had an unfamiliar hue.  "Extra-terrestrial" had no meaning for
most of the onlookers.

   At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the
Thing had come from the planet Mars, but I judged it
improbable that it contained any living creature.  I thought
the unscrewing might be automatic.  In spite of Ogilvy, I
still believed that there were men in Mars.  My mind ran
fancifully on the possibilities of its containing manuscript,
on the difficulties in translation that might arise, whether
we should find coins and models in it, and so forth.  Yet it
was a little too large for assurance on this idea.  I felt an
impatience to see it opened.  About eleven, as nothing
seemed happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to
my home in Maybury.  But I found it difficult to get to work
upon my abstract investigations.

   In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered
very much.  The early editions of the evening papers had
startled London with enormous headlines:


"A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS."

   "REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,"

   and so forth.  In addition, Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical
Exchange had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

   There were half a dozen flies or more from the Woking
station standing in the road by the sand pits, a basketchaise
from Chobham, and a rather lordly carriage.  Besides
that, there was quite a heap of bicycles.  In addition, a
large number of people must have walked, in spite of the
heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there was
altogether quite a considerable crowd--one or two gaily
dressed ladies among the others.
It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath
of wind, and the only shadow was that of the few scattered
pine trees.  The burning heather had been extinguished, but
the level ground towards Ottershaw was blackened as far as
one could see, and still giving off vertical streamers of
smoke.  An enterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham
Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green
apples and ginger beer.

   Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a
group of about half a dozen men--Henderson, Ogilvy, and
a tall, fair-haired man that I afterwards learned was Stent,
the Astronomer Royal, with several workmen wielding spades
and pickaxes.  Stent was giving directions in a clear, highpitched
voice.  He was standing on the cylinder, which was
now evidently much cooler; his face was crimson and streaming
with perspiration, and something seemed to have irritated
him.

   A large portion of the cylinder had been uncovered,
though its lower end was still embedded.  As soon as Ogilvy
saw me among the staring crowd on the edge of the pit
he called to me to come down, and asked me if I would
mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord of the manor.

   The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious
impediment to their excavations, especially the boys.  They
wanted a light railing put up, and help to keep the people
back.  He told me that a faint stirring was occasionally still
audible within the case, but that the workmen had failed
to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to them.  The
case appeared to be enormously thick, and it was possible
that the faint sounds we heard represented a noisy tumult
in the interior.

   I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of
the privileged spectators within the contemplated enclosure.
I failed to find Lord Hilton at his house, but I was told
he was expected from London by the six o'clock train from
Waterloo; and as it was then about a quarter past five, I
went home, had some tea, and walked up to the station
to waylay him.


When I returned to the common the sun was setting.
Scattered groups were hurrying from the direction of Woking,
and one or two persons were returning.  The crowd about
the pit had increased, and stood out black against the lemon
yellow of the sky--a couple of hundred people, perhaps.
There were raised voices, and some sort of struggle appeared
to be going on about the pit.  Strange imaginings passed
through my mind.  As I drew nearer I heard Stent's voice:

   "Keep back!  Keep back!"

   A boy came running towards me.

   "It's a-movin'," he said to me as he passed; "a-screwin' and
a-screwin' out.  I don't like it.  I'm a-goin' 'ome, I am."

   I went on to the crowd.  There were really, I should think,
two or three hundred people elbowing and jostling one another,
the one or two ladies there being by no means the
least active.

   "He's fallen in the pit!" cried some one.

   "Keep back!" said several.

   The crowd swayed a little, and I elbowed my way through.
Every one seemed greatly excited.  I heard a peculiar humming
sound from the pit.

   "I say!" said Ogilvy; "help keep these idiots back.  We
don't know what's in the confounded thing, you know!"

   I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking I believe
he was, standing on the cylinder and trying to scramble out
of the hole again.  The crowd had pushed him in.

   The end of the cylinder was being screwed out from within.
Nearly two feet of shining screw projected.  Somebody blundered
against me, and I narrowly missed being pitched onto
the top of the screw.  I turned, and as I did so the screw must
have come out, for the lid of the cylinder fell upon the gravel
with a ringing concussion.  I stuck my elbow into the person
behind me, and turned my head towards the Thing again.
For a moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black.
I had the sunset in my eyes.

   I think everyone expected to see a man emerge--possibly
something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials
a man.  I know I did.  But, looking, I presently saw something
stirring within the shadow: greyish billowy movements,
one above another, and then two luminous disks--like eyes.
Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the
thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing
middle, and wriggled in the air towards me--and then
another.

   A sudden chill came over me.  There was a loud shriek
from a woman behind.  I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed
upon the cylinder still, from which other tentacles were now
projecting, and began pushing my way back from the edge
of the pit.  I saw astonishment giving place to horror on the
faces of the people about me.  I heard inarticulate exclamations
on all sides.  There was a general movement backwards.
I saw the shopman struggling still on the edge of the pit.  I
found myself alone, and saw the people on the other side of
the pit running off, Stent among them.  I looked again at the
cylinder, and ungovernable terror gripped me.  I stood petrified
and staring.

   A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear,
was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder.  As
it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet
leather.

   Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly.
The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was
rounded, and had, one might say, a face.  There was a mouth
under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and
panted, and dropped saliva.  The whole creature heaved and
pulsated convulsively.  A lank tentacular appendage gripped
the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

   Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely
imagine the strange horror of its appearance.  The peculiar
V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of
brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike
lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon
groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in
a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness
of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the
earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense
eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and
monstrous.  There was something fungoid in the oily brown
skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious
movements unspeakably nasty.  Even at this first encounter,
this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and
dread.

   Suddenly the monster vanished.  It had toppled over the
brim of the cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like
the fall of a great mass of leather.  I heard it give a peculiar
thick cry, and forthwith another of these creatures appeared
darkly in the deep shadow of the aperture.

   I turned and, running madly, made for the first group of
trees, perhaps a hundred yards away; but I ran slantingly
and stumbling, for I could not avert my face from these
things.

   There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I
stopped, panting, and waited further developments.  The
common round the sand pits was dotted with people, standing
like myself in a half-fascinated terror, staring at these
creatures, or rather at the heaped gravel at the edge of the pit
in which they lay.  And then, with a renewed horror, I saw a
round, black object bobbing up and down on the edge of the
pit.  It was the head of the shopman who had fallen in, but
showing as a little black object against the hot western sun.
Now he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he seemed
to slip back until only his head was visible.  Suddenly he vanished,
and I could have fancied a faint shriek had reached
me.  I had a momentary impulse to go back and help him
that my fears overruled.

   Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep
pit and the heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had
made.  Anyone coming along the road from Chobham or Woking
would have been amazed at the sight--a dwindling multitude
of perhaps a hundred people or more standing in a
great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates
and hedges, saying little to one another and that in short,
excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of
sand.  The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black
against the burning sky, and in the sand pits was a row of
deserted vehicles with their horses feeding out of nosebags
or pawing the ground.


After the glimpse I had had of the Martians emerging
from the cylinder in which they had come to the earth from
their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions.  I
remained standing knee-deep in the heather, staring at the
mound that hid them.  I was a battleground of fear and
curiosity.

   I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate
longing to peer into it.  I began walking, therefore, in
a big curve, seeking some point of vantage and continually
looking at the sand heaps that hid these new-comers to our
earth.  Once a leash of thin black whips, like the arms of an
octopus, flashed across the sunset and was immediately withdrawn,
and afterwards a thin rod rose up, joint by joint,
bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling
motion.  What could be going on there?

   Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups
--one a little crowd towards Woking, the other a knot of
people in the direction of Chobham.  Evidently they shared
my mental conflict.  There were few near me.  One man I
approached--he was, I perceived, a neighbour of mine,
though I did not know his name--and accosted.  But it was
scarcely a time for articulate conversation.

   "What ugly brutes!" he said.  "Good God!  What ugly
brutes!"  He repeated this over and over again.

   "Did you see a man in the pit?" I said; but he made no
answer to that.  We became silent, and stood watching for a
time side by side, deriving, I fancy, a certain comfort in one
another's company.  Then I shifted my position to a little
knoll that gave me the advantage of a yard or more of elevation
and when I looked for him presently he was walking
towards Woking.

   The sunset faded to twilight before anything further happened.
The crowd far away on the left, towards Woking,
seemed to grow, and I heard now a faint murmur from it.
The little knot of people towards Chobham dispersed.  There
was scarcely an intimation of movement from the pit.

   It was this, as much as anything, that gave people courage,
and I suppose the new arrivals from Woking also helped to
restore confidence.  At any rate, as the dusk came on a slow,
intermittent movement upon the sand pits began, a movement
that seemed to gather force as the stillness of the evening
about the cylinder remained unbroken.  Vertical black
figures in twos and threes would advance, stop, watch,
and advance again, spreading out as they did so in a thin
irregular crescent that promised to enclose the pit in its
attenuated horns.  I, too, on my side began to move towards
the pit.

   Then I saw some cabmen and others had walked boldly
into the sand pits, and heard the clatter of hoofs and the
gride of wheels.  I saw a lad trundling off the barrow of
apples.  And then, within thirty yards of the pit, advancing
from the direction of Horsell, I noted a little black knot of
men, the foremost of whom was waving a white flag.

   This was the Deputation.  There had been a hasty consultation,
and since the Martians were evidently, in spite of their
repulsive forms, intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to
show them, by approaching them with signals, that we too
were intelligent.

   Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to
the left.  It was too far for me to recognise anyone there, but
afterwards I learned that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were
with others in this attempt at communication.  This little
group had in its advance dragged inward, so to speak, the
circumference of the now almost complete circle of people,
and a number of dim black figures followed it at discreet
distances.

   Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of
luminous greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct
puffs, which drove up, one after the other, straight into the
still air.

   This smoke (or flame, perhaps, would be the better word
for it) was so bright that the deep blue sky overhead and the
hazy stretches of brown common towards Chertsey, set with
black pine trees, seemed to darken abruptly as these puffs
arose, and to remain the darker after their dispersal.  At the
same time a faint hissing sound became audible.

   Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the
white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little
knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground.
As the green smoke arose, their faces flashed out pallid green,
and faded again as it vanished.  Then slowly the hissing passed
into a humming, into a long, loud, droning noise.  Slowly a
humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam
of light seemed to flicker out from it.

   Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping
from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men.
It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and
flashed into white flame.  It was as if each man were suddenly
and momentarily turned to fire.

   Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them
staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to
run.

   I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death
leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.  All I
felt was that it was something very strange.  An almost noiseless
and blinding flash of light, and a man fell headlong and
lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them,
pine trees burst into fire, and every dry furze bush became
with one dull thud a mass of flames.  And far away towards
Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden
buildings suddenly set alight.

   It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming
death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat.  I perceived it
coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and
was too astounded and stupefied to stir.  I heard the crackle
of fire in the sand pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that
was as suddenly stilled.  Then it was as if an invisible yet
intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather
between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line
beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.
Something fell with a crash far away to the left where the
road from Woking station opens out on the common.  Forthwith
the hissing and humming ceased, and the black, domelike
object sank slowly out of sight into the pit.

   All this had happened with such swiftness that I had stood
motionless, dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light.
Had that death swept through a full circle, it must inevitably
have slain me in my surprise.  But it passed and spared me,
and left the night about me suddenly dark and unfamiliar.


   The undulating common seemed now dark almost to
blackness, except where its roadways lay grey and pale under
the deep blue sky of the early night.  It was dark, and suddenly
void of men.  Overhead the stars were mustering, and
in the west the sky was still a pale, bright, almost greenish
blue.  The tops of the pine trees and the roofs of Horsell came
out sharp and black against the western afterglow.  The Martians
and their appliances were altogether invisible, save for
that thin mast upon which their restless mirror wobbled.
Patches of bush and isolated trees here and there smoked and
glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were
sending up spires of flame into the stillness of the evening
air.

   Nothing was changed save for that and a terrible astonishment.
The little group of black specks with the flag of white
had been swept out of existence, and the stillness of the
evening, so it seemed to me, had scarcely been broken.

   It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless,
unprotected, and alone.  Suddenly, like a thing falling upon
me from without, came--fear.

   With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through
the heather.

   The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not
only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about
me.  Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had
that I ran weeping silently as a child might do.  Once I had
turned, I did not dare to look back.

   I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was
being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very
verge of safety, this mysterious death--as swift as the passage
of light--would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder
and strike me down.


It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able
to slay men so swiftly and so silently.  Many think that in
some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a
chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity.  This intense
heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they
choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown
composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse
projects a beam of light.  But no one has absolutely proved
these details.  However it is done, it is certain that a beam of
heat is the essence of the matter.  Heat, and invisible, instead
of visible, light.  Whatever is combustible flashes into flame
at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and
melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that
explodes into steam.

   That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about
the pit, charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all
night long the common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted
and brightly ablaze.

   The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham,
Woking, and Ottershaw about the same time.  In Woking the
shops had closed when the tragedy happened, and a number
of people, shop people and so forth, attracted by the stories
they had heard, were walking over the Horsell Bridge and
along the road between the hedges that runs out at last upon
the common.  You may imagine the young people brushed up
after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they
would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and
enjoying a trivial flirtation.  You may figure to yourself the
hum of voices along the road in the gloaming. . . .

   As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that
the cylinder had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a
messenger on a bicycle to the post office with a special wire
to an evening paper.

   As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open,
they found little knots of people talking excitedly and peering
at the spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the new-comers
were, no doubt, soon infected by the excitement of the occasion.


   By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed,
there may have been a crowd of three hundred people or
more at this place, besides those who had left the road to
approach the Martians nearer.  There were three policemen
too, one of whom was mounted, doing their best, under
instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and deter
them from approaching the cylinder.  There was some booing
from those more thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a
crowd is always an occasion for noise and horse-play.

   Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a
collision, had telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as
soon as the Martians emerged, for the help of a company of
soldiers to protect these strange creatures from violence.
After that they returned to lead that ill-fated advance.  The
description of their death, as it was seen by the crowd, tallies
very closely with my own impressions: the three puffs of
green smoke, the deep humming note, and the flashes of
flame.

   But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than
mine.  Only the fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted
the lower part of the Heat-Ray saved them.  Had the
elevation of the parabolic mirror been a few yards higher,
none could have lived to tell the tale.  They saw the flashes
and the men falling and an invisible hand, as it were, lit the
bushes as it hurried towards them through the twilight.  Then,
with a whistling note that rose above the droning of the pit,
the beam swung close over their heads, lighting the tops of
the beech trees that line the road, and splitting the bricks,
smashing the windows, firing the window frames, and bringing
down in crumbling ruin a portion of the gable of the
house nearest the corner.

   In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees,
the panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed hesitatingly
for some moments.  Sparks and burning twigs began to fall
into the road, and single leaves like puffs of flame.  Hats and
dresses caught fire.  Then came a crying from the common.
There were shrieks and shouts, and suddenly a mounted
policeman came galloping through the confusion with his
hands clasped over his head, screaming.

   "They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently
everyone was turning and pushing at those behind, in order
to clear their way to Woking again.  They must have bolted
as blindly as a flock of sheep.  Where the road grows narrow
and black between the high banks the crowd jammed, and a
desperate struggle occurred.  All that crowd did not escape;
three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were
crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror
and the darkness.


For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight
except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling
through the heather.  All about me gathered the invisible
terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heat seemed
whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended
and smote me out of life.  I came into the road between the
crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

   At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the
violence of my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and
fell by the wayside.  That was near the bridge that crosses
the canal by the gasworks.  I fell and lay still.

   I must have remained there some time.

   I sat up, strangely perplexed.  For a moment, perhaps, I
could not clearly understand how I came there.  My terror
had fallen from me like a garment.  My hat had gone, and
my collar had burst away from its fastener.  A few minutes
before, there had only been three real things before me--the
immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness
and anguish, and the near approach of death.  Now it
was as if something turned over, and the point of view altered
abruptly.  There was no sensible transition from one state of
mind to the other.  I was immediately the self of every day
again--a decent, ordinary citizen.  The silent common, the
impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as if they had
been in a dream.  I asked myself had these latter things indeed
happened?  I could not credit it.

   I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the
bridge.  My mind was blank wonder.  My muscles and nerves
seemed drained of their strength.  I dare say I staggered
drunkenly.  A head rose over the arch, and the figure of a
workman carrying a basket appeared.  Beside him ran a little
boy.  He passed me, wishing me good night.  I was minded to
speak to him, but did not.  I answered his greeting with a
meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.

   Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of
white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows,
went flying south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone.
A dim group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses
in the pretty little row of gables that was called Oriental
Terrace.  It was all so real and so familiar.  And that behind
me!  It was frantic, fantastic!  Such things, I told myself,
could not be.

   Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.  I do not know
how far my experience is common.  At times I suffer from the
strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world
about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out
of the stress and tragedy of it all.  This feeling was very
strong upon me that night.  Here was another side to my
dream.

   But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity
and the swift death flying yonder, not two miles away.  There
was a noise of business from the gasworks, and the electric
lamps were all alight.  I stopped at the group of people.

   "What news from the common?" said I.

   There were two men and a woman at the gate.

   "Eh?" said one of the men, turning.

   "What news from the common?" I said.

   "'Ain't yer just BEEN there?" asked the men.

   "People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman
over the gate.  "What's it all abart?"

   "Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the
creatures from Mars?"

   "Quite enough," said the woman over the gate.  "Thenks";
and all three of them laughed.

   I felt foolish and angry.  I tried and found I could not tell
them what I had seen.  They laughed again at my broken
sentences.

   "You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home.

   I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I.  I went
into the dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so
soon as I could collect myself sufficiently I told her the things
I had seen.  The dinner, which was a cold one, had already
been served, and remained neglected on the table while I
told my story.

   "There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had
aroused; "they are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl.
They may keep the pit and kill people who come near them,
but they cannot get out of it. . . .  But the horror of them!"

   "Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and putting
her hand on mine.

   "Poor Ogilvy!" I said.  "To think he may be lying dead
there!"

   My wife at least did not find my experience incredible.
When I saw how deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.

   "They may come here," she said again and again.

   I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.

   "They can scarcely move," I said.

   I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that
Ogilvy had told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing
themselves on the earth.  In particular I laid stress on
the gravitational difficulty.  On the surface of the earth the
force of gravity is three times what it is on the surface of
Mars.  A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times more
than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same.
His own body would be a cope of lead to him.  That, indeed,
was the general opinion.  Both THE TIMES and the DAILY
TELEGRAPH, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and
both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.


   The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far
more oxygen or far less argon (whichever way one likes to
put it) than does Mars.  The invigorating influences of this
excess of oxygen upon the Martians indisputably did much
to counterbalance the increased weight of their bodies.  And,
in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such
mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite
able to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.

   But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my
reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders.
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and
the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible
degrees courageous and secure.

   "They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my
wineglass.  "They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are
mad with terror.  Perhaps they expected to find no living
things--certainly no intelligent living things.

   "A shell in the pit" said I, "if the worst comes to the worst
will kill them all."

   The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my
perceptive powers in a state of erethism.  I remember that
dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now.  My dear
wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink
lamp shade, the white cloth with its silver and glass table
furniture--for in those days even philosophical writers had
many little luxuries--the crimson-purple wine in my glass,
are photographically distinct.  At the end of it I sat, tempering
nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and
denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.

   So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have
lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful
of pitiless sailors in want of animal food.  "We will peck them
to death tomorrow, my dear."

   I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner
I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.


The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the
strange and wonderful things that happened upon that
Friday, was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of
our social order with the first beginnings of the series of
events that was to topple that social order headlong.  If on
Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses and drawn a
circle with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand pits,
I doubt if you would have had one human being outside it,
unless it were some relation of Stent or of the three or four
cyclists or London people lying dead on the common, whose
emotions or habits were at all affected by the new-comers.
Many people had heard of the cylinder, of course, and talked
about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the
sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done.

   In London that night poor Henderson's telegram describing
the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard,
and his evening paper, after wiring for authentication from
him and receiving no reply--the man was killed--decided
not to print a special edition.

   Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people
were inert.  I have already described the behaviour of the men
and women to whom I spoke.  All over the district people
were dining and supping; working men were gardening after
the labours of the day, children were being put to bed, young
people were wandering through the lanes love-making, students
sat over their books.

   Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel
and dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there
a messenger, or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences,
caused a whirl of excitement, a shouting, and a running to
and fro; but for the most part the daily routine of working,
eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done for countless
years--as though no planet Mars existed in the sky.
Even at Woking station and Horsell and Chobham that was
the case.

   In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping
and going on, others were shunting on the sidings, passengers
were alighting and waiting, and everything was proceeding
in the most ordinary way.  A boy from the town, trenching
on Smith's monopoly, was selling papers with the afternoon's
news.  The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of the
engines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of
"Men from Mars!"  Excited men came into the station about
nine o'clock with incredible tidings, and caused no more
disturbance than drunkards might have done.  People rattling
Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage
windows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark
dance up from the direction of Horsell, a red glow and a
thin veil of smoke driving across the stars, and thought that
nothing more serious than a heath fire was happening.  It was
only round the edge of the common that any disturbance
was perceptible.  There were half a dozen villas burning on
the Woking border.  There were lights in all the houses on the
common side of the three villages, and the people there kept
awake till dawn.

   A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and
going but the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and
Horsell bridges.  One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards
found, went into the darkness and crawled quite near
the Martians; but they never returned, for now and again a
light-ray, like the beam of a warship's searchlight swept the
common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow.  Save for
such, that big area of common was silent and desolate, and
the charred bodies lay about on it all night under the stars,
and all the next day.  A noise of hammering from the pit was
heard by many people.

   So you have the state of things on Friday night.  In the
centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a
poisoned dart, was this cylinder.  But the poison was scarcely
working yet.  Around it was a patch of silent common,
smouldering in places, and with a few dark, dimly seen
objects lying in contorted attitudes here and there.  Here and
there was a burning bush or tree.  Beyond was a fringe of
excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation
had not crept as yet.  In the rest of the world the stream of
life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years.  The
fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden
nerve and destroy brain, had still to develop.

   All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring,
sleepless, indefatigable, at work upon the machines they
were making ready, and ever and again a puff of greenishwhite
smoke whirled up to the starlit sky.

   About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell,
and deployed along the edge of the common to form a
cordon.  Later a second company marched through Chobham
to deploy on the north side of the common.  Several officers
from the Inkerman barracks had been on the common earlier
in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing.
The colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge
and was busy questioning the crowd at midnight.  The military
authorities were certainly alive to the seriousness of the business.
About eleven, the next morning's papers were able to
say, a squadron of hussars, two Maxims, and about four
hundred men of the Cardigan regiment started from Aldershot.

   A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the Chertsey
road, Woking, saw a star fall from heaven into the pine
woods to the northwest.  It had a greenish colour, and caused
a silent brightness like summer lightning.  This was the second
cylinder.