 Book 2, Chapter 1 of The War of the Worlds. 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 Halliburne, whether we fled to escape the black smoke. There I will resume. We stop 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 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 copy books. When he followed me there, 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 the next day. The black smoke drifted slowly riverward, all through Monday morning, creeping nearer and nearer to Oz, driving at last along the roadway outside the house that he does. A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a jet of super-heated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the windows it touched and scolded 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 snow storm 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 mouth for the artillery man's teaching, I sought out food and drink, I had found oil and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and flannel shirt that I found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to go alone, I 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 pool 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 Hammond, Peterson 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 ship 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 route 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 black smoke and dead bodies, the heat 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 Q came a number of people running, and the upper works of a Martian fighting machine loomed in sights over the house tops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood aghast at our danger, and had the Martians look 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 cure had 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 Q. 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 Q Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident that 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 cylinder which projected behind him, much as a working basket hangs over his shoulder. It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other purpose than disruption with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled garden, fell in through 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 hedge roads in the 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 with 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 companions 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 Mort Lake. Here they 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 half a ham. I give this catalogue so precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to subsist upon this store for the next fortnight. A bottle of 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, tin 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 curid, 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 leapt 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-handled and stunned. I was insensible for a long time, the curid 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 a 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 curid 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 fancied 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 curid, when presently it happened again. – Yes, I said. – But what is it? – A Martian! – said the curid. – 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 Shepparton 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 filled it 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 greatly for the first time. The window had been burst in by a mast with 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 drain pipe. 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 a 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 growing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as possible out of the twiler to the kitchen into the darkness of the scurry. 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 through himself. Safe for that sound we lay quite still in the scurry. 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 collars and cuffs. Outside there began 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 the day before that awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me to action. I told the curators 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. End of Book 2 Chapter 1 Book 2 Chapter 2 of the War of the Worlds This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells Chapter 2 What We Saw from the Ruined House After eating we crept back to the scullery and there I must have dozed again for when presently I looked around I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered for the curators 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 a 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 massive plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I gripped his arm fearing that 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 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 working. The earth all rounded had splashed under that tremendous impact. It had splashed, it's the only word, and lay in heap 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, saved towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit. The foundations 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 heap 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 in the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first. I encountered 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 heap mould near it. The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling machines and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed agile legs and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it. Its motion was so swift, complex and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen these structures and have only the ill-imagined epits of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eyewitnesses as myself to go upon scarcely realised 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 mentioned them here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. Even 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 crab-like creature with a glittering integument. The controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles activated its movements seemed 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 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 chimpanic 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 was sixteen slender almost whip-like 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. The 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 grater 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 to 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 from 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 not 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 shriveled remains that have fallen into human hands were bipeds with flimsy, salacious skeletons almost like those of the salacious 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 seemed 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 at 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 their physical 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 24 hours they did 24 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 the earth during the war and it was found attached to its parent partially budded off just as young lilybabs but off or like the young animals in the freshwater 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 tunicades the two processes occur side by side but finally the sexual methods superseded its competitor all together 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 pal-mal 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 the 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 100 diseases all the fevers and contagions of human life consumption cancers tumors and such morbidities never enter the scheme of their life and speaking of the differences between 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 with 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 gains 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 luxurious 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 eyewitness 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 of signal but merely the exploration of air preparatory to the suction or 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 interchange 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 of man lay we men with our bicycles and road skates our lily and the thaw 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 in 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 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 experience 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 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 discs in an elastic sheath these discs become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together and traversed by a current of electricity in this way the curious parallelism to animal motions which was so striking and deserving to the human beholder was attained such quasi-muscles abounded in the crab-like 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 last journey across space while I was still watching this sluggish motions in the sunlight and noting each strange detail of their form the cure it reminded me of his presence by pulling violently at my arm I turned a scowling face and silent eloquent lips, he wanted the slit which permitted only one of us to peep through until I had to forgo 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 lightness 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 around 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 refuse quivering it piped and whistled as it worked so far as I could see the thing was without directing Martian at all End of book 2 Book 2 Chapter 3 of the War of the Worlds This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells Chapter 3 The Days of Imprisonment The arrival of a second fighting machine drove us from our peephole into the scullery for we feared that from his elevation the Martian might see down upon us behind our barrier At a later date we began to feel less in danger of their eyes for to an eye in the dazzle of the sunlight outside our refuge must have been a blank blackness but at first the slightest suggestion of approach drove us into the scullery in heartthrobbing retreat yet terrible as was the danger we incurred the attraction of peeping was for both of us irresistible I recall now the 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 or sight we would race across the kitchen in a grotesque way between eagerness and the dread of making a noise and strike each other and thrust and kick within a few inches of exposure The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions and habits of thought and action and our danger and isolation only accentuated the incompatibility At Alliford I had already come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation his stupid radulity of mine his endless muttering monologue viciated 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 believed that to the very end this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way evercacious 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 my 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, anemic 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 flatter 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 dune 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 time I ventured back to the peephole to find that the newcomers have been reinforced by the occupants and 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 visited and 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 had streamed a white powder flowed into a circular basin below the oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of the handling machine with two spatula 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 the door and removed rusty and black and 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 100 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 their 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 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 clamoured 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 seen 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 at 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 retracted 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 into 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 ready 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 the 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 fast cried out quite loudly at my desertion of him and came running after me that night as we looked in the scullery the silence 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 and 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 how a 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 the chance of escape might be afforded to us I also weighed very carefully the possibility of our digging away 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 silent 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 ever 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 saved for a fighting machine that stood in the remote 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 safe 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 End of Book 2, Chapter 3 Book 2, Chapter 4 of the War of the Worlds This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells Chapter 4, The Death of the Curate It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the last time and presently found myself alone Instead of keeping close to me and trying to oust me from the slit the curate had gone back into the scullery I was struck by a sudden thought I went back quickly and quietly into the scullery In the darkness I heard the curate drinking I snatched in the darkness and my fingers caught a bottle of burgundy For a few minutes there was a tussle The bottle struck the floor and broke and I desisted and rose We stood panting and threatening each other In the end I planted myself between him and the food and told him of my determination to begin a discipline I divided the food in the pantry into rations to last us ten days I would not let him eat any more that day In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to get out 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 widens incompatibility ended at last in open conflict The two last 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 rainwater 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 and durable 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 cure it 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, oh 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 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 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 in treaties mingled with a torrent of half saying and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God's service such as made me pity him then he slept a while and began again with renewed strength so loudly that I must need to make him desist be still I implored he rose to his knees for he had been sitting in the darkness near the copper I had been still too long he said in a tone that must have reached the pit and now I must bear my witness whoa unto this unfaithful city whoa whoa whoa 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 less the Martians should hear us for God's sake nay shouted the cura at the top of his voice standing likewise and extending his arms speak the word of the Lord is upon me in three strikes he was at the door leading into the kitchen I must bear witness I'll 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 they 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 haembling 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 cura and stopped to 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 horse cry I forced myself across the scullery I trembled violently I could scarcely stand upright I opened the door of the cold 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 puked into the kitchen in the triangle of bright outer sunlight I saw the Martian in its pry areas of a handling machine scrutinizing the cure its head I thought at once that it would infer my presence from the mark of the glow I had given him I crept back to the cold 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 walls 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 it 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 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 the biscuit tins rattled and a bottle smashed and then 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 closed darkness buried it among the 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 End of Book 2 Chapter 4 Book 2 Chapter 5 of the War of the World This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells Chapter 5 The Stillness My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door between the kitchen and the scullery but the pantry was empty every scrap of food had gone apparently the Martian had taken it all on the previous day at that discovery I spared for the first time I took no food or no drink either on the eleventh of 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 rainwater pump that stood by the sink and got a couple of glassfuls of black and dented rainwater I was greatly refreshed by this and emboldened by the fact that no inquiring tentacle followed the noise from 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 as I heard a curious, familiar sequence of sounds in the kitchen and, listening, identified it as the snuffling and scratching of a dog going into the kitchen I saw a dog's nose peeping in through a break among the ready fronds this greatly surprised me at the centre 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 crete 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 horse croaking but that was all for a long while I lay close to the peephole but not daring to me beside the red plants that out skewed it once or twice I heard a faint pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going into that on the sand far below me and there were more bird-like 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 grayish blue powder in one corner certain bars of aluminium in another the blackbirds 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 round of rubble I could see in any direction save behind me to the north and neither Martians nor Sino Martians were to be seen the pit dropped shirly away from my feet but a long way along the rubbish afforded a practicable slope to the summits of the ruins my chance of escape had come and 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 threads scaled to still living stones the neighbouring houses had all been red but none had been burned the walls stood sometimes to the second story with smashed windows and shattered doors the red weed grew tumultuously in the roofless rooms below me was the great pit the crows struggling for its refuse a number of other birds hopped about among the ruins far away I saw a gaunt cat slinked crouchingly along a wall the traces of men there were none the day seemed by contrast with my recent confinement dazzlingly bright the sky a glowing blue the gentle breeze kept the red weed that covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying and though the sweetness of the air end of book 2 chapter 5 book 2 chapter 6 of the war of the world this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the war of the world by H.G. Wells chapter 6 the work of 15 days for some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security but 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 its burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen dizzy navies 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 an animal among the animals under the Martian hill 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 had 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 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 Q it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops possessed with two ideas to get more food and to live as soon and as far as my strength permitted out of this accursed unearthly region of the pit someway farther in a grassy place was a group of mushrooms which I also 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 wet 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 its straight way became gigantic and of unparalleled thick undersea its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the way in the Thames and its swiftly growing and titanic waterfront 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 shriveled 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 nought some fronds of the red weed but they were watery and had a sickly metallic taste I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to weed securely 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 space 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 as 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 day like in a shrubbery in a fevered 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 ignored parts of these in my mouth there was nothing to be got from them after sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney well 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 dust was singularly desolate blackened trees blackened desolate ruins and down the hill the sheets of the flooded river red tinged with the weed but they were 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 saved 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 that they had gone northward End of Book 2 Chapter 6 Book 2 Chapter 7 of the War of the Worlds This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells Chapter 7 The Man on Putney Hill I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney hill sleeping in a maid bed for the first time since my fright to leather had I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house afterwards I found the front door was on the latch nor have 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-naught 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 competing 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 sensational 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 cooperation grim chance had taken no heed of that had I foreseen I should have left him at Hallibur 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 form 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 rate 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 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 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 panicked torrent that must have poured Londonwood on the Sunday night after the fighting began there was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb Greengrocer New Molden 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 there was a stained glass about the overturned water drop 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 that I might find or learn there wither the surrey people had fled I knew I wanted to find my wife that my heart ached for her and the world of men I had a 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 prune 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 as he'd 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 coley 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 lost of him and I stopped his voice was hoarse where do you come from? he said I thought surveying him I come from more lake 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's 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 13 or 14 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 walking and you weren't killed at Weebridge I recognised him at the same moment you are the artillery man who came into my garden good luck he said we are the 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 16 days altogether and your hair is grey he looked over his shoulder suddenly oh near look 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 built a flying machine and are learning to fly I stopped on hands and knees before we had come to the bushes fly yes he said fly I went on into a little and sat down it is all over with humanity I said if they can do that he nodded they will but it will relieve things over here a bit and besides he looked at me aren't you satisfied that it is up with humanity I am we're done we're beat I stared strange as it may seem I had not arrived at this fact the fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke I had still held a vague hope rather I had kept a life long 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 waybridge 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 artillery man it never was a war any more than there's a war between man and ants suddenly I recalled a night in the observatory after the 10 shot they fired no more at least until the first cylinder came how do you know said the artillery man I explained he thought something wrong with the gun he said 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 built their cities lived 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 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 why I've been thinking after way bridge 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 that way and I turned right back I went for the Martians like a sparrow goes for a man all round he waved a hand to the horizon they're starving in heaps faulty treading on each other he saw my face and halted awkwardly no doubt not to have money have gone away to France he said he seemed to hesitate whether to apologize 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 organization 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 thought it out, very well then next, at present I assented and 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 rooting 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 fury 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 hull 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 it isn't quite according to what man wants for his species but it's about what the facts point to and that's the principle I acted upon cities, nations, civilization progress, it's all over that games up, we're beat but if that is so, what is there to live for? the artillery man 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 the 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 h's you better chuck them away, there ain't no further use you mean? I mean that men like me are going on living for the sake of the breed we're set on living and if I'm not mistaken you'll show what inside 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 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 to be 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 hands he said, with his eyes shining I thought it out 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 who used to live down that way they'd be no good they haven't any spirit in them no proud dreams and no proud lost and the man who hasn't won all the other, lord what is he but funk and precautions they just useless scared that lot to work I've seen hundreds of them bit of breakfast in hand running wild and shouting to catch their little season to get 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 they'd be 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 he said with a sort of somber 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 sore that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something the weak and those who go weak and a lot of complicated thinking always make for a sort of do nothing religion very pious and superior and submits a persecution and the will of the Lord very likely you've seen the same thing it's energy in a gale of thunk 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 the hunters no I cried that's impossible no human being what's the good of going on with such lies said the artillery man there's men who 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 I'm subsided into a grim meditation I sat contemplating these things I can 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 as a professed and recognized writer on philosophical theme and he the 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 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 to generate into a sort of big savage rat 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 when 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 the cellars, vaults, stores from which bolting passages may be made to the drains and the railway tunnels and subways you've been to see and able-bodied, clean-minded men we're not going to pick up any rubbish that's dressing weaklings go out again as you meant me to go well, I proudly didn't say 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 some person 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 is none so dreadful it's the fulking 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 a runabout in the open when the Martians keep away play cricket perhaps that's how we shall save the race, huh 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 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 artillery man paused I'm downhand up on 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 left and right and not a Martian in them not a Martian in them, 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 mithereens at the end of the run after a bust like that I reckon the Martians will 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're 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 artillery man 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 power 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 burrow 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 the curious relief in 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 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 all together my immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel when it was possible to get into the drain at once than 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 artillery man stopped digging and looked at me we're working well he said he put down his spade let us knock off for a bit he said I think it's time we reconnoited from the roof 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 or one can't always work he said and in a flash I saw the man plane he hesitated holding his spade we ought to recognize now he said because if any come near then we hear the speed and drop upon us unaware 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 me but we can see the river below a bubbly mass of red weed and the low parts of Lamberth flooded and red the red creepers warmed up the trees about the old palace and their branches stretched gaunt and dead and set with shriveled leaves from amid its clusters it was strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for their propagation the bowtows neither had gained a footing levernums pink maize snowballs and trees of Arbivite 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 artillery man began to tell me of the sort of people who still remained in London one day last week he said some fools got the electric light in order and there was all region streets and the circus of bliss 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 nearby the Langham and looking down at them heaven knows how long you've 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 two drunk or frightened to run away grotesque gleam over 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 define 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 temside burgundy said I no said he I am horse today champagne great god with a heavy enough task before us let us take a rest and gather strength while we meet 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 ochre and after dividing London between us I taking the northern side and he the southern we played for parish point 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 flat 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 baseball 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 let a lamp after an interminable string of games we saw and the artillery man 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 and more thoughtful optimism I remember he wound up with my health proposed 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 upon the high gate hills at first I stayed 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 a 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 realization my dormant sense of wonder my sense of proportion of things awoke again I glanced from back 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 wandering at the grotesque changes of the day I recalled my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card player 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 fellow men were doing I was still upon the roof when the late moon rose End of book 2 Chapter 7 Book 2 Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells Chapter 8 Dead London After I had parted from the artillery man 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 moldy but quite eatable in a baker's shop here Someway towards Wallon Green the streets became clear of powder and I passed the 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 jewel as 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 Father 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 father 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 off-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 ooooooooooooooooooooooo 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 I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange remote whaling. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude. Oof, uhhhhh... Oof. Whaled that superhuman note, great waves of sound sweeping down the broad-sunlit roadway between the tall buildings on each side. I turned northward, 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 but the house tops on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the north-west. Ooooooooh! Uh! Ooooooooooooooh! 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, foot sore, 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 chemist shops of the liquors the wine-works had 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 art, 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 parlor 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. It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits and a cheese in the bar. There was a meat-sauce, 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 I could discover. I tried to formulate a plan of action that perpetual sound of Ooo-oo. Ooo-oo 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 inside Park Road, intending to skirt the park, and went along under the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationery 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, Oooooooohhhh, Oooooooooohhhh, he asserted itself. I came up on a wrecked handling machine, half-wait to St. John's Wood station. At first I thought the house had fallen across the road, it was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw with a start, this mechanical samsen lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted, among the ruins it had made. The four part 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 Nord gristle of the Martian that the dogs had let 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 its urological 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 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOG aaaaarrhhhhhhh. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO許 cie. It was, as it were, cut-off. The silence came like a thunder clap. 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 indurable. 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 cabin in the shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still in the sky, I turned once more to reach its path. I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw down a long avenue, in the half light of the early dawn, the kerb 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. 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. But that my heart came abound, and I began running along the road. I hurried through the red weed that choked St Edmunds Terrace. I waded breast-high across the torrent of water, that was rushing down from the waterworks towards 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 rid out 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. Just a skyline and 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 exaltation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster, out of the hood hung a long 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, with the Martians. Dead, slain by the future-affective and diseased bacteria against which their systems were unprepared, slain as the red weed was being slain, slain after all man's devices had failed, but 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 the terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease that have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things, taken toll of our pre-human 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 the 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 with a Martian as 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 torturous 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 not come a day too soon. At the sound of a quarrying 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 Primo's hill. I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, in hail I was now in bird, 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 glitted 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 to great mother of cities. Those who have only seen London veiled in her somber 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 splinted spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in clear sky, and here and there some facet of the great wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with a white intensity. Northward were Kilburn and Hampstead, 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 great mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westpinster, rising hazy beyond, far away in blue with the Surrey Hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two silver rods. The Dome of St. Paul's is was dark against the sunrise and injured I saw for the first time by 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 realized 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, hoodless, 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 stagued. All the gaunt wrecks, the black and 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 trolls. 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 forever. End of Book 2, Chapter 8