The Project Gutenberg eBook of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells (2024)

BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

I.
THE EVE OF THE WAR.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century thatthis world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater thanman’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves abouttheir various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost asnarrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creaturesthat swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men wentto and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in theirassurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria underthe microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of spaceas sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of lifeupon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of themental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied theremight be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready towelcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that areto our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vastand cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowlyand surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century camethe great disillusionment.

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

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to thevery end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent lifemight have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Norwas it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, withscarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, itnecessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’sbeginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone farindeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery,but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperaturebarely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuatedthan ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface,and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either poleand periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion,which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem forthe inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightenedtheir intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And lookingacross space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcelydreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunwardof them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetationand grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, withglimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populouscountry and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

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

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

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazingsubtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess ofours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfectunanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gatheringtrouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched thered planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars hasbeen the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearancesof the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have beengetting ready.

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

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

A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothingof this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, andthe world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatenedthe human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not metOgilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited atthe news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn withhim that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.

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

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

Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, threetelescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomabledarkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frostystarlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to mebecause it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards meacross that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute by so manythousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was tobring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed ofit then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

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

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

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

“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million toone,” he said.

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

Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and popular notesappeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. Theseriocomic periodical Punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in thepolitical cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had firedat us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through theempty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It seemsto me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging overus, men could go about their petty concerns as they did. I remember howjubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for theillustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these latter timesscarcely realise the abundance and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers.For my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busyupon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas ascivilisation progressed.

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

II.
THE FALLING STAR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although the heat wasexcessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the bulk to see the Thingmore clearly. He fancied even then that the cooling of the body might accountfor this, but what disturbed that idea was the fact that the ash was fallingonly from the end of the cylinder.

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

“Good heavens!” said Ogilvy. “There’s a man init—men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!”

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

The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that he forgot theheat and went forward to the cylinder to help turn. But luckily the dullradiation arrested him before he could burn his hands on the still-glowingmetal. At that he stood irresolute for a moment, then turned, scrambled out ofthe pit, and set off running wildly into Woking. The time then must have beensomewhere about six o’clock. He met a waggoner and tried to make himunderstand, but the tale he told and his appearance were so wild—his hathad fallen off in the pit—that the man simply drove on. He was equallyunsuccessful with the potman who was just unlocking the doors of thepublic-house by Horsell Bridge. The fellow thought he was a lunatic at largeand made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the taproom. That sobered hima little; and when he saw Henderson, the London journalist, in his garden, hecalled over the palings and made himself understood.

“Henderson,” he called, “you saw that shooting star lastnight?”

“Well?” said Henderson.

“It’s out on Horsell Common now.”

“Good Lord!” said Henderson. “Fallen meteorite! That’sgood.”

“But it’s something more than a meteorite. It’s acylinder—an artificial cylinder, man! And there’s somethinginside.”

Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

“What’s that?” he said. He was deaf in one ear.

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

They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting withno response, they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible ordead.

Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted consolationand promises, and went off back to the town again to get help. One can imaginethem, covered with sand, excited and disordered, running up the little streetin the bright sunlight just as the shop folks were taking down their shuttersand people were opening their bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railwaystation at once, in order to telegraph the news to London. The newspaperarticles had prepared men’s minds for the reception of the idea.

By eight o’clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already startedfor the common to see the “dead men from Mars.” That was the formthe story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about a quarter tonine when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle. I was naturallystartled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to thesand-pits.

III.
ON HORSELL COMMON.

I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the huge hole inwhich the cylinder lay. I have already described the appearance of thatcolossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf and gravel about it seemedcharred as if by a sudden explosion. No doubt its impact had caused a flash offire. Henderson and Ogilvy were not there. I think they perceived that nothingwas to be done for the present, and had gone away to breakfast atHenderson’s house.

There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the Pit, with their feetdangling, and amusing themselves—until I stopped them—by throwingstones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to them about it, they beganplaying at “touch” in and out of the group of bystanders.

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

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

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

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

“A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS.”

“REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,”

and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy’s wire to the Astronomical Exchange hadroused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

There were half a dozen flys or more from the Woking station standing in theroad by the sand-pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham, and a rather lordlycarriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap of bicycles. In addition, alarge number of people must have walked, in spite of the heat of the day, fromWoking and Chertsey, so that there was altogether quite a considerablecrowd—one or two gaily dressed ladies among the others.

It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, and the onlyshadow was that of the few scattered pine trees. The burning heather had beenextinguished, but the level ground towards Ottershaw was blackened as far asone could see, and still giving off vertical streamers of smoke. Anenterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham Road had sent up his son with abarrow-load of green apples and ginger beer.

Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a group of about half adozen men—Henderson, Ogilvy, and a tall, fair-haired man that Iafterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal, with several workmenwielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving directions in a clear,high-pitched voice. He was standing on the cylinder, which was now evidentlymuch cooler; his face was crimson and streaming with perspiration, andsomething seemed to have irritated him.

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

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

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

IV.
THE CYLINDER OPENS.

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

“Keep back! Keep back!”

A boy came running towards me.

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

I went on to the crowd. There were really, I should think, two or three hundredpeople elbowing and jostling one another, the one or two ladies there being byno means the least active.

“He’s fallen in the pit!” cried some one.

“Keep back!” said several.

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

“I say!” said Ogilvy; “help keep these idiots back. Wedon’t know what’s in the confounded thing, you know!”

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

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

I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a littleunlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. But,looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow: greyish billowymovements, one above another, and then two luminous disks—like eyes. Thensomething resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walkingstick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towardsme—and then another.

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

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

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

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strangehorror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upperlip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelikelower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups oftentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, theevident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitationalenergy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immenseeyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. Therewas something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsydeliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this firstencounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

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

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

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

Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the heap ofsand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming along the road fromChobham or Woking would have been amazed at the sight—a dwindlingmultitude of perhaps a hundred people or more standing in a great irregularcircle, in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates and hedges, saying little toone another and that in short, excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at afew heaps of sand. The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, blackagainst the burning sky, and in the sand-pits was a row of deserted vehicleswith their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the ground.

V.
THE HEAT-RAY.

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

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

Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups—one a littlecrowd towards Woking, the other a knot of people in the direction of Chobham.Evidently they shared my mental conflict. There were few near me. One man Iapproached—he was, I perceived, a neighbour of mine, though I did notknow his name—and accosted. But it was scarcely a time for articulateconversation.

“What ugly brutes!” he said. “Good God! What uglybrutes!” He repeated this over and over again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible,inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashingbushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard thecrackle of fire in the sand-pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was assuddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated fingerwere drawn through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along acurving line beyond the sand-pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.Something fell with a crash far away to the left where the road from Wokingstation opens out on the common. Forth-with the hissing and humming ceased, andthe black, dome-like object sank slowly out of sight into the pit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI.
THE HEAT-RAY IN THE CHOBHAM ROAD.

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

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

The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and Ottershaw aboutthe same time. In Woking the shops had closed when the tragedy happened, and anumber of people, shop people and so forth, attracted by the stories they hadheard, were walking over the Horsell Bridge and along the road between thehedges that runs out at last upon the common. You may imagine the young peoplebrushed up after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they wouldmake any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivialflirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in thegloaming. . . .

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

As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they found littleknots of people talking excitedly and peering at the spinning mirror over thesand-pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt, soon infected by the excitement ofthe occasion.

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

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

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

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

“They’re coming!” a woman shrieked, and incontinentlyeveryone was turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their wayto Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep. Wherethe road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd jammed, and adesperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape; three persons atleast, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there, and left todie amid the terror and the darkness.

VII.
HOW I REACHED HOME.

For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress ofblundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about megathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heatseemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended and smoteme out of life. I came into the road between the crossroads and Horsell, andran along this to the crossroads.

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

I must have remained there some time.

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

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

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

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience iscommon. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myselfand the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhereinconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedyof it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was anotherside to my dream.

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

“What news from the common?” said I.

There were two men and a woman at the gate.

“Eh?” said one of the men, turning.

“What news from the common?” I said.

“Ain’t yer just been there?” asked the men.

“People seem fair silly about the common,” said the woman over thegate. “What’s it all abart?”

“Haven’t you heard of the men from Mars?” said I; “thecreatures from Mars?”

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

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

“You’ll hear more yet,” I said, and went on to my home.

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

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

“Don’t, dear!” said my wife, knitting her brows and puttingher hand on mine.

“Poor Ogilvy!” I said. “To think he may be lying deadthere!”

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

“They may come here,” she said again and again.

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

“They can scarcely move,” I said.

I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told me ofthe impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the earth. Inparticular I laid stress on the gravitational difficulty. On the surface of theearth the force of gravity is three times what it is on the surface of Mars. AMartian, therefore, would weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit hismuscular strength would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead tohim, therefore. That, indeed, was the general opinion. Both The Timesand the Daily Telegraph, for instance, insisted on it the next morning,and both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.

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

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

“They have done a foolish thing,” said I, fingering my wineglass.“They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror. Perhapsthey expected to find no living things—certainly no intelligent livingthings.”

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

The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers ina state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividnesseven now. My dear wife’s sweet anxious face peering at me from under thepink lamp shade, the white cloth with its silver and glass tablefurniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had many littleluxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographicallydistinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regrettingOgilvy’s rashness, and denouncing the short-sighted timidity of theMartians.

So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, anddiscussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animalfood. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”

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

VIII.
FRIDAY NIGHT.

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

In London that night poor Henderson’s telegram describing the gradualunscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his evening paper, afterwiring for authentication from him and receiving no reply—the man waskilled—decided not to print a special edition.

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

Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and dominant topic inthe public-houses, and here and there a messenger, or even an eye-witness ofthe later occurrences, caused a whirl of excitement, a shouting, and a runningto and fro; but for the most part the daily routine of working, eating,drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done for countless years—as thoughno planet Mars existed in the sky. Even at Woking station and Horsell andChobham that was the case.

In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping and going on,others were shunting on the sidings, passengers were alighting and waiting, andeverything was proceeding in the most ordinary way. A boy from the town,trenching on Smith’s monopoly, was selling papers with theafternoon’s news. The ringing impact of trucks, the sharp whistle of theengines from the junction, mingled with their shouts of “Men fromMars!” Excited men came into the station about nine o’clock withincredible tidings, and caused no more disturbance than drunkards might havedone. People rattling Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriagewindows, and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from thedirection of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving across thestars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath fire was happening.It was only round the edge of the common that any disturbance was perceptible.There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border. There were lightsin all the houses on the common side of the three villages, and the peoplethere kept awake till dawn.

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

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

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

About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and deployed along theedge of the common to form a cordon. Later a second company marched throughChobham to deploy on the north side of the common. Several officers from theInkerman barracks had been on the common earlier in the day, and one, MajorEden, was reported to be missing. The colonel of the regiment came to theChobham bridge and was busy questioning the crowd at midnight. The militaryauthorities were certainly alive to the seriousness of the business. Abouteleven, the next morning’s papers were able to say, a squadron ofhussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of the Cardigan regimentstarted from Aldershot.

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

IX.
THE FIGHTING BEGINS.

Saturday lives in my memory as a day of suspense. It was a day of lassitudetoo, hot and close, with, I am told, a rapidly fluctuating barometer. I hadslept but little, though my wife had succeeded in sleeping, and I rose early. Iwent into my garden before breakfast and stood listening, but towards thecommon there was nothing stirring but a lark.

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

“They aren’t to be killed,” said the milkman, “if thatcan possibly be avoided.”

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

“It’s a pity they make themselves so unapproachable,” hesaid. “It would be curious to know how they live on another planet; wemight learn a thing or two.”

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

“They say,” said he, “that there’s another of thoseblessed things fallen there—number two. But one’s enough, surely.This lot’ll cost the insurance people a pretty penny beforeeverything’s settled.” He laughed with an air of the greatest goodhumour as he said this. The woods, he said, were still burning, and pointed outa haze of smoke to me. “They will be hot under foot for days, on accountof the thick soil of pine needles and turf,” he said, and then grewserious over “poor Ogilvy.”

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

“Crawl up under cover and rush ’em, say I,” said one.

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

“Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to ha’ beenborn a rabbit Snippy.”

“Ain’t they got any necks, then?” said a third,abruptly—a little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe.

I repeated my description.

“Octopuses,” said he, “that’s what I calls ’em.Talk about fishers of men—fighters of fish it is this time!”

“It ain’t no murder killing beasts like that,” said the firstspeaker.

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

“Where’s your shells?” said the first speaker. “Thereain’t no time. Do it in a rush, that’s my tip, and do it atonce.”

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

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

I got back to lunch about two, very tired for, as I have said, the day wasextremely hot and dull; and in order to refresh myself I took a cold bath inthe afternoon. About half past four I went up to the railway station to get anevening paper, for the morning papers had contained only a very inaccuratedescription of the killing of Stent, Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. Butthere was little I didn’t know. The Martians did not show an inch ofthemselves. They seemed busy in their pit, and there was a sound of hammeringand an almost continuous streamer of smoke. Apparently they were busy gettingready for a struggle. “Fresh attempts have been made to signal, butwithout success,” was the stereotyped formula of the papers. A sappertold me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag on a long pole. TheMartians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the lowing of acow.

I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this preparation, greatlyexcited me. My imagination became belligerent, and defeated the invaders in adozen striking ways; something of my schoolboy dreams of battle and heroismcame back. It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at that time. They seemed veryhelpless in that pit of theirs.

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

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

I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of Maybury Hill mustbe within range of the Martians’ Heat-Ray now that the college wascleared out of the way.

At that I gripped my wife’s arm, and without ceremony ran her out intothe road. Then I fetched out the servant, telling her I would go upstairsmyself for the box she was clamouring for.

“We can’t possibly stay here,” I said; and as I spoke thefiring reopened for a moment upon the common.

“But where are we to go?” said my wife in terror.

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

“Leatherhead!” I shouted above the sudden noise.

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

“How are we to get to Leatherhead?” she said.

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

“Stop here,” said I; “you are safe here”; and I startedoff at once for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dogcart. I ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of thehill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what was goingon behind his house. A man stood with his back to me, talking to him.

“I must have a pound,” said the landlord, “and I’ve noone to drive it.”

“I’ll give you two,” said I, over the stranger’sshoulder.

“What for?”

“And I’ll bring it back by midnight,” I said.

“Lord!” said the landlord; “what’s the hurry? I’mselling my bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What’s goingon now?”

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

“What news?”

He turned, stared, bawled something about “crawling out in a thing like adish cover,” and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest. A suddenwhirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a moment. I ran to myneighbour’s door and rapped to satisfy myself of what I already knew,that his wife had gone to London with him and had locked up their house. I wentin again, according to my promise, to get my servant’s box, lugged itout, clapped it beside her on the tail of the dog cart, and then caught thereins and jumped up into the driver’s seat beside my wife. In anothermoment we were clear of the smoke and noise, and spanking down the oppositeslope of Maybury Hill towards Old Woking.

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

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

X.
IN THE STORM.

Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent of hay was inthe air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges on either sidewere sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The heavy firing that hadbroken out while we were driving down Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as itbegan, leaving the evening very peaceful and still. We got to Leatherheadwithout misadventure about nine o’clock, and the horse had anhour’s rest while I took supper with my cousins and commended my wife totheir care.

My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed withforebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out that theMartians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and at the utmost could butcrawl a little out of it; but she answered only in monosyllables. Had it notbeen for my promise to the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stayin Leatherhead that night. Would that I had! Her face, I remember, was verywhite as we parted.

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

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

I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my wife’s fears,but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that time I wasabsolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening’s fighting. I didnot know even the circ*mstances that had precipitated the conflict. As I camethrough Ockham (for that was the way I returned, and not through Send and OldWoking) I saw along the western horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drewnearer, crept slowly up the sky. The driving clouds of the gatheringthunderstorm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.

Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so the villageshowed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an accident at the corner ofthe road to Pyrford, where a knot of people stood with their backs to me. Theysaid nothing to me as I passed. I do not know what they knew of the thingshappening beyond the hill, nor do I know if the silent houses I passed on myway were sleeping securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watchingagainst the terror of the night.

From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the Wey, andthe red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little hill beyond PyrfordChurch the glare came into view again, and the trees about me shivered with thefirst intimation of the storm that was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealingout from Pyrford Church behind me, and then came the silhouette of MayburyHill, with its tree-tops and roofs black and sharp against the red.

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

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

A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down this weclattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as rapid a succession offlashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps, treading one on the heels ofanother and with a strange crackling accompaniment, sounded more like theworking of a gigantic electric machine than the usual detonatingreverberations. The flickering light was blinding and confusing, and a thinhail smote gustily at my face as I drove down the slope.

At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly myattention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the oppositeslope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but oneflash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. It was anelusive vision—a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flashlike daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, thegreen tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear andsharp and bright.

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher thanmany houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in itscareer; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather;articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of itspassage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came outvividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappearalmost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Canyou imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? Thatwas the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stoolimagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

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

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

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

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

As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned thethunder—“Aloo! Aloo!”—and in another minute it was withits companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I haveno doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten cylinders they hadfired at us from Mars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the wall, shiveringviolently.

XI.
AT THE WINDOW.

I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of exhaustingthemselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and wet, and with littlepools of water about me on the stair carpet. I got up almost mechanically, wentinto the dining room and drank some whisky, and then I was moved to change myclothes.

After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did so I do notknow. The window of my study looks over the trees and the railway towardsHorsell Common. In the hurry of our departure this window had been left open.The passage was dark, and, by contrast with the picture the window frameenclosed, the side of the room seemed impenetrably dark. I stopped short in thedoorway.

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

It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was on fire—abroad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying and writhing with thegusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red reflection upon the cloud scudabove. Every now and then a haze of smoke from some nearer conflagration droveacross the window and hid the Martian shapes. I could not see what they weredoing, nor the clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they werebusied upon. Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of itdanced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous tang of burningwas in the air.

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

Between these three main centres of light—the houses, the train, and theburning county towards Chobham—stretched irregular patches of darkcountry, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and smokingground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set with fire. Itreminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries at night. At first Icould distinguish no people at all, though I peered intently for them. Later Isaw against the light of Woking station a number of black figures hurrying oneafter the other across the line.

And this was the little world in which I had been living securely for years,this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven hours I still did notknow; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation betweenthese mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from thecylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair tothe window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and particularly atthe three gigantic black things that were going to and fro in the glare aboutthe sand-pits.

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

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

“Hist!” said I, in a whisper.

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

“Who’s there?” he said, also whispering, standing under thewindow and peering up.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“God knows.”

“Are you trying to hide?”

“That’s it.”

“Come into the house,” I said.

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

“My God!” he said, as I drew him in.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“What hasn’t?” In the obscurity I could see he made a gestureof despair. “They wiped us out—simply wiped us out,” herepeated again and again.

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

“Take some whisky,” I said, pouring out a stiff dose.

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

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

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

“I lay still,” he said, “scared out of my wits, with the forequarter of a horse atop of me. We’d been wiped out. And thesmell—good God! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by the fallof the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt better. Just like parade ithad been a minute before—then stumble, bang, swish!”

“Wiped out!” he said.

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

In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a living thingleft upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it that was not already ablackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond thecurvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He heard the Maxims rattlefor a time and then become still. The giant saved Woking station and itscluster of houses until the last; then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought tobear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off theHeat-Ray, and turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle awaytowards the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As itdid so a second glittering Titan built itself up out of the pit.

The second monster followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began tocrawl very cautiously across the hot heather ash towards Horsell. He managed toget alive into the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking.There his story became ejacul*tory. The place was impassable. It seems therewere a few people alive there, frantic for the most part and many burned andscalded. He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost scorchingheaps of broken wall as one of the Martian giants returned. He saw this onepursue a man, catch him up in one of its steely tentacles, and knock his headagainst the trunk of a pine tree. At last, after nightfall, the artillerymanmade a rush for it and got over the railway embankment.

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

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

When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study, and I lookedagain out of the open window. In one night the valley had become a valley ofashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were nowstreamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses andblasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt andterrible in the pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had hadthe luck to escape—a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhousethere, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never before in the history ofwarfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shiningwith the growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood aboutthe pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the desolation theyhad made.

It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and again puffs ofvivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards the brighteningdawn—streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.

Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became pillars of bloodshotsmoke at the first touch of day.

XII.
WHAT I SAW OF THE DESTRUCTION OF WEYBRIDGE AND SHEPPERTON.

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

The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to stay in. Heproposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and thence rejoin hisbattery—No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan was to return at once toLeatherhead; and so greatly had the strength of the Martians impressed me thatI had determined to take my wife to Newhaven, and go with her out of thecountry forthwith. For I already perceived clearly that the country aboutLondon must inevitably be the scene of a disastrous struggle before suchcreatures as these could be destroyed.

Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with its guardinggiants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my chance and struckacross country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me: “It’s nokindness to the right sort of wife,” he said, “to make her awidow”; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the woods,northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him. Thence I would makea big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.

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

Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of the houseshad suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved the chimney tops andpassed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem to be a living soul on MayburyHill. The majority of the inhabitants had escaped, I suppose, by way of the OldWoking road—the road I had taken when I drove to Leatherhead—orthey had hidden.

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

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

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

“You are the first men I’ve seen coming this way thismorning,” said the lieutenant. “What’s brewing?”

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

“Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to rejoinbattery, sir. You’ll come in sight of the Martians, I expect, about halfa mile along this road.”

“What the dickens are they like?” asked the lieutenant.

“Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like’luminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.”

“Get out!” said the lieutenant. “What confoundednonsense!”

“You’ll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fireand strikes you dead.”

“What d’ye mean—a gun?”

“No, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of theHeat-Ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked up at me.I was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.

“It’s perfectly true,” I said.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I suppose it’s mybusiness to see it too. Look here”—to theartilleryman—“we’re detailed here clearing people out oftheir houses. You’d better go along and report yourself toBrigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He’s at Weybridge.Know the way?”

“I do,” I said; and he turned his horse southward again.

“Half a mile, you say?” said he.

“At most,” I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward. Hethanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.

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

By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the country calmand peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far beyond the range of theHeat-Ray there, and had it not been for the silent desertion of some of thehouses, the stirring movement of packing in others, and the knot of soldiersstanding on the bridge over the railway and staring down the line towardsWoking, the day would have seemed very like any other Sunday.

Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road toAddlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across a stretchof flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing neatly at equal distances pointingtowards Woking. The gunners stood by the guns waiting, and the ammunitionwaggons were at a business-like distance. The men stood almost as if underinspection.

“That’s good!” said I. “They will get one fair shot, atany rate.”

The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.

“I shall go on,” he said.

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

“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow,” saidthe artilleryman. “They ’aven’t seen that fire-beamyet.”

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

Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars, some of themdismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about. Three or four blackgovernment waggons, with crosses in white circles, and an old omnibus, amongother vehicles, were being loaded in the village street. There were scores ofpeople, most of them sufficiently sabbatical to have assumed their bestclothes. The soldiers were having the greatest difficulty in making themrealise the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with ahuge box and a score or more of flower pots containing orchids, angrilyexpostulating with the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped andgripped his arm.

“Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pinetops that hid the Martians.

“Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these isvallyble.”

“Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” andleaving him to digest that if he could, I hurried on after the artillery-man.At the corner I looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was stillstanding by his box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staringvaguely over the trees.

No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were established; thewhole place was in such confusion as I had never seen in any town before.Carts, carriages everywhere, the most astonishing miscellany of conveyances andhorseflesh. The respectable inhabitants of the place, men in golf and boatingcostumes, wives prettily dressed, were packing, river-side loafersenergetically helping, children excited, and, for the most part, highlydelighted at this astonishing variation of their Sunday experiences. In themidst of it all the worthy vicar was very pluckily holding an earlycelebration, and his bell was jangling out above the excitement.

I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking fountain, made avery passable meal upon what we had brought with us. Patrols ofsoldiers—here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in white—werewarning people to move now or to take refuge in their cellars as soon as thefiring began. We saw as we crossed the railway bridge that a growing crowd ofpeople had assembled in and about the railway station, and the swarmingplatform was piled with boxes and packages. The ordinary traffic had beenstopped, I believe, in order to allow of the passage of troops and guns toChertsey, and I have heard since that a savage struggle occurred for places inthe special trains that were put on at a later hour.

We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found ourselves atthe place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames join. Part of the timewe spent helping two old women to pack a little cart. The Wey has a treblemouth, and at this point boats are to be hired, and there was a ferry acrossthe river. On the Shepperton side was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that thetower of Shepperton Church—it has been replaced by a spire—roseabove the trees.

Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the flight hadnot grown to a panic, but there were already far more people than all the boatsgoing to and fro could enable to cross. People came panting along under heavyburdens; one husband and wife were even carrying a small outhouse door betweenthem, with some of their household goods piled thereon. One man told us hemeant to try to get away from Shepperton station.

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

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

“What’s that?” cried a boatman, and “Shut up, youfool!” said a man near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again,this time from the direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud—the sound of agun.

The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries across theriver to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up the chorus, firingheavily one after the other. A woman screamed. Everyone stood arrested by thesudden stir of battle, near us and yet invisible to us. Nothing was to be seensave flat meadows, cows feeding unconcernedly for the most part, and silverypollard willows motionless in the warm sunlight.

“The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me,doubtfully. A haziness rose over the treetops.

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

“Here they are!” shouted a man in a blue jersey. “Yonder!D’yer see them? Yonder!”

Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured Martiansappeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat meadows thatstretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards the river. Littlecowled figures they seemed at first, going with a rolling motion and as fast asflying birds.

Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their armoured bodiesglittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward upon the guns, growingrapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on the extreme left, the remotest thatis, flourished a huge case high in the air, and the ghostly, terrible Heat-RayI had already seen on Friday night smote towards Chertsey, and struck the town.

At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd near thewater’s edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck. There was noscreaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse murmur and a movement offeet—a splashing from the water. A man, too frightened to drop theportmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung round and sent me staggering witha blow from the corner of his burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand andrushed past me. I turned with the rush of the people, but I was not tooterrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get underwater! That was it!

“Get under water!” I shouted, unheeded.

I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian, rushed rightdown the gravelly beach and headlong into the water. Others did the same. Aboatload of people putting back came leaping out as I rushed past. The stonesunder my feet were muddy and slippery, and the river was so low that I ranperhaps twenty feet scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overheadscarcely a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under thesurface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the river soundedlike thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing hastily on both sides of theriver. But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment of the peoplerunning this way and that than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nestagainst which his foot has kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my headabove water, the Martian’s hood pointed at the batteries that were stillfiring across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have beenthe generator of the Heat-Ray.

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

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

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

“Hit!” shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.

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

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

A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam, mud, andshattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of the Heat-Ray hit thewater, the latter had immediately flashed into steam. In another moment a hugewave, like a muddy tidal bore but almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping roundthe bend upstream. I saw people struggling shorewards, and heard theirscreaming and shouting faintly above the seething and roar of theMartian’s collapse.

For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need ofself-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water, pushing aside a manin black to do so, until I could see round the bend. Half a dozen desertedboats pitched aimlessly upon the confusion of the waves. The fallen Martiancame into sight downstream, lying across the river, and for the most partsubmerged.

Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through thetumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and vaguely, thegigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash and spray of mud andfroth into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck like living arms, and, savefor the helpless purposelessness of these movements, it was as if some woundedthing were struggling for its life amid the waves. Enormous quantities of aruddy-brown fluid were spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.

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

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

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

The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two hundredyards from me, the other towards Laleham. The generators of the Heat-Rays wavedhigh, and the hissing beams smote down this way and that.

The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict ofnoises—the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling houses,the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling androaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam fromthe river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over Weybridge its impact wasmarked by flashes of incandescent white, that gave place at once to a smokydance of lurid flames. The nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting theirfate, shadowy, faint and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them goingto and fro.

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

Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping towards me. Thehouses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; thetrees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray flickered up and down the towingpath, licking off the people who ran this way and that, and came down to thewater’s edge not fifty yards from where I stood. It swept across theriver to Shepperton, and the water in its track rose in a boiling weal crestedwith steam. I turned shoreward.

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

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

XIII.
HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CURATE.

After getting this sudden lesson in the power of terrestrial weapons, theMartians retreated to their original position upon Horsell Common; and in theirhaste, and encumbered with the debris of their smashed companion, they no doubtoverlooked many such a stray and negligible victim as myself. Had they lefttheir comrade and pushed on forthwith, there was nothing at that time betweenthem and London but batteries of twelve-pounder guns, and they would certainlyhave reached the capital in advance of the tidings of their approach; assudden, dreadful, and destructive their advent would have been as theearthquake that destroyed Lisbon a century ago.

But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed cylinder on its interplanetaryflight; every twenty-four hours brought them reinforcement. And meanwhile themilitary and naval authorities, now fully alive to the tremendous power oftheir antagonists, worked with furious energy. Every minute a fresh gun cameinto position until, before twilight, every copse, every row of suburban villason the hilly slopes about Kingston and Richmond, masked an expectant blackmuzzle. And through the charred and desolated area—perhaps twenty squaremiles altogether—that encircled the Martian encampment on Horsell Common,through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through theblackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine spinneys,crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were presently to warn thegunners of the Martian approach. But the Martians now understood our command ofartillery and the danger of human proximity, and not a man ventured within amile of either cylinder, save at the price of his life.

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

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

I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream; andthrowing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it, gained it, and soescaped out of that destruction. There were no oars in the boat, but Icontrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled hands would allow, down the rivertowards Halliford and Walton, going very tediously and continually lookingbehind me, as you may well understand. I followed the river, because Iconsidered that the water gave me my best chance of escape should these giantsreturn.

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

For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after the violence I hadbeen through, and so intense the heat upon the water. Then my fears got thebetter of me again, and I resumed my paddling. The sun scorched my bare back.At last, as the bridge at Walton was coming into sight round the bend, my feverand faintness overcame my fears, and I landed on the Middlesex bank and laydown, deadly sick, amid the long grass. I suppose the time was then about fouror five o’clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile withoutmeeting a soul, and then lay down again in the shadow of a hedge. I seem toremember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last spurt. I was alsovery thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It is a curiousthing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for it, but my impotentdesire to reach Leatherhead worried me excessively.

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

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

“Have you any water?” I asked abruptly.

He shook his head.

“You have been asking for water for the last hour,” he said.

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

“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these thingsmean?”

I stared at him and made no answer.

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

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morningservice was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for theafternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom andGomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—— What are theseMartians?”

“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat.

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

“I was walking through the roads to clear my brain,” he said.“And suddenly—fire, earthquake, death!”

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

Presently he began waving his hand.

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

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

“The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!” he shouted.

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

By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The tremendous tragedy inwhich he had been involved—it was evident he was a fugitive fromWeybridge—had driven him to the very verge of his reason.

“Are we far from Sunbury?” I said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What are we to do?” he asked. “Are these creatureseverywhere? Has the earth been given over to them?”

“Are we far from Sunbury?”

“Only this morning I officiated at early celebration——”

“Things have changed,” I said, quietly. “You must keep yourhead. There is still hope.”

“Hope!”

“Yes. Plentiful hope—for all this destruction!”

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

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

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

“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! Whatgood is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes andfloods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God hadexempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”

For a time he sat in blank silence.

“But how can we escape?” he asked, suddenly. “They areinvulnerable, they are pitiless.”

“Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other,” I answered. “Andthe mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them waskilled yonder not three hours ago.”

“Killed!” he said, staring about him. “How can God’sministers be killed?”

“I saw it happen.” I proceeded to tell him. “We have chancedto come in for the thick of it,” said I, “and that is all.”

“What is that flicker in the sky?” he asked abruptly.

I told him it was the heliograph signalling—that it was the sign of humanhelp and effort in the sky.

“We are in the midst of it,” I said, “quiet as it is. Thatflicker in the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are theMartians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and Kingstonand the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and guns are beingplaced. Presently the Martians will be coming this way again.”

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

“Listen!” he said.

From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of distantguns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A co*ckchafer camedroning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hungfaint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, stillsplendour of the sunset.

“We had better follow this path,” I said, “northward.”

XIV.
IN LONDON.

My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking. He was amedical student working for an imminent examination, and he heard nothing ofthe arrival until Saturday morning. The morning papers on Saturday contained,in addition to lengthy special articles on the planet Mars, on life in theplanets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely worded telegram, all the morestriking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a number of peoplewith a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The telegram concluded with thewords: “Formidable as they seem to be, the Martians have not moved fromthe pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed, seem incapable of doing so.Probably this is due to the relative strength of the earth’sgravitational energy.” On that last text their leader-writer expandedvery comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer’s biology class, to which mybrother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no signs ofany unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers puffed scraps ofnews under big headlines. They had nothing to tell beyond the movements oftroops about the common, and the burning of the pine woods between Woking andWeybridge, until eight. Then the St. James’s Gazette, in anextra-special edition, announced the bare fact of the interruption oftelegraphic communication. This was thought to be due to the falling of burningpine trees across the line. Nothing more of the fighting was known that night,the night of my drive to Leatherhead and back.

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

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my brotherreached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the midnight trainusually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an accident preventedtrains from reaching Woking that night. The nature of the accident he could notascertain; indeed, the railway authorities did not clearly know at that time.There was very little excitement in the station, as the officials, failing torealise that anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Wokingjunction had occurred, were running the theatre trains which usually passedthrough Woking round by Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy making thenecessary arrangements to alter the route of the Southampton and PortsmouthSunday League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter, mistaking my brotherfor the traffic manager, to whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid andtried to interview him. Few people, excepting the railway officials, connectedthe breakdown with the Martians.

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

The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in theLondoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course inthe papers, that they could read without any personal tremors: “Aboutseven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder, and,moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely wreckedWoking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an entire battalion ofthe Cardigan Regiment. No details are known. Maxims have been absolutelyuseless against their armour; the field guns have been disabled by them. Flyinghussars have been galloping into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be movingslowly towards Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, andearthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward.” That washow the Sunday Sun put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt“handbook” article in the Referee compared the affair to amenagerie suddenly let loose in a village.

No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured Martians, andthere was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be sluggish:“crawling,” “creeping painfully”—such expressionsoccurred in almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could havebeen written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers printedseparate editions as further news came to hand, some even in default of it. Butthere was practically nothing more to tell people until late in the afternoon,when the authorities gave the press agencies the news in their possession. Itwas stated that the people of Walton and Weybridge, and all the district werepouring along the roads Londonward, and that was all.

My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning, still inignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he heard allusionsmade to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace. Coming out, he bought aReferee. He became alarmed at the news in this, and went again toWaterloo station to find out if communication were restored. The omnibuses,carriages, cyclists, and innumerable people walking in their best clothesseemed scarcely affected by the strange intelligence that the newsvendors weredisseminating. People were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on accountof the local residents. At the station he heard for the first time that theWindsor and Chertsey lines were now interrupted. The porters told him thatseveral remarkable telegrams had been received in the morning from Byfleet andChertsey stations, but that these had abruptly ceased. My brother could getvery little precise detail out of them.

“There’s fighting going on about Weybridge” was the extent oftheir information.

The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a number of people whohad been expecting friends from places on the South-Western network werestanding about the station. One grey-headed old gentleman came and abused theSouth-Western Company bitterly to my brother. “It wants showingup,” he said.

One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston, containingpeople who had gone out for a day’s boating and found the locks closedand a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and white blazer addressedmy brother, full of strange tidings.

“There’s hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and cartsand things, with boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “Theycome from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s beenguns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told themto get off at once because the Martians are coming. We heard guns firing atHampton Court station, but we thought it was thunder. What the dickens does itall mean? The Martians can’t get out of their pit, can they?”

My brother could not tell him.

Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to the clientsof the underground railway, and that the Sunday excursionists began to returnfrom all over the South-Western “lung”—Barnes, Wimbledon,Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth—at unnaturally early hours; but not asoul had anything more than vague hearsay to tell of. Everyone connected withthe terminus seemed ill-tempered.

About five o’clock the gathering crowd in the station was immenselyexcited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost invariablyclosed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western stations, and thepassage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and carriages crammed withsoldiers. These were the guns that were brought up from Woolwich and Chatham tocover Kingston. There was an exchange of pleasantries: “You’ll geteaten!” “We’re the beast-tamers!” and so forth. Alittle while after that a squad of police came into the station and began toclear the public off the platforms, and my brother went out into the streetagain.

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

In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who had just beenrushed out of Fleet Street with still-wet newspapers and staring placards.“Dreadful catastrophe!” they bawled one to the other downWellington Street. “Fighting at Weybridge! Full description! Repulse ofthe Martians! London in Danger!” He had to give threepence for a copy ofthat paper.

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

They were described as “vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feethigh, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a beam ofintense heat.” Masked batteries, chiefly of field guns, had been plantedin the country about Horsell Common, and especially between the Woking districtand London. Five of the machines had been seen moving towards the Thames, andone, by a happy chance, had been destroyed. In the other cases the shells hadmissed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavylosses of soldiers were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic.

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

Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed at once byhigh explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and distributed. Nodoubt, ran the report, the situation was of the strangest and gravestdescription, but the public was exhorted to avoid and discourage panic. Nodoubt the Martians were strange and terrible in the extreme, but at the outsidethere could not be more than twenty of them against our millions.

The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the cylinders, that atthe outside there could not be more than five in each cylinder—fifteenaltogether. And one at least was disposed of—perhaps more. The publicwould be fairly warned of the approach of danger, and elaborate measures werebeing taken for the protection of the people in the threatened southwesternsuburbs. And so, with reiterated assurances of the safety of London and theability of the authorities to cope with the difficulty, this quasi-proclamationclosed.

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

All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out the pink sheetsand reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with the voices of an army ofhawkers following these pioneers. Men came scrambling off buses to securecopies. Certainly this news excited people intensely, whatever their previousapathy. The shutters of a map shop in the Strand were being taken down, mybrother said, and a man in his Sunday raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, wasvisible inside the window hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.

Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his hand, mybrother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There was a man with hiswife and two boys and some articles of furniture in a cart such as greengrocersuse. He was driving from the direction of Westminster Bridge; and close behindhim came a hay waggon with five or six respectable-looking people in it, andsome boxes and bundles. The faces of these people were haggard, and theirentire appearance contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best appearance ofthe people on the omnibuses. People in fashionable clothing peeped at them outof cabs. They stopped at the Square as if undecided which way to take, andfinally turned eastward along the Strand. Some way behind these came a man inworkday clothes, riding one of those old-fashioned tricycles with a small frontwheel. He was dirty and white in the face.

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

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

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

“I come from Byfleet,” he said; “a man on a bicycle camethrough the place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us tocome away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there were clouds ofsmoke to the south—nothing but smoke, and not a soul coming that way.Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks coming from Weybridge. SoI’ve locked up my house and come on.”

At that time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the authorities wereto blame for their incapacity to dispose of the invaders without all thisinconvenience.

About eight o’clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible allover the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the traffic in themain thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet back streets to the riverhe was able to distinguish it quite plainly.

He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent’s Park, abouttwo. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at the evidentmagnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run, even as mine had run onSaturday, on military details. He thought of all those silent, expectant guns,of the suddenly nomadic countryside; he tried to imagine “boilers onstilts” a hundred feet high.

There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford Street, andseveral in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news spreading thatRegent Street and Portland Place were full of their usual Sunday-nightpromenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and along the edge of Regent’sPark there were as many silent couples “walking out” together underthe scattered gas lamps as ever there had been. The night was warm and still,and a little oppressive; the sound of guns continued intermittently, and aftermidnight there seemed to be sheet lightning in the south.

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

His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the streetthere were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and heads in everykind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being shouted. “They arecoming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at the door; “the Martiansare coming!” and hurried to the next door.

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

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

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

“What the devil is it?” he asked. “A fire? What a devil of arow!”

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

“What the devil is it all about?” said my brother’s fellowlodger.

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

“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defencesforced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”

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

Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went down andout into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of the houses grewpink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot and in vehicles grew morenumerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he heard people crying, andagain “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a unanimous fear wasinevitable. As my brother hesitated on the door-step, he saw another newsvendorapproaching, and got a paper forthwith. The man was running away with the rest,and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque minglingof profit and panic.

And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of theCommander-in-Chief:

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

That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great six-millioncity was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would be pouring enmasse northward.

“Black Smoke!” the voices cried. “Fire!”

The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart carelesslydriven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water trough up thestreet. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the houses, and some of thepassing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps. And overhead the dawn was growingbrighter, clear and steady and calm.

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairsbehind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown andshawl; her husband followed, ejacul*ting.

As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he turnedhastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten poundsaltogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the streets.

XV.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN SURREY.

It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under the hedge inthe flat meadows near Halliford, and while my brother was watching thefugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the Martians had resumed theoffensive. So far as one can ascertain from the conflicting accounts that havebeen put forth, the majority of them remained busied with preparations in theHorsell pit until nine that night, hurrying on some operation that disengagedhuge volumes of green smoke.

But three certainly came out about eight o’clock and, advancing slowlyand cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford towards Ripley andWeybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant batteries against the settingsun. These Martians did not advance in a body, but in a line, each perhaps amile and a half from his nearest fellow. They communicated with one another bymeans of sirenlike howls, running up and down the scale from one note toanother.

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’sHill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners, unseasonedartillery volunteers who ought never to have been placed in such a position,fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and bolted on horse and footthrough the deserted village, while the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray,walked serenely over their guns, stepped gingerly among them, passed in frontof them, and so came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which hedestroyed.

The St. George’s Hill men, however, were better led or of a bettermettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been quiteunsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their guns asdeliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about a thousandyards’ range.

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

After this it would seem that the three took counsel together and halted, andthe scouts who were watching them report that they remained absolutelystationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been overthrown crawledtediously out of his hood, a small brown figure, oddly suggestive from thatdistance of a speck of blight, and apparently engaged in the repair of hissupport. About nine he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above the treesagain.

It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three sentinels werejoined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick black tube. A similar tubewas handed to each of the three, and the seven proceeded to distributethemselves at equal distances along a curved line between St. George’sHill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of Ripley.

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

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

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

The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up their positionsin the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute silence. It was acrescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never since the devising ofgunpowder was the beginning of a battle so still. To us and to an observerabout Ripley it would have had precisely the same effect—the Martiansseemed in solitary possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by theslender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glarefrom St. George’s Hill and the woods of Painshill.

But facing that crescent everywhere—at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher,Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and across the flat grassmeadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster of trees or village houses gavesufficient cover—the guns were waiting. The signal rockets burst andrained their sparks through the night and vanished, and the spirit of all thosewatching batteries rose to a tense expectation. The Martians had but to advanceinto the line of fire, and instantly those motionless black forms of men, thoseguns glittering so darkly in the early night, would explode into a thunderousfury of battle.

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

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

I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one another that I so farforgot my personal safety and my scalded hands as to clamber up into the hedgeand stare towards Sunbury. As I did so a second report followed, and a bigprojectile hurtled overhead towards Hounslow. I expected at least to see smokeor fire, or some such evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue skyabove, with one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and lowbeneath. And there had been no crash, no answering explosion. The silence wasrestored; the minute lengthened to three.

“What has happened?” said the curate, standing up beside me.

“Heaven knows!” said I.

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

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

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

Everything had suddenly become very still. Far away to the southeast, markingthe quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one another, and then the airquivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But the earthly artillerymade no reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the fourth cylinder fell—a brilliant green meteor—as I learnedafterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond and Kingston lineof hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far away in the southwest, due, Ibelieve, to guns being fired haphazard before the black vapour could overwhelmthe gunners.

So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the Londonwardcountry. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart, until at last theyformed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden. All night through theirdestructive tubes advanced. Never once, after the Martian at St. George’sHill was brought down, did they give the artillery the ghost of a chanceagainst them. Wherever there was a possibility of guns being laid for themunseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour was discharged, and where the gunswere openly displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to bear.

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

They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because they had but alimited supply of material for its production or because they did not wish todestroy the country but only to crush and overawe the opposition they hadaroused. In the latter aim they certainly succeeded. Sunday night was the endof the organised opposition to their movements. After that no body of men wouldstand against them, so hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of thetorpedo-boats and destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up the Thamesrefused to stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only offensive operationmen ventured upon after that night was the preparation of mines and pitfalls,and even in that their energies were frantic and spasmodic.

One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries towardsEsher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there were none. One maypicture the orderly expectation, the officers alert and watchful, the gunnersready, the ammunition piled to hand, the limber gunners with their horses andwaggons, the groups of civilian spectators standing as near as they werepermitted, the evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with theburned and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots theMartians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and housesand smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftlyspreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, toweringheavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horribleantagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seendimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the gunssuddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swiftbroadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night andextinction—nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding itsdead.

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

XVI.
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.

So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest cityin the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of flight risingswiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations,banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, andhurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By teno’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railwayorganisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering,softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body.

All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people atCannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were beingfilled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the carriages evenat two o’clock. By three, people were being trampled and crushed even inBishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Streetstation; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had beensent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the headsof the people they were called out to protect.

And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to return toLondon, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickeningmultitude away from the stations and along the northward-running roads. Bymidday a Martian had been seen at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking blackvapour drove along the Thames and across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off allescape over the bridges in its sluggish advance. Another bank drove overEaling, and surrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, butunable to escape.

After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at ChalkFarm—the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard thereploughed through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought tokeep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace—my brotheremerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying swarm ofvehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop. Thefront tire of the machine he got was punctured in dragging it through thewindow, but he got up and off, notwithstanding, with no further injury than acut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was impassable owing to severaloverturned horses, and my brother struck into Belsize Road.

So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road, reachedEdgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the crowd. Alongthe road people were standing in the roadway, curious, wondering. He was passedby a number of cyclists, some horsem*n, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgwarethe rim of the wheel broke, and the machine became unridable. He left it by theroadside and trudged through the village. There were shops half opened in themain street of the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in thedoorways and windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession offugitives that was beginning. He succeeded in getting some food at an inn.

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

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

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

He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of menstruggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they had beendriving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened pony’s head.One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply screaming; theother, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man who gripped her arm with awhip she held in her disengaged hand.

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

It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him quiet with akick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at the slender lady’sarm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung across his face, a thirdantagonist struck him between the eyes, and the man he held wrenched himselffree and made off down the lane in the direction from which he had come.

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

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

“Take this!” said the slender lady, and she gave my brother herrevolver.

“Go back to the chaise,” said my brother, wiping the blood from hissplit lip.

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

The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother looked again theywere retreating.

“I’ll sit here,” said my brother, “if I may”; andhe got upon the empty front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.

“Give me the reins,” she said, and laid the whip along thepony’s side. In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men frommy brother’s eyes.

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

He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon living atStanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous case at Pinner, andheard at some railway station on his way of the Martian advance. He had hurriedhome, roused the women—their servant had left them two daysbefore—packed some provisions, put his revolver under theseat—luckily for my brother—and told them to drive on to Edgware,with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to tell theneighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half past four in themorning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him. Theycould not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the place, andso they had come into this side lane.

That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presently theystopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay with them, at leastuntil they could determine what to do, or until the missing man arrived, andprofessed to be an expert shot with the revolver—a weapon strange tohim—in order to give them confidence.

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

“We have money,” said the slender woman, and hesitated.

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

“So have I,” said my brother.

She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides afive-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a train atSt. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was hopeless, seeing the furyof the Londoners to crowd upon the trains, and broached his own idea ofstriking across Essex towards Harwich and thence escaping from the countryaltogether.

Mrs. Elphinstone—that was the name of the woman in white—wouldlisten to no reasoning, and kept calling upon “George”; but hersister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to mybrother’s suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, theywent on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as much aspossible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively hot, and underfoot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so that they travelledonly very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced towardsBarnet a tumultuous murmuring grew stronger.

They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring beforethem, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean. One man inevening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground. They heard hisvoice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and theother beating invisible things. His paroxysm of rage over, he went on his waywithout once looking back.

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

“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver, wild-eyed,white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the left, hewhipped up at once without the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in frontof them, and veiling the white façade of a terrace beyond the road thatappeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried outat a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up above the houses in frontof them against the hot, blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself nowinto the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, thecreaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply notfifty yards from the crossroads.

“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you aredriving us into?”

My brother stopped.

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

“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”

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

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

So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to theright was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in between thevillas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms, grew intodistinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past, and merged theirindividuality again in a receding multitude that was swallowed up at last in acloud of dust.

“Go on! Go on!” cried the voices. “Way! Way!”

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

Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but thiswas a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine that host. It had nocharacter of its own. The figures poured out past the corner, and receded withtheir backs to the group in the lane. Along the margin came those who were onfoot threatened by the wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into oneanother.

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

“Push on!” was the cry. “Push on! They are coming!”

In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, “Eternity!Eternity!” His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother couldhear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of the people whocrowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and quarrelled with otherdrivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing with miserable eyes; somegnawed their hands with thirst, or lay prostrate in the bottoms of theirconveyances. The horses’ bits were covered with foam, their eyesbloodshot.

There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, waggons, beyond counting; a mail cart,a road-cleaner’s cart marked “Vestry of St. Pancras,” a hugetimber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by with itstwo near wheels splashed with fresh blood.

“Clear the way!” cried the voices. “Clear the way!”

“Eter-nity! Eter-nity!” came echoing down the road.

There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children thatcried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their weary facessmeared with tears. With many of these came men, sometimes helpful, sometimeslowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them pushed some weary streetoutcast in faded black rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. Therewere sturdy workmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothedlike clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brothernoticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creaturein a nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.

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

“Way! Way! The Martians are coming!”

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

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

“I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”

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

“Ellen!” shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in hervoice—“Ellen!” And the child suddenly darted away from mybrother, crying “Mother!”

“They are coming,” said a man on horseback, riding past along thelane.

“Out of the way, there!” bawled a coachman, towering high; and mybrother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.

The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My brother pushedthe pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by and stopped atthe turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, butonly one was in the traces. My brother saw dimly through the dust that two menlifted out something on a white stretcher and put it gently on the grassbeneath the privet hedge.

One of the men came running to my brother.

“Where is there any water?” he said. “He is dying fast, andvery thirsty. It is Lord Garrick.”

“Lord Garrick!” said my brother; “the Chief Justice?”

“The water?” he said.

“There may be a tap,” said my brother, “in some of thehouses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people.”

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

“Go on!” said the people, thrusting at him. “They are coming!Go on!”

Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced manlugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested onit and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separatecoins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among thestruggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at theheap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gavea shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly.

“Way!” cried the men all about him. “Make way!”

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

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

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

“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’scollar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he stillclutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering at hisarm with a handful of gold. “Go on! Go on!” shouted angry voicesbehind. “Way! Way!”

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

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all achild’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at adusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under the rollingwheels. “Let us go back!” he shouted, and began turning the ponyround. “We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and they wentback a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd washidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of thedying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shiningwith perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat andshivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white andpale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to call upon“George.” My brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as theyhad retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt thiscrossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly resolute.

“We must go that way,” he said, and led the pony round again.

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

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

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

They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the road, andat another place farther on they came upon a great multitude of people drinkingat the stream, some fighting to come at the water. And farther on, from a lullnear East Barnet, they saw two trains running slowly one after the otherwithout signal or order—trains swarming with people, with men even amongthe coals behind the engines—going northward along the Great NorthernRailway. My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, for at thattime the furious terror of the people had rendered the central terminiimpossible.

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

XVII.
THE “THUNDER CHILD”.

Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday haveannihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly throughthe home counties. Not only along the road through Barnet, but also throughEdgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the roads eastward to Southend andShoeburyness, and south of the Thames to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the samefrantic rout. If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in theblazing blue above London every northward and eastward road running out of thetangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streamingfugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have setforth at length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the roadthrough Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarmingof black dots appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the historyof the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. Thelegendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, wouldhave been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it wasa stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order andwithout a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong.It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.

Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of streets farand wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents, gardens—alreadyderelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the southward blotted.Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have seemed as if some monstrous penhad flung ink upon the chart. Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew andspread, shooting out ramifications this way and that, now banking itselfa*gainst rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-foundvalley, exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, theglittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading theirpoison cloud over this patch of country and then over that, laying it againwith their steam jets when it had served its purpose, and taking possession ofthe conquered country. They do not seem to have aimed at extermination so muchas at complete demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. Theyexploded any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wreckedthe railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in nohurry to extend the field of their operations, and did not come beyond thecentral part of London all that day. It is possible that a very considerablenumber of people in London stuck to their houses through Monday morning.Certain it is that many died at home suffocated by the Black Smoke.

Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene. Steamboats andshipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the enormous sums of money offeredby fugitives, and it is said that many who swam out to these vessels werethrust off with boathooks and drowned. About one o’clock in the afternoonthe thinning remnant of a cloud of the black vapour appeared between the archesof Blackfriars Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene of mad confusion,fighting, and collision, and for some time a multitude of boats and bargesjammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and lightermenhad to fight savagely against the people who swarmed upon them from theriverfront. People were actually clambering down the piers of the bridge fromabove.

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

Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The sixth starfell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the women in the chaise ina meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond the hills. On Tuesday the littleparty, still set upon getting across the sea, made its way through the swarmingcountry towards Colchester. The news that the Martians were now in possessionof the whole of London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even,it was said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother’s viewuntil the morrow.

That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need ofprovisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be regarded.Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds, granaries, and ripening rootcrops with arms in their hands. A number of people now, like my brother, hadtheir faces eastward, and there were some desperate souls even going backtowards London to get food. These were chiefly people from the northernsuburbs, whose knowledge of the Black Smoke came by hearsay. He heard thatabout half the members of the government had gathered at Birmingham, and thatenormous quantities of high explosives were being prepared to be used inautomatic mines across the Midland counties.

He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the desertionsof the first day’s panic, had resumed traffic, and was running northwardtrains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of the home counties. Therewas also a placard in Chipping Ongar announcing that large stores of flour wereavailable in the northern towns and that within twenty-four hours bread wouldbe distributed among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But thisintelligence did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and thethree pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distributionthan this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear more of it.That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose Hill. It fell whileMiss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that duty alternately with mybrother. She saw it.

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

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

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

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, tomy brother’s perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the ramThunder Child. It was the only warship in sight, but far away to theright over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day there was a deadcalm—lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next ironclads of theChannel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line, steam up and ready foraction, across the Thames estuary during the course of the Martian conquest,vigilant and yet powerless to prevent it.

At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the assurances of hersister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never been out of England before, shewould rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and soforth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martiansmight prove very similar. She had been growing increasingly hysterical,fearful, and depressed during the two days’ journeyings. Her great ideawas to return to Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore.They would find George at Stanmore....

It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the beach, wherepresently my brother succeeded in attracting the attention of some men on apaddle steamer from the Thames. They sent a boat and drove a bargain forthirty-six pounds for the three. The steamer was going, these men said, toOstend.

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

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

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

The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big crescent ofshipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and hazy, when a Martianappeared, small and faint in the remote distance, advancing along the muddycoast from the direction of Foulness. At that the captain on the bridge sworeat the top of his voice with fear and anger at his own delay, and the paddlesseemed infected with his terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or onthe seats of the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than thetrees or church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a humanstride.

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

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

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards from theirheeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearingthrough the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leapedtowards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and thensucking her deck down almost to the waterline.

A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clearagain he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big ironupperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnelsprojected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram,Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatenedshipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brotherlooked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the threeof them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripodsupports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remoteperspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whosewake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regardingthis new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, thegiant was even such another as themselves. The Thunder Child fired nogun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firingthat enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what tomake of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwithwith the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway between thesteamboat and the Martians—a diminishing black bulk against the recedinghorizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

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

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as theyretreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of theHeat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprangfrom the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of theship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martianreeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body ofwater and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the Thunder Childsounded through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashedthe water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying shipsto the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian’s collapsethe captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the crowdingpassengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together. And then they yelledagain. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long andblack, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnelsspouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her enginesworking. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundredyards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with a violent thud, ablinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggeredwith the violence of her explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage,still driving forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpledhim up like a thing of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boilingtumult of steam hid everything again.

“Two!” yelled the captain.

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

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

The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads recededslowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled bank of vapour,part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in the strangest way. Thefleet of refugees was scattering to the northeast; several smacks were sailingbetween the ironclads and the steamboat. After a time, and before they reachedthe sinking cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly wentabout and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grewfaint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that weregathering about the sinking sun.

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

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the evening startrembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain cried out andpointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed up into the sky out ofthe greyness—rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminousclearness above the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, andvery large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, andvanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it raineddown darkness upon the land.

BOOK TWO
THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS.

I.
UNDER FOOT.

In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to tell of theexperiences of my brother that all through the last two chapters I and thecurate have been lurking in the empty house at Halliford whither we fled toescape the Black Smoke. There I will resume. We stopped there all Sunday nightand all the next day—the day of the panic—in a little island ofdaylight, cut off by the Black Smoke from the rest of the world. We could donothing 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 andcried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off from her, of all that mighthappen to her in my absence. My cousin I knew was brave enough for anyemergency, but he was not the sort of man to realise danger quickly, to risepromptly. What was needed now was not bravery, but circ*mspection. My onlyconsolation was to believe that the Martians were moving Londonward and awayfrom her. Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew veryweary and irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejacul*tions; I tired ofthe sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I keptaway from him, staying in a room—evidently a children’sschoolroom—containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed methither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to be alonewith my aching miseries, locked myself in.

We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the morning ofthe next. There were signs of people in the next house on Sundayevening—a face at a window and moving lights, and later the slamming of adoor. But I do not know who these people were, nor what became of them. We sawnothing of them next day. The Black Smoke drifted slowly riverward all throughMonday morning, creeping nearer and nearer to us, driving at last along theroadway outside the house that hid us.

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

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

“We are safe here,” he repeated; “safe here.”

I resolved to leave him—would that I had! Wiser now for theartilleryman’s teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil andrags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I found inone of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to goalone—had reconciled myself to going alone—he suddenly rousedhimself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we started aboutfive o’clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road to Sunbury.

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying incontorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and luggage, allcovered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery powder made me think ofwhat I had read of the destruction of Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court withoutmisadventure, our minds full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and atHampton Court our eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escapedthe suffocating drift. We went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to andfro under the chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distancetowards Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first people wesaw.

Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still afire.Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and there were morepeople about here, though none could give us news. For the most part they werelike ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to shift their quarters. I have animpression that many of the houses here were still occupied by scaredinhabitants, too frightened even for flight. Here too the evidence of a hastyrout was abundant along the road. I remember most vividly three smashedbicycles in a heap, pounded into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. Wecrossed Richmond Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposedbridge, of course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number of redmasses, some many feet across. I did not know what these were—there wasno time for scrutiny—and I put a more horrible interpretation on themthan they deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had oncebeen smoke, and dead bodies—a heap near the approach to the station; butwe 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 sidestreet towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the hillRichmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond there was notrace of the Black Smoke.

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

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

That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was manifestthe Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate overtaken me than we saweither the fighting-machine we had seen before or another, far away across themeadows in the direction of Kew Lodge. Four or five little black figureshurried before it across the green-grey of the field, and in a moment it wasevident this Martian pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and theyran radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroythem, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them into the greatmetallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman’s baskethangs over his shoulder.

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

I suppose it was nearly eleven o’clock before we gathered courage tostart again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along hedgerowsand through plantations, and watching keenly through the darkness, he on theright and I on the left, for the Martians, who seemed to be all about us. Inone place we blundered upon a scorched and blackened area, now cooling andashen, and a number of scattered dead bodies of men, burned horribly about theheads and trunks but with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of deadhorses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed guncarriages.

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

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

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

We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark—for we dared not strike alight—and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle. Thecurate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly enough, for pushingon, and I was urging him to keep up his strength by eating when the thinghappened that was to imprison us.

“It can’t be midnight yet,” I said, and then came a blindingglare of vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearlyvisible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such aconcussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the heels of thisas to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash of glass, a crash andrattle of falling masonry all about us, and the plaster of the ceiling camedown upon us, smashing into a multitude of fragments upon our heads. I wasknocked headlong across the floor against the oven handle and stunned. I wasinsensible for a long time, the curate told me, and when I came to we were indarkness again, and he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood froma cut forehead, was dabbing water over me.

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

“Are you better?” asked the curate in a whisper.

At last I answered him. I sat up.

“Don’t move,” he said. “The floor is covered withsmashed crockery from the dresser. You can’t possibly move without makinga noise, and I fancy they are outside.”

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

“That!” said the curate, when presently it happened again.

“Yes,” I said. “But what is it?”

“A Martian!” said the curate.

I listened again.

“It was not like the Heat-Ray,” I said, and for a time I wasinclined to think one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled against thehouse, as I had seen one stumble against the tower of Shepperton Church.

Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or four hours,until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. And then the light filtered in, notthrough the window, which remained black, but through a triangular aperturebetween a beam and a heap of broken bricks in the wall behind us. The interiorof the kitchen we now saw greyly for the first time.

The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which flowed over thetable upon which we had been sitting and lay about our feet. Outside, the soilwas banked high against the house. At the top of the window frame we could seean uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end ofthe kitchen towards the house was broken into, and since the daylight shone inthere, it was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrastingvividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion, palegreen, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the wallpaperimitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured supplements flutteringfrom the walls above the kitchen range.

As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the body of aMartian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still glowing cylinder. At thesight of that we crawled as circ*mspectly as possible out of the twilight ofthe kitchen into the darkness of the scullery.

Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.

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

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

“God have mercy upon us!”

I heard him presently whimpering to himself.

Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my part scarcedared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of the kitchendoor. I could just see the curate’s face, a dim, oval shape, and hiscollar and cuffs. Outside there began a metallic hammering, then a violenthooting, and then again, after a quiet interval, a hissing like the hissing ofan engine. These noises, for the most part problematical, continuedintermittently, and seemed if anything to increase in number as time wore on.Presently a measured thudding and a vibration that made everything about usquiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued. Oncethe light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely dark.For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering, until ourtired attention failed. . . .

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

II.
WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE.

After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have dozed again,for when presently I looked round I was alone. The thudding vibration continuedwith wearisome persistence. I whispered for the curate several times, and atlast felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It was still daylight, and Iperceived him across the room, lying against the triangular hole that lookedout upon the Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hiddenfrom me.

I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed; and theplace rocked with that beating thud. Through the aperture in the wall I couldsee the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil eveningsky. 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 litteredthe floor.

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

The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we hadfirst visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, anddispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now far beneath the originalfoundations—deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I hadlooked into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed under thattremendous impact—“splashed” is the only word—and layin heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behavedexactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsedbackward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyedcompletely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buriednow under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towardsthe cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the greatcircular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating sound wasevidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove uplike a veil across our peephole.

The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the fartheredge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the greatfighting-machines, deserted by its occupant, stood stiff and tall against theevening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although ithas been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinaryglittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of thestrange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heapedmould near it.

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

Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it asa machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines werecoordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare withthis. People who have never seen these structures, and have only theill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of sucheye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.

I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give aconsecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study ofone of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. He presented themas tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with analtogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing theserenderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn thereader against the impression they may have created. They were no more like theMartians 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 acrablike creature with a glittering integument, the controlling Martian whosedelicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalentof the crab’s cerebral portion. But then I perceived the resemblance ofits grey-brown, shiny, leathery integument to that of the other sprawlingbodies beyond, and the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me.With that realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the realMartians. Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the firstnausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was concealed andmotionless, 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 indiameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had nonostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell,but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this akind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body—I scarcely know howto speak of it—was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to beanatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air.In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles,arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been namedrather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, thehands. Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to beendeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with theincreased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There isreason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with somefacility.

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

And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a humanbeing, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of ourbodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads.Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they tookthe fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into theirown 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 couldnot endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtainedfrom a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directlyby means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . .

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

The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, ifone thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned byeating and the digestive process. Our bodies are half made up of glands andtubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. Thedigestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strengthand colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy orunhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted aboveall these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.

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

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

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

In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians wereabsolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotionsthat arise from that difference among men. A young Martian, there can now be nodispute, was really born upon earth during the war, and it was found attachedto its parent, partially budded off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, orlike the young animals in the fresh-water polyp.

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

It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientificrepute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a finalstructure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember,appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, thePall Mall Budget, and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martianperiodical called Punch. He pointed out—writing in a foolish,facetious tone—that the perfection of mechanical appliances mustultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; thatsuch organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longeressential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selectionwould lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the bodyhad a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, “teacher and agentof the brain.” While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would growlarger.

There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we havebeyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animalside of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite credible that theMartians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradualdevelopment of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches ofdelicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without thebody the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, withoutany of the emotional substratum of the human being.

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

Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for adominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the seeds which theMartians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in allcases to red-coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the red weed,however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms. The redcreeper was quite a transitory growth, and few people have seen it growing. Fora time, however, the red weed grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance. Itspread 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 ourtriangular 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 rounddrum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not verydifferent from ours except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were asblack to them. It is commonly supposed that they communicated by sounds andtentacular gesticulations; this is asserted, for instance, in the able buthastily compiled pamphlet (written evidently by someone not an eye-witness ofMartian actions) to which I have already alluded, and which, so far, has beenthe chief source of information concerning them. Now no surviving human beingsaw so much of the Martians in action as I did. I take no credit to myself foran accident, but the fact is so. And I assert that I watched them closely timeafter time, and that I have seen four, five, and (once) six of them sluggishlyperforming the most elaborately complicated operations together without eithersound or gesture. Their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; it had nomodulation, and was, I believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expirationof air preparatory to the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to atleast an elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I amconvinced—as firmly as I am convinced of anything—that the Martiansinterchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I have beenconvinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions. Before the Martianinvasion, as an occasional reader here or there may remember, I had writtenwith some little vehemence against the telepathic theory.

The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and decorum werenecessarily different from ours; and not only were they evidently much lesssensible of changes of temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do notseem to have affected their health at all seriously. Yet though they wore noclothing, it was in the other artificial additions to their bodily resourcesthat their great superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles androad-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth,are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out.They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according totheir needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry oran umbrella in the wet. And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is morewonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature ofalmost all human devices in mechanism is absent—the wheel isabsent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace orsuggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it inlocomotion. And in this connection it is curious to remark that even on thisearth Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other expedients toits development. And not only did the Martians either not know of (which isincredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularlylittle use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circularmotions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of themachinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small butbeautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, itis remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most casesactuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; thesedisks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversedby a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animalmotions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, wasattained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which,on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. Itseemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in thesunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly aftertheir vast journey across space.

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

When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together severalof the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the cylinder into a shape havingan unmistakable likeness to its own; and down on the left a busy little diggingmechanism had come into view, emitting jets of green vapour and working its wayround the pit, excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminatingmanner. This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and therhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped andwhistled as it worked. So far as I could see, the thing was without a directingMartian at all.

III.
THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT.

The arrival of a second fighting-machine drove us from our peephole into thescullery, for we feared that from his elevation the Martian might see down uponus behind our barrier. At a later date we began to feel less in danger of theireyes, for to an eye in the dazzle of the sunlight outside our refuge must havebeen blank blackness, but at first the slightest suggestion of approach droveus into the scullery in heart-throbbing retreat. Yet terrible as was the dangerwe incurred, the attraction of peeping was for both of us irresistible. And Irecall now with a sort of wonder that, in spite of the infinite danger in whichwe were between starvation and a still more terrible death, we could yetstruggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight. We would race acrossthe kitchen in a grotesque way between eagerness and the dread of making anoise, and strike each other, and thrust and kick, within a few inches ofexposure.

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

As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so intensifiedour distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort tothreats, and at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But hewas one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anæmic, hatefulsouls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not eventhemselves.

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

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

The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of thehandling-machine. With two spatulate hands the handling-machine was digging outand flinging masses of clay into the pear-shaped receptacle above, while withanother arm it periodically opened a door and removed rusty and blackenedclinkers from the middle part of the machine. Another steely tentacle directedthe powder from the basin along a ribbed channel towards some receiver that washidden from me by the mound of bluish dust. From this unseen receiver a littlethread of green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. As I looked, thehandling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking, extended, telescopicfashion, 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 hadlifted a bar of white aluminium into sight, untarnished as yet, and shiningdazzlingly, and deposited it in a growing stack of bars that stood at the sideof the pit. Between sunset and starlight this dexterous machine must have mademore than a hundred such bars out of the crude clay, and the mound of bluishdust rose steadily until it topped the side of the pit.

The contrast between the swift and complex movements of these contrivances andthe inert panting clumsiness of their masters was acute, and for days I had totell myself repeatedly that these latter were indeed the living of the twothings.

The curate had possession of the slit when the first men were brought to thepit. I was sitting below, huddled up, listening with all my ears. He made asudden movement backward, and I, fearful that we were observed, crouched in aspasm of terror. He came sliding down the rubbish and crept beside me in thedarkness, inarticulate, gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. Hisgesture suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a little while mycuriosity gave me courage, and I rose up, stepped across him, and clambered upto it. At first I could see no reason for his frantic behaviour. The twilighthad now come, the stars were little and faint, but the pit was illuminated bythe flickering green fire that came from the aluminium-making. The wholepicture was a flickering scheme of green gleams and shifting rusty blackshadows, strangely trying to the eyes. Over and through it all went the bats,heeding it not at all. The sprawling Martians were no longer to be seen, themound of blue-green powder had risen to cover them from sight, and afighting-machine, with its legs contracted, crumpled, and abbreviated, stoodacross 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 todismiss.

I crouched, watching this fighting-machine closely, satisfying myself now forthe first time that the hood did indeed contain a Martian. As the green flameslifted I could see the oily gleam of his integument and the brightness of hiseyes. And suddenly I heard a yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over theshoulder of the machine to the little cage that hunched upon its back. Thensomething—something struggling violently—was lifted high againstthe sky, a black, vague enigma against the starlight; and as this black objectcame down again, I saw by the green brightness that it was a man. For aninstant he was clearly visible. He was a stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, welldressed; three days before, he must have been walking the world, a man ofconsiderable consequence. I could see his staring eyes and gleams of light onhis studs and watch chain. He vanished behind the mound, and for a moment therewas silence. And then began a shrieking and a sustained and cheerful hootingfrom 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 withhis arms over his head, looked up as I passed, cried out quite loudly at mydesertion of him, and came running after me.

That night, as we lurked in the scullery, balanced between our horror and theterrible fascination this peeping had, although I felt an urgent need of actionI tried in vain to conceive some plan of escape; but afterwards, during thesecond day, I was able to consider our position with great clearness. Thecurate, I found, was quite incapable of discussion; this new and culminatingatrocity had robbed him of all vestiges of reason or forethought. Practicallyhe had already sunk to the level of an animal. But as the saying goes, Igripped myself with both hands. It grew upon my mind, once I could face thefacts, that terrible as our position was, there was as yet no justification forabsolute despair. Our chief chance lay in the possibility of the Martiansmaking the pit nothing more than a temporary encampment. Or even if they keptit permanently, they might not consider it necessary to guard it, and a chanceof escape might be afforded us. I also weighed very carefully the possibilityof our digging a way out in a direction away from the pit, but the chances ofour emerging within sight of some sentinel fighting-machine seemed at first toogreat. And I should have had to do all the digging myself. The curate wouldcertainly have failed me.

It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that I saw the ladkilled. 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 aday. I went into the scullery, removed the door, and spent some hours diggingwith my hatchet as silently as possible; but when I had made a hole about acouple of feet deep the loose earth collapsed noisily, and I did not darecontinue. 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 ideaof escaping by excavation.

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

It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining brightly. The Martianshad taken away the excavating-machine, and, save for a fighting-machine thatstood in the remoter bank of the pit and a handling-machine that was buried outof my sight in a corner of the pit immediately beneath my peephole, the placewas deserted by them. Except for the pale glow from the handling-machine andthe bars and patches of white moonlight the pit was in darkness, and, exceptfor the clinking of the handling-machine, quite still. That night was abeautiful serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed to have the sky toherself. I heard a dog howling, and that familiar sound it was that made melisten. Then I heard quite distinctly a booming exactly like the sound of greatguns. Six distinct reports I counted, and after a long interval six again. Andthat was all.

IV.
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 tooust me from the slit, the curate had gone back into the scullery. I was struckby a sudden thought. I went back quickly and quietly into the scullery. In thedarkness I heard the curate drinking. I snatched in the darkness, and myfingers 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 theend I planted myself between him and the food, and told him of my determinationto begin a discipline. I divided the food in the pantry, into rations to lastus ten days. I would not let him eat any more that day. In the afternoon hemade a feeble effort to get at the food. I had been dozing, but in an instant Iwas awake. All day and all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, andhe weeping and complaining of his immediate hunger. It was, I know, a night anda day, but to me it seemed—it seems now—an interminable length oftime.

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

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

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

“It is just, O God!” he would say, over and over again. “Itis just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallenshort. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I heldmy peace. I preached acceptable folly—my God, what folly!—when Ishould have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon them torepent—repent! . . . Oppressors of the poor and needy . . . ! The winepress 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 hisvoice—I prayed him not to. He perceived a hold on me—he threatenedhe would shout and bring the Martians upon us. For a time that scared me; butany concession would have shortened our chance of escape beyond estimating. Idefied him, although I felt no assurance that he might not do this thing. Butthat day, at any rate, he did not. He talked with his voice rising slowly,through the greater part of the eighth and ninth days—threats,entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane and always frothy repentancefor his vacant sham of God’s service, such as made me pity him. Then heslept awhile, and began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I mustneeds make him desist.

“Be still!” I implored.

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

“I have been still too long,” he said, in a tone that must havereached the pit, “and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto thisunfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of the earth byreason of the other voices of the trumpet——”

“Shut up!” I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest theMartians should hear us. “For God’s sake——”

“Nay,” shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standinglikewise and extending his arms. “Speak! The word of the Lord is uponme!”

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

“I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too longdelayed.”

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

Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping plaster, andthe triangular aperture in the wall was darkened. I looked up and saw the lowersurface of a handling-machine coming slowly across the hole. One of itsgripping limbs curled amid the debris; another limb appeared, feeling its wayover the fallen beams. I stood petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort ofglass plate near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and thelarge dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake oftentacle came feeling slowly through the hole.

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

Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and then ittapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a faint metallicringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring. Then a heavy body—Iknew too well what—was dragged across the floor of the kitchen towardsthe opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the door and peeped into thekitchen. In the triangle of bright outer sunlight I saw the Martian, in itsBriareus of a handling-machine, scrutinizing the curate’s head. I thoughtat once that it would infer my presence from the mark of the blow I had givenhim.

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

Then the faint metallic jingle returned. I traced it slowly feeling over thekitchen. Presently I heard it nearer—in the scullery, as I judged. Ithought that its length might be insufficient to reach me. I prayed copiously.It passed, scraping faintly across the cellar door. An age of almostintolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the latch! It hadfound 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 trunkmore than anything else—waving towards me and touching and examining thewall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a black worm swaying its blind headto and fro.

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

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

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

While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar door andclosed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins rattled and abottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against the cellar door. Thensilence 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 closedarkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even to crawl out for thedrink for which I craved. It was the eleventh day before I ventured so far frommy security.

V.
THE STILLNESS.

My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door between thekitchen and the scullery. But the pantry was empty; every scrap of food hadgone. Apparently, the Martian had taken it all on the previous day. At thatdiscovery I despaired for the first time. I took no food, or no drink either,on the eleventh or the twelfth day.

At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed sensibly. Isat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of despondentwretchedness. My mind ran on eating. I thought I had become deaf, for thenoises of movement I had been accustomed to hear from the pit had ceasedabsolutely. 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 alarmingthe Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water pump that stood by the sink,and got a couple of glassfuls of blackened and tainted rain water. I wasgreatly refreshed by this, and emboldened by the fact that no enquiringtentacle followed the noise of my pumping.

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

On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and thoughtdisjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of escape. Whenever Idozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death of the curate, or ofsumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a keen pain that urged me todrink again and again. The light that came into the scullery was no longergrey, 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 thatthe fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in the wall, turningthe half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured obscurity.

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

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

I crept forward, saying “Good dog!” very softly; but he suddenlywithdrew his head and disappeared.

I listened—I was not deaf—but certainly the pit was still. I hearda sound like the flutter of a bird’s wings, and a hoarse croaking, butthat was all.

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

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

I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the machinery had gone. Savefor the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one corner, certain bars ofaluminium in another, the black birds, and the skeletons of the killed, theplace was merely an empty circular pit in the sand.

Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound ofrubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the north, and neitherMartians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The pit dropped sheerly from myfeet, but a little way along the rubbish afforded a practicable slope to thesummit of the ruins. My chance of escape had come. I began to tremble.

I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate resolution, andwith a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to the top of the mound inwhich 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 astraggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed withabundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay, andgravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high,without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute their footing. The trees nearme were dead and brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the stillliving stems.

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

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

VI.
THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.

For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety. Withinthat noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a narrow intensityonly of our immediate security. I had not realised what had been happening tothe world, had not anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. Ihad expected to see Sheen in ruins—I found about me the landscape, weirdand lurid, of another planet.

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet onethat the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit mightfeel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozenbusy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of athing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for manydays, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, butan animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be aswith them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man hadpassed away.

But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my dominantmotive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the direction away fromthe pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch of garden ground unburied.This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the redweed. The density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wallwas some six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could notlift my feet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to acorner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into thegarden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs,and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and, scramblingover a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towardsKew—it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blooddrops—possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soonand as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region ofthe pit.

Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which also Idevoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow water, wheremeadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served only to whet myhunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a hot, dry summer, butafterwards I discovered that it was caused by the tropical exuberance of thered weed. Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightwaybecame gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poureddown into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanicwater fronds speedily choked both those rivers.

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

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. Acankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria,presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, allterrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterialdiseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weedrotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and thenshrivelled and brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters thathad 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. Idrank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed some fronds of redweed; but they were watery, and had a sickly, metallic taste. I found the waterwas sufficiently shallow for me to wade securely, although the red weed impededmy feet a little; but the flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and Iturned back to Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasionalruins of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of thisspate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came out onPutney Common.

Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of thefamiliar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in afew score yards I would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses withtheir blinds trimly drawn and doors closed, as if they had been left for a dayby the owners, or as if their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was lessabundant; the tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. Ihunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple ofsilent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked. I restedfor the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my enfeebledcondition, too fatigued to push on.

All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians. Iencountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried circuitously awayfrom the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I had seen two humanskeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean—and in the woodby me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits andthe skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there wasnothing to be got from them.

After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I think theHeat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the garden beyondRoehampton 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 theplace in the dusk was singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolateruins, and down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with theweed. And over all—silence. It filled me with indescribable terror tothink how swiftly that desolating change had come.

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

VII.
THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.

I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill, sleepingin a made bed for the first time since my flight to Leatherhead. I will nottell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house—afterwards Ifound the front door was on the latch—nor how I ransacked every room forfood, until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be aservant’s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple.The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards foundsome biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could noteat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filledmy pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that partof London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an interval ofrestlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering out for some sign ofthese monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinkingconsecutively—a thing I do not remember to have done since my lastargument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental conditionhad been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupidreceptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food Ihad 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 formergave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a thingdone, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality ofremorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towardsthat hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably tothat. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, hauntedme. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God thatsometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my onlytrial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of ourconversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedlessof my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from theruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of co-operation—grim chance hadtaken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. ButI did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as Ihave set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses—allthese things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader mustform his judgment as he will.

And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate body, Ifaced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For the former I hadno data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so, unhappily, I could for thelatter. And suddenly that night became terrible. I found myself sitting up inbed, staring at the dark. I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might havesuddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my returnfrom Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, hadprayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayedindeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God.Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who hadtalked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hidingplace—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that forany passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they alsoprayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this warhas 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 wasfretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the top of PutneyHill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that musthave poured Londonward on the Sunday night after the fighting began. There wasa little two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer,New Malden, with a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a strawhat trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot ofblood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements werelanguid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to Leatherhead, thoughI 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 fledthence; but it seemed to me I might find or learn there whither the Surreypeople had fled. I knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for herand the world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. Iwas also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went,under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common,stretching wide and far.

That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there was nored 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 swarmof 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, turningsuddenly, with an odd feeling of being watched, I beheld something crouchingamid a clump of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, andit rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. Hestood silent and motionless, regarding me.

As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy asmy 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 ofdried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and hisface was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him.There was a red cut across the lower part of his face.

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

I thought, surveying him.

“I come from Mortlake,” I said. “I was buried near the pitthe Martians made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out andescaped.”

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

I answered slowly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have been buried in theruins of a house thirteen or fourteen days. I don’t know what hashappened.”

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 Ishall go to Leatherhead, for my wife was there.”

He shot out a pointing finger.

“It is you,” said he; “the man from Woking. And youweren’t killed at Weybridge?”

I recognised him at the same moment.

“You are the artilleryman who came into my garden.”

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

“Have you seen any Martians?” I said. “Since I crawledout——”

“They’ve gone away across London,” he said. “I guessthey’ve got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampsteadway, the sky is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city, and inthe glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can’t. Butnearer—I haven’t seen them—” (he counted on hisfingers) “five days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carryingsomething big. And the night before last”—he stopped and spokeimpressively—“it was just a matter of lights, but it was somethingup in the air. I believe they’ve built a flying-machine, and are learningto fly.”

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

“Fly!”

“Yes,” he said, “fly.”

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

“It is all over with humanity,” I said. “If they can do thatthey will simply go round the world.”

He nodded.

“They will. But—— It will relieve things over here a bit. Andbesides——” He looked at me. “Aren’t you satisfiedit is up with humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.”

I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact—a factperfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope; rather, Ihad kept a lifelong habit of mind. He repeated his words, “We’rebeat.” They carried absolute conviction.

“It’s all over,” he said. “They’ve lostone—just one. And they’ve made their footing good andcrippled the greatest power in the world. They’ve walked over us. Thedeath of that one at Weybridge was an accident. And these are only pioneers.They kept on coming. These green stars—I’ve seen none these five orsix 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 somecountervailing thought.

“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It neverwas a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”

Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.

“After the tenth shot they fired no more—at least, until the firstcylinder came.”

“How do you know?” said the artilleryman. I explained. He thought.“Something wrong with the gun,” he said. “But what if thereis? They’ll get it right again. And even if there’s a delay, howcan it alter the end? It’s just men and ants. There’s the antsbuilds their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the menwant them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That’s what weare now—just ants. Only——”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re eatable ants.”

We sat looking at each other.

“And what will they do with us?” I said.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” he said;“that’s what I’ve been thinking. After Weybridge I wentsouth—thinking. I saw what was up. Most of the people were hard at itsquealing and exciting themselves. But I’m not so fond of squealing.I’ve been in sight of death once or twice; I’m not an ornamentalsoldier, and at the best and worst, death—it’s just death. Andit’s the man that keeps on thinking comes through. I saw everyonetracking away south. Says I, ‘Food won’t last this way,’ andI turned right back. I went for the Martians like a sparrow goes for man. Allround”—he waved a hand to the horizon—“they’restarving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other. . . .”

He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.

“No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France,” he said. Heseemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on:“There’s food all about here. Canned things in shops; wines,spirits, mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty. Well, I wastelling you what I was thinking. ‘Here’s intelligent things,’I said, ‘and it seems they want us for food. First, they’ll smashus up—ships, machines, guns, cities, all the order and organisation. Allthat will go. If we were the size of ants we might pull through. Butwe’re not. It’s all too bulky to stop. That’s the firstcertainty.’ Eh?”

I assented.

“It is; I’ve thought it out. Very well, then—next; at presentwe’re caught as we’re wanted. A Martian has only to go a few milesto get a crowd on the run. And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth, pickinghouses to pieces and routing among the wreckage. But they won’t keep ondoing that. So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, andsmashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over there, theywill begin catching us systematic, picking the best and storing us in cages andthings. That’s what they will start doing in a bit. Lord! Theyhaven’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 havingthe sense to keep quiet—worrying them with guns and such foolery. Andlosing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn’t anymore safety than where we were. They don’t want to bother us yet.They’re making their things—making all the things theycouldn’t bring with them, getting things ready for the rest of theirpeople. Very likely that’s why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, forfear of hitting those who are here. And instead of our rushing about blind, onthe howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up, we’ve gotto fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs. That’s how Ifigure it out. It isn’t quite according to what a man wants for hisspecies, but it’s about what the facts point to. And that’s theprinciple I acted upon. Cities, nations, civilisation,progress—it’s all over. That game’s up. We’rebeat.”

“But if that is so, what is there to live for?”

The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.

“There won’t be any more blessed concerts for a million years orso; there won’t be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds atrestaurants. If it’s amusem*nt you’re after, I reckon the game isup. If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peaswith a knife or dropping aitches, you’d better chuck ’em away. Theyain’t no further use.”

“You mean——”

“I mean that men like me are going on living—for the sake of thebreed. I tell you, I’m grim set on living. And if I’m not mistaken,you’ll show what insides you’ve got, too, before long. Wearen’t going to be exterminated. And I don’t mean to be caughteither, and tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy thosebrown creepers!”

“You don’t mean to say——”

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

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

“Great God!” cried I. “But you are a man indeed!” Andsuddenly I gripped his hand.

“Eh!” he said, with his eyes shining. “I’ve thought itout, eh?”

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I’mgetting ready. Mind you, it isn’t all of us that are made for wildbeasts; and that’s what it’s got to be. That’s why I watchedyou. I had my doubts. You’re slender. I didn’t know that it wasyou, you see, or just how you’d been buried. All these—the sort ofpeople that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that usedto live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’tany spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man whohasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch theirlittle season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if theydidn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble tounderstand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time fordinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleepingwith the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they hada bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserableskedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear ofaccidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built forrabbits! 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 aboutthe fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caughtcheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder whatpeople did before there were Martians to take care of them. And the barloafers, and mashers, and singers—I can imagine them. I can imaginethem,” he said, with a sort of sombre gratification.“There’ll be any amount of sentiment and religion loose among them.There’s hundreds of things I saw with my eyes that I’ve only begunto see clearly these last few days. There’s lots will take things as theyare—fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling thatit’s all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now wheneverthings are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, theweak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make fora sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit topersecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you’ve seen the samething. It’s energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. Thesecages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those of a less simplesort 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 todo tricks—who knows?—get sentimental over the pet boy who grew upand had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us.”

“No,” I cried, “that’s impossible! No humanbeing——”

“What’s the good of going on with such lies?” said theartilleryman. “There’s men who’d do it cheerful. Whatnonsense to pretend there isn’t!”

And I succumbed to his conviction.

“If they come after me,” he said; “Lord, if they come afterme!” and subsided into a grim meditation.

I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring against thisman’s reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would havequestioned my intellectual superiority to his—I, a professed andrecognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet hehad already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realised.

“What are you doing?” I said presently. “What plans have youmade?”

He hesitated.

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

“As you meant me to go?”

“Well—I parleyed, didn’t I?”

“We won’t quarrel about that. Go on.”

“Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we wantalso—mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blastedrolling eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, andthe useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. Theyought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to liveand taint the race. And they can’t be happy. Moreover, dying’s noneso dreadful; it’s the funking makes it bad. And in all those places weshall gather. Our district will be London. And we may even be able to keep awatch, and run about in the open when the Martians keep away. Play cricket,perhaps. That’s how we shall save the race. Eh? It’s a possiblething? But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I say, that’s onlybeing 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 mustmake great safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels andpoetry swipes, but ideas, science books. That’s where men like you comein. 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 theseMartians. Some of us must go as spies. When it’s all working, perhaps Iwill. Get caught, I mean. And the great thing is, we must leave the Martiansalone. We mustn’t even steal. If we get in their way, we clear out. Wemust show them we mean no harm. Yes, I know. But they’re intelligentthings, and they won’t hunt us down if they have all they want, and thinkwe’re just harmless vermin.”

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

“After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before—Justimagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly startingoff—Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in ’em. Not aMartian in ’em, but men—men who have learned the way how. It may bein my time, even—those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, withits Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it matter ifyou smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that? Ireckon the Martians’ll open their beautiful eyes! Can’t you seethem, man? Can’t you see them hurrying, hurrying—puffing andblowing and hooting to their other mechanical affairs? Something out of gear inevery case. And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it,swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to hisown.”

For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone ofassurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my mind. I believedunhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny and in the practicabilityof his astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks me susceptible and foolishmust contrast his position, reading steadily with all his thoughts about hissubject, and mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distractedby apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning time, andlater 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 aweek upon—it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed toreach to the main drain on Putney Hill—I had my first inkling of the gulfbetween his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But Ibelieved in him sufficiently to work with him all that morning until pastmidday at his digging. We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removedagainst the kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock-turtlesoup and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a curious relief from theaching strangeness of the world in this steady labour. As we worked, I turnedhis project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began toarise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with apurpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the distance onehad to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing italtogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, whenit was possible to get into the drain at once down one of the manholes, andwork back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that the house was inconvenientlychosen, and required a needless length of tunnel. And just as I was beginningto face these things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

“We’re working well,” he said. He put down his spade.“Let us knock off a bit” he said. “I think it’s time wereconnoitred from the roof of the house.”

I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade; andthen 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 ofbeing here?”

“Taking the air,” he said. “I was coming back. It’ssafer by night.”

“But the work?”

“Oh, one can’t always work,” he said, and in a flash I sawthe man plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. “We ought to reconnoitrenow,” he said, “because if any come near they may hear the spadesand drop upon us unawares.”

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

From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but we couldsee the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambethflooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, andtheir branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, fromamid its clusters. It was strange how entirely dependent both these things wereupon flowing water for their propagation. About us neither had gained afooting; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out oflaurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. BeyondKensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northwardhills.

The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still remained inLondon.

“One night last week,” he said, “some fools got the electriclight in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze, crowdedwith painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and shouting tilldawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came they became aware of afighting-machine standing near by the Langham and looking down at them. Heavenknows how long he had been there. It must have given some of them a nasty turn.He came down the road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk orfrightened to run away.”

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

From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plansagain. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the possibility ofcapturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again. Butnow that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, I could divinethe stress he laid on doing nothing precipitately. And I noted that now therewas 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 toresume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was nothing loath. He becamesuddenly very generous, and when we had eaten he went away and returned withsome excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism glowed. He was inclinedto regard my coming as a great occasion.

“There’s some champagne in the cellar,” he said.

“We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy,” said I.

“No,” said he; “I am host today. Champagne! Great God!We’ve a heavy enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gatherstrength while we may. Look at these blistered hands!”

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

Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of extermination orappalling degradation, with no clear prospect before us but the chance of ahorrible death, we could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard,and playing the “joker” with vivid delight. Afterwards he taught mepoker, and I beat him at three tough chess games. When dark came we decided totake the risk, and lit a lamp.

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

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

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

VIII.
DEAD LONDON.

After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by the HighStreet 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 inpatches 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 manlying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust, alive, but helplesslyand speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing from him but curses and furiouslunges at my head. I think I should have stayed by him but for the brutalexpression of his face.

There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and it grewthicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I got food—sour,hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable—in a baker’s shop here. Someway towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I passed awhite terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning was an absoluterelief. Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet again.

Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon deadbodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the Fulham Road. Theyhad been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past them. The black powdercovered them over, and softened their outlines. One or two had been disturbedby 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, thedesertion, and the stillness. In some places plunderers had been at work, butrarely at other than the provision and wine shops. A jeweller’s windowhad 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 didnot trouble to touch them. Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on adoorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled down her rustybrown dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool across thepavement. She seemed asleep, but she was dead.

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

In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black powder. It wasnear South Kensington that I first heard the howling. It crept almostimperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing alternation of two notes,“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” keeping on perpetually. When I passedstreets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and buildings seemedto deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide down Exhibition Road. Istopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remotewailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for itsfear and solitude.

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” wailed that superhuman note—greatwaves of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tallbuildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the iron gatesof Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into the Natural History Museum andfind 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 sowent on up the Exhibition Road. All the large mansions on each side of the roadwere 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 busoverturned, and the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for atime, and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine. The voice grewstronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above the housetops on thenorth side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the northwest.

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” cried the voice, coming, as it seemed tome, from the district about Regent’s Park. The desolating cry worked uponmy mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing took possession ofme. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and now again hungry and thirsty.

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

I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again were black powderand several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from the gratings of the cellarsof some of the houses. I grew very thirsty after the heat of my long walk. Withinfinite trouble I managed to break into a public-house and get food and drink.I was weary after eating, and went into the parlour behind the bar, and slepton a black horsehair sofa I found there.

I awoke to find that dismal howling still in my ears, “Ulla, ulla, ulla,ulla.” It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits and acheese in the bar—there was a meat safe, but it contained nothing butmaggots—I wandered on through the silent residential squares to BakerStreet—Portman Square is the only one I can name—and so came out atlast upon Regent’s Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker Street, Isaw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset the hood of theMartian giant from which this howling proceeded. I was not terrified. I cameupon him as if it were a matter of course. I watched him for some time, but hedid not move. He appeared to be standing and yelling, for no reason that Icould discover.

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

I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John’s Woodstation. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was only asI clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this mechanical Samsonlying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted, among the ruins it hadmade. The forepart was shattered. It seemed as if it had driven blindlystraight at the house, and had been overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed tome then that this might have happened by a handling-machine escaping from theguidance of its Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and thetwilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat wassmeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left, wereinvisible 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 asthe first, standing in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent. Alittle beyond the ruins about the smashed handling-machine I came upon the redweed again, and found the Regent’s Canal, a spongy mass of dark-redvegetation.

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

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

London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses werelike the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a thousandnoiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. In frontof me the road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I saw acontorted shape lying across the pathway. I could not bring myself to go on. Iturned down St. John’s Wood Road, and ran headlong from this unendurablestillness towards Kilburn. I hid from the night and the silence, until longafter midnight, in a cabmen’s shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawnmy courage returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I turned oncemore towards Regent’s Park. I missed my way among the streets, andpresently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, thecurve of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was athird Martian, erect and motionless like the others.

An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would save myselfeven 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 blackbirds was circling and clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave abound, and I began running along the road.

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

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon itscrest, 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 andstrange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturnedwar-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of themstark and silent and laid in a row, were theMartians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and diseasebacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed wasbeing slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblestthings 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 notterror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken tollof humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehumanancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of ourkind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without astruggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, forinstance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are nobacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank andfed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when Iwatched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they wentto and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has boughthis birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would stillbe his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do menlive nor die in vain.

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

I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as therising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was stillin darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power andcomplexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague andstrange out of the shadows towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I couldhear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far belowme. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the greatflying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denseratmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day toosoon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the hugefighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shredsof flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of PrimroseHill.

I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds,stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight, just as death hadovertaken 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 theforce of its machinery was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripodtowers of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun.

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

Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the splinteredspire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky, and here and theresome facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with awhite intensity.

Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses; westward thegreat city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians, the green waves ofRegent’s Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the Albert Hall, theImperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came out clearand little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazilybeyond. Far away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the CrystalPalace glittered like two silver rods. The dome of St. Paul’s was darkagainst the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, by a huge gapingcavity 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, theinnumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of theswift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised thatthe 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 awave of emotion that was near akin to tears.

The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The survivors ofthe people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless, foodless, likesheep without a shepherd—the thousands who had fled by sea, would beginto return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, would beat againin the empty streets and pour across the vacant squares. Whatever destructionwas done, the hand of the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, theblackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass ofthe hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers andringing with the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended my handstowards 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 oldlife of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.

IX.
WRECKAGE.

And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is notaltogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly, all that I didthat day until the time that I stood weeping and praising God upon the summitof Primrose Hill. And then I forget.

Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that, so far frommy being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow, several such wanderersas myself had already discovered this on the previous night. One man—thefirst—had gone to St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered inthe cabmen’s hut, had contrived to telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyfulnews had flashed all over the world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastlyapprehensions, suddenly flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it inDublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon theverge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard, shouting andstaying their work to shake hands and shout, were making up trains, even asnear as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church bells that had ceased afortnight since suddenly caught the news, until all England was bell-ringing.Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along every country lane shoutingof unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair. And forthe food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic, corn,bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All the shipping in the worldseemed going Londonward in those days. But of all this I have no memory. Idrifted—a demented man. I found myself in a house of kindly people, whohad found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through thestreets of St. John’s Wood. They have told me since that I was singingsome insane doggerel about “The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last ManLeft Alive!” Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people,whose name, much as I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may noteven give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, andprotected me from myself. Apparently they had learned something of my storyfrom me during the days of my lapse.

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

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

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

I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my melancholypilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the streets and vivid themoving life about me. So many people were abroad everywhere, busied in athousand activities, that it seemed incredible that any great proportion of thepopulation could have been slain. But then I noticed how yellow were the skinsof the people I met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright theireyes, and that every other man still wore his dirty rags. Their faces seemedall with one of two expressions—a leaping exultation and energy or a grimresolution. Save for the expression of the faces, London seemed a city oftramps. The vestries were indiscriminately distributing bread sent us by theFrench government. The ribs of the few horses showed dismally. Haggard specialconstables with white badges stood at the corners of every street. I saw littleof the mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached Wellington Street, andthere I saw the red weed clambering over the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge.

At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of thatgrotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the redweed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of thefirst newspaper to resume publication—the Daily Mail. I bought acopy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank,but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making agrotesque scheme of advertisem*nt stereo on the back page. The matter heprinted was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found its way back.I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of theMartian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, thearticle assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the “Secretof Flying,” was discovered. At Waterloo I found the free trains that weretaking people to their homes. The first rush was already over. There were fewpeople in the train, and I was in no mood for casual conversation. I got acompartment to myself, and sat with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlitdevastation that flowed past the windows. And just outside the terminus thetrain jolted over temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houseswere blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy withpowder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms and rain, andat Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds ofout-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side with the customary navvies,and we were jolted over a hasty relaying.

All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt andunfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue of itsunburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along the line. TheWandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped mass of red weed, inappearance between butcher’s meat and pickled cabbage. The Surrey pinewoods were too dry, however, for the festoons of the red climber. BeyondWimbledon, within sight of the line, in certain nursery grounds, were theheaped masses of earth about the sixth cylinder. A number of people werestanding about it, and some sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over itflaunted a Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The nurserygrounds were everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colourcut with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One’s gaze wentwith infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the foregroundto the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.

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

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

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

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

I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table still, withthe selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had left on theafternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I stood reading over myabandoned arguments. It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideaswith the development of the civilising process; and the last sentence was theopening of a prophecy: “In about two hundred years,” I had written,“we may expect——” The sentence ended abruptly. Iremembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by,and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. Iremembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I hadlistened to his odd story of “Men from Mars.”

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

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

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

“I came,” she said. “I knew—knew——”

She put her hand to her throat—swayed. I made a step forward, and caughther in my arms.

X.
THE EPILOGUE.

I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am able tocontribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions which are stillunsettled. In one respect I shall certainly provoke criticism. My particularprovince is speculative philosophy. My knowledge of comparative physiology isconfined to a book or two, but it seems to me that Carver’s suggestionsas to the reason of the rapid death of the Martians is so probable as to beregarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of mynarrative.

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

Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians usedwith such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle.The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories havedisinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter. Spectrumanalysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknownelement with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possiblethat it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadlyeffect upon some constituent in the blood. But such unproven speculations willscarcely be of interest to the general reader, to whom this story is addressed.None of the brown scum that drifted down the Thames after the destruction ofShepperton was examined at the time, and now none is forthcoming.

The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as theprowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already given. Buteveryone is familiar with the magnificent and almost complete specimen inspirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that havebeen made from it; and beyond that the interest of their physiology andstructure is purely scientific.

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

In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery beforeit was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they might be butcheredby means of guns so soon as the screw opened. It seems to me that they havelost a vast advantage in the failure of their first surprise. Possibly they seeit in the same light.

Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians haveactually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus. Seven months agonow, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was inopposition from the point of view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently apeculiar luminous and sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of theinner planet, and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuouscharacter was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to seethe drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkableresemblance in character.

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

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

Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreadingslowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimatevastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the otherhand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and notto us, perhaps, is the future ordained.

I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense ofdoubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, andsuddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, andfeel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into theByfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful ofvisitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly theybecome vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through thehot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silentstreets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon metattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, maddistortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darknessof the night.

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

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

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