# H. G. Wells "The War of the Worlds" (1898)
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#     @section 2 {tpg} = title page.
#       @section 3 {tt} = book title.
#       @section 3 {au} = author and year.
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@section 1 {i}
@section 2 {tpg}
@section 3 {tt}

  The War of the Worlds

@section 3 {au}
  by H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells [1898] =

@section 3 {qt}

  {»}But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be 
  {»}inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the 
  {»}World? . . . And how are all things made for man?-- =

  {»»»}KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy) =

@section 1 {p1}
@section 2 {tpg}
@section 3 {pn}

  BOOK ONE

@section 3 {tt}

  THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS 

@section 2 {c1}
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  CHAPTER ONE 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE EVE OF THE WAR 

@section 3 {tx}
  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 man 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 habits 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 present~day 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. =

@section 2 {c2}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER TWO 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE FALLING STAR 

@section 3 {tx}
  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. =

@section 2 {c3}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER THREE 

@section 3 {tt}

  ON HORSELL COMMON 

@section 3 {tx}
  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 
  basket~chaise 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, 
  high~pitched 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. =

@section 2 {c4}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FOUR 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE CYLINDER OPENS 

@section 3 {tx}
  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. =

@section 2 {c5}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FIVE 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE HEAT~RAY 

@section 3 {tx}
  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, dome~like 
  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. =

@section 2 {c6}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SIX 

  THE HEAT~RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD =

@section 3 {tx}
  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. =

@section 2 {c7}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SEVEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  HOW I REACHED HOME 

@section 3 {tx}
  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. =

@section 2 {c8}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER EIGHT 

@section 3 {tt}

  FRIDAY NIGHT 

@section 3 {tx}
  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 
  greenish~white 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. =

@section 2 {c9}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER NINE 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE FIGHTING BEGINS 

@section 3 {tx}
  Saturday lives in my memory as a day of suspense. It was a 
  day of lassitude too, hot and close, with, I am told, a 
  rapidly fluctuating barometer. I had slept but little, 
  though my wife had succeeded in sleeping, and I rose early. 
  I went into my garden before breakfast and stood listening, 
  but towards the common there was nothing stirring but a 
  lark. =

  The milkman came as usual. I heard the rattle of his chariot 
  and I went round to the side gate to ask the latest news. He 
  told me that during the night the Martians had been 
  surrounded by troops, and that guns were expected. Then--a 
  familiar, reassuring note--I heard a train running towards 
  Woking. =

  "They aren't to be killed," said the milkman, "if that can 
  possibly be avoided." =

  I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, 
  and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most 
  unexceptional morning. My neighbour was of opinion that the 
  troops would be able to capture or to destroy the Martians 
  during the day. =

  "It's a pity they make themselves so unapproachable," he 
  said. "It would be curious to know how they live on another 
  planet; we might learn a thing or two." =

  He came up to the fence and extended a handful of 
  strawberries, for his gardening was as generous as it was 
  enthusiastic. At the same time he told me of the burning of 
  the pine woods about the Byfleet Golf Links. =

  "They say," said he, "that there's another of those blessed 
  things fallen there--number two. But one's enough, surely. 
  This lot'll cost the insurance people a pretty penny before 
  everything's settled." He laughed with an air of the 
  greatest good humour as he said this. The woods, he said, 
  were still burning, and pointed out a haze of smoke to me. 
  "They will be hot under foot for days, on account of the 
  thick soil of pine needles and turf," he said, and then grew 
  serious over "poor Ogilvy." =

  After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to walk down 
  towards the common. Under the railway bridge I found a group 
  of soldiers--sappers, I think, men in small round caps, 
  dirty red jackets unbuttoned, and showing their blue shirts, 
  dark trousers, and boots coming to the calf. They told me no 
  one was allowed over the canal, and, looking along the road 
  towards the bridge, I saw one of the Cardigan men standing 
  sentinel there. I talked with these soldiers for a time; I 
  told them of my sight of the Martians on the previous 
  evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and they had 
  but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with 
  questions. They said that they did not know who had 
  authorised the movements of the troops; their idea was that 
  a dispute had arisen at the Horse Guards. The ordinary 
  sapper is a great deal better educated than the common 
  soldier, and they discussed the peculiar conditions of the 
  possible fight with some acuteness. I described the Heat~Ray 
  to them, and they began to argue among themselves. =

  "Crawl up under cover and rush 'em, say I," said one. =

  "Get aht!," said another. "What's cover against this 'ere 
  'eat? Sticks to cook yer! What we got to do is to go as near 
  as the ground'll let us, and then drive a trench." =

  "Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to 
  ha" been born a rabbit Snippy." =

  "'Ain't they got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly--a 
  little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe. =

  I repeated my description. =

  "Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls 'em. Talk about 
  fishers of men--fighters of fish it is this time!" =

  "It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the 
  first speaker. =

  "Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish 'em?" 
  said the little dark man. "You carn tell what they might 
  do." =

  "Where's your shells?" said the first speaker. "There ain't 
  no time. Do it in a rush, that's my tip, and do it at once." =

  So they discussed it. After a while I left them, and went on 
  to the railway station to get as many morning papers as I 
  could. =

  But I will not weary the reader with a description of that 
  long morning and of the longer afternoon. I did not succeed 
  in getting a glimpse of the common, for even Horsell and 
  Chobham church towers were in the hands of the military 
  authorities. The soldiers I addressed didn't know anything; 
  the officers were mysterious as well as busy. I found people 
  in the town quite secure again in the presence of the 
  military, and I heard for the first time from Marshall, the 
  tobacconist, that his son was among the dead on the common. 
  The soldiers had made the people on the outskirts of Horsell 
  lock up and leave their houses. =

  I got back to lunch about two, very tired for, as I have 
  said, the day was extremely hot and dull; and in order to 
  refresh myself I took a cold bath in the afternoon. About 
  half past four I went up to the railway station to get an 
  evening paper, for the morning papers had contained only a 
  very inaccurate description of the killing of Stent, 
  Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I 
  didn't know. The Martians did not show an inch of 
  themselves. They seemed busy in their pit, and there was a 
  sound of hammering and an almost continuous streamer of 
  smoke. Apparently they were busy getting ready for a 
  struggle. "Fresh attempts have been made to signal, but 
  without success," was the stereotyped formula of the papers. 
  A sapper told me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag 
  on a long pole. The Martians took as much notice of such 
  advances as we should of the lowing of a cow. =

  I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this 
  preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became 
  belligerent, and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking 
  ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism 
  came back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that time. 
  They seemed very helpless in that pit of theirs. =

  About three o'clock there began the thud of a gun at 
  measured intervals from Chertsey or Addlestone. I learned 
  that the smouldering pine wood into which the second 
  cylinder had fallen was being shelled, in the hope of 
  destroying that object before it opened. It was only about 
  five, however, that a field gun reached Chobham for use 
  against the first body of Martians. =

  About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in 
  the summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was 
  lowering upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the 
  common, and immediately after a gust of firing. Close on the 
  heels of that came a violent rattling crash, quite close to 
  us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon the lawn, 
  I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst 
  into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church 
  beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque 
  had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked 
  as if a hundred~ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our 
  chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece 
  of it came clattering down the tiles and made a heap of 
  broken red fragments upon the flower bed by my study window. =

  I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest 
  of Maybury Hill must be within range of the Martians" 
  Heat~Ray now that the college was cleared out of the way. =

  At that I gripped my wife's arm, and without ceremony ran 
  her out into the road. Then I fetched out the servant, 
  telling her I would go upstairs myself for the box she was 
  clamouring for. =

  "We can't possibly stay here," I said; and as I spoke the 
  firing reopened for a moment upon the common. =

  "But where are we to go?" said my wife in terror. =

  I thought perplexed. Then I remembered her cousins at 
  Leatherhead. =

  "Leatherhead!" I shouted above the sudden noise. =

  She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out 
  of their houses, astonished. =

  "How are we to get to Leatherhead?" she said. =

  Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway 
  bridge; three galloped through the open gates of the 
  Oriental College; two others dismounted, and began running 
  from house to house. The sun, shining through the smoke that 
  drove up from the tops of the trees, seemed blood red, and 
  threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything. =

  "Stop here," said I; "you are safe here"; and I started off 
  at once for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a 
  horse and dog cart. I ran, for I perceived that in a moment 
  everyone upon this side of the hill would be moving. I found 
  him in his bar, quite unaware of what was going on behind 
  his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to him. =

  "I must have a pound," said the landlord, "and I've no one 
  to drive it." =

  "I'll give you two," said I, over the stranger's shoulder. =

  "What for?" =

  "And I'll bring it back by midnight," I said. =

  "Lord!" said the landlord; "what's the hurry? I'm selling my 
  bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What's 
  going on now?" =

  I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so 
  secured the dog cart. At the time it did not seem to me 
  nearly so urgent that the landlord should leave his. I took 
  care to have the cart there and then, drove it off down the 
  road, and, leaving it in charge of my wife and servant, 
  rushed into my house and packed a few valuables, such plate 
  as we had, and so forth. The beech trees below the house 
  were burning while I did this, and the palings up the road 
  glowed red. While I was occupied in this way, one of the 
  dismounted hussars came running up. He was going from house 
  to house, warning people to leave. He was going on as I came 
  out of my front door, lugging my treasures, done up in a 
  tablecloth. I shouted after him: =

  "What news?" =

  He turned, stared, bawled something about "crawling out in a 
  thing like a dish cover," and ran on to the gate of the 
  house at the crest. A sudden whirl of black smoke driving 
  across the road hid him for a moment. I ran to my 
  neighbour's door and rapped to satisfy myself of what I 
  already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and 
  had locked up their house. I went in again, according to my 
  promise, to get my servant's box, lugged it out, clapped it 
  beside her on the tail of the dog cart, and then caught the 
  reins and jumped up into the driver's seat beside my wife. 
  In another moment we were clear of the smoke and noise, and 
  spanking down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old 
  Woking. =

  In front was a quiet sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead on 
  either side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its 
  swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the 
  bottom of the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside 
  I was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot with 
  threads of red fire were driving up into the still air, and 
  throwing dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The 
  smoke already extended far away to the east and west--to the 
  Byfleet pine woods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The 
  road was dotted with people running towards us. And very 
  faint now, but very distinct through the hot, quiet air, one 
  heard the whirr of a machine~gun that was presently stilled, 
  and an intermittent cracking of rifles. Apparently the 
  Martians were setting fire to everything within range of 
  their Heat~Ray. =

  I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my 
  attention to the horse. When I looked back again the second 
  hill had hidden the black smoke. I slashed the horse with 
  the whip, and gave him a loose rein until Woking and Send 
  lay between us and that quivering tumult. I overtook and 
  passed the doctor between Woking and Send. =

@section 2 {c10}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER TEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  IN THE STORM 

@section 3 {tx}
  Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The 
  scent of hay was in the air through the lush meadows beyond 
  Pyrford, and the hedges on either side were sweet and gay 
  with multitudes of dog~roses. The heavy firing that had 
  broken out while we were driving down Maybury Hill ceased as 
  abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful and 
  still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine 
  o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest while I took 
  supper with my cousins and commended my wife to their care. =

  My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and 
  seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil. I talked to her 
  reassuringly, pointing out that the Martians were tied to 
  the Pit by sheer heaviness, and at the utmost could but 
  crawl a little out of it; but she answered only in 
  monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to the 
  innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in 
  Leatherhead that night. Would that I had! Her face, I 
  remember, was very white as we parted. =

  For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day. 
  Something very like the war fever that occasionally runs 
  through a civilised community had got into my blood, and in 
  my heart I was not so very sorry that I had to return to 
  Maybury that night. I was even afraid that that last 
  fusillade I had heard might mean the extermination of our 
  invaders from Mars. I can best express my state of mind by 
  saying that I wanted to be in at the death. =

  It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was 
  unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage 
  of my cousins' house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as 
  hot and close as the day. Overhead the clouds were driving 
  fast, albeit not a breath stirred the shrubs about us. My 
  cousins' man lit both lamps. Happily, I knew the road 
  intimately. My wife stood in the light of the doorway, and 
  watched me until I jumped up into the dog cart. Then 
  abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by 
  side wishing me good hap. =

  I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my 
  wife's fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the 
  Martians. At that time I was absolutely in the dark as to 
  the course of the evening's fighting. I did not know even 
  the circumstances that had precipitated the conflict. As I 
  came through Ockham (for that was the way I returned, and 
  not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western 
  horizon a blood~red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept 
  slowly up the sky. The driving clouds of the gathering 
  thunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red 
  smoke. =

  Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window 
  or so the village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly 
  escaped an accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, 
  where a knot of people stood with their backs to me. They 
  said nothing to me as I passed. I do not know what they knew 
  of the things happening beyond the hill, nor do I know if 
  the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping securely, 
  or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the 
  terror of the night. =

  From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley 
  of the Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I 
  ascended the little hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare 
  came into view again, and the trees about me shivered with 
  the first intimation of the storm that was upon me. Then I 
  heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind me, 
  and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its 
  treetops and roofs black and sharp against the red. =

  Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about 
  me and showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a 
  tug at the reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been 
  pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly 
  lighting their confusion and falling into the field to my 
  left. It was the third falling star! =

  Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, 
  danced out the first lightning of the gathering storm, and 
  the thunder burst like a rocket overhead. The horse took the 
  bit between his teeth and bolted. =

  A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, 
  and down this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it 
  went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever 
  seen. The thunderclaps, treading one on the heels of another 
  and with a strange crackling accompaniment, sounded more 
  like the working of a gigantic electric machine than the 
  usual detonating reverberations. The flickering light was 
  blinding and confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my 
  face as I drove down the slope. =

  At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then 
  abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was 
  moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At 
  first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash 
  following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. 
  It was an elusive vision--a moment of bewildering darkness, 
  and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the 
  Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the 
  pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear and 
  sharp and bright. =

  And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous 
  tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young 
  pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking 
  engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; 
  articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the 
  clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of 
  the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over 
  one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear 
  almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a 
  hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted 
  and bowled violently along the ground? That was the 
  impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a 
  milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a 
  tripod stand. =

  Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were 
  parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting 
  through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and 
  a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, 
  headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to meet it! At 
  the sight of the second monster my nerve went altogether. 
  Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the horse's head hard 
  round to the right and in another moment the dog cart had 
  heeled over upon the horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and 
  I was flung sideways and fell heavily into a shallow pool of 
  water. =

  I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet 
  still in the water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay 
  motionless (his neck was broken, poor brute!) and by the 
  lightning flashes I saw the black bulk of the overturned dog 
  cart and the silhouette of the wheel still spinning slowly. 
  In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding by 
  me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford. =

  Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no 
  mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, 
  with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering 
  tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging 
  and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as 
  it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted 
  it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head 
  looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white 
  metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green 
  smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the 
  monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone. =

  So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the 
  lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black shadows. =

  As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that 
  drowned the thunder--"Aloo! Aloo!"--and in another minute it 
  was with its companion, half a mile away, stooping over 
  something in the field. I have no doubt this Thing in the 
  field was the third of the ten cylinders they had fired at 
  us from Mars. =

  For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness 
  watching, by the intermittent light, these monstrous beings 
  of metal moving about in the distance over the hedge tops. A 
  thin hail was now beginning, and as it came and went their 
  figures grew misty and then flashed into clearness again. 
  Now and then came a gap in the lightning, and the night 
  swallowed them up. =

  I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was 
  some time before my blank astonishment would let me struggle 
  up the bank to a drier position, or think at all of my 
  imminent peril. =

  Not far from me was a little one~roomed squatter's hut of 
  wood, surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to 
  my feet at last, and, crouching and making use of every 
  chance of cover, I made a run for this. I hammered at the 
  door, but I could not make the people hear (if there were 
  any people inside), and after a time I desisted, and, 
  availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way, 
  succeeded in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous 
  machines, into the pine woods towards Maybury. =

  Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, 
  towards my own house. I walked among the trees trying to 
  find the footpath. It was very dark indeed in the wood, for 
  the lightning was now becoming infrequent, and the hail, 
  which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in columns through 
  the gaps in the heavy foliage. =

  If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had 
  seen I should have immediately worked my way round through 
  Byfleet to Street Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife 
  at Leatherhead. But that night the strangeness of things 
  about me, and my physical wretchedness, prevented me, for I 
  was bruised, weary, wet to the skin, deafened and blinded by 
  the storm. =

  I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was 
  as much motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell 
  into a ditch and bruised my knees against a plank, and 
  finally splashed out into the lane that ran down from the 
  College Arms. I say splashed, for the storm water was 
  sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy torrent. There in 
  the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me reeling 
  back. =

  He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on 
  before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. 
  So heavy was the stress of the storm just at this place that 
  I had the hardest task to win my way up the hill. I went 
  close up to the fence on the left and worked my way along 
  its palings. =

  Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash 
  of lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth 
  and a pair of boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how 
  the man lay, the flicker of light had passed. I stood over 
  him waiting for the next flash. When it came, I saw that he 
  was a sturdy man, cheaply but not shabbily dressed; his head 
  was bent under his body, and he lay crumpled up close to the 
  fence, as though he had been flung violently against it. =

  Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never 
  before touched a dead body, I stooped and turned him over to 
  feel for his heart. He was quite dead. Apparently his neck 
  had been broken. The lightning flashed for a third time, and 
  his face leaped upon me. I sprang to my feet. It was the 
  landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose conveyance I had taken. =

  I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I 
  made my way by the police station and the College Arms 
  towards my own house. Nothing was burning on the hillside, 
  though from the common there still came a red glare and a 
  rolling tumult of ruddy smoke beating up against the 
  drenching hail. So far as I could see by the flashes, the 
  houses about me were mostly uninjured. By the College Arms a 
  dark heap lay in the road. =

  Down the road towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and 
  the sound of feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to 
  go to them. I let myself in with my latchkey, closed, locked 
  and bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, 
  and sat down. My imagination was full of those striding 
  metallic monsters, and of the dead body smashed against the 
  fence. =

  I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the 
  wall, shivering violently. =

@section 2 {c11}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  AT THE WINDOW 

@section 3 {tx}
  I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick 
  of exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I 
  was cold and wet, and with little pools of water about me on 
  the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, went into 
  the dining room and drank some whiskey, and then I was moved 
  to change my clothes. =

  After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I 
  did so I do not know. The window of my study looks over the 
  trees and the railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry 
  of our departure this window had been left open. The passage 
  was dark, and, by contrast with the picture the window frame 
  enclosed, the side of the room seemed impenetrably dark. I 
  stopped short in the doorway. =

  The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental 
  College and the pine trees about it had gone, and very far 
  away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about the sand 
  pits was visible. Across the light huge black shapes, 
  grotesque and strange, moved busily to and fro. =

  It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction 
  was on fire--a broad hillside set with minute tongues of 
  flame, swaying and writhing with the gusts of the dying 
  storm, and throwing a red reflection upon the cloud scud 
  above. Every now and then a haze of smoke from some nearer 
  conflagration drove across the window and hid the Martian 
  shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the clear 
  form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were 
  busied upon. Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the 
  reflections of it danced on the wall and ceiling of the 
  study. A sharp, resinous tang of burning was in the air. =

  I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. 
  As I did so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it 
  reached to the houses about Woking station, and on the other 
  to the charred and blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There 
  was a light down below the hill, on the railway, near the 
  arch, and several of the houses along the Maybury road and 
  the streets near the station were glowing ruins. The light 
  upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black 
  heap and a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of 
  yellow oblongs. Then I perceived this was a wrecked train, 
  the fore part smashed and on fire, the hinder carriages 
  still upon the rails. =

  Between these three main centres of light--the houses, the 
  train, and the burning county towards Chobham--stretched 
  irregular patches of dark country, broken here and there by 
  intervals of dimly glowing and smoking ground. It was the 
  strangest spectacle, that black expanse set with fire. It 
  reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at 
  night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though 
  I peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of 
  Woking station a number of black figures hurrying one after 
  the other across the line. =

  And this was the little world in which I had been living 
  securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in 
  the last seven hours I still did not know; nor did I know, 
  though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these 
  mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen 
  disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of 
  impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, 
  sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and 
  particularly at the three gigantic black things that were 
  going to and fro in the glare about the sand pits. =

  They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they 
  could be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I 
  felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, 
  ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and 
  rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human 
  machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an 
  ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent 
  lower animal. =

  The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the 
  burning land the little fading pinpoint of Mars was dropping 
  into the west, when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a 
  slight scraping at the fence, and rousing myself from the 
  lethargy that had fallen upon me, I looked down and saw him 
  dimly, clambering over the palings. At the sight of another 
  human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the window 
  eagerly. =

  "Hist!" said I, in a whisper. =

  He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over 
  and across the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down 
  and stepped softly. =

  "Who's there?" he said, also whispering, standing under the 
  window and peering up. =

  "Where are you going?" I asked. =

  "God knows." =

  "Are you trying to hide?" =

  "That's it." =

  "Come into the house," I said. =

  I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked 
  the door again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, 
  and his coat was unbuttoned. =

  "My God!" he said, as I drew him in. =

  "What has happened?" I asked. =

  "What hasn't?" In the obscurity I could see he made a 
  gesture of despair. "They wiped us out--simply wiped us 
  out," he repeated again and again. =

  He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room. =

  "Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a stiff dose. =

  He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put 
  his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a 
  little boy, in a perfect passion of emotion, while I, with a 
  curious forgetfulness of my own recent despair, stood beside 
  him, wondering. =

  It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to 
  answer my questions, and then he answered perplexingly and 
  brokenly. He was a driver in the artillery, and had only 
  come into action about seven. At that time firing was going 
  on across the common, and it was said the first party of 
  Martians were crawling slowly towards their second cylinder 
  under cover of a metal shield. =

  Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the 
  first of the fighting~machines I had seen. The gun he drove 
  had been unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the 
  sand pits, and its arrival it was that had precipitated the 
  action. As the limber gunners went to the rear, his horse 
  trod in a rabbit hole and came down, throwing him into a 
  depression of the ground. At the same moment the gun 
  exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was fire 
  all about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of 
  charred dead men and dead horses. =

  "I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the 
  fore quarter of a horse atop of me. We'd been wiped out. And 
  the smell--good God! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the 
  back by the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until 
  I felt better. Just like parade it had been a minute 
  before--then stumble, bang, swish!" =

  "Wiped out!" he said. =

  He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out 
  furtively across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a 
  rush, in skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept 
  out of existence. Then the monster had risen to its feet and 
  had begun to walk leisurely to and fro across the common 
  among the few fugitives, with its headlike hood turning 
  about exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind 
  of arm carried a complicated metallic case, about which 
  green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this 
  there smoked the Heat~Ray. =

  In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, 
  not a living thing left upon the common, and every bush and 
  tree upon it that was not already a blackened skeleton was 
  burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond the 
  curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He 
  heard the Martians rattle for a time and then become still. 
  The giant saved Woking station and its cluster of houses 
  until the last; then in a moment the Heat~Ray was brought to 
  bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the 
  Thing shut off the Heat~Ray, and turning its back upon the 
  artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the smouldering 
  pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so 
  a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit. =

  The second monster followed the first, and at that the 
  artilleryman began to crawl very cautiously across the hot 
  heather ash towards Horsell. He managed to get alive into 
  the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking. 
  There his story became ejaculatory. The place was 
  impassable. It seems there were a few people alive there, 
  frantic for the most part and many burned and scalded. He 
  was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost 
  scorching heaps of broken wall as one of the Martian giants 
  returned. He saw this one pursue a man, catch him up in one 
  of its steely tentacles, and knock his head against the 
  trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the 
  artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the railway 
  embankment. =

  Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in 
  the hope of getting out of danger Londonward. People were 
  hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors 
  had made off towards Woking village and Send. He had been 
  consumed with thirst until he found one of the water mains 
  near the railway arch smashed, and the water bubbling out 
  like a spring upon the road. =

  That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew 
  calmer telling me and trying to make me see the things he 
  had seen. He had eaten no food since midday, he told me 
  early in his narrative, and I found some mutton and bread in 
  the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit no lamp for 
  fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our 
  hands would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things 
  about us came darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled 
  bushes and broken rose trees outside the window grew 
  distinct. It would seem that a number of men or animals had 
  rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face, blackened 
  and haggard, as no doubt mine was also. =

  When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my 
  study, and I looked again out of the open window. In one 
  night the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had 
  dwindled now. Where flames had been there were now streamers 
  of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted 
  houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had 
  hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless 
  light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had the 
  luck to escape--a white railway signal here, the end of a 
  greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never 
  before in the history of warfare had destruction been so 
  indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with the 
  growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants 
  stood about the pit, their cowls rotating as though they 
  were surveying the desolation they had made. =

  It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and 
  again puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it 
  towards the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke, 
  and vanished. =

  Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became 
  pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day. =

@section 2 {c12}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER TWELVE 

@section 3 {tt}

  WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION 

@section 3 {tx}
  OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON =

  As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from 
  which we had watched the Martians, and went very quietly 
  downstairs. =

  The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place 
  to stay in. He proposed, he said, to make his way 
  Londonward, and thence rejoin his battery--No. 12, of the 
  Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once to 
  Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians 
  impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to 
  Newhaven, and go with her out of the country forthwith. For 
  I already perceived clearly that the country about London 
  must inevitably be the scene of a disastrous struggle before 
  such creatures as these could be destroyed. =

  Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, 
  with its guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should 
  have taken my chance and struck across country. But the 
  artilleryman dissuaded me: "It's no kindness to the right 
  sort of wife," he said, "to make her a widow"; and in the 
  end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the woods, 
  northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him. 
  Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach 
  Leatherhead. =

  I should have started at once, but my companion had been in 
  active service and he knew better than that. He made me 
  ransack the house for a flask, which he filled with whiskey; 
  and we lined every available pocket with packets of biscuits 
  and slices of meat. Then we crept out of the house, and ran 
  as quickly as we could down the ill~made road by which I had 
  come overnight. The houses seemed deserted. In the road lay 
  a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead 
  by the Heat~Ray; and here and there were things that people 
  had dropped--a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the 
  like poor valuables. At the corner turning up towards the 
  post office a little cart, filled with boxes and furniture, 
  and horseless, heeled over on a broken wheel. A cash box had 
  been hastily smashed open and thrown under the debris. =

  Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, 
  none of the houses had suffered very greatly here. The 
  Heat~Ray had shaved the chimney tops and passed. Yet, save 
  ourselves, there did not seem to be a living soul on Maybury 
  Hill. The majority of the inhabitants had escaped, I 
  suppose, by way of the Old Woking road--the road I had taken 
  when I drove to Leatherhead--or they had hidden. =

  We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, 
  sodden now from the overnight hail, and broke into the woods 
  at the foot of the hill. We pushed through these towards the 
  railway without meeting a soul. The woods across the line 
  were but the scarred and blackened ruins of woods; for the 
  most part the trees had fallen, but a certain proportion 
  still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown foliage 
  instead of green. =

  On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer 
  trees; it had failed to secure its footing. In one place the 
  woodmen had been at work on Saturday; trees, felled and 
  freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing, with heaps of sawdust by 
  the sawing~machine and its engine. Hard by was a temporary 
  hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning, 
  and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were 
  hushed, and as we hurried along I and the artilleryman 
  talked in whispers and looked now and again over our 
  shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen. =

  After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we 
  heard the clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems 
  three cavalry soldiers riding slowly towards Woking. We 
  hailed them, and they halted while we hurried towards them. 
  It was a lieutenant and a couple of privates of the 8th 
  Hussars, with a stand like a theodolite, which the 
  artilleryman told me was a heliograph. =

  "You are the first men I've seen coming this way this 
  morning," said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?" =

  His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared 
  curiously. The artilleryman jumped down the bank into the 
  road and saluted. =

  "Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to 
  rejoin battery, sir. You'll come in sight of the Martians, I 
  expect, about half a mile along this road." =

  "What the dickens are they like?" asked the lieutenant. =

  "Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a 
  body like 'luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, 
  sir." =

  "Get out!" said the lieutenant. "What confounded nonsense!" =

  "You'll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots 
  fire and strikes you dead." =

  "What d'ye mean--a gun?" =

  "No, sir," and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the 
  Heat~Ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him 
  and looked up at me. I was still standing on the bank by the 
  side of the road. =

  "It's perfectly true," I said. =

  "Well," said the lieutenant, "I suppose it's my business to 
  see it too. Look here"--to the artilleryman--"we're detailed 
  here clearing people out of their houses. You'd better go 
  along and report yourself to Brigadier~General Marvin, and 
  tell him all you know. He's at Weybridge. Know the way?" =

  "I do," I said; and he turned his horse southward again. =

  "Half a mile, you say?" said he. =

  "At most," I answered, and pointed over the treetops 
  southward. He thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no 
  more. =

  Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two 
  children in the road, busy clearing out a labourer's 
  cottage. They had got hold of a little hand truck, and were 
  piling it up with unclean~looking bundles and shabby 
  furniture. They were all too assiduously engaged to talk to 
  us as we passed. =

  By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found 
  the country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We 
  were far beyond the range of the Heat~Ray there, and had it 
  not been for the silent desertion of some of the houses, the 
  stirring movement of packing in others, and the knot of 
  soldiers standing on the bridge over the railway and staring 
  down the line towards Woking, the day would have seemed very 
  like any other Sunday. =

  Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along 
  the road to Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a 
  field we saw, across a stretch of flat meadow, six 
  twelve~pounders standing neatly at equal distances pointing 
  towards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns waiting, and 
  the ammunition waggons were at a business~like distance. The 
  men stood almost as if under inspection. =

  "That's good!" said I. "They will get one fair shot, at any 
  rate." =

  The artilleryman hesitated at the gate. =

  "I shall go on," he said. =

  Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there 
  were a number of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a 
  long rampart, and more guns behind. =

  "It's bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow," said 
  the artilleryman. "They 'aven't seen that fire~beam yet." =

  The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared 
  over the treetops southwestward, and the men digging would 
  stop every now and again to stare in the same direction. =

  Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of 
  hussars, some of them dismounted, some on horseback, were 
  hunting them about. Three or four black government waggons, 
  with crosses in white circles, and an old omnibus, among 
  other vehicles, were being loaded in the village street. 
  There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently 
  sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers 
  were having the greatest difficulty in making them realise 
  the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old 
  fellow with a huge box and a score or more of flower pots 
  containing orchids, angrily expostulating with the corporal 
  who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his arm. =

  "Do you know what's over there?" I said, pointing at the 
  pine tops that hid the Martians. =

  "Eh?" said he, turning. "I was explainin" these is 
  vallyble." =

  "Death!" I shouted. "Death is coming! Death!" and leaving 
  him to digest that if he could, I hurried on after the 
  artilleryman. At the corner I looked back. The soldier had 
  left him, and he was still standing by his box, with the 
  pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely over 
  the trees. =

  No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters 
  were established; the whole place was in such confusion as I 
  had never seen in any town before. Carts, carriages 
  everywhere, the most astonishing miscellany of conveyances 
  and horseflesh. The respectable inhabitants of the place, 
  men in golf and boating costumes, wives prettily dressed, 
  were packing, river~side loafers energetically helping, 
  children excited, and, for the most part, highly delighted 
  at this astonishing variation of their Sunday experiences. 
  In the midst of it all the worthy vicar was very pluckily 
  holding an early celebration, and his bell was jangling out 
  above the excitement. =

  I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking 
  fountain, made a very passable meal upon what we had brought 
  with us. Patrols of soldiers--here no longer hussars, but 
  grenadiers in white--were warning people to move now or to 
  take refuge in their cellars as soon as the firing began. We 
  saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing crowd of 
  people had assembled in and about the railway station, and 
  the swarming platform was piled with boxes and packages. The 
  ordinary traffic had been stopped, I believe, in order to 
  allow of the passage of troops and guns to Chertsey, and I 
  have heard since that a savage struggle occurred for places 
  in the special trains that were put on at a later hour. =

  We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we 
  found ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the 
  Wey and Thames join. Part of the time we spent helping two 
  old women to pack a little cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, 
  and at this point boats are to be hired, and there was a 
  ferry across the river. On the Shepperton side was an inn 
  with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of Shepperton Church 
  --it has been replaced by a spire--rose above the trees. =

  Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As 
  yet the flight had not grown to a panic, but there were 
  already far more people than all the boats going to and fro 
  could enable to cross. People came panting along under heavy 
  burdens; one husband and wife were even carrying a small 
  outhouse door between them, with some of their household 
  goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get 
  away from Shepperton station. =

  There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. 
  The idea people seemed to have here was that the Martians 
  were simply formidable human beings, who might attack and 
  sack the town, to be certainly destroyed in the end. Every 
  now and then people would glance nervously across the Wey, 
  at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over there 
  was still. =

  Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed, 
  everything was quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey 
  side. The people who landed there from the boats went 
  tramping off down the lane. The big ferryboat had just made 
  a journey. Three or four soldiers stood on the lawn of the 
  inn, staring and jesting at the fugitives, without offering 
  to help. The inn was closed, as it was now within prohibited 
  hours. =

  "What's that?" cried a boatman, and "Shut up, you fool!" 
  said a man near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came 
  again, this time from the direction of Chertsey, a muffled 
  thud--the sound of a gun. =

  The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen 
  batteries across the river to our right, unseen because of 
  the trees, took up the chorus, firing heavily one after the 
  other. A woman screamed. Everyone stood arrested by the 
  sudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible to us. 
  Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding 
  unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows 
  motionless in the warm sunlight. =

  "The sojers'll stop 'em," said a woman beside me, 
  doubtfully. A haziness rose over the treetops. =

  Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, 
  a puff of smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and 
  forthwith the ground heaved under foot and a heavy explosion 
  shook the air, smashing two or three windows in the houses 
  near, and leaving us astonished. =

  "Here they are!" shouted a man in a blue jersey. "Yonder! 
  D'yer see them? Yonder!" =

  Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the 
  armoured Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, 
  across the flat meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and 
  striding hurriedly towards the river. Little cowled figures 
  they seemed at first, going with a rolling motion and as 
  fast as flying birds. =

  Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their 
  armoured bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly 
  forward upon the guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew 
  nearer. One on the extreme left, the remotest that is, 
  flourished a huge case high in the air, and the ghostly, 
  terrible Heat~Ray I had already seen on Friday night smote 
  towards Chertsey, and struck the town. =

  At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the 
  crowd near the water's edge seemed to me to be for a moment 
  horror~struck. There was no screaming or shouting, but a 
  silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a movement of feet--a 
  splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to drop the 
  portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent 
  me staggering with a blow from the corner of his burden. A 
  woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed past me. I 
  turned with the rush of the people, but I was not too 
  terrified for thought. The terrible Heat~Ray was in my mind. 
  To get under water! That was it! =

  "Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded. =

  I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching 
  Martian, rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong 
  into the water. Others did the same. A boatload of people 
  putting back came leaping out as I rushed past. The stones 
  under my feet were muddy and slippery, and the river was so 
  low that I ran perhaps twenty feet scarcely waist~deep. 
  Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely a couple of 
  hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the 
  surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping 
  into the river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People 
  were landing hastily on both sides of the river. But the 
  Martian machine took no more notice for the moment of the 
  people running this way and that than a man would of the 
  confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has 
  kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water, 
  the Martian's hood pointed at the batteries that were still 
  firing across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose 
  what must have been the generator of the Heat~Ray. =

  In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading 
  halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the 
  farther bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to 
  its full height again, close to the village of Shepperton. 
  Forthwith the six guns which, unknown to anyone on the right 
  bank, had been hidden behind the outskirts of that village, 
  fired simultaneously. The sudden near concussion, the last 
  close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was 
  already raising the case generating the Heat~Ray as the 
  first shell burst six yards above the hood. =

  I gave a cry of astonishment. I saw and thought nothing of 
  the other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted 
  upon the nearer incident. Simultaneously two other shells 
  burst in the air near the body as the hood twisted round in 
  time to receive, but not in time to dodge, the fourth shell. =

  The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood 
  bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered 
  fragments of red flesh and glittering metal. =

  "Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a 
  cheer. =

  I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about 
  me. I could have leaped out of the water with that momentary 
  exultation. =

  The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it 
  did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, 
  and, no longer heeding its steps and with the camera that 
  fired the Heat~Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly 
  upon Shepperton. The living intelligence, the Martian within 
  the hood, was slain and splashed to the four winds of 
  heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate device of 
  metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight 
  line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of 
  Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the impact of a 
  battering ram might have done, swerved aside, blundered on 
  and collapsed with tremendous force into the river out of my 
  sight. =

  A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, 
  steam, mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As 
  the camera of the Heat~Ray hit the water, the latter had 
  immediately flashed into steam. In another moment a huge 
  wave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost scaldingly hot, 
  came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw people 
  struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and 
  shouting faintly above the seething and roar of the 
  Martian's collapse. =

  For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent 
  need of self~preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous 
  water, pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could 
  see round the bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched 
  aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves. The fallen 
  Martian came into sight downstream, lying across the river, 
  and for the most part submerged. =

  Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and 
  through the tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, 
  intermittently and vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the 
  water and flinging a splash and spray of mud and froth into 
  the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like living arms, 
  and, save for the helpless purposelessness of these 
  movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling 
  for its life amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a 
  ruddy~brown fluid were spurting up in noisy jets out of the 
  machine. =

  My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a 
  furious yelling, like that of the thing called a siren in 
  our manufacturing towns. A man, knee~deep near the towing 
  path, shouted inaudibly to me and pointed. Looking back, I 
  saw the other Martians advancing with gigantic strides down 
  the riverbank from the direction of Chertsey. The Shepperton 
  guns spoke this time unavailingly. =

  At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath 
  until movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under 
  the surface as long as I could. The water was in a tumult 
  about me, and rapidly growing hotter. =

  When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw 
  the hair and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a 
  whirling white fog that at first hid the Martians 
  altogether. The noise was deafening. Then I saw them dimly, 
  colossal figures of grey, magnified by the mist. They had 
  passed by me, and two were stooping over the frothing, 
  tumultuous ruins of their comrade. =

  The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one 
  perhaps two hundred yards from me, the other towards 
  Laleham. The generators of the Heat~Rays waved high, and the 
  hissing beams smote down this way and that. =

  The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing 
  conflict of noises--the clangorous din of the Martians, the 
  crash of falling houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds 
  flashing into flame, and the crackling and roaring of fire. 
  Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam 
  from the river, and as the Heat~Ray went to and fro over 
  Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent 
  white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid 
  flames. The nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their 
  fate, shadowy, faint and pallid in the steam, with the fire 
  behind them going to and fro. =

  For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast~high in the 
  almost boiling water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless 
  of escape. Through the reek I could see the people who had 
  been with me in the river scrambling out of the water 
  through the reeds, like little frogs hurrying through grass 
  from the advance of a man, or running to and fro in utter 
  dismay on the towing path. =

  Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat~Ray came leaping 
  towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its 
  touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with 
  a roar. The Ray flickered up and down the towing path, 
  licking off the people who ran this way and that, and came 
  down to the water's edge not fifty yards from where I stood. 
  It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the water in 
  its track rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I 
  turned shoreward. =

  In another moment the huge wave, well~nigh at the 
  boiling~point had rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and 
  scalded, half blinded, agonised, I staggered through the 
  leaping, hissing water towards the shore. Had my foot 
  stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell helplessly, in 
  full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare gravelly 
  spit that runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames. 
  I expected nothing but death. =

  I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down 
  within a score of yards of my head, driving straight into 
  the loose gravel, whirling it this way and that and lifting 
  again; of a long suspense, and then of the four carrying the 
  debris of their comrade between them, now clear and then 
  presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding 
  interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of 
  river and meadow. And then, very slowly, I realised that by 
  a miracle I had escaped. =

@section 2 {c13}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE 

@section 3 {tx}
  After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial 
  weapons, the Martians retreated to their original position 
  upon Horsell Common; and in their haste, and encumbered with 
  the debris of their smashed companion, they no doubt 
  overlooked many such a stray and negligible victim as 
  myself. Had they left their comrade and pushed on forthwith, 
  there was nothing at that time between them and London but 
  batteries of twelve~pounder guns, and they would certainly 
  have reached the capital in advance of the tidings of their 
  approach; as sudden, dreadful, and destructive their advent 
  would have been as the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon a 
  century ago. =

  But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its 
  interplanetary flight; every twenty~four hours brought them 
  reinforcement. And meanwhile the military and naval 
  authorities, now fully alive to the tremendous power of 
  their antagonists, worked with furious energy. Every minute 
  a fresh gun came into position until, before twilight, every 
  copse, every row of suburban villas on the hilly slopes 
  about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant black 
  muzzle. And through the charred and desolated area--perhaps 
  twenty square miles altogether--that encircled the Martian 
  encampment on Horsell Common, through charred and ruined 
  villages among the green trees, through the blackened and 
  smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine spinneys, 
  crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were 
  presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But 
  the Martians now understood our command of artillery and the 
  danger of human proximity, and not a man ventured within a 
  mile of either cylinder, save at the price of his life. =

  It would seem that these giants spent the earlier part of 
  the afternoon in going to and fro, transferring everything 
  from the second and third cylinders--the second in 
  Addlestone Golf Links and the third at Pyrford--to their 
  original pit on Horsell Common. Over that, above the 
  blackened heather and ruined buildings that stretched far 
  and wide, stood one as sentinel, while the rest abandoned 
  their vast fighting~machines and descended into the pit. 
  They were hard at work there far into the night, and the 
  towering pillar of dense green smoke that rose therefrom 
  could be seen from the hills about Merrow, and even, it is 
  said, from Banstead and Epsom Downs. =

  And while the Martians behind me were thus preparing for 
  their next sally, and in front of me Humanity gathered for 
  the battle, I made my way with infinite pains and labour 
  from the fire and smoke of burning Weybridge towards London. =

  I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting 
  down~stream; and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, 
  I went after it, gained it, and so escaped out of that 
  destruction. There were no oars in the boat, but I contrived 
  to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would allow, down 
  the river towards Halliford and Walton, going very tediously 
  and continually looking behind me, as you may well 
  understand. I followed the river, because I considered that 
  the water gave me my best chance of escape should these 
  giants return. =

  The hot water from the Martian's overthrow drifted 
  downstream with me, so that for the best part of a mile I 
  could see little of either bank. Once, however, I made out a 
  string of black figures hurrying across the meadows from the 
  direction of Weybridge. Halliford, it seemed, was deserted, 
  and several of the houses facing the river were on fire. It 
  was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite desolate 
  under the hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of 
  flame going straight up into the heat of the afternoon. 
  Never before had I seen houses burning without the 
  accompaniment of an obstructive crowd. A little farther on 
  the dry reeds up the bank were smoking and glowing, and a 
  line of fire inland was marching steadily across a late 
  field of hay. =

  For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after 
  the violence I had been through, and so intense the heat 
  upon the water. Then my fears got the better of me again, 
  and I resumed my paddling. The sun scorched my bare back. At 
  last, as the bridge at Walton was coming into sight round 
  the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my fears, and I 
  landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick, amid 
  the long grass. I suppose the time was then about four or 
  five o'clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile 
  without meeting a soul, and then lay down again in the 
  shadow of a hedge. I seem to remember talking, wanderingly, 
  to myself during that last spurt. I was also very thirsty, 
  and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It is a 
  curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot 
  account for it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead 
  worried me excessively. =

  I do not clearly remember the arrival of the curate, so that 
  probably I dozed. I became aware of him as a seated figure 
  in soot~smudged shirt sleeves, and with his upturned, 
  clean~shaven face staring at a faint flickering that danced 
  over the sky. The sky was what is called a mackerel 
  sky--rows and rows of faint down~plumes of cloud, just 
  tinted with the midsummer sunset. =

  I sat up, and at the rustle of my motion he looked at me 
  quickly. =

  "Have you any water?" I asked abruptly. =

  He shook his head. =

  "You have been asking for water for the last hour," he said. =

  For a moment we were silent, taking stock of each other. I 
  dare say he found me a strange enough figure, naked, save 
  for my water~soaked trousers and socks, scalded, and my face 
  and shoulders blackened by the smoke. His face was a fair 
  weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, 
  almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were 
  rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke 
  abruptly, looking vacantly away from me. =

  "What does it mean?" he said. "What do these things mean?" =

  I stared at him and made no answer. =

  He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a 
  complaining tone. =

  "Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The 
  morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to 
  clear my brain for the afternoon, and then--fire, 
  earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our 
  work undone, all the work----What are these Martians?" =

  "What are we?" I answered, clearing my throat. =

  He gripped his knees and turned to look at me again. For 
  half a minute, perhaps, he stared silently. =

  "I was walking through the roads to clear my brain," he 
  said. "And suddenly--fire, earthquake, death!" =

  He relapsed into silence, with his chin now sunken almost to 
  his knees. =

  Presently he began waving his hand. =

  "All the work--all the Sunday schools----What have we 
  done--what has Weybridge done? Everything gone--everything 
  destroyed. The church! We rebuilt it only three years ago. 
  Gone! Swept out of existence! Why?" =

  Another pause, and he broke out again like one demented. =

  "The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!" he 
  shouted. =

  His eyes flamed, and he pointed a lean finger in the 
  direction of Weybridge. =

  By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The 
  tremendous tragedy in which he had been involved--it was 
  evident he was a fugitive from Weybridge--had driven him to 
  the very verge of his reason. =

  "Are we far from Sunbury?" I said, in a matter~of~fact tone. =

  "What are we to do?" he asked. "Are these creatures 
  everywhere? Has the earth been given over to them?" =

  "Are we far from Sunbury?" =

  "Only this morning I officiated at early celebration----" =

  "Things have changed," I said, quietly. "You must keep your 
  head. There is still hope." =

  "Hope!" =

  "Yes. Plentiful hope--for all this destruction!" =

  I began to explain my view of our position. He listened at 
  first, but as I went on the interest dawning in his eyes 
  gave place to their former stare, and his regard wandered 
  from me. =

  "This must be the beginning of the end," he said, 
  interrupting me. "The end! The great and terrible day of the 
  Lord! When men shall call upon the mountains and the rocks 
  to fall upon them and hide them--hide them from the face of 
  Him that sitteth upon the throne!" =

  I began to understand the position. I ceased my laboured 
  reasoning, struggled to my feet, and, standing over him, 
  laid my hand on his shoulder. =

  "Be a man!" said I. "You are scared out of your wits! What 
  good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of 
  what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done 
  before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He 
  is not an insurance agent." =

  For a time he sat in blank silence. =

  "But how can we escape?" he asked, suddenly. "They are 
  invulnerable, they are pitiless." =

  "Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other," I answered. "And 
  the mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. 
  One of them was killed yonder not three hours ago." =

  "Killed!" he said, staring about him. "How can God's 
  ministers be killed?" =

  "I saw it happen." I proceeded to tell him. "We have chanced 
  to come in for the thick of it," said I, "and that is all." =

  "What is that flicker in the sky?" he asked abruptly. =

  I told him it was the heliograph signalling--that it was the 
  sign of human help and effort in the sky. =

  "We are in the midst of it," I said, "quiet as it is. That 
  flicker in the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I 
  take it are the Martians, and Londonward, where those hills 
  rise about Richmond and Kingston and the trees give cover, 
  earthworks are being thrown up and guns are being placed. 
  Presently the Martians will be coming this way again." =

  And even as I spoke he sprang to his feet and stopped me by 
  a gesture. =

  "Listen!" he said. =

  From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull 
  resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then 
  everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the 
  hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung 
  faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton 
  and the hot, still splendour of the sunset. =

  "We had better follow this path," I said, "northward." =

@section 2 {c14}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  IN LONDON 

@section 3 {tx}
  My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at 
  Woking. He was a medical student working for an imminent 
  examination, and he heard nothing of the arrival until 
  Saturday morning. The morning papers on Saturday contained, 
  in addition to lengthy special articles on the planet Mars, 
  on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely 
  worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity. =

  The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed 
  a number of people with a quick~firing gun, so the story 
  ran. The telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as 
  they seem to be, the Martians have not moved from the pit 
  into which they have fallen, and, indeed, seem incapable of 
  doing so. Probably this is due to the relative strength of 
  the earth's gravitational energy." On that last text their 
  leader~writer expanded very comfortingly. =

  Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class, 
  to which my brother went that day, were intensely 
  interested, but there were no signs of any unusual 
  excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers puffed 
  scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell 
  beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the 
  burning of the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, 
  until eight. Then the ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE, in an 
  extra~special edition, announced the bare fact of the 
  interruption of telegraphic communication. This was thought 
  to be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the 
  line. Nothing more of the fighting was known that night, the 
  night of my drive to Leatherhead and back. =

  My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the 
  description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two 
  miles from my house. He made up his mind to run down that 
  night to me, in order, as he says, to see the Things before 
  they were killed. He despatched a telegram, which never 
  reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the evening at a 
  music hall. =

  In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, 
  and my brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform 
  from which the midnight train usually starts he learned, 
  after some waiting, that an accident prevented trains from 
  reaching Woking that night. The nature of the accident he 
  could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities did not 
  clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement 
  in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that 
  anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking 
  junction had occurred, were running the theatre trains which 
  usually passed through Woking round by Virginia Water or 
  Guildford. They were busy making the necessary arrangements 
  to alter the route of the Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday 
  League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking 
  my brother for the traffic manager, to whom he bears a 
  slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview him. Few 
  people, excepting the railway officials, connected the 
  breakdown with the Martians. =

  I have read, in another account of these events, that on 
  Sunday morning "all London was electrified by the news from 
  Woking." As a matter of fact, there was nothing to justify 
  that very extravagant phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not 
  hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday morning. 
  Those who did took some time to realise all that the hastily 
  worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The majority 
  of people in London do not read Sunday papers. =

  The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed 
  in the Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much a 
  matter of course in the papers, that they could read without 
  any personal tremors: "About seven o'clock last night the 
  Martians came out of the cylinder, and, moving about under 
  an armour of metallic shields, have completely wrecked 
  Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an 
  entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are 
  known. Maxims have been absolutely useless against their 
  armour; the field guns have been disabled by them. Flying 
  hussars have been galloping into Chertsey. The Martians 
  appear to be moving slowly towards Chertsey or Windsor. 
  Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and earthworks are 
  being thrown up to check the advance Londonward." That was 
  how the Sunday SUN put it, and a clever and remarkably 
  prompt "handbook" article in the REFEREE compared the affair 
  to a menagerie suddenly let loose in a village. =

  No one in London knew positively of the nature of the 
  armoured Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that 
  these monsters must be sluggish: "crawling," "creeping 
  painfully"--such expressions occurred in almost all the 
  earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have been 
  written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers 
  printed separate editions as further news came to hand, some 
  even in default of it. But there was practically nothing 
  more to tell people until late in the afternoon, when the 
  authorities gave the press agencies the news in their 
  possession. It was stated that the people of Walton and 
  Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the roads 
  Londonward, and that was all. =

  My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the 
  morning, still in ignorance of what had happened on the 
  previous night. There he heard allusions made to the 
  invasion, and a special prayer for peace. Coming out, he 
  bought a REFEREE. He became alarmed at the news in this, and 
  went again to Waterloo station to find out if communication 
  were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and 
  innumerable people walking in their best clothes seemed 
  scarcely affected by the strange intelligence that the news 
  venders were disseminating. People were interested, or, if 
  alarmed, alarmed only on account of the local residents. At 
  the station he heard for the first time that the Windsor and 
  Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him 
  that several remarkable telegrams had been received in the 
  morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that these 
  had abruptly ceased. My brother could get very little 
  precise detail out of them. =

  "There's fighting going on about Weybridge" was the extent 
  of their information. =

  The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a 
  number of people who had been expecting friends from places 
  on the South~Western network were standing about the 
  station. One grey~headed old gentleman came and abused the 
  South~Western Company bitterly to my brother. "It wants 
  showing up," he said. =

  One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and 
  Kingston, containing people who had gone out for a day's 
  boating and found the locks closed and a feeling of panic in 
  the air. A man in a blue and white blazer addressed my 
  brother, full of strange tidings. =

  "There's hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and 
  carts and things, with boxes of valuables and all that," he 
  said. "They come from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and 
  they say there's been guns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, 
  and that mounted soldiers have told them to get off at once 
  because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing at 
  Hampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What 
  the dickens does it all mean? The Martians can't get out of 
  their pit, can they?" =

  My brother could not tell him. =

  Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had 
  spread to the clients of the underground railway, and that 
  the Sunday excursionists began to return from all over the 
  South~Western "lung"--Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, 
  and so forth--at unnaturally early hours; but not a soul had 
  anything more than vague hearsay to tell of. Everyone 
  connected with the terminus seemed ill~tempered. =

  About five o'clock the gathering crowd in the station was 
  immensely excited by the opening of the line of 
  communication, which is almost invariably closed, between 
  the South~Eastern and the South~Western stations, and the 
  passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and carriages 
  crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were brought 
  up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was an 
  exchange of pleasantries: "You'll get eaten!" "We're the 
  beast~tamers!" and so forth. A little while after that a 
  squad of police came into the station and began to clear the 
  public off the platforms, and my brother went out into the 
  street again. =

  The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of 
  Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On 
  the bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown 
  scum that came drifting down the stream in patches. The sun 
  was just setting, and the Clock Tower and the Houses of 
  Parliament rose against one of the most peaceful skies it is 
  possible to imagine, a sky of gold, barred with long 
  transverse stripes of reddish~purple cloud. There was talk 
  of a floating body. One of the men there, a reservist he 
  said he was, told my brother he had seen the heliograph 
  flickering in the west. =

  In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy 
  roughs who had just been rushed out of Fleet Street with 
  still~wet newspapers and staring placards. "Dreadful 
  catastrophe!" they bawled one to the other down Wellington 
  Street. "Fight ing at Weybridge! Full description! Repulse 
  of the Martians! London in Danger!" He had to give 
  threepence for a copy of that paper. =

  Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of 
  the full power and terror of these monsters. He learned that 
  they were not merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, 
  but that they were minds swaying vast mechanical bodies; and 
  that they could move swiftly and smite with such power that 
  even the mightiest guns could not stand against them. =

  They were described as "vast spiderlike machines, nearly a 
  hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, 
  and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat." Masked 
  batteries, chiefly of field guns, had been planted in the 
  country about Horsell Common, and especially between the 
  Woking district and London. Five of the machines had been 
  seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, 
  had been destroyed. In the other cases the shells had 
  missed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by 
  the Heat~Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned, but 
  the tone of the despatch was optimistic. =

  The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable. 
  They had retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in 
  the circle about Woking. Signallers with heliographs were 
  pushing forward upon them from all sides. Guns were in rapid 
  transit from Windsor, Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich--even 
  from the north; among others, long wire~guns of ninety~five 
  tons from Woolwich. Altogether one hundred and sixteen were 
  in position or being hastily placed, chiefly covering 
  London. Never before in England had there been such a vast 
  or rapid concentration of military material. =

  Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be 
  destroyed at once by high explosives, which were being 
  rapidly manufactured and distributed. No doubt, ran the 
  report, the situation was of the strangest and gravest 
  description, but the public was exhorted to avoid and 
  discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and 
  terrible in the extreme, but at the outside there could not 
  be more than twenty of them against our millions. =

  The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the 
  cylinders, that at the outside there could not be more than 
  five in each cylinder--fifteen altogether. And one at least 
  was disposed of--perhaps more. The public would be fairly 
  warned of the approach of danger, and elaborate measures 
  were being taken for the protection of the people in the 
  threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with reiterated 
  assurances of the safety of London and the ability of the 
  authorities to cope with the difficulty, this 
  quasi~proclamation closed. =

  This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it 
  was still wet, and there had been no time to add a word of 
  comment. It was curious, my brother said, to see how 
  ruthlessly the usual contents of the paper had been hacked 
  and taken out to give this place. =

  All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering 
  out the pink sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly 
  noisy with the voices of an army of hawkers following these 
  pioneers. Men came scrambling off buses to secure copies. 
  Certainly this news excited people intensely, whatever their 
  previous apathy. The shutters of a map shop in the Strand 
  were being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his 
  Sunday raiment, lemon~yellow gloves even, was visible inside 
  the window hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass. =

  Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in 
  his hand, my brother saw some of the fugitives from West 
  Surrey. There was a man with his wife and two boys and some 
  articles of furniture in a cart such as greengrocers use. He 
  was driving from the direction of Westminster Bridge; and 
  close behind him came a hay waggon with five or six 
  respectable~looking people in it, and some boxes and 
  bundles. The faces of these people were haggard, and their 
  entire appearance contrasted conspicuously with the 
  Sabbath~best appearance of the people on the omnibuses. 
  People in fashionable clothing peeped at them out of cabs. 
  They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to 
  take, and finally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way 
  behind these came a man in workday clothes, riding one of 
  those old~fashioned tricycles with a small front wheel. He 
  was dirty and white in the face. =

  My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of 
  such people. He had a vague idea that he might see something 
  of me. He noticed an unusual number of police regulating the 
  traffic. Some of the refugees were exchanging news with the 
  people on the omnibuses. One was professing to have seen the 
  Martians. "Boilers on stilts, I tell you, striding along 
  like men." Most of them were excited and animated by their 
  strange experience. =

  Beyond Victoria the public~houses were doing a lively trade 
  with these arrivals. At all the street corners groups of 
  people were reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at 
  these unusual Sunday visitors. They seemed to increase as 
  night drew on, until at last the roads, my brother said, 
  were like Epsom High Street on a Derby Day. My brother 
  addressed several of these fugitives and got unsatisfactory 
  answers from most. =

  None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one 
  man, who assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed 
  on the previous night. =

  "I come from Byfleet," he said; "man on a bicycle came 
  through the place in the early morning, and ran from door to 
  door warning us to come away. Then came soldiers. We went 
  out to look, and there were clouds of smoke to the 
  south--nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming that way. 
  Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from 
  Weybridge. So I've locked up my house and come on." =

  At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that 
  the authorities were to blame for their incapacity to 
  dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience. =

  About eight o'clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly 
  audible all over the south of London. My brother could not 
  hear it for the traffic in the main thoroughfares, but by 
  striking through the quiet back streets to the river he was 
  able to distinguish it quite plainly. =

  He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent's 
  Park, about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and 
  disturbed at the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind 
  was inclined to run, even as mine had run on Saturday, on 
  military details. He thought of all those silent, expectant 
  guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried to 
  imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet high. =

  There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along 
  Oxford Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so 
  slowly was the news spreading that Regent Street and 
  Portland Place were full of their usual Sunday~night 
  promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along the 
  edge of Regent's Park there were as many silent couples 
  "walking out" together under the scattered gas lamps as ever 
  there had been. The night was warm and still, and a little 
  oppressive; the sound of guns continued intermittently, and 
  after midnight there seemed to be sheet lightning in the 
  south. =

  He read and re~read the paper, fearing the worst had 
  happened to me. He was restless, and after supper prowled 
  out again aimlessly. He returned and tried in vain to divert 
  his attention to his examination notes. He went to bed a 
  little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams in 
  the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, 
  feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour 
  of bells. Red reflections danced on the ceiling. For a 
  moment he lay astonished, wondering whether day had come or 
  the world gone mad. Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the 
  window. =

  His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and 
  down the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of 
  his window sash, and heads in every kind of night disarray 
  appeared. Enquiries were being shouted. "They are coming!" 
  bawled a policeman, hammering at the door; "the Martians are 
  coming!" and hurried to the next door. =

  The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany 
  Street Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at 
  work killing sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There 
  was a noise of doors opening, and window after window in the 
  houses opposite flashed from darkness into yellow 
  illumination. =

  Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting 
  abruptly into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering 
  climax under the window, and dying away slowly in the 
  distance. Close on the rear of this came a couple of cabs, 
  the forerunners of a long procession of flying vehicles, 
  going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where the 
  North~Western special trains were loading up, instead of 
  coming down the gradient into Euston. =

  For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank 
  astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after 
  door, and delivering their incomprehensible message. Then 
  the door behind him opened, and the man who lodged across 
  the landing came in, dressed only in shirt, trousers, and 
  slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his hair 
  disordered from his pillow. =

  "What the devil is it?" he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a 
  row!" =

  They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to 
  hear what the policemen were shouting. People were coming 
  out of the side streets, and standing in groups at the 
  corners talking. =

  "What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow 
  lodger. =

  My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running 
  with each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of 
  the growing excitement. And presently men selling 
  unnaturally early newspapers came bawling into the street: =

  "London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond 
  defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!" =

  And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on each 
  side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces 
  and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, 
  and the Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and 
  westward and northward in Kilburn and St. John's Wood and 
  Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and 
  Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness 
  of London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their 
  eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless 
  questions, dressing hastily as the first breath of the 
  coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the 
  dawn of the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on 
  Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small 
  hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger. =

  Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my 
  brother went down and out into the street, just as the sky 
  between the parapets of the houses grew pink with the early 
  dawn. The flying people on foot and in vehicles grew more 
  numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he heard people 
  crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of such a 
  unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on 
  the door~step, he saw another news vender approaching, and 
  got a paper forthwith. The man was running away with the 
  rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he 
  ran--a grotesque mingling of profit and panic. =

  And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic 
  despatch of the Commander~in~Chief: =

  "The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a 
  black and poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have 
  smothered our batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and 
  Wimbledon, and are advancing slowly towards London, 
  destroying everything on the way. It is impossible to stop 
  them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke but in instant 
  flight." =

  That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the 
  great six~million city was stirring, slipping, running; 
  presently it would be pouring EN MASSE northward. =

  "Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!" =

  The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, 
  a cart carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, 
  against the water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights 
  went to and fro in the houses, and some of the passing cabs 
  flaunted unextinguished lamps. And overhead the dawn was 
  growing brighter, clear and steady and calm. =

  He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up 
  and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, 
  loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband 
  followed ejaculating. =

  As my brother began to realise the import of all these 
  things, he turned hastily to his own room, put all his 
  available money--some ten pounds altogether--into his 
  pockets, and went out again into the streets. =

@section 2 {c15}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY 

@section 3 {tx}
  It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me 
  under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford, and 
  while my brother was watching the fugitives stream over 
  Westminster Bridge, that the Martians had resumed the 
  offensive. So far as one can ascertain from the conflicting 
  accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them 
  remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until 
  nine that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged 
  huge volumes of green smoke. =

  But three certainly came out about eight o'clock and, 
  advancing slowly and cautiously, made their way through 
  Byfleet and Pyrford towards Ripley and Weybridge, and so 
  came in sight of the expectant batteries against the setting 
  sun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but in a 
  line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest 
  fellow. They communicated with one another by means of 
  sirenlike howls, running up and down the scale from one note 
  to another. =

  It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. 
  George's Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The 
  Ripley gunners, unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought 
  never to have been placed in such a position, fired one 
  wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and bolted on horse and 
  foot through the deserted village, while the Martian, 
  without using his Heat~Ray, walked serenely over their guns, 
  stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so 
  came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he 
  destroyed. =

  The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or of a 
  better mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem 
  to have been quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to 
  them. They laid their guns as deliberately as if they had 
  been on parade, and fired at about a thousand yards' range. =

  The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance 
  a few paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled 
  together, and the guns were reloaded in frantic haste. The 
  overthrown Martian set up a prolonged ululation, and 
  immediately a second glittering giant, answering him, 
  appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that a 
  leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The 
  whole of the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the 
  ground, and, simultaneously, both his companions brought 
  their Heat~Rays to bear on the battery. The ammunition blew 
  up, the pine trees all about the guns flashed into fire, and 
  only one or two of the men who were already running over the 
  crest of the hill escaped. =

  After this it would seem that the three took counsel 
  together and halted, and the scouts who were watching them 
  report that they remained absolutely stationary for the next 
  half hour. The Martian who had been overthrown crawled 
  tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure, oddly 
  suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and 
  apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine 
  he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees 
  again. =

  It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three 
  sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each carrying 
  a thick black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the 
  three, and the seven proceeded to distribute themselves at 
  equal distances along a curved line between St. George's 
  Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of 
  Ripley. =

  A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon 
  as they began to move, and warned the waiting batteries 
  about Ditton and Esher. At the same time four of their 
  fighting machines, similarly armed with tubes, crossed the 
  river, and two of them, black against the western sky, came 
  into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried wearily 
  and painfully along the road that runs northward out of 
  Halliford. They moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for 
  a milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their 
  height. =

  At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and 
  began running; but I knew it was no good running from a 
  Martian, and I turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles 
  and brambles into the broad ditch by the side of the road. 
  He looked back, saw what I was doing, and turned to join me. =

  The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing 
  Sunbury, the remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the 
  evening star, away towards Staines. =

  The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took 
  up their positions in the huge crescent about their 
  cylinders in absolute silence. It was a crescent with twelve 
  miles between its horns. Never since the devising of 
  gun~powder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and 
  to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the 
  same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary possession of 
  the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, 
  the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy 
  glare from St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill. =

  But facing that crescent everywhere--at Staines, Hounslow, 
  Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the 
  river, and across the flat grass meadows to the north of it, 
  wherever a cluster of trees or village houses gave 
  sufficient cover--the guns were waiting. The signal rockets 
  burst and rained their sparks through the night and 
  vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries 
  rose to a tense expectation. The Martians had but to advance 
  into the line of fire, and instantly those motionless black 
  forms of men, those guns glittering so darkly in the early 
  night, would explode into a thunderous fury of battle. =

  No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of 
  those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was 
  the riddle--how much they understood of us. Did they grasp 
  that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working 
  together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the 
  sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of 
  their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of 
  onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they 
  might exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food 
  they needed.) A hundred such questions struggled together in 
  my mind as I watched that vast sentinel shape. And in the 
  back of my mind was the sense of all the huge unknown and 
  hidden forces Londonward. Had they prepared pitfalls? Were 
  the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare? Would the 
  Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater 
  Moscow of their mighty province of houses? =

  Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, 
  crouching and peering through the hedge, came a sound like 
  the distant concussion of a gun. Another nearer, and then 
  another. And then the Martian beside us raised his tube on 
  high and discharged it, gunwise, with a heavy report that 
  made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him. 
  There was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation. =

  I was so excited by these heavy minute~guns following one 
  another that I so far forgot my personal safety and my 
  scalded hands as to clamber up into the hedge and stare 
  towards Sunbury. As I did so a second report followed, and a 
  big projectile hurtled overhead towards Hounslow. I expected 
  at least to see smoke or fire, or some such evidence of its 
  work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with one 
  solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and low 
  beneath. And there had been no crash, no answering 
  explosion. The silence was restored; the minute lengthened 
  to three. =

  "What has happened?" said the curate, standing up beside me. =

  "Heaven knows!" said I. =

  A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of 
  shouting began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian, 
  and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank, with 
  a swift, rolling motion, =

  Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to 
  spring upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The 
  figure of the Martian grew smaller as he receded, and 
  presently the mist and the gathering night had swallowed him 
  up. By a common impulse we clambered higher. Towards Sunbury 
  was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had suddenly 
  come into being there, hiding our view of the farther 
  country; and then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we 
  saw another such summit. These hill~like forms grew lower 
  and broader even as we stared. =

  Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I 
  perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen. =

  Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the 
  southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting 
  to one another, and then the air quivered again with the 
  distant thud of their guns. But the earthly artillery made 
  no reply. =

  Now at the time we could not understand these things, but 
  later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes 
  that gathered in the twilight. Each of the Martians, 
  standing in the great crescent I have described, had 
  discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a huge 
  canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or 
  other possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of 
  him. Some fired only one of these, some two--as in the case 
  of the one we had seen; the one at Ripley is said to have 
  discharged no fewer than five at that time. These canisters 
  smashed on striking the ground--they did not explode--and 
  incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky 
  vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony 
  cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself 
  slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that 
  vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all 
  that breathes. =

  It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, 
  so that, after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of 
  its impact, it sank down through the air and poured over the 
  ground in a manner rather liquid than gaseous, abandoning 
  the hills, and streaming into the valleys and ditches and 
  watercourses even as I have heard the carbonic~acid gas that 
  pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And where it came 
  upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface 
  would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank 
  slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely 
  insoluble, and it is a strange thing, seeing the instant 
  effect of the gas, that one could drink without hurt the 
  water from which it had been strained. The vapour did not 
  diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in banks, 
  flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving 
  reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined 
  with the mist and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth 
  in the form of dust. Save that an unknown element giving a 
  group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum is 
  concerned, we are still entirely ignorant of the nature of 
  this substance. =

  Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the 
  black smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its 
  precipitation, that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs 
  and upper stories of high houses and on great trees, there 
  was a chance of escaping its poison altogether, as was 
  proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton. =

  The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful 
  story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he 
  looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the 
  village rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For 
  a day and a half he remained there, weary, starving and 
  sun~scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the 
  prospect of the distant hills a velvet~black expanse, with 
  red roofs, green trees, and, later, black~veiled shrubs and 
  gates, barns, out~houses, and walls, rising here and there 
  into the sunlight. =

  But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was 
  allowed to remain until it sank of its own accord into the 
  ground. As a rule the Martians, when it had served its 
  purpose, cleared the air of it again by wading into it and 
  directing a jet of steam upon it. =

  This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in 
  the starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper 
  Halliford, whither we had returned. From there we could see 
  the searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to 
  and fro, and about eleven the windows rattled, and we heard 
  the sound of the huge siege guns that had been put in 
  position there. These continued intermittently for the space 
  of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the 
  invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale 
  beams of the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a 
  bright red glow. =

  Then the fourth cylinder fell--a brilliant green meteor--as 
  I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the 
  Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a 
  fitful cannonade far away in the southwest, due, I believe, 
  to guns being fired haphazard before the black vapour could 
  overwhelm the gunners. =

  So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out 
  a wasps' nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling 
  vapour over the Londonward country. The horns of the 
  crescent slowly moved apart, until at last they formed a 
  line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night through 
  their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the 
  Martian at St. George's Hill was brought down, did they give 
  the artillery the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever 
  there was a possibility of guns being laid for them unseen, 
  a fresh canister of the black vapour was discharged, and 
  where the guns were openly displayed the Heat~Ray was 
  brought to bear. =

  By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond 
  Park and the glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a 
  network of black smoke, blotting out the whole valley of the 
  Thames and extending as far as the eye could reach. And 
  through this two Martians slowly waded, and turned their 
  hissing steam jets this way and that. =

  They were sparing of the Heat~Ray that night, either because 
  they had but a limited supply of material for its production 
  or because they did not wish to destroy the country but only 
  to crush and overawe the opposition they had aroused. In the 
  latter aim they certainly succeeded. Sunday night was the 
  end of the organised opposition to their movements. After 
  that no body of men would stand against them, so hopeless 
  was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo~boats and 
  destroyers that had brought their quick~firers up the Thames 
  refused to stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only 
  offensive operation men ventured upon after that night was 
  the preparation of mines and pitfalls, and even in that 
  their energies were frantic and spasmodic. =

  One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those 
  batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. 
  Survivors there were none. One may picture the orderly 
  expectation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunners 
  ready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber gunners with 
  their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian spectators 
  standing as near as they were permitted, the evening 
  stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned 
  and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the 
  shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling 
  over the trees and houses and smashing amid the neighbouring 
  fields. =

  One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, 
  the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness 
  advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the 
  twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible 
  antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and 
  horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling 
  headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men 
  choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift 
  broadening~out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night 
  and extinction--nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable 
  vapour hiding its dead. =

  Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets 
  of Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government 
  was, with a last expiring effort, rousing the population of 
  London to the necessity of flight. =

@section 2 {c16}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE EXODUS FROM LONDON 

@section 3 {tx}
  So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept 
  through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was 
  dawning--the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, 
  lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, 
  banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the 
  Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward 
  and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and by 
  midday even the railway organisations, were losing 
  coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, 
  softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the 
  social body. =

  All the railway lines north of the Thames and the 
  South~Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by 
  midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled. People 
  were fighting savagely for standing~room in the carriages 
  even at two o'clock. By three, people were being trampled 
  and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred 
  yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were 
  fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent 
  to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were 
  breaking the heads of the people they were called out to 
  protect. =

  And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers 
  refused to return to London, the pressure of the flight 
  drove the people in an ever~thickening multitude away from 
  the stations and along the northward~running roads. By 
  midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes, and a cloud of 
  slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and 
  across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the 
  bridges in its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over 
  Ealing, and surrounded a little island of survivors on 
  Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape. =

  After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North~Western 
  train at Chalk Farm--the engines of the trains that had 
  loaded in the goods yard there PLOUGHED through shrieking 
  people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowd 
  from crushing the driver against his furnace--my brother 
  emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a 
  hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost 
  in the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine 
  he got was punctured in dragging it through the window, but 
  he got up and off, notwithstanding, with no further injury 
  than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was 
  impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my 
  brother struck into Belsize Road. =

  So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the 
  Edgware Road, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and 
  wearied, but well ahead of the crowd. Along the road people 
  were standing in the roadway, curious, wondering. He was 
  passed by a number of cyclists, some horsemen, and two motor 
  cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and 
  the machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and 
  trudged through the village. There were shops half opened in 
  the main street of the place, and people crowded on the 
  pavement and in the doorways and windows, staring astonished 
  at this extraordinary procession of fugitives that was 
  beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an inn. =

  For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to 
  do. The flying people increased in number. Many of them, 
  like my brother, seemed inclined to loiter in the place. 
  There was no fresh news of the invaders from Mars. =

  At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from 
  congested. Most of the fugitives at that hour were mounted 
  on cycles, but there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and 
  carriages hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds 
  along the road to St. Albans. =

  It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, 
  where some friends of his lived, that at last induced my 
  brother to strike into a quiet lane running eastward. 
  Presently he came upon a stile, and, crossing it, followed a 
  footpath northeastward. He passed near several farmhouses 
  and some little places whose names he did not learn. He saw 
  few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he 
  happened upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. 
  He came upon them just in time to save them. =

  He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw 
  a couple of men struggling to drag them out of the little 
  pony~chaise in which they had been driving, while a third 
  with difficulty held the frightened pony's head. One of the 
  ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply 
  screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the 
  man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her 
  disengaged hand. =

  My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and 
  hurried towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and 
  turned towards him, and my brother, realising from his 
  antagonist's face that a fight was unavoidable, and being an 
  expert boxer, went into him forthwith and sent him down 
  against the wheel of the chaise. =

  It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid 
  him quiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who 
  pulled at the slender lady's arm. He heard the clatter of 
  hoofs, the whip stung across his face, a third antagonist 
  struck him between the eyes, and the man he held wrenched 
  himself free and made off down the lane in the direction 
  from which he had come. =

  Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held 
  the horse's head, and became aware of the chaise receding 
  from him down the lane, swaying from side to side, and with 
  the women in it looking back. The man before him, a burly 
  rough, tried to close, and he stopped him with a blow in the 
  face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he dodged round 
  and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the sturdy 
  man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now, 
  following remotely. =

  Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went 
  headlong, and he rose to his feet to find himself with a 
  couple of antagonists again. He would have had little chance 
  against them had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled 
  up and returned to his help. It seems she had had a revolver 
  all this time, but it had been under the seat when she and 
  her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards' 
  distance, narrowly missing my brother. The less courageous 
  of the robbers made off, and his companion followed him, 
  cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in sight down the 
  lane, where the third man lay insensible. =

  "Take this!" said the slender lady, and she gave my brother 
  her revolver. =

  "Go back to the chaise," said my brother, wiping the blood 
  from his split lip. =

  She turned without a word--they were both panting--and they 
  went back to where the lady in white struggled to hold back 
  the frightened pony. =

  The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother 
  looked again they were retreating. =

  "I'll sit here," said my brother, "if I may"; and he got 
  upon the empty front seat. The lady looked over her 
  shoulder. =

  "Give me the reins," she said, and laid the whip along the 
  pony's side. In another moment a bend in the road hid the 
  three men from my brother's eyes. =

  So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, 
  with a cut mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, 
  driving along an unknown lane with these two women. =

  He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a 
  surgeon living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours 
  from a dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some railway 
  station on his way of the Martian advance. He had hurried 
  home, roused the women--their servant had left them two days 
  before--packed some provisions, put his revolver under the 
  seat--luckily for my brother--and told them to drive on to 
  Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped 
  behind to tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he 
  said, at about half past four in the morning, and now it was 
  nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him. They could not 
  stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the 
  place, and so they had come into this side lane. =

  That was the story they told my brother in fragments when 
  presently they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He 
  promised to stay with them, at least until they could 
  determine what to do, or until the missing man arrived, and 
  professed to be an expert shot with the revolver--a weapon 
  strange to him--in order to give them confidence. =

  They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony 
  became happy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape 
  out of London, and all that he knew of these Martians and 
  their ways. The sun crept higher in the sky, and after a 
  time their talk died out and gave place to an uneasy state 
  of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane, and 
  of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Every 
  broken answer he had deepened his impression of the great 
  disaster that had come on humanity, deepened his persuasion 
  of the immediate necessity for prosecuting this flight. He 
  urged the matter upon them. =

  "We have money," said the slender woman, and hesitated. =

  Her eyes met my brother's, and her hesitation ended. =

  "So have I," said my brother. =

  She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in 
  gold, besides a five~pound note, and suggested that with 
  that they might get upon a train at St. Albans or New 
  Barnet. My brother thought that was hopeless, seeing the 
  fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains, and broached 
  his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and 
  thence escaping from the country altogether. =

  Mrs. Elphinstone--that was the name of the woman in 
  white--would listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon 
  "George"; but her sister~in~law was astonishingly quiet and 
  deliberate, and at last agreed to my brother's suggestion. 
  So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they went on 
  towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as 
  much as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became 
  excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew 
  burning and blinding, so that they travelled only very 
  slowly. The hedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced 
  towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew stronger. =

  They began to meet more people. For the most part these were 
  staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, 
  haggard, unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on 
  foot, his eyes on the ground. They heard his voice, and, 
  looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and 
  the other beating invisible things. His paroxysm of rage 
  over, he went on his way without once looking back. =

  As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the 
  south of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across 
  some fields on their left, carrying a child and with two 
  other children; and then passed a man in dirty black, with a 
  thick stick in one hand and a small portmanteau in the 
  other. Then round the corner of the lane, from between the 
  villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high road, 
  came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven 
  by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There 
  were three girls, East End factory girls, and a couple of 
  little children crowded in the cart. =

  "This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?" asked the driver, 
  wild~eyed, white~faced; and when my brother told him it 
  would if he turned to the left, he whipped up at once 
  without the formality of thanks. =

  My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among 
  the houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of 
  a terrace beyond the road that appeared between the backs of 
  the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number 
  of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up above the houses in 
  front of them against the hot, blue sky. The tumultuous 
  noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of 
  many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of 
  waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round 
  sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads. =

  "Good heavens!" cried Mrs. Elphinstone. "What is this you 
  are driving us into?" =

  My brother stopped. =

  For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent 
  of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. 
  A great bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the 
  sun, made everything within twenty feet of the ground grey 
  and indistinct and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying 
  feet of a dense crowd of horses and of men and women on 
  foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description. =

  "Way!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make way!" =

  It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the 
  meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a 
  fire, and the dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a 
  little way up the road a villa was burning and sending 
  rolling masses of black smoke across the road to add to the 
  confusion. =

  Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy 
  bundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging 
  tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, 
  and fled at my brother's threat. =

  So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the 
  houses to the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, 
  hurrying people, pent in between the villas on either side; 
  the black heads, the crowded forms, grew into distinctness 
  as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past, and merged 
  their individuality again in a receding multitude that was 
  swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust. =

  "Go on! Go on!" cried the voices. "Way! Way!" =

  One man's hands pressed on the back of another. My brother 
  stood at the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, he 
  advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane. =

  Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous 
  tumult, but this was a whole population in movement. It is 
  hard to imagine that host. It had no character of its own. 
  The figures poured out past the corner, and receded with 
  their backs to the group in the lane. Along the margin came 
  those who were on foot threatened by the wheels, stumbling 
  in the ditches, blundering into one another. =

  The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, 
  making little way for those swifter and more impatient 
  vehicles that darted forward every now and then when an 
  opportunity showed itself of doing so, sending the people 
  scattering against the fences and gates of the villas. =

  "Push on!" was the cry. "Push on! They are coming!" =

  In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the 
  Salvation Army, gesticulating with his crooked fingers and 
  bawling, "Eternity! Eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very 
  loud so that my brother could hear him long after he was 
  lost to sight in the dust. Some of the people who crowded in 
  the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and quarrelled 
  with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing 
  with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or 
  lay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The 
  horses" bits were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot. =

  There were cabs, carriages, shop cars, waggons, beyond 
  counting; a mail cart, a road~cleaner's cart marked "Vestry 
  of St. Pancras," a huge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A 
  brewer's dray rumbled by with its two near wheels splashed 
  with fresh blood. =

  "Clear the way!" cried the voices. "Clear the way!" =

  "Eter~nity! Eter~nity!" came echoing down the road. =

  There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, 
  with children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes 
  smothered in dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. 
  With many of these came men, sometimes helpful, sometimes 
  lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them pushed 
  some weary street outcast in faded black rags, wide~eyed, 
  loud~voiced, and foul~mouthed. There were sturdy workmen 
  thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed 
  like clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded 
  soldier my brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of 
  railway porters, one wretched creature in a nightshirt with 
  a coat thrown over it. =

  But varied as its composition was, certain things all that 
  host had in common. There were fear and pain on their faces, 
  and fear behind them. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a 
  place in a waggon, sent the whole host of them quickening 
  their pace; even a man so scared and broken that his knees 
  bent under him was galvanised for a moment into renewed 
  activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon 
  this multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and 
  cracked. They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And 
  amid the various cries one heard disputes, reproaches, 
  groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices of most of them 
  were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain: =

  "Way! Way! The Martians are coming!" =

  Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened 
  slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had 
  a delusive appearance of coming from the direction of 
  London. Yet a kind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; 
  weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the most part 
  rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little 
  way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a 
  man with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. He was 
  a lucky man to have friends. =

  A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a 
  filthy black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the 
  trap, removed his boot--his sock was blood~stained--shook 
  out a pebble, and hobbled on again; and then a little girl 
  of eight or nine, all alone, threw herself under the hedge 
  close by my brother, weeping. =

  "I can't go on! I can't go on!" =

  My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted 
  her up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss 
  Elphinstone. So soon as my brother touched her she became 
  quite still, as if frightened. =

  "Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her 
  voice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from my 
  brother, crying "Mother!" =

  "They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past 
  along the lane. =

  "Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; 
  and my brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane. =

  The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. 
  My brother pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, 
  and the man drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It 
  was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only 
  one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly through the dust 
  that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher and 
  put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge. =

  One of the men came running to my brother. =

  "Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and 
  very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick." =

  "Lord Garrick!" said my brother; "the Chief Justice?" =

  "The water?" he said. =

  "There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the 
  houses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people." =

  The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the 
  corner house. =

  "Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are 
  coming! Go on!" =

  Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, 
  eagle~faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as 
  my brother's eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of 
  sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it 
  struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the 
  struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and 
  looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck 
  his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and 
  dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly. =

  "Way!" cried the men all about him. "Make way!" =

  So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both 
  hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting 
  handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in 
  another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under 
  the horse's hoofs. =

  "Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his 
  way, tried to clutch the bit of the horse. =

  Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the 
  wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over the 
  poor wretch's back. The driver of the cart slashed his whip 
  at my brother, who ran round behind the cart. The 
  multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The man was 
  writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to 
  rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs 
  lay limp and dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the 
  next driver, and a man on a black horse came to his 
  assistance. =

  "Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's 
  collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. 
  But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my 
  brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of 
  gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angry voices behind. =

  "Way! Way!" =

  There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the 
  cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked 
  up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit 
  the wrist that held his collar. There was a concussion, and 
  the black horse came staggering sideways, and the carthorse 
  pushed beside it. A hoof missed my brother's foot by a 
  hair's breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and 
  jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of 
  the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden 
  and my brother was borne backward and carried past the 
  entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent 
  to recover it. =

  He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little 
  child, with all a child's want of sympathetic imagination, 
  staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay 
  black and still, ground and crushed under the rolling 
  wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and began turning the 
  pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said and they 
  went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the 
  fighting crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the 
  lane my brother saw the face of the dying man in the ditch 
  under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining with 
  perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in their 
  seat and shivering. =

  Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss 
  Elphinstone was white and pale, and her sister~in~law sat 
  weeping, too wretched even to call upon "George." My brother 
  was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they had retreated 
  he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt 
  this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly 
  resolute. =

  "We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round 
  again. =

  For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. 
  To force their way into the torrent of people, my brother 
  plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while 
  she drove the pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels 
  for a moment and ripped a long splinter from the chaise. In 
  another moment they were caught and swept forward by the 
  stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across 
  his face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the 
  reins from her. =

  "Point the revolver at the man behind," he said, giving it 
  to her, "if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at his 
  horse." =

  Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the 
  right across the road. But once in the stream he seemed to 
  lose volition, to become a part of that dusty rout. They 
  swept through Chipping Barnet with the torrent; they were 
  nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before they had 
  fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din 
  and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the 
  road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the 
  stress. =

  They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either 
  side of the road, and at another place farther on they came 
  upon a great multitude of people drinking at the stream, 
  some fighting to come at the water. And farther on, from a 
  lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains running slowly 
  one after the other without signal or order--trains swarming 
  with people, with men even among the coals behind the 
  engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway. 
  My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, 
  for at that time the furious terror of the people had 
  rendered the central termini impossible. =

  Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, 
  for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted 
  all three of them. They began to suffer the beginnings of 
  hunger; the night was cold, and none of them dared to sleep. 
  And in the evening many people came hurrying along the road 
  nearby their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers 
  before them, and going in the direction from which my 
  brother had come. =

@section 2 {c17}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE "THUNDER CHILD" 

@section 3 {tx}
  Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on 
  Monday have annihilated the entire population of London, as 
  it spread itself slowly through the home counties. Not only 
  along the road through Barnet, but also through Edgware and 
  Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to Southend and 
  Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and 
  Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could have 
  hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue 
  above London every northward and eastward road running out 
  of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled 
  black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony 
  of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at length 
  in the last chapter my brother's account of the road through 
  Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how 
  that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those 
  concerned. Never before in the history of the world had such 
  a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The 
  legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia 
  has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. 
  And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede--a 
  stampede gigantic and terrible--without order and without a 
  goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving 
  headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, 
  of the massacre of mankind. =

  Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the 
  network of streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, 
  crescents, gardens--already derelict--spread out like a huge 
  map, and in the southward BLOTTED. Over Ealing, Richmond, 
  Wimbledon, it would have seemed as if some monstrous pen had 
  flung ink upon the chart. Steadily, incessantly, each black 
  splash grew and spread, shooting out ramifications this way 
  and that, now banking itself against rising ground, now 
  pouring swiftly over a crest into a new~found valley, 
  exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting 
  paper. =

  And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the 
  river, the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and 
  methodically spreading their poison cloud over this patch of 
  country and then over that, laying it again with their steam 
  jets when it had served its purpose, and taking possession 
  of the conquered country. They do not seem to have aimed at 
  extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and the 
  destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of 
  powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the 
  railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. 
  They seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their 
  operations, and did not come beyond the central part of 
  London all that day. It is possible that a very considerable 
  number of people in London stuck to their houses through 
  Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home 
  suffocated by the Black Smoke. =

  Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing 
  scene. Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, 
  tempted by the enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, 
  and it is said that many who swam out to these vessels were 
  thrust off with boathooks and drowned. About one o'clock in 
  the afternoon the thinning remnant of a cloud of the black 
  vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. At 
  that the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting, and 
  collision, and for some time a multitude of boats and barges 
  jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the 
  sailors and lightermen had to fight savagely against the 
  people who swarmed upon them from the riverfront. People 
  were actually clambering down the piers of the bridge from 
  above. =

  When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock 
  Tower and waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated 
  above Limehouse. =

  Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to 
  tell. The sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping 
  watch beside the women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the 
  green flash of it far beyond the hills. On Tuesday the 
  little party, still set upon getting across the sea, made 
  its way through the swarming country towards Colchester. The 
  news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole 
  of London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and 
  even, it was said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my 
  brother's view until the morrow. =

  That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the 
  urgent need of provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of 
  property ceased to be regarded. Farmers were out to defend 
  their cattle~sheds, granaries, and ripening root crops with 
  arms in their hands. A number of people now, like my 
  brother, had their faces eastward, and there were some 
  desperate souls even going back towards London to get food. 
  These were chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose 
  knowledge of the Black Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that 
  about half the members of the government had gathered at 
  Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of high explosives 
  were being prepared to be used in automatic mines across the 
  Midland counties. =

  He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had 
  replaced the desertions of the first day's panic, had 
  resumed traffic, and was running northward trains from St. 
  Albans to relieve the congestion of the home counties. There 
  was also a placard in Chipping Ongar announcing that large 
  stores of flour were available in the northern towns and 
  that within twenty~four hours bread would be distributed 
  among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this 
  intelligence did not deter him from the plan of escape he 
  had formed, and the three pressed eastward all day, and 
  heard no more of the bread distribution than this promise. 
  Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear more of it. 
  That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose 
  Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she 
  took that duty alternately with my brother. She saw it. =

  On Wednesday the three fugitives--they had passed the night 
  in a field of unripe wheat--reached Chelmsford, and there a 
  body of the inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of 
  Public Supply, seized the pony as provisions, and would give 
  nothing in exchange for it but the promise of a share in it 
  the next day. Here there were rumours of Martians at Epping, 
  and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder Mills in 
  a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders. =

  People were watching for Martians here from the church 
  towers. My brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, 
  preferred to push on at once to the coast rather than wait 
  for food, although all three of them were very hungry. By 
  midday they passed through Tillingham, which, strangely 
  enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save for a 
  few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham 
  they suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing 
  crowd of shipping of all sorts that it is possible to 
  imagine. =

  For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, 
  they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and 
  Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring 
  off the people. They lay in a huge sickle~shaped curve that 
  vanished into mist at last towards the Naze. Close inshore 
  was a multitude of fishing smacks--English, Scotch, French, 
  Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, 
  electric boats; and beyond were ships of large burden, a 
  multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle 
  ships, passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an 
  old white transport even, neat white and grey liners from 
  Southampton and Hamburg; and along the blue coast across the 
  Blackwater my brother could make out dimly a dense swarm of 
  boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which 
  also extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon. =

  About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the 
  water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a 
  water~logged ship. This was the ram THUNDER CHILD. It was 
  the only warship in sight, but far away to the right over 
  the smooth surface of the sea--for that day there was a dead 
  calm--lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next 
  iron~clads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an 
  extended line, steam up and ready for action, across the 
  Thames estuary during the course of the Martian conquest, 
  vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it. =

  At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the 
  assurances of her sister~in~law, gave way to panic. She had 
  never been out of England before, she would rather die than 
  trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. 
  She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the 
  Martians might prove very similar. She had been growing 
  increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed during the 
  two days' journeyings. Her great idea was to return to 
  Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore. 
  They would find George at Stanmore. =

  It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down 
  to the beach, where presently my brother succeeded in 
  attracting the attention of some men on a paddle steamer 
  from the Thames. They sent a boat and drove a bargain for 
  thirty~six pounds for the three. The steamer was going, 
  these men said, to Ostend. =

  It was about two o'clock when my brother, having paid their 
  fares at the gangway, found himself safely aboard the 
  steamboat with his charges. There was food aboard, albeit at 
  exorbitant prices, and the three of them contrived to eat a 
  meal on one of the seats forward. =

  There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, 
  some of whom had expended their last money in securing a 
  passage, but the captain lay off the Blackwater until five 
  in the afternoon, picking up passengers until the seated 
  decks were even dangerously crowded. He would probably have 
  remained longer had it not been for the sound of guns that 
  began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the 
  ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of 
  flags. A jet of smoke sprang out of her funnels. =

  Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came 
  from Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing 
  louder. At the same time, far away in the southeast the 
  masts and upperworks of three ironclads rose one after the 
  other out of the sea, beneath clouds of black smoke. But my 
  brother's attention speedily reverted to the distant firing 
  in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke rising out 
  of the distant grey haze. =

  The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of 
  the big crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was 
  growing blue and hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and 
  faint in the remote distance, advancing along the muddy 
  coast from the direction of Foulness. At that the captain on 
  the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear and anger 
  at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his 
  terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the 
  seats of the steamer and stared at that distant shape, 
  higher than the trees or church towers inland, and advancing 
  with a leisurely parody of a human stride. =

  It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, 
  more amazed than terrified, watching this Titan advancing 
  deliberately towards the shipping, wading farther and 
  farther into the water as the coast fell away. Then, far 
  away beyond the Crouch, came another, striding over some 
  stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther off, 
  wading deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang 
  halfway up between sea and sky. They were all stalking 
  seaward, as if to intercept the escape of the multitudinous 
  vessels that were crowded between Foulness and the Naze. In 
  spite of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the 
  little paddle~boat, and the pouring foam that her wheels 
  flung behind her, she receded with terrifying slowness from 
  this ominous advance. =

  Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of 
  shipping already writhing with the approaching terror; one 
  ship passing behind another, another coming round from 
  broadside to end on, steamships whistling and giving off 
  volumes of steam, sails being let out, launches rushing 
  hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and by the 
  creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for 
  anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat 
  (she had suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung 
  him headlong from the seat upon which he was standing. There 
  was a shouting all about him, a trampling of feet, and a 
  cheer that seemed to be answered faintly. The steamboat 
  lurched and rolled him over upon his hands. =

  He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a 
  hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron 
  bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, 
  tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leaped 
  towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the 
  air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the waterline. =

  A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his 
  eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was 
  rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this 
  headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and 
  spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, 
  THUNDER CHILD, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of 
  the threatened shipping. =

  Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the 
  bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at 
  the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close 
  together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod 
  supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and 
  seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less 
  formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer 
  was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were 
  regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their 
  intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as 
  themselves. The THUNDER CHILD fired no gun, but simply drove 
  full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that 
  enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did 
  not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have 
  sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat~Ray. =

  She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed 
  halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a 
  diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal 
  expanse of the Essex coast. =

  Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and 
  discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It 
  hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that 
  rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, 
  from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from 
  the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their 
  eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the 
  Martians. =

  They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the 
  water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised 
  the camera~like generator of the Heat~Ray. He held it 
  pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from 
  the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron 
  of the ship's side like a white~hot iron rod through paper. =

  A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and 
  then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he 
  was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high 
  in the air. The guns of the THUNDER CHILD sounded through 
  the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot 
  splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted 
  towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a 
  smack to matchwood. =

  But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the 
  Martian's collapse the captain on the bridge yelled 
  inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers on the 
  steamer's stern shouted together. And then they yelled 
  again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove 
  something long and black, the flames streaming from its 
  middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire. =

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

  "Two!," yelled the captain. =

  Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end 
  rang with frantic cheering that was taken up first by one 
  and then by all in the crowding multitude of ships and boats 
  that was driving out to sea. =

  The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the 
  third Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time 
  the boat was paddling steadily out to sea and away from the 
  fight; and when at last the confusion cleared, the drifting 
  bank of black vapour intervened, and nothing of the THUNDER 
  CHILD could be made out, nor could the third Martian be 
  seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite close and 
  standing in towards shore past the steamboat. =

  The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the 
  ironclads receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden 
  still by a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black 
  gas, eddying and combining in the strangest way. The fleet 
  of refugees was scattering to the northeast; several smacks 
  were sailing between the ironclads and the steamboat. After 
  a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud bank, the 
  warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and 
  passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The 
  coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low 
  banks of clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun. =

  Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the 
  vibration of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. 
  Everyone struggled to the rail of the steamer and peered 
  into the blinding furnace of the west, but nothing was to be 
  distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose slanting and 
  barred the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its 
  way through an interminable suspense. =

  The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, 
  the evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight 
  when the captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained 
  his eyes. Something rushed up into the sky out of the 
  greyness--rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the 
  luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky; 
  something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round 
  in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished 
  again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it 
  rained down darkness upon the land. =

@section 1 {p2}
@section 2 {tpg}
@section 3 {pn}

  BOOK TWO

@section 3 {tt}

  THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS 

@section 2 {c1}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER ONE 

@section 3 {tt}

  UNDER FOOT 

@section 3 {tx}
  In the first book I have wandered so much from my own 
  adventures to tell of the experiences of my brother that all 
  through the last two chapters I and the curate have been 
  lurking in the empty house at Halliford whither we fled to 
  escape the Black Smoke. There I will resume. We stopped 
  there all Sunday night and all the next day--the day of the 
  panic--in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black 
  Smoke from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but 
  wait in aching inactivity during those two weary days. =

  My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her 
  at Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as 
  a dead man. I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought 
  of how I was cut off from her, of all that might happen to 
  her in my absence. My cousin I knew was brave enough for any 
  emergency, but he was not the sort of man to realise danger 
  quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was not 
  bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to 
  believe that the Martians were moving Londonward and away 
  from her. Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and 
  painful. I grew very weary and irritable with the curate's 
  perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the sight of his selfish 
  despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I kept away 
  from him, staying in a room--evidently a children's 
  schoolroom--containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he 
  followed me thither, I went to a box room at the top of the 
  house and, in order to be alone with my aching miseries, 
  locked myself in. =

  We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day 
  and the morning of the next. There were signs of people in 
  the next house on Sunday evening--a face at a window and 
  moving lights, and later the slamming of a door. But I do 
  not know who these people were, nor what became of them. We 
  saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke drifted slowly 
  riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer and 
  nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the 
  house that hid us. =

  A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the 
  stuff with a jet of superheated steam that hissed against 
  the walls, smashed all the windows it touched, and scalded 
  the curate's hand as he fled out of the front room. When at 
  last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked out again, 
  the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had 
  passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were 
  astonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling with the 
  black of the scorched meadows. =

  For a time we did not see how this change affected our 
  position, save that we were relieved of our fear of the 
  Black Smoke. But later I perceived that we were no longer 
  hemmed in, that now we might get away. So soon as I realised 
  that the way of escape was open, my dream of action 
  returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable. =

  "We are safe here," he repeated; "safe here." =

  I resolved to leave him--would that I had! Wiser now for the 
  artilleryman's teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had 
  found oil and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a 
  flannel shirt that I found in one of the bedrooms. When it 
  was clear to him that I meant to go alone--had reconciled 
  myself to going alone--he suddenly roused himself to come. 
  And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we started 
  about five o'clock, as I should judge, along the blackened 
  road to Sunbury. =

  In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead 
  bodies lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, 
  overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black 
  dust. That pall of cindery powder made me think of what I 
  had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We got to Hampton 
  Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange and 
  unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were 
  relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the 
  suffocating drift. We went through Bushey Park, with its 
  deer going to and fro under the chestnuts, and some men and 
  women hurrying in the distance towards Hampton, and so we 
  came to Twickenham. These were the first people we saw. =

  Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were 
  still afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat~Ray or 
  Black Smoke, and there were more people about here, though 
  none could give us news. For the most part they were like 
  ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to shift their 
  quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses here 
  were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened 
  even for flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was 
  abundant along the road. I remember most vividly three 
  smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded into the road by the 
  wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond Bridge about 
  half past eight. We hurried across the exposed bridge, of 
  course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number of 
  red masses, some many feet across. I did not know what these 
  were--there was no time for scrutiny--and I put a more 
  horrible interpretation on them than they deserved. Here 
  again on the Surrey side were black dust that had once been 
  smoke, and dead bodies--a heap near the approach to the 
  station; but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were 
  some way towards Barnes. =

  We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people 
  running down a side street towards the river, but otherwise 
  it seemed deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning 
  briskly; outside the town of Richmond there was no trace of 
  the Black Smoke. =

  Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people 
  running, and the upperworks of a Martian fighting~machine 
  loomed in sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away 
  from us. We stood aghast at our danger, and had the Martian 
  looked down we must immediately have perished. We were so 
  terrified that we dared not go on, but turned aside and hid 
  in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping 
  silently, and refusing to stir again. =

  But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me 
  rest, and in the twilight I ventured out again. I went 
  through a shrubbery, and along a passage beside a big house 
  standing in its own grounds, and so emerged upon the road 
  towards Kew. The curate I left in the shed, but he came 
  hurrying after me. =

  That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. 
  For it was manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner 
  had the curate overtaken me than we saw either the 
  fighting~machine we had seen before or another, far away 
  across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge. Four or 
  five little black figures hurried before it across the 
  green~grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this 
  Martian pursued them. In three strides he was among them, 
  and they ran radiating from his feet in all directions. He 
  used no Heat~Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by 
  one. Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic 
  carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman's 
  basket hangs over his shoulder. =

  It was the first time I realised that the Martians might 
  have any other purpose than destruction with defeated 
  humanity. We stood for a moment petrified, then turned and 
  fled through a gate behind us into a walled garden, fell 
  into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there, 
  scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were 
  out. =

  I suppose it was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered 
  courage to start again, no longer venturing into the road, 
  but sneaking along hedgerows and through plantations, and 
  watching keenly through the darkness, he on the right and I 
  on the left, for the Martians, who seemed to be all about 
  us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched and blackened 
  area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered dead 
  bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks 
  but with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead 
  horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped 
  guns and smashed gun carriages. =

  Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was 
  silent and deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the 
  night was too dark for us to see into the side roads of the 
  place. In Sheen my companion suddenly complained of 
  faintness and thirst, and we decided to try one of the 
  houses. =

  The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with 
  the window, was a small semi~detached villa, and I found 
  nothing eatable left in the place but some mouldy cheese. 
  There was, however, water to drink; and I took a hatchet, 
  which promised to be useful in our next house~breaking. =

  We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards 
  Mortlake. Here there stood a white house within a walled 
  garden, and in the pantry of this domicile we found a store 
  of food--two loaves of bread in a pan, an uncooked steak, 
  and the half of a ham. I give this catalogue so precisely 
  because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon 
  this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood under 
  a shelf, and there were two bags of haricot beans and some 
  limp lettuces. This pantry opened into a kind of wash~up 
  kitchen, and in this was firewood; there was also a 
  cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen of burgundy, 
  tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits. =

  We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark--for we dared not 
  strike a light--and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of 
  the same bottle. The curate, who was still timorous and 
  restless, was now, oddly enough, for pushing on, and I was 
  urging him to keep up his strength by eating when the thing 
  happened that was to imprison us. =

  "It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding 
  glare of vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped 
  out, clearly visible in green and black, and vanished again. 
  And then followed such a concussion as I have never heard 
  before or since. So close on the heels of this as to seem 
  instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash of glass, a 
  crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the 
  plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a 
  multitude of fragments upon our heads. I was knocked 
  headlong across the floor against the oven handle and 
  stunned. I was insensible for a long time, the curate told 
  me, and when I came to we were in darkness again, and he, 
  with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from a 
  cut forehead, was dabbing water over me. =

  For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then 
  things came to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted 
  itself. =

  "Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper. =

  At last I answered him. I sat up. =

  "Don't move," he said. "The floor is covered with smashed 
  crockery from the dresser. You can't possibly move without 
  making a noise, and I fancy THEY are outside." =

  We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear 
  each other breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but 
  once something near us, some plaster or broken brickwork, 
  slid down with a rumbling sound. Outside and very near was 
  an intermittent, metallic rattle. =

  "That!" said the curate, when presently it happened again. =

  "Yes," I said. "But what is it?" =

  "A Martian!" said the curate. =

  I listened again. =

  "It was not like the Heat~Ray," I said, and for a time I was 
  inclined to think one of the great fighting~machines had 
  stumbled against the house, as I had seen one stumble 
  against the tower of Shepperton Church. =

  Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for 
  three or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. 
  And then the light filtered in, not through the window, 
  which remained black, but through a triangular aperture 
  between a beam and a heap of broken bricks in the wall 
  behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for 
  the first time. =

  The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, 
  which flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting 
  and lay about our feet. Outside, the soil was banked high 
  against the house. At the top of the window frame we could 
  see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered with 
  smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house 
  was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it 
  was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. 
  Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, 
  stained in the fashion, pale green, and with a number of 
  copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaper imitating 
  blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements 
  fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range. =

  As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall 
  the body of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over 
  the still glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled 
  as circumspectly as possible out of the twilight of the 
  kitchen into the darkness of the scullery. =

  Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind. =

  "The fifth cylinder," I whispered, "the fifth shot from 
  Mars, has struck this house and buried us under the ruins!" =

  For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered: =

  "God have mercy upon us!" =

  I heard him presently whimpering to himself. =

  Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I 
  for my part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed 
  on the faint light of the kitchen door. I could just see the 
  curate's face, a dim, oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. 
  Outside there began a metallic hammering, then a violent 
  hooting, and then again, after a quiet interval, a hissing 
  like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for the most 
  part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if 
  anything to increase in number as time wore on. Presently a 
  measured thudding and a vibration that made everything about 
  us quiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, 
  began and continued. Once the light was eclipsed, and the 
  ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely dark. For many 
  hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering, 
  until our tired attention failed. . . . =

  At last I found myself awake and very hungry. I am inclined 
  to believe we must have spent the greater portion of a day 
  before that awakening. My hunger was at a stride so 
  insistent that it moved me to action. I told the curate I 
  was going to seek food, and felt my way towards the pantry. 
  He made me no answer, but so soon as I began eating the 
  faint noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling 
  after me. =

@section 2 {c2}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER TWO 

  WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE =

@section 3 {tx}
  After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must 
  have dozed again, for when presently I looked round I was 
  alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome 
  persistence. I whispered for the curate several times, and 
  at last felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It was still 
  daylight, and I perceived him across the room, lying against 
  the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians. His 
  shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me. =

  I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an 
  engine shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. 
  Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a 
  tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil 
  evening sky. For a minute or so I remained watching the 
  curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with 
  extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the 
  floor. =

  I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that 
  a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a 
  loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, 
  and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I turned to 
  see how much of our rampart remained. The detachment of the 
  plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and by 
  raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see 
  out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet 
  suburban roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we 
  beheld. =

  The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of 
  the house we had first visited. The building had vanished, 
  completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. 
  The cylinder lay now far beneath the original 
  foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the 
  pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it had 
  splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the 
  only word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of 
  the adjacent houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under 
  the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsed 
  backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had 
  been destroyed completely; by a chance the kitchen and 
  scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and 
  ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards 
  the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge 
  of the great circular pit the Martians were engaged in 
  making. The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind 
  us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like a 
  veil across our peephole. =

  The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, 
  and on the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and 
  gravel~heaped shrubbery, one of the great fighting~machines, 
  deserted by its occupant, stood stiff and tall against the 
  evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the 
  cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them 
  first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism 
  I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange 
  creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the 
  heaped mould near it. =

  The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. 
  It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been 
  called handling~machines, and the study of which has already 
  given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As 
  it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic 
  spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an 
  extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching 
  and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms 
  were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing 
  out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the 
  covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the 
  cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and 
  deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it. =

  Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first 
  I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic 
  glitter. The fighting~machines were co~ordinated and 
  animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare 
  with this. People who have never seen these structures, and 
  have only the ill~imagined efforts of artists or the 
  imperfect descriptions of such eye~witnesses as myself to go 
  upon, scarcely realise that living quality. =

  I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first 
  pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The 
  artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the 
  fighting~machines, and there his knowledge ended. He 
  presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either 
  flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading 
  monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings 
  had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to 
  warn the reader against the impression they may have 
  created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action 
  than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the 
  pamphlet would have been much better without them. =

  At first, I say, the handling~machine did not impress me as 
  a machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering 
  integument, the controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles 
  actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent 
  of the crab's cerebral portion. But then I perceived the 
  resemblance of its grey~brown, shiny, leathery integument to 
  that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true 
  nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that 
  realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, 
  the real Martians. Already I had had a transient impression 
  of these, and the first nausea no longer obscured my 
  observation. Moreover, I was concealed and motionless, and 
  under no urgency of action. =

  They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is 
  possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies--or, 
  rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having 
  in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils--indeed, 
  the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but 
  it had a pair of very large dark~coloured eyes, and just 
  beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head 
  or body--I scarcely know how to speak of it--was the single 
  tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an 
  ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense 
  air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost 
  whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. 
  These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that 
  distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the HANDS. Even as 
  I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be 
  endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of 
  course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, 
  this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on Mars 
  they may have progressed upon them with some facility. =

  The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has 
  since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of 
  the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the 
  eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the 
  bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and 
  its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser 
  atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too 
  evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin. =

  And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it 
  may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of 
  digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not 
  exist in the Martians. They were heads--merely heads. 
  Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. 
  Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other 
  creatures, and INJECTED it into their own veins. I have 
  myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its 
  place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself 
  to describe what I could not endure even to continue 
  watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still 
  living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run 
  directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient 
  canal. . . . =

  The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, 
  but at the same time I think that we should remember how 
  repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an 
  intelligent rabbit. =

  The physiological advantages of the practice of injection 
  are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of 
  human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive 
  process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and 
  organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. 
  The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous 
  system sap our strength and colour our minds. Men go happy 
  or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or 
  sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all 
  these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion. =

  Their undeniable preference for men as their source of 
  nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains 
  of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from 
  Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains 
  that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, 
  silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious 
  sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet 
  high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty 
  sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in 
  each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. 
  It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand 
  upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in 
  their bodies. =

  And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in 
  this place certain further details which, although they were 
  not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader 
  who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of 
  these offensive creatures. =

  In three other points their physiology differed strangely 
  from ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the 
  heart of man sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular 
  mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was 
  unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue, it 
  would seem. On earth they could never have moved without 
  effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In 
  twenty~four hours they did twenty~four hours of work, as 
  even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants. =

  In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, 
  the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore 
  without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that 
  difference among men. A young Martian, there can now be no 
  dispute, was really born upon earth during the war, and it 
  was found attached to its parent, partially BUDDED off, just 
  as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the 
  fresh~water polyp. =

  In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method 
  of increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was 
  certainly the primitive method. Among the lower animals, up 
  even to those first cousins of the vertebrated animals, the 
  Tunicates, the two processes occur side by side, but finally 
  the sexual method superseded its competitor altogether. On 
  Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the 
  case. =

  It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of 
  quasi~scientific repute, writing long before the Martian 
  invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike 
  the actual Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember, 
  appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long~defunct 
  publication, the PALL MALL BUDGET, and I recall a caricature 
  of it in a pre~Martian periodical called PUNCH. He pointed 
  out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the 
  perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately 
  supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, 
  digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, 
  ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human 
  being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie 
  in the direction of their steady diminution through the 
  coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. 
  Only one other part of the body had a strong case for 
  survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and agent of the 
  brain." While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would 
  grow larger. =

  There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the 
  Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of 
  such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the 
  intelligence. To me it is quite credible that the Martians 
  may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a 
  gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving 
  rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at 
  the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the 
  brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, 
  without any of the emotional substratum of the human being. =

  The last salient point in which the systems of these 
  creatures differed from ours was in what one might have 
  thought a very trivial particular. Micro~organisms, which 
  cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never 
  appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated 
  them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and 
  contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and 
  such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life. And 
  speaking of the differences between the life on Mars and 
  terrestrial life, I may allude here to the curious 
  suggestions of the red weed. =

  Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having 
  green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood~red tint. 
  At any rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or 
  accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to 
  red~coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the red 
  weed, however, gained any footing in competition with 
  terrestrial forms. The red creeper was quite a transitory 
  growth, and few people have seen it growing. For a time, 
  however, the red weed grew with astonishing vigour and 
  luxuriance. It spread up the sides of the pit by the third 
  or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus~like 
  branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our 
  triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast 
  throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a 
  stream of water. =

  The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory 
  organ, a single round drum at the back of the head~body, and 
  eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except 
  that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to 
  them. It is commonly supposed that they communicated by 
  sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is asserted, for 
  instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet (written 
  evidently by someone not an eye~witness of Martian actions) 
  to which I have already alluded, and which, so far, has been 
  the chief source of information concerning them. Now no 
  surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action 
  as I did. I take no credit to myself for an accident, but 
  the fact is so. And I assert that I watched them closely 
  time after time, and that I have seen four, five, and (once) 
  six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately 
  complicated operations together without either sound or 
  gesture. Their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; 
  it had no modulation, and was, I believe, in no sense a 
  signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the 
  suctional operation. I have a certain claim to at least an 
  elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am 
  convinced--as firmly as I am convinced of anything--that the 
  Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical 
  intermediation. And I have been convinced of this in spite 
  of strong preconceptions. Before the Martian invasion, as an 
  occasional reader here or there may remember, I had written 
  with some little vehemence against the telepathic theory. =

  The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament 
  and decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not 
  only were they evidently much less sensible of changes of 
  temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do not seem 
  to have affected their health at all seriously. Yet though 
  they wore no clothing, it was in the other artificial 
  additions to their bodily resources that their great 
  superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and 
  road~skates, our Lilienthal soaring~machines, our guns and 
  sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the 
  evolution that the Martians have worked out. They have 
  become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies 
  according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes 
  and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And 
  of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a 
  man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature 
  of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the 
  WHEEL is absent; among all the things they brought to earth 
  there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One 
  would have at least expected it in locomotion. And in this 
  connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth 
  Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other 
  expedients to its development. And not only did the Martians 
  either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, 
  the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is 
  made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with 
  circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost 
  all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system 
  of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved 
  friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it 
  is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are 
  in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the 
  disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and 
  drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a 
  current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism 
  to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to 
  the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi~muscles 
  abounded in the crablike handling~machine which, on my first 
  peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. 
  It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians 
  lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring 
  ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast 
  journey across space. =

  While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the 
  sunlight, and noting each strange detail of their form, the 
  curate reminded me of his presence by pulling violently at 
  my arm. I turned to a scowling face, and silent, eloquent 
  lips. He wanted the slit, which permitted only one of us to 
  peep through; and so I had to forego watching them for a 
  time while he enjoyed that privilege. =

  When I looked again, the busy handling~machine had already 
  put together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken 
  out of the cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable 
  likeness to its own; and down on the left a busy little 
  digging mechanism had come into view, emitting jets of green 
  vapour and working its way round the pit, excavating and 
  embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner. This it 
  was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the 
  rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. 
  It piped and whistled as it worked. So far as I could see, 
  the thing was without a directing Martian at all. =

@section 2 {c3}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER THREE 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT 

@section 3 {tx}
  The arrival of a second fighting~machine drove us from our 
  peephole into the scullery, for we feared that from his 
  elevation the Martian might see down upon us behind our 
  barrier. At a later date we began to feel less in danger of 
  their eyes, for to an eye in the dazzle of the sunlight 
  outside our refuge must have been blank blackness, but at 
  first the slightest suggestion of approach drove us into the 
  scullery in heart~throbbing retreat. Yet terrible as was the 
  danger we incurred, the attraction of peeping was for both 
  of us irresistible. And I recall now with a sort of wonder 
  that, in spite of the infinite danger in which we were 
  between starvation and a still more terrible death, we could 
  yet struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight. 
  We would race across the kitchen in a grotesque way between 
  eagerness and the dread of making a noise, and strike each 
  other, and thrust add kick, within a few inches of exposure. =

  The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions 
  and habits of thought and action, and our danger and 
  isolation only accentuated the incompatibility. At Halliford 
  I had already come to hate the curate's trick of helpless 
  exclamation, his stupid rigidity of mind. His endless 
  muttering monologue vitiated every effort I made to think 
  out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent up 
  and intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. He was as 
  lacking in restraint as a silly woman. He would weep for 
  hours together, and I verily believe that to the very end 
  this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some 
  way efficacious. And I would sit in the darkness unable to 
  keep my mind off him by reason of his importunities. He ate 
  more than I did, and it was in vain I pointed out that our 
  only chance of life was to stop in the house until the 
  Martians had done with their pit, that in that long patience 
  a time might presently come when we should need food. He ate 
  and drank impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals. He 
  slept little. =

  As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any 
  consideration so intensified our distress and danger that I 
  had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and 
  at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But 
  he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, 
  anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face 
  neither God nor man, who face not even themselves. =

  It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, 
  but I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those 
  who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will 
  find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, 
  easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as 
  any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who 
  have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to 
  elemental things, will have a wider charity. =

  And while within we fought out our dark, dim contest of 
  whispers, snatched food and drink, and gripping hands and 
  blows, without, in the pitiless sunlight of that terrible 
  June, was the strange wonder, the unfamiliar routine of the 
  Martians in the pit. Let me return to those first new 
  experiences of mine. After a long time I ventured back to 
  the peephole, to find that the new~comers had been 
  reinforced by the occupants of no fewer than three of the 
  fighting~machines. These last had brought with them certain 
  fresh appliances that stood in an orderly manner about the 
  cylinder. The second handling~machine was now completed, and 
  was busied in serving one of the novel contrivances the big 
  machine had brought. This was a body resembling a milk can 
  in its general form, above which oscillated a pear~shaped 
  receptacle, and from which a stream of white powder flowed 
  into a circular basin below. =

  The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle 
  of the handling~machine. With two spatulate hands the 
  handling~machine was digging out and flinging masses of clay 
  into the pear~shaped receptacle above, while with another 
  arm it periodically opened a door and removed rusty and 
  blackened clinkers from the middle part of the machine. 
  Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the basin 
  along a ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden 
  from me by the mound of bluish dust. From this unseen 
  receiver a little thread of green smoke rose vertically into 
  the quiet air. As I looked, the handling~machine, with a 
  faint and musical clinking, extended, telescopic fashion, a 
  tentacle that had been a moment before a mere blunt 
  projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound of 
  clay. In another second it had lifted a bar of white 
  aluminium into sight, untarnished as yet, and shining 
  dazzlingly, and deposited it in a growing stack of bars that 
  stood at the side of the pit. Between sunset and starlight 
  this dexterous machine must have made more than a hundred 
  such bars out of the crude clay, and the mound of bluish 
  dust rose steadily until it topped the side of the pit. =

  The contrast between the swift and complex movements of 
  these contrivances and the inert panting clumsiness of their 
  masters was acute, and for days I had to tell myself 
  repeatedly that these latter were indeed the living of the 
  two things. =

  The curate had possession of the slit when the first men 
  were brought to the pit. I was sitting below, huddled up, 
  listening with all my ears. He made a sudden movement 
  backward, and I, fearful that we were observed, crouched in 
  a spasm of terror. He came sliding down the rubbish and 
  crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate, 
  gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. His 
  gesture suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a 
  little while my curiosity gave me courage, and I rose up, 
  stepped across him, and clambered up to it. At first I could 
  see no reason for his frantic behaviour. The twilight had 
  now come, the stars were little and faint, but the pit was 
  illuminated by the flickering green fire that came from the 
  aluminium~making. The whole picture was a flickering scheme 
  of green gleams and shifting rusty black shadows, strangely 
  trying to the eyes. Over and through it all went the bats, 
  heeding it not at all. The sprawling Martians were no longer 
  to be seen, the mound of blue~green powder had risen to 
  cover them from sight, and a fighting~machine, with its legs 
  contracted, crumpled, and abbreviated, stood across the 
  corner of the pit. And then, amid the clangour of the 
  machinery, came a drifting suspicion of human voices, that I 
  entertained at first only to dismiss. =

  I crouched, watching this fighting~machine closely, 
  satisfying myself now for the first time that the hood did 
  indeed contain a Martian. As the green flames lifted I could 
  see the oily gleam of his integument and the brightness of 
  his eyes. And suddenly I heard a yell, and saw a long 
  tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the machine to the 
  little cage that hunched upon its back. Then 
  something--something struggling violently--was lifted high 
  against the sky, a black, vague enigma against the 
  starlight; and as this black object came down again, I saw 
  by the green brightness that it was a man. For an instant he 
  was clearly visible. He was a stout, ruddy, middle~aged man, 
  well dressed; three days before, he must have been walking 
  the world, a man of considerable consequence. I could see 
  his staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch 
  chain. He vanished behind the mound, and for a moment there 
  was silence. And then began a shrieking and a sustained and 
  cheerful hooting from the Martians. =

  I slid down the rubbish, struggled to my feet, clapped my 
  hands over my ears, and bolted into the scullery. The 
  curate, who had been crouching silently with his arms over 
  his head, looked up as I passed, cried out quite loudly at 
  my desertion of him, and came running after me. =

  That night, as we lurked in the scullery, balanced between 
  our horror and the terrible fascination this peeping had, 
  although I felt an urgent need of action I tried in vain to 
  conceive some plan of escape; but afterwards, during the 
  second day, I was able to consider our position with great 
  clearness. The curate, I found, was quite incapable of 
  discussion; this new and culminating atrocity had robbed him 
  of all vestiges of reason or forethought. Practically he had 
  already sunk to the level of an animal. But as the saying 
  goes, I gripped myself with both hands. It grew upon my 
  mind, once I could face the facts, that terrible as our 
  position was, there was as yet no justification for absolute 
  despair. Our chief chance lay in the possibility of the 
  Martians making the pit nothing more than a temporary 
  encampment. Or even if they kept it permanently, they might 
  not consider it necessary to guard it, and a chance of 
  escape might be afforded us. I also weighed very carefully 
  the possibility of our digging a way out in a direction away 
  from the pit, but the chances of our emerging within sight 
  of some sentinel fighting~machine seemed at first too great. 
  And I should have had to do all the digging myself. The 
  curate would certainly have failed me. =

  It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that 
  I saw the lad killed. It was the only occasion on which I 
  actually saw the Martians feed. After that experience I 
  avoided the hole in the wall for the better part of a day. I 
  went into the scullery, removed the door, and spent some 
  hours digging with my hatchet as silently as possible; but 
  when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep the loose 
  earth collapsed noisily, and I did not dare continue. I lost 
  heart, and lay down on the scullery floor for a long time, 
  having no spirit even to move. And after that I abandoned 
  altogether the idea of escaping by excavation. =

  It says much for the impression the Martians had made upon 
  me that at first I entertained little or no hope of our 
  escape being brought about by their overthrow through any 
  human effort. But on the fourth or fifth night I heard a 
  sound like heavy guns. =

  It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining 
  brightly. The Martians had taken away the 
  excavating~machine, and, save for a fighting~machine that 
  stood in the remoter bank of the pit and a handling~machine 
  that was buried out of my sight in a corner of the pit 
  immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by 
  them. Except for the pale glow from the handling~machine and 
  the bars and patches of white moonlight the pit was in 
  darkness, and, except for the clinking of the 
  handling~machine, quite still. That night was a beautiful 
  serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed to have the 
  sky to herself. I heard a dog howling, and that familiar 
  sound it was that made me listen. Then I heard quite 
  distinctly a booming exactly like the sound of great guns. 
  Six distinct reports I counted, and after a long interval 
  six again. And that was all. =

@section 2 {c4}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FOUR 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE DEATH OF THE CURATE 

@section 3 {tx}
  It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped 
  for the last time, and presently found myself alone. Instead 
  of keeping close to me and trying to oust me from the slit, 
  the curate had gone back into the scullery. I was struck by 
  a sudden thought. I went back quickly and quietly into the 
  scullery. In the darkness I heard the curate drinking. I 
  snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a bottle of 
  burgundy. =

  For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the 
  floor and broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood panting 
  and threatening each other. In the end I planted myself 
  between him and the food, and told him of my determination 
  to begin a discipline. I divided the food in the pantry, 
  into rations to last us ten days. I would not let him eat 
  any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort 
  to get at the food. I had been dozing, but in an instant I 
  was awake. All day and all night we sat face to face, I 
  weary but resolute, and he weeping and complaining of his 
  immediate hunger. It was, I know, a night and a day, but to 
  me it seemed--it seems now--an interminable length of time. =

  And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open 
  conflict. For two vast days we struggled in undertones and 
  wrestling contests. There were times when I beat and kicked 
  him madly, times when I cajoled and persuaded him, and once 
  I tried to bribe him with the last bottle of burgundy, for 
  there was a rain~water pump from which I could get water. 
  But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond 
  reason. He would neither desist from his attacks on the food 
  nor from his noisy babbling to himself. The rudimentary 
  precautions to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not 
  observe. Slowly I began to realise the complete overthrow of 
  his intelligence, to perceive that my sole companion in this 
  close and sickly darkness was a man insane. =

  From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own 
  mind wandered at times. I had strange and hideous dreams 
  whenever I slept. It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined 
  to think that the weakness and insanity of the curate warned 
  me, braced me, and kept me a sane man. =

  On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of 
  whispering, and nothing I could do would moderate his 
  speech. =

  "It is just, O God!" he would say, over and over again. "It 
  is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have 
  sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the 
  poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace. I 
  preached acceptable folly--my God, what folly!--when I 
  should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon 
  them to repent~repent! . . . Oppressors of the poor and 
  needy . . . ! The wine press of God!" =

  Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I 
  withheld from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last 
  threatening. He began to raise his voice--I prayed him not 
  to. He perceived a hold on me--he threatened he would shout 
  and bring the Martians upon us. For a time that scared me; 
  but any concession would have shortened our chance of escape 
  beyond estimating. I defied him, although I felt no 
  assurance that he might not do this thing. But that day, at 
  any rate, he did not. He talked with his voice rising 
  slowly, through the greater part of the eighth and ninth 
  days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of 
  half~sane and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham 
  of God's service, such as made me pity him. Then he slept 
  awhile, and began again with renewed strength, so loudly 
  that I must needs make him desist. =

  "Be still!" I implored. =

  He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the 
  darkness near the copper. =

  "I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must 
  have reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness. Woe 
  unto this unfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the 
  inhabitants of the earth by reason of the other voices of 
  the trumpet----" =

  "Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest 
  the Martians should hear us. "For God's sake----" =

  "Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing 
  likewise and extending his arms. "Speak! The word of the 
  Lord is upon me!" =

  In three strides he was at the door leading into the 
  kitchen. =

  "I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long 
  delayed." =

  I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the 
  wall. In a flash I was after him. I was fierce with fear. 
  Before he was halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken 
  him. With one last touch of humanity I turned the blade back 
  and struck him with the butt. He went headlong forward and 
  lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled over him and stood 
  panting. He lay still. =

  Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of 
  slipping plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall 
  was darkened. I looked up and saw the lower surface of a 
  handling~machine coming slowly across the hole. One of its 
  gripping limbs curled amid the debris; another limb 
  appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams. I stood 
  petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate 
  near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and 
  the large dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long 
  metallic snake of tentacle came feeling slowly through the 
  hole. =

  I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped 
  at the scullery door. The tentacle was now some way, two 
  yards or more, in the room, and twisting and turning, with 
  queer sudden movements, this way and that. For a while I 
  stood fascinated by that slow, fitful advance. Then, with a 
  faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the scullery. I 
  trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright. I opened 
  the door of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness 
  staring at the faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and 
  listening. Had the Martian seen me? What was it doing now? =

  Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every 
  now and then it tapped against the wall, or started on its 
  movements with a faint metallic ringing, like the movements 
  of keys on a split~ring. Then a heavy body--I knew too well 
  what--was dragged across the floor of the kitchen towards 
  the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the door and 
  peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright outer 
  sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a 
  handling~machine, scrutinizing the curate's head. I thought 
  at once that it would infer my presence from the mark of the 
  blow I had given him. =

  I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to 
  cover myself up as much as I could, and as noiselessly as 
  possible in the darkness, among the firewood and coal 
  therein. Every now and then I paused, rigid, to hear if the 
  Martian had thrust its tentacles through the opening again. =

  Then the faint metallic jingle returned. I traced it slowly 
  feeling over the kitchen. Presently I heard it nearer--in 
  the scullery, as I judged. I thought that its length might 
  be insufficient to reach me. I prayed copiously. It passed, 
  scraping faintly across the cellar door. An age of almost 
  intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it fumbling at 
  the latch! It had found the door! The Martians understood 
  doors! =

  It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the 
  door opened. =

  In the darkness I could just see the thing--like an 
  elephant's trunk more than anything else--waving towards me 
  and touching and examining the wall, coals, wood and 
  ceiling. It was like a black worm swaying its blind head to 
  and fro. =

  Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot. I was on the 
  verge of screaming; I bit my hand. For a time the tentacle 
  was silent. I could have fancied it had been withdrawn. 
  Presently, with an abrupt click, it gripped something--I 
  thought it had me!--and seemed to go out of the cellar 
  again. For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it had taken 
  a lump of coal to examine. =

  I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, 
  which had become cramped, and then listened. I whispered 
  passionate prayers for safety. =

  Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me 
  again. Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the 
  walls and tapping the furniture. =

  While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the 
  cellar door and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, 
  and the biscuit~tins rattled and a bottle smashed, and then 
  came a heavy bump against the cellar door. Then silence that 
  passed into an infinity of suspense. =

  Had it gone? =

  At last I decided that it had. =

  It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth 
  day in the close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, 
  not daring even to crawl out for the drink for which I 
  craved. It was the eleventh day before I ventured so far 
  from my security. =

@section 2 {c5}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER FIVE 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE STILLNESS 

@section 3 {tx}
  My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the 
  door between the kitchen and the scullery. But the pantry 
  was empty; every scrap of food had gone. Apparently, the 
  Martian had taken it all on the previous day. At that 
  discovery I despaired for the first time. I took no food, or 
  no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day. =

  At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength 
  ebbed sensibly. I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, 
  in a state of despondent wretchedness. My mind ran on 
  eating. I thought I had become deaf, for the noises of 
  movement I had been accustomed to hear from the pit had 
  ceased absolutely. I did not feel strong enough to crawl 
  noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there. =

  On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the 
  chance of alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking 
  rain~water pump that stood by the sink, and got a couple of 
  glassfuls of blackened and tainted rain water. I was greatly 
  refreshed by this, and emboldened by the fact that no 
  enquiring tentacle followed the noise of my pumping. =

  During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I 
  thought much of the curate and of the manner of his death. =

  On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and 
  thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans 
  of escape. Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, 
  of the death of the curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, 
  asleep or awake, I felt a keen pain that urged me to drink 
  again and again. The light that came into the scullery was 
  no longer grey, but red. To my disordered imagination it 
  seemed the colour of blood. =

  On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was 
  surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown 
  right across the hole in the wall, turning the half~light of 
  the place into a crimson~coloured obscurity. =

  It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious, 
  familiar sequence of sounds in the kitchen, and, listening, 
  identified it as the snuffing and scratching of a dog. Going 
  into the kitchen, I saw a dog's nose peering in through a 
  break among the ruddy fronds. This greatly surprised me. At 
  the scent of me he barked shortly. =

  I thought if I could induce him to come into the place 
  quietly I should be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and 
  in any case, it would be advisable to kill him, lest his 
  actions attracted the attention of the Martians. =

  I crept forward, saying "Good dog!" very softly; but he 
  suddenly withdrew his head and disappeared. =

  I listened--I was not deaf--but certainly the pit was still. 
  I heard a sound like the flutter of a bird's wings, and a 
  hoarse croaking, but that was all. =

  For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring 
  to move aside the red plants that obscured it. Once or twice 
  I heard a faint pitter~patter like the feet of the dog going 
  hither and thither on the sand far below me, and there were 
  more birdlike sounds, but that was all. At length, 
  encouraged by the silence, I looked out. =

  Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and 
  fought over the skeletons of the dead the Martians had 
  consumed, there was not a living thing in the pit. =

  I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the 
  machinery had gone. Save for the big mound of greyish~blue 
  powder in one corner, certain bars of aluminium in another, 
  the black birds, and the skeletons of the killed, the place 
  was merely an empty circular pit in the sand. =

  Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood 
  upon the mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save 
  behind me, to the north, and neither Martians nor sign of 
  Martians were to be seen. The pit dropped sheerly from my 
  feet, but a little way along the rubbish afforded a 
  practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of 
  escape had come. I began to tremble. =

  I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate 
  resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, I 
  scrambled to the top of the mound in which I had been buried 
  so long. =

  I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was 
  visible. =

  When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it 
  had been a straggling street of comfortable white and red 
  houses, interspersed with abundant shady trees. Now I stood 
  on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay, and gravel, over 
  which spread a multitude of red cactus~shaped plants, 
  knee~high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute 
  their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but 
  further a network of red thread scaled the still living 
  stems. =

  The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had 
  been burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second 
  story, with smashed windows and shattered doors. The red 
  weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms. Below me was 
  the great pit, with the crows struggling for its refuse. A 
  number of other birds hopped about among the ruins. Far away 
  I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces 
  of men there were none. =

  The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement, 
  dazzlingly bright, the sky a glowing blue. A gentle breeze 
  kept the red weed that covered every scrap of unoccupied 
  ground gently swaying. And oh! the sweetness of the air! =

@section 2 {c6}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SIX 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS 

@section 3 {tx}
  For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of 
  my safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged 
  I had thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate 
  security. I had not realised what had been happening to the 
  world, had not anticipated this startling vision of 
  unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in ruins--I 
  found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another 
  planet. =

  For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range 
  of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only 
  too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his 
  burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy 
  navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first 
  inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my 
  mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of 
  dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, 
  but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. 
  With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run 
  and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away. =

  But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, 
  and my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and 
  dismal fast. In the direction away from the pit I saw, 
  beyond a red~covered wall, a patch of garden ground 
  unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee~deep, and 
  sometimes neck~deep, in the red weed. The density of the 
  weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some 
  six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I 
  could not lift my feet to the crest. So I went along by the 
  side of it, and came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled 
  me to get to the top, and tumble into the garden I coveted. 
  Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, 
  and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, 
  and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through 
  scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking 
  through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with 
  two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soon and as far 
  as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly 
  region of the pit. =

  Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of 
  mushrooms which also I devoured, and then I came upon a 
  brown sheet of flowing shallow water, where meadows used to 
  be. These fragments of nourishment served only to whet my 
  hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a hot, dry 
  summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by 
  the tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this 
  extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became 
  gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were 
  simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and 
  its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily choked 
  both those rivers. =

  At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost 
  in a tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames 
  water poured in a broad and shallow stream across the 
  meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the water spread the 
  weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the Thames 
  valley were for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin 
  I explored, and much of the desolation the Martians had 
  caused was concealed. =

  In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it 
  had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the 
  action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by 
  the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have 
  acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases--they 
  never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed 
  rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became 
  bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke off at 
  the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their 
  early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea. =

  My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to 
  slake my thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an 
  impulse, gnawed some fronds of red weed; but they were 
  watery, and had a sickly, metallic taste. I found the water 
  was sufficiently shallow for me to wade securely, although 
  the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the flood 
  evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to 
  Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of 
  occasional ruins of its villas and fences and lamps, and so 
  presently I got out of this spate and made my way to the 
  hill going up towards Roehampton and came out on Putney 
  Common. =

  Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to 
  the wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited 
  the devastation of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I 
  would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with 
  their blinds trimly drawn and doors closed, as if they had 
  been left for a day by the owners, or as if their 
  inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; 
  the tall trees along the lane were free from the red 
  creeper. I hunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, 
  and I also raided a couple of silent houses, but they had 
  already been broken into and ransacked. I rested for the 
  remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my 
  enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on. =

  All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the 
  Martians. I encountered a couple of hungry~looking dogs, but 
  both hurried circuitously away from the advances I made 
  them. Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons--not 
  bodies, but skeletons, picked clean--and in the wood by me I 
  found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and 
  rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts 
  of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them. =

  After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, 
  where I think the Heat~Ray must have been used for some 
  reason. And in the garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity 
  of immature potatoes, sufficient to stay my hunger. From 
  this garden one looked down upon Putney and the river. The 
  aspect of the place in the dusk was singularly desolate: 
  blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and down the 
  hill the sheets of the flooded river, red~tinged with the 
  weed. And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable 
  terror to think how swiftly that desolating change had come. =

  For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of 
  existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left 
  alive. Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another 
  skeleton, with the arms dislocated and removed several yards 
  from the rest of the body. As I proceeded I became more and 
  more convinced that the extermination of mankind was, save 
  for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this 
  part of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and 
  left the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps 
  even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might 
  be they had gone northward. =

@section 2 {c7}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER SEVEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL 

@section 3 {tx}
  I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of 
  Putney Hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since 
  my flight to Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless 
  trouble I had breaking into that house--afterwards I found 
  the front door was on the latch--nor how I ransacked every 
  room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in what 
  seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a rat~gnawed 
  crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already 
  searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some 
  biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter 
  I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not 
  only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no 
  lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of 
  London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an 
  interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, 
  peering out for some sign of these monsters. I slept little. 
  As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a 
  thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument 
  with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental 
  condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional 
  states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my 
  brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew 
  clear again, and I thought. =

  Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the 
  killing of the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and 
  the possible fate of my wife. The former gave me no 
  sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as 
  a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite 
  without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see 
  myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the 
  creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to 
  that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, 
  unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with 
  that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into 
  the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only 
  trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every 
  step of our conversation from the moment when I had found 
  him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing 
  to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of 
  Weybridge. We had been incapable of co~operation--grim 
  chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should 
  have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime 
  is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all 
  this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses--all 
  these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and 
  the reader must form his judgment as he will. =

  And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a 
  prostrate body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the 
  fate of my wife. For the former I had no data; I could 
  imagine a hundred things, and so, unhappily, I could for the 
  latter. And suddenly that night became terrible. I found 
  myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I found 
  myself praying that the Heat~Ray might have suddenly and 
  painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my 
  return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered 
  prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter 
  charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, 
  pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the 
  darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so 
  soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out 
  of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place--a creature 
  scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any 
  passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. 
  Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we 
  have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity 
  for those witless souls that suffer our dominion. =

  The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed 
  pink, and was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road 
  that runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a 
  number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have 
  poured Londonward on the Sunday night after the fighting 
  began. There was a little two~wheeled cart inscribed with 
  the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with a 
  smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw 
  hat trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of 
  West Hill a lot of blood~stained glass about the overturned 
  water trough. My movements were languid, my plans of the 
  vaguest. I had an idea of going to Leatherhead, though I 
  knew that there I had the poorest chance of finding my wife. 
  Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly, my 
  cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me 
  I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had 
  fled. I knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached 
  for her and the world of men, but I had no clear idea how 
  the finding might be done. I was also sharply aware now of 
  my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover 
  of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon 
  Common, stretching wide and far. =

  That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and 
  broom; there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, 
  hesitating, on the verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding 
  it all with light and vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of 
  little frogs in a swampy place among the trees. I stopped to 
  look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout resolve to 
  live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling 
  of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump 
  of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, 
  and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I 
  approached him slowly. He stood silent and motionless, 
  regarding me. =

  As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as 
  dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he 
  had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished 
  the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of 
  dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell 
  over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, 
  so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red 
  cut across the lower part of his face. =

  "Stop!" he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I 
  stopped. His voice was hoarse. "Where do you come from?" he 
  said. =

  I thought, surveying him. =

  "I come from Mortlake," I said. "I was buried near the pit 
  the Martians made about their cylinder. I have worked my way 
  out and escaped." =

  "There is no food about here," he said. "This is my country. 
  All this hill down to the river, and back to Clapham, and up 
  to the edge of the common. There is only food for one. Which 
  way are you going?" =

  I answered slowly. =

  "I don't know," I said. "I have been buried in the ruins of 
  a house thirteen or fourteen days. I don't know what has 
  happened." =

  He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a 
  changed expression. =

  "I've no wish to stop about here," said I. "I think I shall 
  go to Leatherhead, for my wife was there." =

  He shot out a pointing finger. =

  "It is you," said he; "the man from Woking. And you weren't 
  killed at Weybridge?" =

  I recognised him at the same moment. =

  "You are the artilleryman who came into my garden." =

  "Good luck!" he said. "We are lucky ones! Fancy YOU!" He put 
  out a hand, and I took it. "I crawled up a drain," he said. 
  "But they didn't kill everyone. And after they went away I 
  got off towards Walton across the fields. But----It's not 
  sixteen days altogether--and your hair is grey." He looked 
  over his shoulder suddenly. "Only a rook," he said. "One 
  gets to know that birds have shadows these days. This is a 
  bit open. Let us crawl under those bushes and talk." =

  "Have you seen any Martians?" I said. "Since I crawled 
  out----" =

  "They've gone away across London," he said. "I guess they've 
  got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, 
  Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It's like 
  a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. 
  By daylight you can't. But nearer--I haven't seen them--" 
  (he counted on his fingers) "five days. Then I saw a couple 
  across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night 
  before last"--he stopped and spoke impressively--"it was 
  just a matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. 
  I believe they've built a flying~machine, and are learning 
  to fly." =

  I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the 
  bushes. =

  "Fly!" =

  "Yes," he said, "fly." =

  I went on into a little bower, and sat down. =

  "It is all over with humanity," I said. "If they can do that 
  they will simply go round the world." =

  He nodded. =

  "They will. But----It will relieve things over here a bit. 
  And besides----" He looked at me. "Aren't you satisfied it 
  IS up with humanity? I am. We're down; we're beat." =

  I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this 
  fact--a fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had 
  still held a vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit 
  of mind. He repeated his words, "We're beat." They carried 
  absolute conviction. =

  "It's all over," he said. "They've lost ONE--just ONE. And 
  they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest 
  power in the world. They've walked over us. The death of 
  that one at Weybridge was an accident. And these are only 
  pioneers. They kept on coming. These green stars--I've seen 
  none these five or six days, but I've no doubt they're 
  falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're 
  under! We're beat!" =

  I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in 
  vain to devise some countervailing thought. =

  "This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a 
  war, any more than there's war between man and ants." =

  Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory. =

  "After the tenth shot they fired no more--at least, until 
  the first cylinder came." =

  "How do you know?" said the artilleryman. I explained. He 
  thought. "Something wrong with the gun," he said. "But what 
  if there is? They'll get it right again. And even if there's 
  a delay, how can it alter the end? It's just men and ants. 
  There's the ants builds their cities, live their lives, have 
  wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the way, 
  and then they go out of the way. That's what we are 
  now--just ants. Only----" =

  "Yes," I said. =

  "We're eatable ants." =

  We sat looking at each other. =

  "And what will they do with us?" I said. =

  "That's what I've been thinking," he said; "that's what I've 
  been thinking. After Weybridge I went south--thinking. I saw 
  what was up. Most of the people were hard at it squealing 
  and exciting themselves. But I'm not so fond of squealing. 
  I've been in sight of death once or twice; I'm not an 
  ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst, death--it's 
  just death. And it's the man that keeps on thinking comes 
  through. I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I, "Food 
  won't last this way," and I turned right back. I went for 
  the Martians like a sparrow goes for man. All round"--he 
  waved a hand to the horizon--"they're starving in heaps, 
  bolting, treading on each other. . . ." =

  He saw my face, and halted awkwardly. =

  "No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France," he 
  said. He seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my 
  eyes, and went on: "There's food all about here. Canned 
  things in shops; wines, spirits, mineral waters; and the 
  water mains and drains are empty. Well, I was telling you 
  what I was thinking. "Here's intelligent things," I said, 
  "and it seems they want us for food. First, they'll smash us 
  up--ships, machines, guns, cities, all the order and 
  organisation. All that will go. If we were the size of ants 
  we might pull through. But we're not. It's all too bulky to 
  stop. That's the first certainty." Eh?" =

  I assented. =

  "It is; I've thought it out. Very well, then--next; at 
  present we're caught as we're wanted. A Martian has only to 
  go a few miles to get a crowd on the run. And I saw one, one 
  day, out by Wandsworth, picking houses to pieces and routing 
  among the wreckage. But they won't keep on doing that. So 
  soon as they've settled all our guns and ships, and smashed 
  our railways, and done all the things they are doing over 
  there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the 
  best and storing us in cages and things. That's what they 
  will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven't begun on us 
  yet. Don't you see that?" =

  "Not begun!" I exclaimed. =

  "Not begun. All that's happened so far is through our not 
  having the sense to keep quiet--worrying them with guns and 
  such foolery. And losing our heads, and rushing off in 
  crowds to where there wasn't any more safety than where we 
  were. They don't want to bother us yet. They're making their 
  things--making all the things they couldn't bring with them, 
  getting things ready for the rest of their people. Very 
  likely that's why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for 
  fear of hitting those who are here. And instead of our 
  rushing about blind, on the howl, or getting dynamite on the 
  chance of busting them up, we've got to fix ourselves up 
  according to the new state of affairs. That's how I figure 
  it out. It isn't quite according to what a man wants for his 
  species, but it's about what the facts point to. And that's 
  the principle I acted upon. Cities, nations, civilisation, 
  progress--it's all over. That game's up. We're beat." =

  "But if that is so, what is there to live for?" =

  The artilleryman looked at me for a moment. =

  "There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million 
  years or so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and 
  no nice little feeds at restaurants. If it's amusement 
  you're after, I reckon the game is up. If you've got any 
  drawing~room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a 
  knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away. They 
  ain't no further use." =

  "You mean----" =

  "I mean that men like me are going on living--for the sake 
  of the breed. I tell you, I'm grim set on living. And if I'm 
  not mistaken, you'll show what insides YOU'VE got, too, 
  before long. We aren't going to be exterminated. And I don't 
  mean to be caught either, and tamed and fattened and bred 
  like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those brown creepers!" =

  "You don't mean to say----" =

  "I do. I'm going on, under their feet. I've got it planned; 
  I've thought it out. We men are beat. We don't know enough. 
  We've got to learn before we've got a chance. And we've got 
  to live and keep independent while we learn. See! That's 
  what has to be done." =

  I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man's 
  resolution. =

  "Great God!," cried I. "But you are a man indeed!" And 
  suddenly I gripped his hand. =

  "Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining. "I've thought it out, 
  eh?" =

  "Go on," I said. =

  "Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get 
  ready. I'm getting ready. Mind you, it isn't all of us that 
  are made for wild beasts; and that's what it's got to be. 
  That's why I watched you. I had my doubts. You're slender. I 
  didn't know that it was you, you see, or just how you'd been 
  buried. All these--the sort of people that lived in these 
  houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live 
  down that way--they'd be no good. They haven't any spirit in 
  them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who 
  hasn't one or the other--Lord! What is he but funk and 
  precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work--I've 
  seen hundreds of 'em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild 
  and shining to catch their little season~ticket train, for 
  fear they'd get dismissed if they didn't; working at 
  businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to 
  understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in 
  time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of 
  the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, 
  not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of 
  money that would make for safety in their one little 
  miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a 
  bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays--fear of 
  the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the 
  Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, 
  fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or 
  so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, 
  they'll come and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad 
  after a bit. They'll wonder what people did before there 
  were Martians to take care of them. And the bar loafers, and 
  mashers, and singers--I can imagine them. I can imagine 
  them," he said, with a sort of sombre gratification. 
  "There'll be any amount of sentiment and religion loose 
  among them. There's hundreds of things I saw with my eyes 
  that I've only begun to see clearly these last few days. 
  There's lots will take things as they are--fat and stupid; 
  and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all 
  wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now 
  whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought 
  to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with 
  a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of 
  do~nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to 
  persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've 
  seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and 
  turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms 
  and hymns and piety. And those of a less simple sort will 
  work in a bit of--what is it?--eroticism." =

  He paused. =

  "Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; 
  train them to do tricks--who knows?--get sentimental over 
  the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. And some, 
  maybe, they will train to hunt us." =

  "No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being----" =

  "What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the 
  artilleryman. "There's men who'd do it cheerful. What 
  nonsense to pretend there isn't!" =

  And I succumbed to his conviction. =

  "If they come after me," he said; "Lord, if they come after 
  me!" and subsided into a grim meditation. =

  I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to 
  bring against this man's reasoning. In the days before the 
  invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual 
  superiority to his--I, a professed and recognised writer on 
  philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet he 
  had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely 
  realised. =

  "What are you doing?" I said presently. "What plans have you 
  made?" =

  He hesitated. =

  "Well, it's like this," he said. "What have we to do? We 
  have to invent a sort of life where men can live and breed, 
  and be sufficiently secure to bring the children up. 
  Yes--wait a bit, and I'll make it clearer what I think ought 
  to be done. The tame ones will go like all tame beasts; in a 
  few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich~blooded, 
  stupid--rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go 
  savage--degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat. . . . You 
  see, how I mean to live is underground. I've been thinking 
  about the drains. Of course those who don't know drains 
  think horrible things; but under this London are miles and 
  miles--hundreds of miles--and a few days" rain and London 
  empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are 
  big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there's cellars, 
  vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may be made to 
  the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You 
  begin to see? And we form a band--able~bodied, clean~minded 
  men. We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. 
  Weaklings go out again." =

  "As you meant me to go?" =

  "Well--l parleyed, didn't I?" =

  "We won't quarrel about that. Go on." =

  "Those who stop obey orders. Able~bodied, clean~minded women 
  we want also--mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical 
  ladies--no blasted rolling eyes. We can't have any weak or 
  silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome 
  and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought 
  to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, 
  to live and taint the race. And they can't be happy. 
  Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes 
  it bad. And in all those places we shall gather. Our 
  district will be London. And we may even be able to keep a 
  watch, and run about in the open when the Martians keep 
  away. Play cricket, perhaps. That's how we shall save the 
  race. Eh? It's a possible thing? But saving the race is 
  nothing in itself. As I say, that's only being rats. It's 
  saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There 
  men like you come in. There's books, there's models. We must 
  make great safe places down deep, and get all the books we 
  can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books. 
  That's where men like you come in. We must go to the British 
  Museum and pick all those books through. Especially we must 
  keep up our science--learn more. We must watch these 
  Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When it's all 
  working, perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great 
  thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn't even 
  steal. If we get in their way, we clear out. We must show 
  them we mean no harm. Yes, I know. But they're intelligent 
  things, and they won't hunt us down if they have all they 
  want, and think we're just harmless vermin." =

  The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm. =

  "After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn 
  before--Just imagine this: four or five of their fighting 
  machines suddenly starting off--Heat~Rays right and left, 
  and not a Martian in 'em. Not a Martian in 'em, but men--men 
  who have learned the way how. It may be in my time, 
  even--those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, 
  with its Heat~Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! 
  What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the 
  end of the run, after a bust like that? I reckon the 
  Martians'll open their beautiful eyes! Can't you see them, 
  man? Can't you see them hurrying, hurrying--puffing and 
  blowing and hooting to their other mechanical affairs? 
  Something out of gear in every case. And swish, bang, 
  rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, SWISH 
  comes the Heat~Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his 
  own." =

  For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and 
  the tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely 
  dominated my mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his 
  forecast of human destiny and in the practicability of his 
  astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks me susceptible 
  and foolish must contrast his position, reading steadily 
  with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine, crouching 
  fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by 
  apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early 
  morning time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after 
  scanning the sky for Martians, hurried precipitately to the 
  house on Putney Hill where he had made his lair. It was the 
  coal cellar of the place, and when I saw the work he had 
  spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, 
  which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney 
  Hill--I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams 
  and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But I 
  believed in him sufficiently to work with him all that 
  morning until past midday at his digging. We had a garden 
  barrow and shot the earth we removed against the kitchen 
  range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock~turtle soup 
  and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a curious 
  relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this 
  steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my 
  mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; 
  but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find 
  myself with a purpose again. After working an hour I began 
  to speculate on the distance one had to go before the cloaca 
  was reached, the chances we had of missing it altogether. My 
  immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, 
  when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one 
  of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to 
  me, too, that the house was inconveniently chosen, and 
  required a needless length of tunnel. And just as I was 
  beginning to face these things, the artilleryman stopped 
  digging, and looked at me. =

  "We're working well," he said. He put down his spade. "Let 
  us knock off a bit" he said. "I think it's time we 
  reconnoitred from the roof of the house." =

  I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed 
  his spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I 
  stopped, and so did he at once. =

  "Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of 
  being here?" =

  "Taking the air," he said. "I was coming back. It's safer by 
  night." =

  "But the work?" =

  "Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw 
  the man plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. "We ought to 
  reconnoitre now," he said, "because if any come near they 
  may hear the spades and drop upon us unawares." =

  I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the 
  roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No 
  Martians were to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, 
  and slipped down under shelter of the parapet. =

  From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of 
  Putney, but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of 
  red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The 
  red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and 
  their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with 
  shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was strange 
  how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing 
  water for their propagation. About us neither had gained a 
  footing; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of 
  arborvitae, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and 
  brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington dense smoke 
  was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward 
  hills. =

  The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who 
  still remained in London. =

  "One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric 
  light in order, and there was all Regent Street and the 
  Circus ablaze, crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, 
  men and women, dancing and shouting till dawn. A man who was 
  there told me. And as the day came they became aware of a 
  fighting~machine standing near by the Langham and looking 
  down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there. It 
  must have given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the 
  road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk 
  or frightened to run away." =

  Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully 
  describe! =

  From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his 
  grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so 
  eloquently of the possibility of capturing a 
  fighting~machine that I more than half believed in him again. But now 
  that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, 
  I could divine the stress he laid on doing nothing 
  precipitately. And I noted that now there was no question 
  that he personally was to capture and fight the great 
  machine. =

  After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us 
  seemed disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a 
  meal, I was nothing loath. He became suddenly very generous, 
  and when we had eaten he went away and returned with some 
  excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism glowed. He 
  was inclined to regard my coming as a great occasion. =

  "There's some champagne in the cellar," he said. =

  "We can dig better on this Thames~side burgundy," said I. =

  "No," said he; "I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We've 
  a heavy enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather 
  strength while we may. Look at these blistered hands!" =

  And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon 
  playing cards after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and 
  after dividing London between us, I taking the northern side 
  and he the southern, we played for parish points. Grotesque 
  and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is 
  absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, I found the 
  card game and several others we played extremely 
  interesting. =

  Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of 
  extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear 
  prospect before us but the chance of a horrible death, we 
  could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard, 
  and playing the "joker" with vivid delight. Afterwards he 
  taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough chess games. 
  When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a lamp. =

  After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the 
  artilleryman finished the champagne. We went on smoking the 
  cigars. He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his 
  species I had encountered in the morning. He was still 
  optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more thoughtful 
  optimism. I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in 
  a speech of small variety and considerable intermittence. I 
  took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of 
  which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the 
  Highgate hills. =

  At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. 
  The northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near 
  Kensington glowed redly, and now and then an orange~red 
  tongue of flame flashed up and vanished in the deep blue 
  night. All the rest of London was black. Then, nearer, I 
  perceived a strange light, a pale, violet~purple fluorescent 
  glow, quivering under the night breeze. For a space I could 
  not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red 
  weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that 
  realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the 
  proportion of things, awoke again. I glanced from that to 
  Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the west, and then 
  gazed long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead and 
  Highgate. =

  I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the 
  grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states 
  from the midnight prayer to the foolish card~playing. I had 
  a violent revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the 
  cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me 
  with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and 
  to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I resolved to leave 
  this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his 
  drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it 
  seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning what the 
  Martians and my fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the 
  roof when the late moon rose. =

@section 2 {c8}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER EIGHT 

@section 3 {tt}

  DEAD LONDON 

@section 3 {tx}
  After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the 
  hill, and by the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. 
  The red weed was tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked 
  the bridge roadway; but its fronds were already whitened in 
  patches by the spreading disease that presently removed it 
  so swiftly. =

  At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station 
  I found a man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the 
  black dust, alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I 
  could get nothing from him but curses and furious lunges at 
  my head. I think I should have stayed by him but for the 
  brutal expression of his face. =

  There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge 
  onwards, and it grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were 
  horribly quiet. I got food--sour, hard, and mouldy, but 
  quite eatable--in a baker's shop here. Some way towards 
  Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I 
  passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the 
  burning was an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, 
  the streets were quiet again. =

  Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets 
  and upon dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the 
  length of the Fulham Road. They had been dead many days, so 
  that I hurried quickly past them. The black powder covered 
  them over, and softened their outlines. One or two had been 
  disturbed by dogs. =

  Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a 
  Sunday in the City, with the closed shops, the houses locked 
  up and the blinds drawn, the desertion, and the stillness. 
  In some places plunderers had been at work, but rarely at 
  other than the provision and wine shops. A jeweller's window 
  had been broken open in one place, but apparently the thief 
  had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch 
  lay scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch 
  them. Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on a 
  doorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and 
  bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed magnum of 
  champagne formed a pool across the pavement. She seemed 
  asleep, but she was dead. =

  The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew 
  the stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of 
  death--it was the stillness of suspense, of expectation. At 
  any time the destruction that had already singed the 
  northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had annihilated 
  Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses and 
  leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and 
  derelict. . . . =

  In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of 
  black powder. It was near South Kensington that I first 
  heard the howling. It crept almost imperceptibly upon my 
  senses. It was a sobbing alternation of two notes, "Ulla, 
  ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on perpetually. When I passed 
  streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and 
  buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in 
  a full tide down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards 
  Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remote 
  wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found 
  a voice for its fear and solitude. =

  "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," wailed that superhuman 
  note--great waves of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit 
  roadway, between the tall buildings on each side. I turned 
  northwards, marvelling, towards the iron gates of Hyde Park. 
  I had half a mind to break into the Natural History Museum 
  and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in order to 
  see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground, 
  where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the 
  Exhibition Road. All the large mansions on each side of the 
  road were empty and still, and my footsteps echoed against 
  the sides of the houses. At the top, near the park gate, I 
  came upon a strange sight--a bus overturned, and the 
  skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for a 
  time, and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine. 
  The voice grew stronger and stronger, though I could see 
  nothing above the housetops on the north side of the park, 
  save a haze of smoke to the northwest. =

  "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," cried the voice, coming, as it 
  seemed to me, from the district about Regent's Park. The 
  desolating cry worked upon my mind. The mood that had 
  sustained me passed. The wailing took possession of me. I 
  found I was intensely weary, footsore, and now again hungry 
  and thirsty. =

  It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this 
  city of the dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying 
  in state, and in its black shroud? I felt intolerably 
  lonely. My mind ran on old friends that I had forgotten for 
  years. I thought of the poisons in the chemists" shops, of 
  the liquors the wine merchants stored; I recalled the two 
  sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared 
  the city with myself. . . . =

  I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again 
  were black powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous 
  smell from the gratings of the cellars of some of the 
  houses. I grew very thirsty after the heat of my long walk. 
  With infinite trouble I managed to break into a public~house 
  and get food and drink. I was weary after eating, and went 
  into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a black 
  horse~hair sofa I found there. =

  I awoke to find that dismal howling still in my ears, "Ulla, 
  ulla, ulla, ulla." It was now dusk, and after I had routed 
  out some biscuits and a cheese in the bar--there was a meat 
  safe, but it contained nothing but maggots--I wandered on 
  through the silent residential squares to Baker Street 
  --Portman Square is the only one I can name--and so came out 
  at last upon Regent's Park. And as I emerged from the top of 
  Baker Street, I saw far away over the trees in the clearness 
  of the sunset the hood of the Martian giant from which this 
  howling proceeded. I was not terrified. I came upon him as 
  if it were a matter of course. I watched him for some time, 
  but he did not move. He appeared to be standing and yelling, 
  for no reason that I could discover. =

  I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound 
  of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," confused my mind. Perhaps I was 
  too tired to be very fearful. Certainly I was more curious 
  to know the reason of this monotonous crying than afraid. I 
  turned back away from the park and struck into Park Road, 
  intending to skirt the park, went along under the shelter of 
  the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling 
  Martian from the direction of St. John's Wood. A couple of 
  hundred yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, 
  and saw, first a dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in 
  his jaws coming headlong towards me, and then a pack of 
  starving mongrels in pursuit of him. He made a wide curve to 
  avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a fresh 
  competitor. As the yelping died away down the silent road, 
  the wailing sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," reasserted 
  itself. =

  I came upon the wrecked handling~machine halfway to St. 
  John's Wood station. At first I thought a house had fallen 
  across the road. It was only as I clambered among the ruins 
  that I saw, with a start, this mechanical Samson lying, with 
  its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted, among the ruins 
  it had made. The forepart was shattered. It seemed as if it 
  had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been 
  overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this 
  might have happened by a handling~machine escaping from the 
  guidance of its Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins 
  to see it, and the twilight was now so far advanced that the 
  blood with which its seat was smeared, and the gnawed 
  gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left, were 
  invisible to me. =

  Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on 
  towards Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, 
  I saw a second Martian, as motionless as the first, standing 
  in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent. A 
  little beyond the ruins about the smashed handling~machine I 
  came upon the red weed again, and found the Regent's Canal, 
  a spongy mass of dark~red vegetation. =

  As I crossed the bridge, the sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, 
  ulla," ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came 
  like a thunderclap. =

  The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the 
  trees towards the park were growing black. All about me the 
  red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me 
  in the dimness. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was 
  coming upon me. But while that voice sounded the solitude, 
  the desolation, had been endurable; by virtue of it London 
  had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had 
  upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of 
  something--I knew not what--and then a stillness that could 
  be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet. =

  London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the 
  white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me 
  my imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. 
  Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. In front of me 
  the road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I 
  saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could not 
  bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road, 
  and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness towards 
  Kilburn. I hid from the night and the silence, until long 
  after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But 
  before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars 
  were still in the sky I turned once more towards Regent's 
  Park. I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw 
  down a long avenue, in the half~light of the early dawn, the 
  curve of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the 
  fading stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like 
  the others. =

  An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And 
  I would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I 
  marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I 
  drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of 
  black birds was circling and clustering about the hood. At 
  that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the 
  road. =

  I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's 
  Terrace (I waded breast~high across a torrent of water that 
  was rushing down from the waterworks towards the Albert 
  Road), and emerged upon the grass before the rising of the 
  sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the crest of the 
  hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and 
  largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these 
  heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the 
  sky line an eager dog ran and disappeared. The thought that 
  had flashed into my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no 
  fear, only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the 
  hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood hung 
  lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and 
  tore. =

  In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and 
  stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was 
  below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here 
  and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange 
  shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their 
  overturned war~machines, some in the now rigid 
  handling~machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and 
  laid in a row, were the Martians--DEAD!--slain by the 
  putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their 
  systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being 
  slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the 
  humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this 
  earth. =

  For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might 
  have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. 
  These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the 
  beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors 
  since life began here. But by virtue of this natural 
  selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to 
  no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to 
  many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for 
  instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there 
  are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders 
  arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies 
  began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them 
  they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they 
  went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion 
  deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is 
  his against all comers; it would still be his were the 
  Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men 
  live nor die in vain. =

  Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, 
  in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that 
  must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death 
  could be. To me also at that time this death was 
  incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that had 
  been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I 
  believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been 
  repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had 
  slain them in the night. =

  I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened 
  gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire 
  about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the 
  mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and 
  complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird 
  and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light. 
  A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies 
  that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. 
  Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and 
  strange, lay the great flying~machine with which they had 
  been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and 
  death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At 
  the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge 
  fighting~machine that would fight no more for ever, at the 
  tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the 
  overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill. =

  I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, 
  enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two Martians that I 
  had seen overnight, just as death had overtaken them. The 
  one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; 
  perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice had gone on 
  perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted. 
  They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, 
  in the brightness of the rising sun. =

  All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from 
  everlasting destruction, stretched the great Mother of 
  Cities. Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre 
  robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and 
  beauty of the silent wilderness of houses. =

  Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and 
  the splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling 
  in a clear sky, and here and there some facet in the great 
  wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with a white 
  intensity. =

  Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with 
  houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, 
  beyond the Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the 
  Langham Hotel, the dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial 
  Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came 
  out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of 
  Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the 
  Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered 
  like two silver rods. The dome of St. Paul's was dark 
  against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, 
  by a huge gaping cavity on its western side. =

  And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories 
  and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the 
  multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of 
  lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the 
  swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; 
  when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and 
  that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast 
  dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a 
  wave of emotion that was near akin to tears. =

  The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. 
  The survivors of the people scattered over the 
  country--leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a 
  shepherd--the thousands who had fled by sea, would begin to 
  return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, 
  would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the 
  vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of 
  the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the 
  blackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the 
  sunlit grass of the hill, would presently be echoing with 
  the hammers of the restorers and ringing with the tapping of 
  their trowels. At the thought I extended my hands towards 
  the sky and began thanking God. In a year, thought I--in a 
  year. . . =

  With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my 
  wife, and the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that 
  had ceased for ever. =

@section 2 {c9}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER NINE 

@section 3 {tt}

  WRECKAGE 

@section 3 {tx}
  And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, 
  it is not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly 
  and vividly, all that I did that day until the time that I 
  stood weeping and praising God upon the summit of Primrose 
  Hill. And then I forget. =

  Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since 
  that, so far from my being the first discoverer of the 
  Martian overthrow, several such wanderers as myself had 
  already discovered this on the previous night. One man--the 
  first--had gone to St. Martin's~le~Grand, and, while I 
  sheltered in the cabmen's hut, had contrived to telegraph to 
  Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the 
  world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, 
  suddenly flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it 
  in Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time 
  when I stood upon the verge of the pit. Already men, weeping 
  with joy, as I have heard, shouting and staying their work 
  to shake hands and shout, were making up trains, even as 
  near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church bells that 
  had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news, until 
  all England was bell~ringing. Men on cycles, lean~faced, 
  unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of 
  unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of 
  despair. And for the food! Across the Channel, across the 
  Irish Sea, across the Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were 
  tearing to our relief. All the shipping in the world seemed 
  going Londonward in those days. But of all this I have no 
  memory. I drifted--a demented man. I found myself in a house 
  of kindly people, who had found me on the third day 
  wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. 
  John's Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some 
  insane doggerel about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The 
  Last Man Left Alive!" Troubled as they were with their own 
  affairs, these people, whose name, much as I would like to 
  express my gratitude to them, I may not even give here, 
  nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and 
  protected me from myself. Apparently they had learned 
  something of my story from me during the days of my lapse. =

  Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break 
  to me what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two 
  days after I was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with 
  every soul in it, by a Martian. He had swept it out of 
  existence, as it seemed, without any provocation, as a boy 
  might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power. =

  I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me. I was a 
  lonely man and a sad one, and they bore with me. I remained 
  with them four days after my recovery. All that time I felt 
  a vague, a growing craving to look once more on whatever 
  remained of the little life that seemed so happy and bright 
  in my past. It was a mere hopeless desire to feast upon my 
  misery. They dissuaded me. They did all they could to divert 
  me from this morbidity. But at last I could resist the 
  impulse no longer, and, promising faithfully to return to 
  them, and parting, as I will confess, from these four~day 
  friends with tears, I went out again into the streets that 
  had lately been so dark and strange and empty. =

  Already they were busy with returning people; in places even 
  there were shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running 
  water. =

  I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went 
  back on my melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at 
  Woking, how busy the streets and vivid the moving life about 
  me. So many people were abroad everywhere, busied in a 
  thousand activities, that it seemed incredible that any 
  great proportion of the population could have been slain. 
  But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I 
  met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright 
  their eyes, and that every other man still wore his dirty 
  rags. Their faces seemed all with one of two expressions--a 
  leaping exultation and energy or a grim resolution. Save for 
  the expression of the faces, London seemed a city of tramps. 
  The vestries were indiscriminately distributing bread sent 
  us by the French government. The ribs of the few horses 
  showed dismally. Haggard special constables with white 
  badges stood at the corners of every street. I saw little of 
  the mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached 
  Wellington Street, and there I saw the red weed clambering 
  over the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge. =

  At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common 
  contrasts of that grotesque time--a sheet of paper flaunting 
  against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick 
  that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first 
  newspaper to resume publication--the DAILY MAIL. I bought a 
  copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of 
  it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the 
  thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of 
  advertisement stereo on the back page. The matter he printed 
  was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found 
  its way back. I learned nothing fresh except that already in 
  one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had 
  yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the article 
  assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the 
  "Secret of Flying," was discovered. At Waterloo I found the 
  free trains that were taking people to their homes. The 
  first rush was already over. There were few people in the 
  train, and I was in no mood for casual conversation. I got a 
  compartment to myself, and sat with folded arms, looking 
  greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed past the 
  windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over 
  temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the 
  houses were blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of 
  London was grimy with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of 
  two days of thunderstorms and rain, and at Clapham Junction 
  the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds of 
  out~of~work clerks and shopmen working side by side with the 
  customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty relaying. =

  All down the line from there the aspect of the country was 
  gaunt and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. 
  Walton, by virtue of its unburned pine woods, seemed the 
  least hurt of any place along the line. The Wandle, the 
  Mole, every little stream, was a heaped mass of red weed, in 
  appearance between butcher's meat and pickled cabbage. The 
  Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons of 
  the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, 
  in certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth 
  about the sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing 
  about it, and some sappers were busy in the midst of it. 
  Over it flaunted a Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in the 
  morning breeze. The nursery grounds were everywhere crimson 
  with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut with 
  purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One's gaze went 
  with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds 
  of the foreground to the blue~green softness of the eastward 
  hills. =

  The line on the London side of Woking station was still 
  undergoing repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and 
  took the road to Maybury, past the place where I and the 
  artilleryman had talked to the hussars, and on by the spot 
  where the Martian had appeared to me in the thunderstorm. 
  Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find, among a 
  tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with 
  the whitened bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. For a 
  time I stood regarding these vestiges. . . . =

  Then I returned through the pine wood, neck~high with red 
  weed here and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog 
  had already found burial, and so came home past the College 
  Arms. A man standing at an open cottage door greeted me by 
  name as I passed. =

  I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded 
  immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was 
  opening slowly as I approached. =

  It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of 
  the open window from which I and the artilleryman had 
  watched the dawn. No one had closed it since. The smashed 
  bushes were just as I had left them nearly four weeks ago. I 
  stumbled into the hall, and the house felt empty. The stair 
  carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had crouched, 
  soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the 
  catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the 
  stairs. =

  I followed them to my study, and found lying on my 
  writing~table still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, 
  the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the opening 
  of the cylinder. For a space I stood reading over my 
  abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the probable 
  development of Moral Ideas with the development of the 
  civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of 
  a prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we 
  may expect----" The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my 
  inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone 
  by, and how I had broken off to get my DAILY CHRONICLE from 
  the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden gate 
  as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd story of 
  "Men from Mars." =

  I came down and went into the dining room. There were the 
  mutton and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer 
  bottle overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left 
  them. My home was desolate. I perceived the folly of the 
  faint hope I had cherished so long. And then a strange thing 
  occurred. "It is no use," said a voice. "The house is 
  deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay 
  here to torment yourself. No one escaped but you." =

  I was startled. Had I spoken my thought aloud? I turned, and 
  the French window was open behind me. I made a step to it, 
  and stood looking out. =

  And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and 
  afraid, were my cousin and my wife--my wife white and 
  tearless. She gave a faint cry. =

  "I came," she said. "I knew--knew----" =

  She put her hand to her throat--swayed. I made a step 
  forward, and caught her in my arms. =

@section 2 {c10}
@section 3 {cn}

  CHAPTER TEN 

@section 3 {tt}

  THE EPILOGUE 

@section 3 {tx}
  I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how 
  little I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many 
  debatable questions which are still unsettled. In one 
  respect I shall certainly provoke criticism. My particular 
  province is speculative philosophy. My knowledge of 
  comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but it 
  seems to me that Carver's suggestions as to the reason of 
  the rapid death of the Martians is so probable as to be 
  regarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have assumed that 
  in the body of my narrative. =

  At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were 
  examined after the war, no bacteria except those already 
  known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not 
  bury any of their dead, and the reckless slaughter they 
  perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the 
  putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by 
  no means a proven conclusion. =

  Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which 
  the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator 
  of the Heat~Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at 
  the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have 
  disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the 
  latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder points 
  unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a 
  brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is 
  possible that it combines with argon to form a compound 
  which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent 
  in the blood. But such unproven speculations will scarcely 
  be of interest to the general reader, to whom this story is 
  addressed. None of the brown scum that drifted down the 
  Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at 
  the time, and now none is forthcoming. =

  The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so 
  far as the prowling dogs had left such an examination 
  possible, I have already given. But everyone is familiar 
  with the magnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits 
  at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings 
  that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of 
  their physiology and structure is purely scientific. =

  A question of graver and universal interest is the 
  possibility of another attack from the Martians. I do not 
  think that nearly enough attention is being given to this 
  aspect of the matter. At present the planet Mars is in 
  conjunction, but with every return to opposition I, for one, 
  anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we 
  should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be 
  possible to define the position of the gun from which the 
  shots are discharged, to keep a sustained watch upon this 
  part of the planet, and to anticipate the arrival of the 
  next attack. =

  In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite 
  or artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the 
  Martians to emerge, or they might be butchered by means of 
  guns so soon as the screw opened. It seems to me that they 
  have lost a vast advantage in the failure of their first 
  surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light. =

  Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that 
  the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing 
  on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars 
  were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was in 
  opposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus. 
  Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking 
  appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and 
  almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous 
  character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian 
  disk. One needs to see the drawings of these appearances in 
  order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in 
  character. =

  At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our 
  views of the human future must be greatly modified by these 
  events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this 
  planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for 
  Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that 
  may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in 
  the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is 
  not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us 
  of that serene confidence in the future which is the most 
  fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it 
  has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote 
  the conception of the commonweal of mankind. It may be that 
  across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the 
  fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, 
  and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer 
  settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will 
  certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the 
  Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting 
  stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable 
  apprehension to all the sons of men. =

  The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely 
  be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general 
  persuasion that through all the deep of space no life 
  existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now 
  we see further. If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no 
  reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and 
  when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth 
  uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the 
  thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out 
  and caught our sister planet within its toils. =

  Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my 
  mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of 
  the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of 
  sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on 
  the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only 
  a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future 
  ordained. =

  I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left 
  an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit 
  in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again 
  the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel 
  the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out 
  into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy 
  in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, 
  children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and 
  unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the 
  hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder 
  darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies 
  shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and 
  dog~bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad 
  distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and 
  wretched, in the darkness of the night. =

  I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street 
  and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are 
  but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have 
  seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a 
  dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And 
  strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but 
  a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great 
  province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the 
  smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, 
  to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds 
  on the hill, to see the sight~seers about the Martian 
  machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of 
  playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all 
  bright and clear~cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of 
  that last great day. . . . =

  And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and 
  to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted 
  me, among the dead. =

# END OF TEXT

