6282 lines
327 KiB
Plaintext
6282 lines
327 KiB
Plaintext
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
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Contents
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Book One -- THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
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1. The Eve of the War
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2. The Falling Star
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3. On Horsell Common
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4. The Cylinder Opens
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5. The Heat-Ray
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6. The Heat-Ray in Chobham Road
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7. How I Reached Home
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8. Friday Night
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9. The Fighting Begins
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0. In the Storm
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1. At the Window
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2. What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
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3. How I Fell in with the Curate
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4. In London
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5. What Had Happened in Surrey
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6. The Exodus from London
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7. The "Thunder Child"
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Book Two -- THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
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1. Under Foot
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2. What We Saw from the Ruined House
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3. The Days of Imprisonment
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4. The Death of the Curate
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5. The Stillness
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6. The Work of Fifteen Days
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7. The Man on Putney Hill
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8. Dead London
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9. Wreckage
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0. The Epilogue
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
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Chapter 1: The Eve of the War
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No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth
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century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
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intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that
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as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were
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scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
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microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and
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multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to
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and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
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assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
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infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to
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the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
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them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
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improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of
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those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be
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other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
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welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds
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that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,
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intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with
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envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And
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early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
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The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
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about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light
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and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by
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this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth,
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older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten,
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life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it
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is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have
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accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin.
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It has air and water and all that necessary for the support of
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animated existence.
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Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
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writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any
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idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed
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at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood
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that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of
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the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows
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that it is not only more distant from life's beginning but nearer its
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end.
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The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has
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already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition
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is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its
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equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of
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our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its
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oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and
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as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either
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pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage
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of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a
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present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate
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pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their
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powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with
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instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of,
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they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of
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them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with
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vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of
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fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad
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stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
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And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to
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them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.
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The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
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struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
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of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and
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this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what
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they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is,
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indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after
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generation, creeps upon them.
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And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what
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ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only
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upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its
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inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,
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were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged
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by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such
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apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
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spirit?
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The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
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subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
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ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
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perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have
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seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men
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like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that
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for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to
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interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so
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well. All that time the Martians; must have been getting ready.
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During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the
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illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by
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Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard
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of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to
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think that this have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast
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pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired at us.
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Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site of
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that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
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The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
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opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical
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exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak
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of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards
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midnight of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at
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once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen,
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moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of
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fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared
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it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of
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the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
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A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day
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there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the
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Daily Telgraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest
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dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard
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of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known
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astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and
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in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him
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that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.
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In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that
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vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed
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lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the
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steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in
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the roof--an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.
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Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the
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telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet
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swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and
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small and still faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly
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flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery
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warm--a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really
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this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork
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that kept the planet in view.
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As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
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advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
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millions of miles it was from us--more than forty millions of miles
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of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the
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dust of the material universe swims.
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Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of
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light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it
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was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that
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blackness looks on a frosty starlight night in a telescope it seems
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far profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and
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small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible
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distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles,
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came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so
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much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed
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of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
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missile.
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That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the
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distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the
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slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck
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midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place. The night
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was warm and I was thirsty, and I went, stretching my legs clumsily
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and feeling my way in the darkness, to the little table where the
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siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came
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out towards us.
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That night another invisible missile started on its way to the
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earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after
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the first one. I remember how I sat on the table there in the
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blackness, with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes.
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I wished I had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of
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the minute gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me.
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Olgivy watched till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern
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and walked over to his house. Down below in the darkness were
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Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in
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peace.
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He was full of speculation that night about the condition of
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Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who
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were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in
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a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was
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in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic
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evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.
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"The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to
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one," he said.
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Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night
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after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten
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nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no
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one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the
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firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or
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dust, visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey,
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fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet's
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atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.
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Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and
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popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the
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volcanoes upon Mars. The serio-comic periodical Punch, I remember,
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made a happy use of it in the political cartoon. And, all
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unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew
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earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the
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empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer.
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It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift
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fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they
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did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new
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photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those
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days. People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance
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and enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I
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was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a
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series of papers discussing the fprobable developments of moral ideas
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as civilisation progressed.
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One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been
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10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was
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starlight, and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and
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pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards
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which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night. Coming
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home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us
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singing and playing music. There were lights in the upper windows of
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the houses as the people went to bed. From the railway station in
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the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling,
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softened almost into melody by the distance. My wife pointed out to
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me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging
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in a framework against the sky. It seemed so safe and tranquil.
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
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Chapter 2: The Falling Star
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Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in
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the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high
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in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an
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ordinary falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish
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streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest
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authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first
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appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him
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that it fell to earth about one hundred miles east of him.
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I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although
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my French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I
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loved in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of
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it. Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from
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outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me
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had I only looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight
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say it travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of
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that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen
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the fall of it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had
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descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass
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that night.
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But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the
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shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on
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the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with
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the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far
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from the sand pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of
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the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in
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every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a
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half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke
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rose against the dawn.
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The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the
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scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its
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descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder,
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caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured
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incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He
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approached the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape,
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since most meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was,
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however, still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid
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his near approach. A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed
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to the unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had not
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occurred to him that it might be hollow.
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He remained standing at the edge of the pit that the Thing had
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made for itself, staring at its strange appearance, astonished
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chiefly at its unusual shape and colour, and dimly perceiving even
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then some evidence of design in its arrival. The early morning was
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wonderfully still, and the sun, just clearing the pine trees towards
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Weybridge, was already warm. He did not remember hearing any birds
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that morning, there was certainly no breeze stirring, and the only
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sounds were the faint movements from within the cindery cylinder. He
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was all alone on the common.
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Then suddenly he noticed with a start that some of the grey
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clinker, the ashy incrustation that covered the meteorite, was
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falling off the circular edge of the end. It was dropping off in
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flakes and raining down upon the sand. A large piece suddenly came
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off and fell with a sharp noise that brought his heart into his
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mouth.
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For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although
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the heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the
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bulk to see the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the
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cooling of the body might account for this, but what disturbed that
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idea was the fact that the ash was failing only from the end of the
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cylinder.
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And then he perceived that, very slowly, the circular top of the
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cylinder was rotating on its body. It was such a gradual movement
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that he discovered it only through noticing that a black mark that
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had been near him five minutes ago was now at the other side of the
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circumference. Even then he scarcely understood what this indicated,
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until he heard a muffled grating sound and saw the black mark jerk
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forward an inch or so. Then the thing came upon him in a flash. The
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cylinder was artificial--hollow--with an end that screwed out!
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Something within the cylinder was unscrewing the top!
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"Good heavens!" said Ogilvy. "There's a man in it--men in it!
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Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!"
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At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the
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flash upon Mars.
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The thought of the confined creature was so dreadful to him that
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he forgot the heat, and went forward to the cylinder to help turn.
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But luckily the dull radiation arrested him before he could burn his
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hands on the still glowing metal. At that he stood irresolute for a
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moment, then turned, scrambled out of the pit, and set off running
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wildly into Woking. The time then must have been somewhere about six
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o'clock. He met a waggoner and tried to make him understand, but the
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tale he told and his appearance were so wild--his hat had fallen off
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in the pit--that the man simply drove on. He was equally
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unsuccessful with the pot man who was just unlocking the doors of the
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public-house by Horsell Bridge. The fellow thought he was a lunatic
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at large and made an unsuccessful attempt to shut him into the
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taproom. That sobered him a little; and when he saw Henderson, the
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London journalist, in his garden, he called over the palings and made
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himself understood.
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"Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting star last night?"
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"Well?" said Henderson
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"It's out on Horsell Common now."
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"Good Lord!" said Henderson. "Fallen meteorite! That's good."
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"But it's something more than a meteorite. It's a cylinder-- an
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artificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside."
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Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.
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"What's that?" he said. He was deaf in one ear.
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Ogilvy told him all that he had seen. Henderson was a minute or
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so taking it in. Then he dropped his spade, snatched up his jacket,
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and came out into the road. The two men hurried back at once to the
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common, and found the cylinder still lying in the same position. But
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now the sounds inside had ceased, and a thin circle of bright metal
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showed between the top and the body of the cylinder. Air was either
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entering or escaping at the rim with a thin, sizzling sound.
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They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick,
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and, meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men
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inside must be insensible or dead.
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Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They
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shouted consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again
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to get help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and
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disordered, running up the little street in the bright sunlight just
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as the shop folks were taking down their shutters and people were
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opening their bedroom windows. Henderson went into the railway
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station at once, in order to telegraph the news to London. The
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newspaper articles had prepared men's minds for the reception of the
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idea.
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By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already
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started for the common to see the "dead men from Mars." That was the
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form the story took. I heard of it first from my newspaper boy about
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a quarter to nine when I went out to get my Daily Chronicle. I was
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naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the
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Ottershaw bridge to the sand pits.
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
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Chapter 3: On Horsell Common
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I found a little crowd of perhaps twenty people surrounding the
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huge hole in which the cylinder lay. I have already described the
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appearance of that colossal bulk, embedded in the ground. The turf
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and gravel about it seemed charred as if by a sudden explosion. No
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doubt its impact had caused a flash of fire. Henderson and Ogilvy
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were not there. I think they perceived that nothing was to be done
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for the present, and had gone away to breakfast at Henderson's house.
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There were four or five boys sitting on the edge of the pit,
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with their feet dangling, and amusing themselves until I stopped
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them--by throwing stones at the giant mass. After I had spoken to
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them about it, they began playing at "touch" in and out of the group
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of bystanders.
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Among these were a couple of cyclists, a jobbing gardener I
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employed sometimes, a girl carrying a baby, Gregg the butcher and his
|
|
little boy, and two or three loafers and golf caddies who were
|
|
accustomed to hang about the railway station. There was very little
|
|
talking. Few of the common people in England had anything but the
|
|
vaguest astronomical ideas in those days. Most of them were standing
|
|
quietly at the big tablelike end of the cylinder, which was still as
|
|
Ogilvy and Henderson had left it. I fancy the popular expectation of
|
|
a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this inanimate bulk.
|
|
Some went away while I was there, and other people came. I clambered
|
|
into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under my feet. The
|
|
top had certainly ceased to rotate.
|
|
|
|
It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of
|
|
this object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was
|
|
really no more exciting than an overturned carriage or a tree blown
|
|
across the road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas
|
|
float. It required a certain amount of scientific education to
|
|
perceive that the grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that
|
|
the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid
|
|
and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue. "Extraterrestrial" had no
|
|
meaning for most of the onlookers.
|
|
|
|
At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the Thing
|
|
had come from the planet Mars, but I judged it improbable that it
|
|
contained any living creature. I thought the unscrewing might be
|
|
automatic. In spite of Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men
|
|
in Mars. My mind ran fancifully on the possibilities of its
|
|
containing manuscript, on the difficulties in translation that might
|
|
arise, whether we should find coins and models in it, and so forth.
|
|
Yet it was a little too large for assurance on this idea. I felt an
|
|
impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed
|
|
happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in
|
|
Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract
|
|
investigations.
|
|
|
|
In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered very
|
|
much. The early editions of the evening papers had startled London
|
|
with enormous headlines:
|
|
|
|
A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS
|
|
|
|
REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING
|
|
|
|
and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical
|
|
Exchange had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.
|
|
|
|
There were half a dozen flies or more from the Woking station
|
|
standing in the road by the sand pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham,
|
|
and a rather lordly carriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap
|
|
of bicycles. In addition, a large number of people must have walked,
|
|
in spite of the heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that
|
|
there was altogether quite a considerable crowd--one or two gaily
|
|
dressed ladies among the others.
|
|
|
|
It was glaringly hot, not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of
|
|
wind, and the only shadow was that of the few scattered pine trees.
|
|
The burning heather had been extinguished, but the level ground
|
|
towards Ottershaw was blackened as far as one could see, and still
|
|
giving off vertical streamers of smoke. An enterprising sweet-stuff
|
|
dealer in the Chobham Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of
|
|
green apples and ginger beer.
|
|
|
|
Going to the edge of the pit, I found it occupied by a group of
|
|
about half a dozen men--Henderson, Ogilvy, and a tall, fair-haired
|
|
man that I afterwards learned was Stent, the Astronomer Royal, with
|
|
several workmen, wielding spades and pickaxes. Stent was giving
|
|
directions in a clear, high-pitched voice. He was standing on the
|
|
cylinder, which was now evidently much cooler; his face was crimson
|
|
and streaming with perspiration, and something seemed to have
|
|
irritated him.
|
|
|
|
A large portion of the cylinder had been uncovered, though its
|
|
lower end was still embedded. As soon as Ogilvy saw me among the
|
|
staring crowd on the edge of the pit he called to me to come down,
|
|
and asked me if I would mind going over to see Lord Hilton, the lord
|
|
of the manor.
|
|
|
|
The growing crowd, he said, was becoming a serious impediment to
|
|
their excavations, especially the boys. They wanted a light railing
|
|
put up, and help to keep the people back. He told me that a faint
|
|
stirring was occasionally still audible within the case, but that the
|
|
workmen had failed to unscrew the top, as it afforded no grip to
|
|
them. The case appeared to be enormously thick, and it was possible
|
|
that the faint sounds we heard represented a noisy tumult in the
|
|
interior.
|
|
|
|
I was very glad to do as he asked, and so become one of the
|
|
privileged spectators within the contemplated enclosure. I failed to
|
|
find Lord Hilton at his house, but I was told he was expected from
|
|
London by the six o'clock train from Waterloo; and as it was then
|
|
about a quarter past five, I went home, had some tea, and walked up
|
|
to the station to waylay him.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 4: The Cylinder Opens
|
|
|
|
When I returned to the common the sun was setting. Scattered
|
|
groups were hurrying from the direction of Woking, and one or two
|
|
persons were returning. The crowd about the pit had increased, and
|
|
stood out black against the lemon yellow of the sky--a couple of
|
|
hundred people, perhaps. There were raised voices, and some sort of
|
|
struggle appeared to be going on about the pit. Strange imaginings
|
|
passed through my mind. As I drew nearer I heard Stent's voice:
|
|
|
|
"Keep back! Keep back!"
|
|
|
|
A boy came running towards me.
|
|
|
|
"Its a movin'," he said to me as he passed; "a-screwin' and
|
|
a-screwin' out. I don't like it. I'm a-goin' home, I am."
|
|
|
|
I went on to the crowd. There were really, I should think, two
|
|
or three hundred people elbowing and jostling one another, the one or
|
|
two ladies there being by no means the least active.
|
|
|
|
"He's fallen in the pit!" cried some one.
|
|
|
|
"Keep back!" said several.
|
|
|
|
The crowd swayed a little, and I elbowed my way through. Every
|
|
one seemed greatly excited. I heard a peculiar humming sound from
|
|
the pit.
|
|
|
|
"I say!" said Ogilvy; "help keep these idiots back. We don't
|
|
know what's in the confounded thing, you know!"
|
|
|
|
I saw a young man, a shop assistant in Woking I believe he was,
|
|
standing on the cylinder and trying to scramble out of the hole
|
|
again. The crowd had pushed him in.
|
|
|
|
The end of the cylinder was being screwed but from within.
|
|
Nearly two feet of shining screw projected. Somebody blundered
|
|
against me, and I narrowly missed being pitched onto the top of the
|
|
screw. I turned, and as I did so the screw must have come out, for
|
|
the lid of the cylinder fell upon the gravel with a ringing
|
|
concussion. I stuck my elbow into the person behind me, and turned my
|
|
head towards the Thing again. For a moment that circular cavity
|
|
seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in my eyes.
|
|
|
|
I think everyone expected to see a man emerge--possibly
|
|
something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a
|
|
man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring
|
|
within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and
|
|
then two luminous disks--like eyes. Then something resembling a
|
|
little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up
|
|
out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me--and
|
|
then another.
|
|
|
|
A sudden chill came over me. There was a loud shriek from a
|
|
woman behind. I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed upon the cylinder
|
|
still, from which other tentacles were now projecting, and began
|
|
pushing my way back from the edge of the pit. I saw astonishment
|
|
giving place to horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard
|
|
inarticulate exclamations on all sides. There was a general movement
|
|
backwards. I saw the shopman struggling still on the edge of the
|
|
pit. I found myself alone, and saw the people on the other side of
|
|
the pit running off, Stent among them. I looked again at the
|
|
cylinder, and ungovernable terror gripped me. I stood petrified and
|
|
staring.
|
|
|
|
A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was
|
|
rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and
|
|
caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.
|
|
|
|
Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The
|
|
mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had,
|
|
one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless
|
|
brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole
|
|
creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular
|
|
appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the
|
|
air.
|
|
|
|
Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine
|
|
the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth
|
|
with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence
|
|
of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of
|
|
this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing
|
|
of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and
|
|
painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of
|
|
the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense
|
|
eye--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.
|
|
There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the
|
|
clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even
|
|
at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with
|
|
disgust and dread.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly the monster vanished. It had toppled over the brim of
|
|
the cylinder and fallen into the pit, with a thud like the fall of a
|
|
great mass of leather. I heard it give a peculiar thick cry, and
|
|
forthwith another of these creatures appeared darkly in the deep
|
|
shadow of the aperture.
|
|
|
|
I turned and, running madly, made for the first group of trees,
|
|
perhaps a hundred yards away; but I ran slantingly and stumbling, for
|
|
I could not avert my face from these things.
|
|
|
|
There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I stopped,
|
|
panting, and waited further developments. The common round the sand
|
|
pits was dotted with people, standing like myself in a
|
|
half-fascinated terror, staring at these creatures, or rather at the
|
|
heaped gravel at the edge of the pit in which they lay. And then,
|
|
with a renewed horror, I saw a round, black object bobbing up and
|
|
down on the edge of the pit. It was the head of the shopman who had
|
|
fallen in, but showing as a little black object against the hot
|
|
western sky. Now he got his shoulder and knee up, and again he
|
|
seemed to slip back until only his head was visible. Suddenly he
|
|
vanished, and I could have fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I
|
|
had a momentary impulse to go back and help him that my fears
|
|
overruled.
|
|
|
|
Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and
|
|
the heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone
|
|
coming along the road from Choban or Woking would have been amazed at
|
|
the sight--a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more
|
|
standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes,
|
|
behind gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in
|
|
short, excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of
|
|
sand. The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black
|
|
against the burning sky, and in the sand pits was a row of deserted
|
|
vehicles with their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the
|
|
ground.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 5: The Heat-Ray
|
|
|
|
After the glimpse I had had of the Martians emerging from the
|
|
cylinder in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a
|
|
kind of fascination paralysed my actions. I remained standing
|
|
knee-deep in the heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was
|
|
a battleground of fear and curiosity.
|
|
|
|
I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a
|
|
passionate longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a
|
|
big curve, seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at
|
|
the sand heaps that hid these newcomers to our earth. Once a leash
|
|
of thin black whips, like the arms of an octopus, flashed across the
|
|
sunset and was immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose
|
|
up, joint by joint, bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun
|
|
with a wobbling motion. What could be going on there?
|
|
|
|
Most of the spectators had gathered in one or two groups--one a
|
|
little crowd towards Woking, the other a knot of people in the
|
|
direction of Chobham. Evidently they shared my mental conflict.
|
|
There were few near me. One man I approached--he was, I perceived, a
|
|
neighbour of mine, though I did not know his name-- and accosted.
|
|
But it was scarcely a time for articulate conversation.
|
|
|
|
"What ugly brutes!" he said. "Good God! What ugly brutes!" He
|
|
repeated this over and over again.
|
|
|
|
"Did you see a man in the pit?" I said; but he made no answer to
|
|
that. We became silent, and stood watching for a time side by side,
|
|
deriving, I fancy, a certain comfort in one another's company. Then
|
|
I shifted my position to a little knoll that gave me the advantage of
|
|
a yard or more of elevation, and when I looked for him presently he
|
|
was walking towards Woking.
|
|
|
|
The sunset faded to twilight before anything further happened.
|
|
The crowd far away on the left, towards Woking, seemed to grow, and I
|
|
heard now a faint murmur from it. The little knot of people towards
|
|
Chobham dispersed. There was scarcely an intimation of movement from
|
|
the pit.
|
|
|
|
It was this, as much as anything, that gave people courage, and
|
|
I suppose the new arrivals from Woking also helped to restore
|
|
confidence. At any rate, as the dusk came on a slow, intermittent
|
|
movement upon the sand pits began, a movement that seemed to gather
|
|
force as the stillness of the evening about the cylinder remained
|
|
unbroken. Vertical black figures in twos and threes would advance,
|
|
stop, watch, and advance again, spreading out as they did so in a
|
|
thin irregular crescent that promised to enclose the pit in its
|
|
attenuated horns. I, too, on my side began to move towards the pit.
|
|
|
|
Then I saw some cabmen and others had walked boldly into the
|
|
sand pits, and heard the clatter of hoofs and the gride of wheels. I
|
|
saw a lad trundling off the barrow of apples. And then, within
|
|
thirty yards of the pit, advancing from the direction of Horsell, I
|
|
noted a little black knot of men, the foremost of whom was waving a
|
|
white flag.
|
|
|
|
This was the Deputation. There had been a hasty consultation,
|
|
and since the Martians were evidently, in spite of their repulsive
|
|
forms, intelligent creatures, it had been resolved to show them, by
|
|
approaching them with signals, that we too were intelligent.
|
|
|
|
Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the
|
|
left. It was too far for me to recognise anyone there, but
|
|
afterwards I learned that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were with
|
|
others in this attempt at communication. This little group had in
|
|
its advance dragged inward, so to speak, the circumference of the now
|
|
almost complete circle of people, and a number of dim black figures
|
|
followed it at discreet distances.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous
|
|
greenish smoke came out of the pit in three distinct puffs, which
|
|
drove up, one after the other, straight into the still air.
|
|
|
|
This smoke (or flame, perhaps, would be the better word for it)
|
|
was so bright that the deep blue sky overhead and the hazy stretches
|
|
of brown common towards Chertsey, set with black pine trees, seemed
|
|
to darken abruptly as these puffs arose, and to remain the darker
|
|
after their dispersal. At the same time a faint hissing sound became
|
|
audible.
|
|
|
|
Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white
|
|
flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small
|
|
vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke
|
|
arose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it
|
|
vanished. Then slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a
|
|
long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the
|
|
pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.
|
|
|
|
Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from
|
|
one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if
|
|
some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame.
|
|
It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.
|
|
|
|
Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them
|
|
staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.
|
|
|
|
I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death
|
|
leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was
|
|
that it was something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding
|
|
flash of light, and a man fell headlong and lay still; and as the
|
|
unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine trees burst into fire and
|
|
every dry furze bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And
|
|
far away towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and
|
|
wooden buildings suddenly set alight.
|
|
|
|
It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death,
|
|
this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming
|
|
towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded
|
|
and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand pits
|
|
and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then
|
|
it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn
|
|
through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along a
|
|
curving line beyond the sand pits the dark ground smoked and
|
|
crackled. Something fell with a crash far away to the left where the
|
|
road from Woking station opens out on the common. Forthwith the
|
|
hissing and humming ceased, and the black, domelike object sank
|
|
slowly out of sight into the pit.
|
|
|
|
All this had happened with such swiftness that I had stood
|
|
motionless, dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light. Had
|
|
that death swept through a full circle, it must inevitably have slain
|
|
me in my surprise. But it passed and spared me, and left the night
|
|
about me suddenly dark and unfamiliar.
|
|
|
|
The undulating common seemed now dark almost to blackness,
|
|
except where its roadways lay grey and pale under the deep blue sky
|
|
of the early night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men. Overhead
|
|
the stars were mustering, and in the west the sky was still a pale,
|
|
bright, almost greenish blue. The tops of the pine trees and the
|
|
roofs of Horsell came out sharp and black against the western
|
|
afterglow. The Martians and their appliances were altogether
|
|
invisible, save for that thin mast upon which their restless mirror
|
|
wobbled. Patches of bush and isolated trees here and there smoked
|
|
and glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were sending
|
|
up spires of flame into the stillness of the evening air.
|
|
|
|
Nothing was changed save for that and a terrible astonishment.
|
|
The little group of black specks with the flag of white had been
|
|
swept out of existence, and the stillness of the evening, so it
|
|
seemed to me, had scarcely been broken.
|
|
|
|
It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless,
|
|
unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from
|
|
without, came--fear.
|
|
|
|
With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the
|
|
heather.
|
|
|
|
The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not
|
|
only of the Martians, but of the dusk and stillness all about me.
|
|
Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran
|
|
weeping silently as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not
|
|
dare to look back.
|
|
|
|
I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being
|
|
played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of
|
|
safety, this mysterious death--as swift as the passage of light--
|
|
would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me
|
|
down.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 6: The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road
|
|
|
|
It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay
|
|
men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are
|
|
able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute
|
|
non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam
|
|
against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic
|
|
mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a
|
|
lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely
|
|
proved these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam
|
|
of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead
|
|
of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its
|
|
touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass,
|
|
and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.
|
|
|
|
That night nearly forty people lay under the starlight about the
|
|
pit charred and distorted beyond recognition, and all night long the
|
|
common from Horsell to Maybury was deserted and brightly ablaze.
|
|
|
|
The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and
|
|
Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when
|
|
the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so
|
|
forth, attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the
|
|
Horsell Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at
|
|
last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up
|
|
after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would
|
|
make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a
|
|
trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hunt of voices
|
|
along the road in the gloaming....
|
|
|
|
As yet, of course, few people in Woking even knew that the
|
|
cylinder had opened, though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a
|
|
bicycle to the post office with a special wire to an evening paper.
|
|
|
|
As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open, they
|
|
found little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the
|
|
spinning mirror over the sand pits, and the newcomers were, no doubt,
|
|
soon infected by the excitement of the occasion.
|
|
|
|
By half past eight, when the Deputation was destroyed, there may
|
|
have been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place,
|
|
besides those who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer.
|
|
There were three policemen too, one of whom was mounted, doing their
|
|
best, under instructions from Stent, to keep the people back and
|
|
deter them from approaching the cylinder. There was some booing from
|
|
those more thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always
|
|
an occasion for noise and horse-play.
|
|
|
|
Stent and Ogilvy, anticipating some possibilities of a
|
|
collision, had telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as soon as
|
|
the Martians emerged, for the help of a company of soldiers to
|
|
protect these strange creatures from violence. After that they
|
|
returned to lead that ill-fated advance. The description of their
|
|
death, as it was seen by the crowd, tallies very closely with my own
|
|
impressions: the three puffs of green smoke, the deep humming note,
|
|
and the flashes of flame.
|
|
|
|
But that crowd of people had a far narrower escape than mine.
|
|
Only the fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower
|
|
part of the Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the parabolic
|
|
mirror been a few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the
|
|
tale. They saw the flashes and the men falling and an invisible
|
|
hand, as it were, lit the bushes as it hurried towards them through
|
|
the twilight. Then, with a whistling note that rose above the
|
|
droning of the pit, the beam swung close over their heads, lighting
|
|
the tops of the beech trees that line the road, and splitting the
|
|
bricks, smashing the windows, firing the window frames, and bringing
|
|
down in crumbling rain a portion of the gable of the house nearest
|
|
the corner.
|
|
|
|
In the sudden thud, hiss, and glare of the igniting trees, the
|
|
panic-stricken crowd seems to have swayed hesitatingly for some
|
|
moments. Sparks and burning twigs began to fall into the road, and
|
|
single leaves like puffs of flame. Hats and dresses caught fire.
|
|
Then came a crying from the common. There were shrieks and shouts,
|
|
and suddenly a mounted policeman came galloping through the confusion
|
|
with his hands clasped over his head, screaming.
|
|
|
|
"They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone
|
|
was turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way
|
|
to Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of
|
|
sheep. Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks
|
|
the crowd jammed, and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd
|
|
did not escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy,
|
|
were crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror and
|
|
the darkness.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 7: How I Reached Home
|
|
|
|
For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the
|
|
stress of blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather.
|
|
All about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that
|
|
pitiless sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing
|
|
overhead before it descended and smote me out of life. I came into
|
|
the road between the crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to
|
|
the crossroads.
|
|
|
|
At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence
|
|
of my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the
|
|
wayside. That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the
|
|
gasworks. I fell and lay still.
|
|
|
|
I must have remained there some time.
|
|
|
|
I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could
|
|
not clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from
|
|
me like a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away
|
|
from its fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three
|
|
real things before me--the immensity of the night and space and
|
|
nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of
|
|
death. Now it was as if something turned over, and the point of view
|
|
altered abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one state of
|
|
mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day again--a
|
|
decent ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my
|
|
flight, the starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream. I
|
|
asked myself had these latter things indeed happened? I could not
|
|
credit it.
|
|
|
|
I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge.
|
|
My mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of
|
|
their strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over
|
|
the arch, and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared.
|
|
Beside him ran a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I
|
|
was minded to speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting
|
|
with a meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.
|
|
|
|
Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white,
|
|
firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying
|
|
south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of
|
|
people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little
|
|
row of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real
|
|
and so familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic!
|
|
Such things, I told myself, could not be.
|
|
|
|
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far
|
|
my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense
|
|
of detachment from myself and the world about me, I seem to watch it
|
|
all from the outsider from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of
|
|
time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This
|
|
feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to
|
|
my dream.
|
|
|
|
But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and
|
|
the swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise
|
|
of business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all
|
|
alight. I stopped at the group of people.
|
|
|
|
"What news from the common?" said I.
|
|
|
|
There were two men and a woman at the gate.
|
|
|
|
"Eh?" said one of the men, turning.
|
|
|
|
"What news from the common?" I said.
|
|
|
|
"Ain't yer just been there?" asked the men.
|
|
|
|
"People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over
|
|
the gate. "What's it all abart?"
|
|
|
|
"Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the creatures
|
|
from Mars?"
|
|
|
|
"Quite enough," said the woman over the gate. "Thenks"; and all
|
|
three of them laughed.
|
|
|
|
I felt foolish, and angry. I tried and found I could not tell
|
|
them what I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.
|
|
|
|
"You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home.
|
|
|
|
I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went
|
|
into the dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I
|
|
could collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen.
|
|
The dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and
|
|
remained neglected on the table while I told my story.
|
|
|
|
"There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had aroused;
|
|
"they are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep
|
|
the pit and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out
|
|
of it.... But the horror of them!"
|
|
|
|
"Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her
|
|
hand on mine.
|
|
|
|
"Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think he may be lying dead there!"
|
|
|
|
My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I
|
|
saw how deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.
|
|
|
|
"They may come here," she said again and again.
|
|
|
|
I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.
|
|
|
|
"They can scarcely move," I said.
|
|
|
|
I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy
|
|
had told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing
|
|
themselves on the earth. In particular I laid stress on the
|
|
gravitational difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of
|
|
gravity is three times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian,
|
|
therefore, would weigh three times more on Mars, albeit his muscular
|
|
strength would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to
|
|
him. That, indeed, was the general opinion. Both The Times and the
|
|
Daily Telegraph, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and
|
|
both overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.
|
|
|
|
The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more
|
|
oxygen or far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than
|
|
does Mars. The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon
|
|
the Martians indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased
|
|
weight of their bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked
|
|
the fact that such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed
|
|
was quite able to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.
|
|
|
|
But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my
|
|
reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine
|
|
and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of
|
|
reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and
|
|
secure.
|
|
|
|
"They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my
|
|
wineglass. "They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with
|
|
terror. Perhaps they expected to find no living things-- certainly
|
|
no intelligent living things.
|
|
|
|
"A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to the worst,
|
|
will kill them all."
|
|
|
|
The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my
|
|
perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner
|
|
table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet
|
|
anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white
|
|
cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days
|
|
even philosophical writers had many little luxuries-- the crimson
|
|
purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end
|
|
of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's
|
|
rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.
|
|
|
|
So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it
|
|
in his nest and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless
|
|
sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death
|
|
tomorrow, my dear."
|
|
|
|
I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was
|
|
to eat for very many strange and terrible days.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 8: Friday Night
|
|
|
|
The most extraordinary thing to my mind, of all the strange and
|
|
wonderful things that happened upon that Friday, was the dovetailing
|
|
of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first
|
|
beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social
|
|
order headlong. If on Friday night you had taken a pair of compasses
|
|
and drawn a circle with a radius of five miles round the Woking sand
|
|
pits, I doubt if you would have had one human being outside it,
|
|
unless it were some relation of Stent or of the three or four
|
|
cyclists or London people lying dead on the common, whose emotions or
|
|
habits were at all affected by the new-comers. Many people had heard
|
|
of the cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but
|
|
it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany
|
|
would have done.
|
|
|
|
In London that night poor Henderson's telegram describing the
|
|
gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his
|
|
evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and receiving
|
|
no reply--the man was killed--decided not to print a special edition.
|
|
|
|
Even within the five-mile circle the great majority of people
|
|
were inert. I have already described the behaviour of the men and
|
|
women to whom I spoke. All over the district people were dining and
|
|
supping; working men were gardening after the labours of the day,
|
|
children were being put to bed, young people were wandering through
|
|
the lanes love-making, students sat over their books.
|
|
|
|
Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and
|
|
dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger,
|
|
or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl of
|
|
excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most
|
|
part the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went
|
|
on as it had done for countless years--as though no planet Mars
|
|
existed in the sky. Even at Woking station and Horsell and Chobham
|
|
that was the case.
|
|
|
|
In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping and
|
|
going on, others were shunting on the sidings, passengers were
|
|
alighting and waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most
|
|
ordinary way. A boy from the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly,
|
|
was selling papers with the afternoon's news. The ringing impact of
|
|
trucks, the sharp whistle of the engines from the junction, mingled
|
|
with their shouts of "Men from Mars!" Excited men came into the
|
|
station about nine o'clock with incredible tidings, and caused no
|
|
more disturbance than drunkards might have done. People rattling
|
|
Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage windows,
|
|
and saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from the
|
|
direction of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving
|
|
across the stars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath
|
|
fire was happening. It was only round the edge of the common that
|
|
any disturbance was perceptible. There were half a dozen villas
|
|
burning on the Woking border. There were lights in all the houses on
|
|
the common side of the three villages, and the people there kept
|
|
awake till dawn.
|
|
|
|
A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and going but
|
|
the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell bridges. One or
|
|
two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the
|
|
darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never
|
|
returned, for now and again a light-ray, like the beam of a warships'
|
|
searchlight, swept the common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow.
|
|
Save for such, that big area of common was silent and desolate, and
|
|
the charred bodies lay about on it all night under the stars, and all
|
|
the next day. A noise of hammering from the pit was heard by many
|
|
people.
|
|
|
|
So you have the state of things on Friday night. In the centre,
|
|
sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart,
|
|
was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around
|
|
it was a patch of silent common, smouldering in places, and with a
|
|
few dark, dimly seen objects lying in contorted attitudes here and
|
|
there. Here and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a
|
|
fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation
|
|
had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life
|
|
still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war
|
|
that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy
|
|
brain, had still to develop.
|
|
|
|
All night long the Martians were hammering and stirring,
|
|
sleepless, indefatigable, at work upon the machines they were making
|
|
ready, and ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up
|
|
to the starlit sky.
|
|
|
|
About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and
|
|
deployed along the edge of the common to form a cordon. Later a
|
|
second company marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of
|
|
the common. Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on
|
|
the common earlier in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to
|
|
be missing. The colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge
|
|
and was busy questioning the crowd at midnight. The military
|
|
authorities were certainly alive to the seriousness of the business.
|
|
About eleven, the next morning's papers were able to say, a squadron
|
|
of hussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of the Cardigan
|
|
regiment started from Aldershot.
|
|
|
|
A few seconds after midnight the crowd in the Chertsey road,
|
|
Woking, saw a star fall from heaven into the pine woods to the
|
|
northwest. It had a greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness
|
|
like summer lightning. This was the second cylinder.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 9: The Fighting Begins
|
|
|
|
Saturday lives in my memory as a day of suspense. It was a day
|
|
of lassitude too, hot and close, with, I am told, a rapidly
|
|
fluctuating barometer. I had slept but little, though my wife had
|
|
succeeded in sleeping, and I rose early. I went into my garden
|
|
before breakfast and stood listening, but towards the common there
|
|
was nothing stirring but a lark.
|
|
|
|
The milkman came as usual. I heard the rattle of his chariot,
|
|
and I went round to the side gate to ask the latest news. He told me
|
|
that during the night the Martians had been surrounded by troops, and
|
|
that guns were expected.
|
|
|
|
Then--a familiar, reassuring note--I heard a train running
|
|
towards Woking.
|
|
|
|
"They aren't to be killed," said the milkman, "if that can
|
|
possibly be avoided."
|
|
|
|
I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and
|
|
then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning.
|
|
My neighbour was of opinion that the troops would be able to capture
|
|
or to destroy the Martians during the day.
|
|
|
|
"Its a pity they make themselves so unapproachable," he said.
|
|
"It would be curious to know how they live on another planet; we
|
|
might learn a thing or two."
|
|
|
|
He came up to the fence and extended a handful of strawberries,
|
|
for his gardening was as generous as it was enthusiastic. At the
|
|
same time he told me of the burning of the pine woods about the
|
|
Byfleet Golf Links.
|
|
|
|
"They say," said he, "that there's another of those blessed
|
|
things fallen there--number two. But one's enough, surely. This
|
|
lot'll cost the insurance people a pretty penny before everything's
|
|
settled." He laughed with an air of the greatest good humour as he
|
|
said this. The woods, he said, were still burning, and pointed out a
|
|
haze of smoke to me. "They will be hot under foot for days, on
|
|
account of the thick soil of pine needles and turf," he said, and
|
|
then grew serious over "poor Ogilvy."
|
|
|
|
After breakfast, instead of working, I decided to walk down
|
|
towards the common. Under the railway bridge I found a group of
|
|
soldiers--sappers, I think, men in small round caps, dirty red
|
|
Jackets unbuttoned, and showing their blue shirts, dark trousers, and
|
|
boots coming to the calf. They told me no one was allowed over the
|
|
canal, and, looking along the road towards the bridge, I saw one of
|
|
the Gardigan men standing sentinel there. I talked with these
|
|
soldiers for a time; I told them of my sight of the Martians on the
|
|
previous evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and they had
|
|
but the vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with questions.
|
|
They said that they did not know who had authorised the movements of
|
|
the troops; their idea was that a dispute had arisen at the Horse
|
|
Guards. The ordinary sapper is a great deal better educated than the
|
|
common soldier, and they discussed the peculiar conditions of the
|
|
possible fight with some acuteness. I described the Heat-Ray to
|
|
them, and they began to argue among themselves.
|
|
|
|
"Crawl up under cover and rush 'em, say I," said one.
|
|
|
|
"Get aht!" said another. "What's cover against this 'ere 'eat?
|
|
Sticks to cook yer! What we got to do is to go as near as the
|
|
ground'll let us, and then drive a trench."
|
|
|
|
"Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to ha'
|
|
been born a rabbit, Snippy."
|
|
|
|
" 'Ain't they got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly--a
|
|
little, contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe.
|
|
|
|
I repeated my description.
|
|
|
|
"Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls `em. Talk about
|
|
fishers of men--fighters of fish it is this time!"
|
|
|
|
"It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the first
|
|
speaker.
|
|
|
|
"Why not shell the darned things strite off and finish 'em?"
|
|
said the little dark man. "You carn tell what they might do."
|
|
|
|
"Where's your shells?" said the first speaker. "There ain't no
|
|
time. Do it in a rush, that's my tip, and do it at once."
|
|
|
|
So they discussed it. After a while I left them, and went on to
|
|
the railway station to get as many morning papers as I could.
|
|
|
|
But I will not weary the reader with a description of that long
|
|
morning and of the longer afternoon. I did not succeed in getting a
|
|
glimpse of the common, for even Horsell and Chobham church towers
|
|
were in the hands of the military authorities. The soldiers I
|
|
addressed didn't know anything; the officers were mysterious as well
|
|
as busy. I found people in the town quite secure again in the
|
|
presence of the military, and I heard for the first time from
|
|
Marshall, the tobacconist, that his son was among the dead on the
|
|
common. The soldiers had made the people on the outskirts of Horsell
|
|
lock up and leave their houses.
|
|
|
|
I got back to lunch about two, very tired, for, as I have said,
|
|
the day was extremely hot and dull; and in order to refresh myself I
|
|
took a cold bath in the afternoon. About half past four I went up to
|
|
the railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers
|
|
had contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of
|
|
Scent, Henderson, Ogilvy, and the others. But there was little I
|
|
didn't know. The Martians did not show an inch of themselves. They
|
|
seemed busy in their pit, and there was a sound of hammering and an
|
|
almost continuous streamer of smoke. Apparently they were busy
|
|
getting ready for a struggle. "Fresh attempts have been made to
|
|
signal, but without success," was the stereotyped formula of the
|
|
papers. A sapper told me it was done by a man in a ditch with a flag
|
|
on a long pole. The Martians took as much notice of such advances as
|
|
we should of the lowing of a cow.
|
|
|
|
I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this
|
|
preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent,
|
|
and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my
|
|
schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a
|
|
fair fight to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit
|
|
of theirs.
|
|
|
|
About three o'clock there began the thud of a gun at measured
|
|
intervals from Chertsey or Addlerstone. I learned that the
|
|
smouldering pine wood into which the second cylinder had fallen was
|
|
being shelled, in the hope of destroying that object before it
|
|
opened. It was only about five, however, that a field gun reached
|
|
Chobham for use against the first body of Martians.
|
|
|
|
About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the
|
|
summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering
|
|
upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and
|
|
immediately after a gust of firing. Close on the heels of that came
|
|
a violent, rattling crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground;
|
|
and, starting out upon the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about
|
|
the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the
|
|
little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the
|
|
mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked
|
|
as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our
|
|
chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it
|
|
came clattering down the tiles and made a heap of broken red
|
|
fragments upon the flower bed by my study window.
|
|
|
|
I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of
|
|
Maybury Hill must be within range of the Martians' Heat-Ray now that
|
|
the college was cleared out of the way.
|
|
|
|
At that I gripped my wife's arm, and without ceremony ran her
|
|
out into the road. Then I fetched out the servant, telling her I
|
|
would go upstairs myself for the box she was clamouring for.
|
|
|
|
"We can't possibly stay here," I said; and as I spoke the firing
|
|
reopened for a moment upon the common.
|
|
|
|
"But where are we to go?" said my wife in terror.
|
|
|
|
I thought, perplexed. Then I remembered her cousins at
|
|
Leatherhead.
|
|
|
|
"Leatherhead!" I shouted above the sudden noise.
|
|
|
|
She looked away from me downhill. The people were coming out of
|
|
their houses, astonished.
|
|
|
|
"How are we to get to Leatherhead?" she said.
|
|
|
|
Down the hill I saw a bevy of hussars ride under the railway
|
|
bridge; three galloped through the open gates of the Oriental
|
|
college; two others dismounted, and began running from house to
|
|
house. The sun, shining through the smoke that drove up from the
|
|
tops of the trees, seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid
|
|
light upon everything.
|
|
|
|
"Stop here," said I; "you are safe here"; and I started off at
|
|
once for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dog
|
|
cart. I ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this
|
|
side of the hill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite
|
|
unaware of what was going on behind his house. A man stood with his
|
|
back to me, talking to him.
|
|
|
|
"I must have a pound," said the landlord, "and I've no one to
|
|
drive it."
|
|
|
|
"I'll give you two," said I, over the stranger's shoulder.
|
|
|
|
"What for?"
|
|
|
|
"And I'll bring it back by midnight," I said.
|
|
|
|
"Lord!" said the landlord; "what's the hurry? I'm selling my
|
|
bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What's going on
|
|
now?"
|
|
|
|
I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured
|
|
the dog cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent
|
|
that the landlord should leave his. I took care to have the cart
|
|
there and then, drove it off down the road, and, leaving it in charge
|
|
of my wife and servant, rushed into my house and packed a few
|
|
valuables, such plate as we had, and so forth. The beech trees below
|
|
the house were burning while I did this, and the palings up the road
|
|
glowed red. While I was occupied in this way, one of the dismounted
|
|
hussars came running up. He was going from house to house, warning
|
|
people to leave. He was going on as I came out of my front door,
|
|
lugging my treasures, done up in a tablecloth. I shouted after him:
|
|
|
|
"What news?"
|
|
|
|
He turned, stared, bawled something about "crawling out in a
|
|
thing like a dish cover," and ran on to the gate of the house at the
|
|
crest. A sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him
|
|
for a moment. I ran to my neighbour's door and rapped to satisfy
|
|
myself of what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with
|
|
him and had locked up their house. I went in again, according to my
|
|
promise, to get my servant's box, lugged it out, clapped it beside
|
|
her on the tail of the dog cart, and then caught the reins and jumped
|
|
up into the driver's seat beside my wife. In another moment we were
|
|
clear of the smoke and noise, and spanking down the opposite slope of
|
|
Maybury Hill towards Old Woking.
|
|
|
|
In front was a quiet, sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead on
|
|
either side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its swinging sign.
|
|
I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the bottom of the hill I
|
|
turned my head to look at the hillside I was leaving. Thick
|
|
streamers of black smoke shot with threads of red fire were driving
|
|
up into the still air, and throwing dark shadows upon the green
|
|
treetops eastward. The smoke already extended far away to the east
|
|
and west--to the Byfleet pine woods eastward, and to Woking on the
|
|
west. The road was dotted with people running towards us. And very
|
|
faint now, but very distinct through the hot, quiet air, one heard
|
|
the whirr of a machine-gun that, was presently stilled, and an
|
|
intermittent cracking of rifles. Apparently the Martians were
|
|
setting fire to everything within range of their Heat-Ray.
|
|
|
|
I am not an expert driver, and I had immediately to turn my
|
|
attention to the horse. When I looked back again the second hill had
|
|
hidden the black smoke. I slashed the horse with the whip, and gave
|
|
him a loose rein until Woking and Send lay between us and that
|
|
quivering tumult. I overtook and passed the doctor between Woking
|
|
and Send.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 10: In the Storm
|
|
|
|
Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill. The scent
|
|
of hay was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and
|
|
the hedges on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of
|
|
dog-roses. The heavy firing that had broken out while we were
|
|
driving down Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the
|
|
evening very peaceful and still. We got to Leatherhead without
|
|
misadventure about nine o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest
|
|
while I took supper with my cousins and commended my wife to their
|
|
care.
|
|
|
|
My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed
|
|
oppressed with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly,
|
|
pointing out that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer
|
|
heaviness, and at the utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but
|
|
she answered only in monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise
|
|
to the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in
|
|
Leatherhead that night. Would that I had! Her face, I remember, was
|
|
very white as we parted.
|
|
|
|
For my own part, I had been feverishly excited all day.
|
|
Something very like the war fever that occasionally runs through a
|
|
civilised community had got into my blood and in my heart I was not
|
|
so very sorry that I had to return to Maybury that night. I was even
|
|
afraid that that last fusillade I had heard might mean the
|
|
extermination of our invaders from Mars. I can best express my state
|
|
of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death.
|
|
|
|
It was nearly eleven when I started to return. The night was
|
|
unexpectedly dark; to me, walking out of the lighted passage of my
|
|
cousins' house, it seemed indeed black, and it was as hot and close
|
|
as the day. Overhead the clouds were driving fast, albeit not a
|
|
breath stirred the shrubs about us. My cousins' man lit both lamps.
|
|
Happily, I knew the road intimately. My wife stood in the light of
|
|
the doorway, and watched me until I jumped up into the dog cart.
|
|
Then abruptly she turned and went in, leaving my cousins side by side
|
|
wishing me good hap.
|
|
|
|
I was a little depressed at first, with the contagion of my
|
|
wife's fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At
|
|
that time I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the
|
|
evening's fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had
|
|
precipitated the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was
|
|
the way I returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along
|
|
the western horizon a blood-red glow, which, as I drew nearer, crept
|
|
slowly up the sky. The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm
|
|
mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.
|
|
|
|
Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or
|
|
so the village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an
|
|
accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people
|
|
stood with their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed.
|
|
I do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill,
|
|
nor do I know if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping
|
|
securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the
|
|
terror of the night.
|
|
|
|
From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of
|
|
the Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the
|
|
little hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and
|
|
the trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm
|
|
that was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford
|
|
Church behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with
|
|
its treetops and roofs black and sharp against the red.
|
|
|
|
Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me
|
|
and showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the
|
|
reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by
|
|
a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling
|
|
into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!
|
|
|
|
Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast,
|
|
danced out the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the
|
|
thunder burst like a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between
|
|
his teeth and bolted.
|
|
|
|
A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and
|
|
down this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in
|
|
as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The
|
|
thunderclaps, treading one on the heels of another and with a strange
|
|
crackling accompaniment, sounded more like the working of a gigantic
|
|
electric machine than the usual detonating reverberations. The
|
|
flickering light was blinding and confusing, and a thin hail smote
|
|
gustily at my face as I drove down the slope.
|
|
|
|
At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then
|
|
abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving
|
|
rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it
|
|
for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed
|
|
it to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision--a
|
|
moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight,
|
|
the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green
|
|
tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear
|
|
and sharp and bright.
|
|
|
|
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous
|
|
tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees,
|
|
and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering
|
|
metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel
|
|
dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling
|
|
with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly,
|
|
heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear
|
|
almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards
|
|
nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently
|
|
along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes
|
|
gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of
|
|
machinery on a tripod stand.
|
|
|
|
Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were
|
|
parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them;
|
|
they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod
|
|
appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was
|
|
galloping hard to meet it! At the sight of the second monster my
|
|
nerve went altogether. Not stopping to look again, I wrenched the
|
|
horse's head hard round to the right, and in another moment the dog
|
|
cart had heeled over upon the horse; the shafts smashed noisily, and
|
|
I was flung sideways and fell heavily into a shallow pool of water.
|
|
|
|
I crawled out almost immediately, and crouched, my feet still in
|
|
the water, under a clump of furze. The horse lay motionless (his
|
|
neck was broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the
|
|
black bulk of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel
|
|
still spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went
|
|
striding by me, and passed uphill towards Pyrford.
|
|
|
|
Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no
|
|
mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a
|
|
ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one
|
|
of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its
|
|
strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the
|
|
brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable
|
|
suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge
|
|
mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of
|
|
green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster
|
|
swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.
|
|
|
|
So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the
|
|
lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black shadows.
|
|
|
|
As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned
|
|
the thunder--"Aloo! Aloo!"--and in another minute it was with its
|
|
companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I
|
|
have no doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten
|
|
cylinders they had fired at us from Mars.
|
|
|
|
For some minutes I lay there in the rain and darkness watching,
|
|
by the intermittent light, these monstrous beings of metal moving
|
|
about in the distance over the hedge tops. A thin hail was now
|
|
beginning, and as it came and went their figures grew misty and then
|
|
flashed into clearness again. Now and then came a gap in the
|
|
lightning, and the night swallowed them up.
|
|
|
|
I was soaked with hail above and puddle water below. It was
|
|
some time before my blank astonishment would let me struggle up the
|
|
bank to a drier position, or think at all of my imminent peril.
|
|
|
|
Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter's hut of wood,
|
|
surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at
|
|
last, and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made
|
|
a run for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the
|
|
people hear (if there were any people inside), and after a time I
|
|
desisted, and, availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the
|
|
way, succeeded in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines,
|
|
into the pine wood towards Maybury.
|
|
|
|
Under cover of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards
|
|
my own house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath.
|
|
It was very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now
|
|
becoming infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a
|
|
torrent, fell in columns through the gaps in the heavy foliage.
|
|
|
|
If I had fully realised the meaning of all the things I had seen
|
|
I should have immediately worked my way round through Byfleet to
|
|
Street Cobham, and so gone back to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead.
|
|
But that night the strangeness of things about me, and my physical
|
|
wretchedness, prevented me, for I was bruised, weary, wet to the
|
|
skin, deafened and blinded by the storm.
|
|
|
|
I had a vague idea of going on to my own house, and that was as
|
|
much motive as I had. I staggered through the trees, fell into a
|
|
ditch and bruised my knees against a plant, and finally splashed out
|
|
into the lane that ran down from the College Arms. I say splashed,
|
|
for the storm water was sweeping the sand down the hill in a muddy
|
|
torrent. There in the darkness a man blundered into me and sent me
|
|
reeling back.
|
|
|
|
He gave a cry of terror, sprang sideways, and rushed on before I
|
|
could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. So heavy was the
|
|
stress of the storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to
|
|
win my way up the hill. I went close up to the fence on the left and
|
|
worked my way along its palings.
|
|
|
|
Near the top I stumbled upon something soft, and, by a flash of
|
|
lightning, saw between my feet a heap of black broadcloth and a pair
|
|
of boots. Before I could distinguish clearly how the man lay, the
|
|
flicker of light had passed. I stood over him waiting for the next
|
|
flash. When it came, I saw that he was a sturdy man, cheaply but not
|
|
shabbily dressed; his head was bent under his body, and he lay
|
|
crumpled up close to the fence, as though he had been flung violently
|
|
against it.
|
|
|
|
Overcoming the repugnance natural to one who had never before
|
|
touched a dead body, I stooped and turned him over to feel for his
|
|
heart. He was quite dead. Apparently his neck had been broken. The
|
|
lightning flashed for a third time, and his face leaped upon me. I
|
|
sprang to my feet. It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog, whose
|
|
conveyance I had taken.
|
|
|
|
I stepped over him gingerly and pushed on up the hill. I made
|
|
my way by the police station and the College Arms towards my own
|
|
house. Nothing was burning on the hillside, though from the common
|
|
there still came a red glare and a rolling tumult of ruddy smoke
|
|
beating up against the drenching hail. So far as I could see by the
|
|
flashes, the houses about me were mostly uninjured. By the College
|
|
Arms a dark heap lay in the road.
|
|
|
|
Down the bad towards Maybury Bridge there were voices and the
|
|
sound of feet, but I had not the courage to shout or to go to them.
|
|
I let myself in with my latchkey, closed, locked and bolted the door,
|
|
staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down. My imagination
|
|
was full of those striding metallic monsters, and of the dead body
|
|
smashed against the fence.
|
|
|
|
I crouched at the foot of the staircase with my back to the
|
|
wall, shivering violently.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 11: At the Window
|
|
|
|
I have already said that my storms of emotion have a trick of
|
|
exhausting themselves. After a time I discovered that I was cold and
|
|
wet, and with little pools of water about me on the stair carpet. I
|
|
got up almost mechanically, vent into the dining room and drank some
|
|
whiskey, and then I was moved to change my clothes.
|
|
|
|
After I had done that I went upstairs to my study, but why I did
|
|
so I do not know. The window of my study looks over the trees and
|
|
the railway towards Horsell Common. In the hurry of our departure
|
|
this window had been left open. The passage was dark, and, by
|
|
contrast with the picture the window frame enclosed, the side of the
|
|
room seemed impenetrably dark. I stopped short in the doorway.
|
|
|
|
The thunderstorm had passed. The towers of the Oriental College
|
|
and the pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a
|
|
vivid red glare, the common about the sand pits was visible. Across
|
|
the light, huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved busily to
|
|
and fro.
|
|
|
|
It seemed indeed as if the whole country in that direction was
|
|
on fire--a broad hillside set with minute tongues of flame, swaying
|
|
and writhing with the gusts of the dying storm, and throwing a red
|
|
reflection upon the cloud scud above. Every now and then a haze of
|
|
smoke from some nearer conflagration drove across the window and hid
|
|
the Martian shapes. I could not see what they were doing, nor the
|
|
clear form of them, nor recognise the black objects they were busied
|
|
upon. Neither could I see the nearer fire, though the reflections of
|
|
it danced on the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous
|
|
tang of burning was in the air.
|
|
|
|
I closed the door noiselessly and crept towards the window. As
|
|
I did so, the view opened out until, on the one hand, it reached to
|
|
the houses about Woking station, and on the other to the charred and
|
|
blackened pine woods of Byfleet. There was a light down below the
|
|
hill, on the railway, near the arch, and several of the houses along
|
|
the Maybury road and the streets near the station were glowing ruins.
|
|
The light upon the railway puzzled me at first; there were a black
|
|
heap and a vivid glare, and to the right of that a row of yellow
|
|
oblongs. Then I perceived this was a wrecked train, the fore part
|
|
smashed and on fire, the hinder carriages still upon the rails.
|
|
|
|
Between these three main centres of light--the houses, the
|
|
train, and the burning country towards Chobham stretched irregular
|
|
patches of dark country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly
|
|
glowing and smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that
|
|
black expanse set with fire. It reminded me, more than anything
|
|
else, of the Potteries at night. At first I could distinguish no
|
|
people at all, though I peered intently for them. Later I saw
|
|
against the light of Woking station a number of black figures
|
|
hurrying one after the other across the line.
|
|
|
|
And this was the little world in which I had been living
|
|
securely for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last
|
|
seven hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was
|
|
beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and
|
|
the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a
|
|
queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the
|
|
window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and
|
|
particularly at the three gigantic black things that were going to
|
|
and fro in the glare about the sand pits.
|
|
|
|
They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they
|
|
could be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was
|
|
impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing,
|
|
directing, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began
|
|
to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first
|
|
time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an
|
|
intelligent lower animal.
|
|
|
|
The storm had left the sky clear, and over the smoke of the
|
|
burning land the little fading pin point of Mars was dropping into
|
|
the west, when a soldier came into my garden. I heard a slight
|
|
scraping at the fence, and rousing myself from the lethargy that had
|
|
fallen upon me, I looked down and saw him dimly, clambering over the
|
|
palings. At the sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I
|
|
leaned out of the window eagerly.
|
|
|
|
"Hist!" said I, in a whisper.
|
|
|
|
He stopped astride of the fence in doubt. Then he came over and
|
|
across the lawn to the corner of the house. He bent down and stepped
|
|
softly.
|
|
|
|
"Who's there?" he said, also whispering, standing under the
|
|
window and peering up.
|
|
|
|
"Where are you going?" I asked.
|
|
|
|
"God knows."
|
|
|
|
"Are you trying to hide?"
|
|
|
|
"That's it."
|
|
|
|
"Come into the house," I said.
|
|
|
|
I went down, unfastened the door, and let him in, and locked the
|
|
door again. I could not see his face. He was hatless, and his coat
|
|
was unbuttoned.
|
|
|
|
"My God!" he said, as I drew him in.
|
|
|
|
"What has happened?" I asked.
|
|
|
|
"What hasn't?" In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture
|
|
of despair. "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out," he repeated
|
|
again and again.
|
|
|
|
He followed me, almost mechanically, into the dining room.
|
|
|
|
"Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a stiff dose.
|
|
|
|
He drank it. Then abruptly he sat down before the table, put
|
|
his head on his arms, and began to sob and weep like a little boy, in
|
|
a perfect passion of emotion, while I, with a curious forgetfulness
|
|
of my own recent despair, stood beside him, wondering.
|
|
|
|
It was a long time before he could steady his nerves to answer
|
|
my questions, and then he answered perplexingly and brokenly. He was
|
|
a driver in the artillery, and had only come into action about seven.
|
|
At that time firing was going on across the common, and it was said
|
|
the first party of Martians were crawling slowly towards their second
|
|
cylinder under cover of a metal shield.
|
|
|
|
Later this shield staggered up on tripod legs and became the
|
|
first of the fighting-machines I had seen. The gun he drove had been
|
|
unlimbered near Horsell, in order to command the sand pits, and its
|
|
arrival it was that had precipitated the action. As the limber
|
|
gunners went to the rear, his horse trod in a rabbit hole and came
|
|
down, throwing him into a depression of the ground. At the same
|
|
moment the gun exploded behind him, the ammunition blew up, there was
|
|
fire all about him, and he found himself lying under a heap of
|
|
charred dead men and dead horses.
|
|
|
|
"I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the fore
|
|
quarter of a horse atop of me. We'd been wiped out. And the
|
|
smell--good Lord! Like burnt meat! I was hurt across the back by
|
|
the fall of the horse, and there I had to lie until I felt better.
|
|
Just like parade it had been a minute before--then stumble, bang,
|
|
swish!
|
|
|
|
"Wiped out!" he said.
|
|
|
|
He had hid under the dead horse for a long time, peeping out
|
|
furtively across the common. The Cardigan men had tried a rush, in
|
|
skirmishing order, at the pit, simply to be swept out of existence.
|
|
Then the monster had risen to its feet, and had begun to walk
|
|
leisurely to and fro across the common among the few fugitives, with
|
|
its headlike hood turning about exactly like the head of a cowled
|
|
human being. A kind of arm carried a complicated metallic case,
|
|
about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this
|
|
there smoked the Heat-Ray.
|
|
|
|
In a few minutes there was, so far as the soldier could see, not
|
|
a living thing left upon the common, and every bush and tree upon it
|
|
that was not already a blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars
|
|
had been on the road beyond the curvature of the ground, and he saw
|
|
nothing of them. He heard the Maxims rattle for a time and then
|
|
become silent. The giant saved Woking station and its cluster of
|
|
houses until the last; then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to
|
|
bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut
|
|
off the Heat-Ray, and, turning its back upon the artilleryman, began
|
|
to waddle away towards the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the
|
|
second cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan built itself
|
|
up out of the pit.
|
|
|
|
The second monster followed the first, and at that the
|
|
artilleryman began to crawl very cautiously across the hot heather
|
|
ash towards Horsell. He managed to get alive into the ditch by the
|
|
side of the road, and so escaped to Woking. There his story became
|
|
ejaculatory. The place was impassable. It seems there were a few
|
|
people alive there, frantic for the most part, and many burned and
|
|
scalded. He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some almost
|
|
scorching heaps of broken wall as one of the Martian giants returned.
|
|
He saw this one pursue a man, catch him up in one of its steely
|
|
tentacles, and knock his head against the trunk of a pine tree. At
|
|
last, after nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got
|
|
over the railway embankment.
|
|
|
|
Since then he had been skulking along towards Maybury, in the
|
|
hope of getting out of danger Londonward. People were hiding in
|
|
trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors had made off towards
|
|
Woking village and Send. He had been consumed with thirst until he
|
|
found one of the water mains near the railway arch smashed, and the
|
|
water bubbling out like a spring upon the road.
|
|
|
|
That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew calmer
|
|
telling me and trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had
|
|
eaten no food since midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I
|
|
found some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the
|
|
room. We lit no lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever
|
|
and again our hands would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked,
|
|
things about us came darkly out of the darkness, and the trampled
|
|
bushes and broken rose trees outside the window grew distinct. It
|
|
would seem that a number of men or animals had rushed across the
|
|
lawn. I began to see his face, blackened and haggard, as no doubt
|
|
mine was also.
|
|
|
|
When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study,
|
|
and I looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley
|
|
had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where
|
|
flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless
|
|
ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees
|
|
that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the
|
|
pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had the
|
|
luck to escaped--a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse
|
|
there, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never before in the
|
|
history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so
|
|
universal. And shining with the growing light of the east, three of
|
|
the metallic giants stood about the pit, their cowls rotating as
|
|
though they were surveying the desolation they had made.
|
|
|
|
It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever and
|
|
again puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards
|
|
the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.
|
|
|
|
Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They became
|
|
pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
Chapter 12: What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
|
|
|
|
As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window from which
|
|
we had watched the Martians, and went very quietly downstairs.
|
|
|
|
The artilleryman agreed with me that the house was no place to
|
|
stay in. He proposed, he said, to make his way Londonward, and
|
|
thence rejoin his battery--No. 12, of the Horse Artillery. My plan
|
|
was to return at once to Leatherhead; and so greatly had the strength
|
|
of the Martians impressed me that I had determined to take my wife to
|
|
Newhaven, and go with her out of the country forthwith. For I
|
|
already perceived clearly that the country about London must
|
|
inevitably be the scene of a disastrous struggle before such
|
|
creatures as these could be destroyed.
|
|
|
|
Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder,
|
|
with its guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have
|
|
taken my chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman
|
|
dissuaded me: "Its no kindness to the right sort of wife," he said,
|
|
"to make her a widow"; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under
|
|
cover of the woods, northward as far as Street Chobham before I
|
|
parted with him. Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach
|
|
Leatherhead.
|
|
|
|
I should have started at once, but my companion had been in
|
|
active service and he knew better than that. He made me ransack the
|
|
house for a flask, which he filled with whiskey; and we lined every
|
|
available pocket with packets of biscuits and slices of meat. Then
|
|
we crept out of the house, and ran as quickly as we could down the
|
|
ill-made road by which I had come overnight. The houses seemed
|
|
deserted. In the road lay a group of three charred bodies close
|
|
together, struck dead by the Heat-Ray; and here and there were things
|
|
that people had dropped--a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the
|
|
like poor valuables. At the corner turning up towards the post
|
|
office a little cart, filled with boxes and furniture, and horseless,
|
|
heeled over on a broken wheel. A cash box had been hastily smashed
|
|
open and thrown under the debris.
|
|
|
|
Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none
|
|
of the houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had
|
|
shaved the chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did
|
|
not seem to be a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the
|
|
inhabitants had escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking
|
|
road--the road I had taken when I drove to Leatherhead or they had
|
|
hidden.
|
|
|
|
We went down the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden
|
|
now from the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of
|
|
the hill. We pushed through these towards the railway without
|
|
meeting a soul. The woods across the line were but the scarred and
|
|
blackened ruins of woods; for the most part the trees had fallen, but
|
|
a certain proportion still stood, dismal grey stems, with dark brown
|
|
foliage instead of green.
|
|
|
|
On our side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer
|
|
trees; it had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen
|
|
had been at work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay
|
|
in a clearing, with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its
|
|
engine. Hard by was a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a
|
|
breath of wind this morning, and everything was strangely still.
|
|
Even the birds were hushed, and as we hurried along I and the
|
|
artilleryman talked in whispers and looked now and again over our
|
|
shoulders. Once or twice we stopped to listen.
|
|
|
|
After a time we drew near the road, and as we did so we heard
|
|
the clatter of hoofs and saw through the tree stems three cavalry
|
|
soldiers riding slowly towards Woking. We hailed them, and they
|
|
halted while we hurried towards them. It was a lieutenant and a
|
|
couple of privates of the 8th Hussars, with a stand like a
|
|
theodolite, which the artilleryman told me was a heliograph.
|
|
|
|
"You are the first men I've seen coming this way this morning,"
|
|
said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?"
|
|
|
|
His voice and face were eager. The men behind him stared
|
|
curiously. The artilleryman jumped down the bank into the road and
|
|
saluted.
|
|
|
|
"Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to
|
|
rejoin battery, sir. You'll come in sight of the Martians, I expect,
|
|
about half a mile along this road."
|
|
|
|
"What the dickens are they like?" asked the lieutenant. "Giants
|
|
in armour, sir. Hundred feet high. Three legs and a body like
|
|
aluminium, with a mighty great head in a hood, sir.
|
|
|
|
"Get out!" said the lieutenant. "What confounded nonsense!"
|
|
|
|
"You'll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots
|
|
fire and strikes you dead."
|
|
|
|
"What d'ye mean--a gun?"
|
|
|
|
"No, sir," and the artilleryman began a vivid account of the
|
|
Heat-Ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted him and looked
|
|
up at me. I was still standing on the bank by the side of the road.
|
|
|
|
"It's perfectly true," I said.
|
|
|
|
"Well," said the lieutenant, "I suppose it's my business to see
|
|
it too. Look here"--to the artilleryman--"we're detailed here
|
|
clearing people out of their houses. You'd better go along and
|
|
report yourself to Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you
|
|
know. He's at Weybridge. Know the way?"
|
|
|
|
"I do," I said; and he turned his horse southward again.
|
|
|
|
"Half a mile, you say?" said he.
|
|
|
|
"At most," I answered, and pointed over the treetops southward.
|
|
He thanked me and rode on, and we saw them no more.
|
|
|
|
Farther along we came upon a group of three women and two
|
|
children in the road, busy clearing out a labourer's cottage. They
|
|
had got hold of a little hand truck, and were piling it up with
|
|
unclean-looking bundles and shabby furniture. They were all too
|
|
assiduously engaged to talk to us as we passed.
|
|
|
|
By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the
|
|
country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight. We were far
|
|
beyond the range of the Heat-Ray there, and had it not been for the
|
|
silent desertion of some of the houses, the stirring movement of
|
|
packing in others, and the knot of soldiers standing on the bridge
|
|
over the railway and staring down the line towards Woking, the day
|
|
would have seemed very like any other Sunday.
|
|
|
|
Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the
|
|
road to Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw,
|
|
across a stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing nearly
|
|
at equal distances pointing towards Woking. The gunners stood by the
|
|
guns waiting, and the ammunition waggons were at a business-like
|
|
distance. The men stood almost as if under inspection.
|
|
|
|
"That's, good," said I. "They will get one fair shot, at any
|
|
rate.
|
|
|
|
The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.
|
|
|
|
"I shall go on," he said.
|
|
|
|
Farther on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a
|
|
number of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart,
|
|
and more guns behind.
|
|
|
|
"It's bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow," said the
|
|
artilleryman. "They 'aven't seen that fire-beam yet."
|
|
|
|
The officers who were not actively engaged stood and stared over
|
|
the treetops southwestward, and the men digging would stop every now
|
|
and again to stare in the same direction.
|
|
|
|
Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars,
|
|
some of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about.
|
|
Three or four black government waggons, with crosses in white
|
|
circles, and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded
|
|
in the village street. There were scores of people, most of them
|
|
sufficiently sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The
|
|
soldiers were having the greatest difficulty in making them realise
|
|
the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with
|
|
a huge box and a score or more of flower pots containing orchids,
|
|
angrily expostulating with the corporal who would leave them behind.
|
|
I stopped and gripped his arm.
|
|
|
|
"Do you know what's over there?" I said, pointing at the pine
|
|
tops that hid the Martians.
|
|
|
|
"Eh?" said he, turning. "I was explainin' these is vallyble."
|
|
|
|
"Death!" I shouted. "Death is coming! Death!" and leaving him
|
|
to digest that if he could, I hurried on after the artilleryman. At
|
|
the corner I looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still
|
|
standing by his box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and
|
|
staring vaguely over the trees.
|
|
|
|
No one in Weybridge could tell us where the headquarters were
|
|
established; the whole place was in such confusion as I had never
|
|
seen in any town before. Carts, carriages everywhere, the most
|
|
astonishing miscellany of conveyances and horseflesh. The
|
|
respectable inhabitants of the place, men in golf and boating
|
|
costumes, wives prettily dressed, were packing, river-side loafers
|
|
energetically helping, children excited, and, for the most part,
|
|
highly delighted at this astonishing variation of their Sunday
|
|
experiences. In the midst of it all the worthy vicar was very
|
|
pluckily holding an early celebration, and his bell was jangling out
|
|
above the excitement.
|
|
|
|
I and the artilleryman, seated on the step of the drinking
|
|
fountain, made a very passable meal upon what we had brought with us.
|
|
Patrols of soldiers--here no longer hussars, but grenadiers in
|
|
white--were warning people to move now or to take refuge in their
|
|
cellars as soon as the firing began. We saw as we crossed the
|
|
railway bridge that a growing crowd of people had assembled in and
|
|
about the railway station, and the swarming platform was piled with
|
|
boxes and packages. The ordinary traffic had been stopped, I
|
|
believe, in order to allow of the passage of troops and guns to
|
|
Chertsey, and I have heard since that a savage struggle occurred for
|
|
places in the special trains that were put on at a later hour.
|
|
|
|
We remained at Weybridge until midday, and at that hour we found
|
|
ourselves at the place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames
|
|
join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a
|
|
little cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are
|
|
to be hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the
|
|
Shepperton side was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of
|
|
Shepperton Church--it has been replaced by a spire--rose above the
|
|
trees.
|
|
|
|
Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet
|
|
the flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more
|
|
people than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross.
|
|
People came panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife
|
|
were even carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of
|
|
their household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try
|
|
to get away from Shepperton station.
|
|
|
|
There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting. The
|
|
idea people seemed to have here was that the Martians were simply
|
|
formidable human beings, who might attack and sack the town, to be
|
|
certainly destroyed in the end. Every now and then people would
|
|
glance nervously across the Wey, at the meadows towards Chertsey, but
|
|
everything over there was still.
|
|
|
|
Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed,
|
|
everything was quiet, in vivid contrast with the Surrey side. The
|
|
people who landed there from the boats went tramping off down the
|
|
lane. The big ferryboat had just made a journey. Three or four
|
|
soldiers stood on the lawn of the inn, staring and jesting at the
|
|
fugitives, without offering to help. The inn was closed, as it was
|
|
now within prohibited hours.
|
|
|
|
"What's that?" cried a boatman, and "Shut up, you fool!" said a
|
|
man near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time
|
|
from the direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud--the sound of a gun.
|
|
|
|
The fighting was beginning. Almost immediately unseen batteries
|
|
across the river to our right, unseen because of the trees, took up
|
|
the chorus, firing heavily one after the other. A woman screamed.
|
|
Everyone stood arrested by the sudden stir of battle, near us and yet
|
|
invisible to us. Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows
|
|
feeding unconcernedly for the most part and silvery pollard willows
|
|
motionless in the warm sunlight.
|
|
|
|
"The sojers'll stop 'em," said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A
|
|
haziness rose over the treetops.
|
|
|
|
Then suddenly we saw a rush of smoke far away up the river, a
|
|
puff of smoke that jerked up into the air and hung; and forthwith the
|
|
ground heaved under foot and a heavy explosion shook the air,
|
|
smashing two or three windows in the houses near, and leaving us
|
|
astonished.
|
|
|
|
"Here they are!" shouted a man in a blue jersey. "Yonder!
|
|
D'yer see them? Yonder!"
|
|
|
|
Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the
|
|
armoured Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across
|
|
the flat meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding
|
|
hurriedly towards the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at
|
|
first, going with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.
|
|
|
|
Then, advancing obliquely towards us, came a fifth. Their
|
|
armoured bodies glittered in the sun as they swept swiftly forward
|
|
upon the guns, growing rapidly larger as they drew nearer. One on
|
|
the extreme left, the remotest that is, flourished a huge case high
|
|
in the air, and the ghostly, terrible Heat-Ray I had already seen on
|
|
Friday night smote towards Chertsey, and struck the town.
|
|
|
|
At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the
|
|
crowd near the water's edge seemed to me to be for a moment
|
|
horror-struck. There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence.
|
|
Then a hoarse murmur and a movement of feet--a splashing from the
|
|
water. A man, too frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on
|
|
his shoulder, swung round and sent me staggering with a blow from the
|
|
corner of his burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed
|
|
past me. I turned with the rush of the people, but I was not too
|
|
terrified for thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get
|
|
under water! That was it!
|
|
|
|
"Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded.
|
|
|
|
I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian,
|
|
rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water.
|
|
Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping
|
|
out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and
|
|
slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet
|
|
scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely
|
|
a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the
|
|
surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the
|
|
river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing
|
|
hastily on both sides of the river.
|
|
|
|
But the Martian machine took no more notice for the moment of
|
|
the people running this way and that than a man would of the
|
|
confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has kicked. When,
|
|
half suffocated, I raised my head above water, the Martian's hood
|
|
pointed at the batteries that were still firing across the river, and
|
|
as it advanced it swung loose what must have been the generator of
|
|
the Heat-Ray.
|
|
|
|
In another moment it was on the bank, and in a stride wading
|
|
halfway across. The knees of its foremost legs bent at the farther
|
|
bank, and in another moment it had raised itself to its full height
|
|
again, close to the village of Shepperton. Forthwith the six guns
|
|
which, unknown to anyone on the right bank, had been hidden behind
|
|
the outskirts of that village, fired simultaneously. The sudden near
|
|
concussion, the last close upon the first, made my heart jump. The
|
|
monster was already raising the case generating the Heat-Ray as the
|
|
first shell burst six yards above the hood.
|
|
|
|
I gave a cry of astonishment I saw and thought nothing of the
|
|
other four Martian monsters; my attention was riveted upon the nearer
|
|
incident. Simultaneously two other shells burst in the air near the
|
|
body as the hood twisted round in time to receive, but not in time to
|
|
dodge, the fourth shell.
|
|
|
|
The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood
|
|
bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red
|
|
flesh and glittering metal.
|
|
|
|
"Hit!" shouted I, with something between a scream and a cheer.
|
|
|
|
I heard answering shouts from the people in the water about me.
|
|
I could have leaped out of the water with that momentary exultation.
|
|
|
|
The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did
|
|
not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
|
|
heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
|
|
rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
|
|
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
|
|
the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
|
|
device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a
|
|
straight line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of
|
|
Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram
|
|
might have done, swerved aside, blundered on, and collapsed with
|
|
tremendous force into the river out of my sight.
|
|
|
|
A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam,
|
|
mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of
|
|
the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into
|
|
steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but
|
|
almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw
|
|
people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting
|
|
faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian's collapse.
|
|
|
|
For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent
|
|
need of self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water,
|
|
pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the
|
|
bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the
|
|
confusion of the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight
|
|
downstream, lying across the river, and for the most part submerged.
|
|
|
|
Thick clouds of steam were pouring off the wreckage, and through
|
|
the tumultuously whirling wisps I could see, intermittently and
|
|
vaguely, the gigantic limbs churning the water and flinging a splash
|
|
and spray of mud and froth into the air. The tentacles swayed and
|
|
struck like living arms, and, save for the helpless purposelessness
|
|
of these movements, it was as if some wounded thing were struggling
|
|
for its life amid the waves. Enormous quantities of a ruddy-brown
|
|
fluid were spurting up in noisy jets out of the machine.
|
|
|
|
My attention was diverted from this death flurry by a furious
|
|
yelling, like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing
|
|
towns. A man, knee-deep near the towing path, shouted inaudibly to
|
|
me and pointed. Looking back, I saw the other Martians advancing
|
|
with gigantic strides down the riverbank from the direction of
|
|
Chertsey. The Shepperton guns spoke this time unavailingly.
|
|
|
|
At that I ducked at once under water, and, holding my breath
|
|
until movement was an agony, blundered painfully ahead under the
|
|
surface as long as I could. The water was in a tumult about me, and
|
|
rapidly growing hotter.
|
|
|
|
When for a moment I raised my head to take breath and throw the
|
|
hair and water from my eyes, the steam was rising in a whirling white
|
|
fog that at first hid the Martians altogether. The noise was
|
|
deafening. Then I saw them dimly, colossal figures of grey,
|
|
magnified by the mist. They had passed by me, and two were stooping
|
|
over the frothing, tumultuous ruins of their comrade.
|
|
|
|
The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps
|
|
two hundreds yards from me, the other towards Laleham. The
|
|
generators of the Heat-Rays waved high, and the hissing beams smote
|
|
down this way and that.
|
|
|
|
The air was full of sound, a deafening and confusing conflict of
|
|
noises--the clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of falling
|
|
houses, the thud of trees, fences, sheds flashing into flame, and the
|
|
crackling and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was leaping up to
|
|
mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and
|
|
fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent
|
|
white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames. The
|
|
nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy,
|
|
faint, and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them going to
|
|
and fro.
|
|
|
|
For a moment perhaps I stood there, breast-high in the almost
|
|
boiling water, dumbfounded at my position, hopeless of escape.
|
|
Through the reek I could see the people who had been with me in the
|
|
river scrambling out of the water through the reeds, like little
|
|
frogs hurrying through grass from the advance of a man, or running to
|
|
and fro in utter dismay on the towing path.
|
|
|
|
Then suddenly the white flashes of the Heat-Ray came leaping
|
|
towards me. The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and
|
|
darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar. The Ray
|
|
flickered up and down the towing path, licking off the people who ran
|
|
this way and that, and came down to the water's edge not fifty yards
|
|
from where I stood. It swept across the river to Shepperton, and the
|
|
water in its track rose in a boiling weal crested with steam. I
|
|
turned shoreward.
|
|
|
|
In another moment the huge wave, well-nigh at the boiling-point,
|
|
had rushed upon me. I screamed aloud, and scalded, half blinded,
|
|
agonised, I staggered through the leaping, hissing water towards the
|
|
shore. Had my foot stumbled, it would have been the end. I fell
|
|
helplessly, in full sight of the Martians, upon the broad, bare
|
|
gravelly spit that runs down to mark the angle of the Wey and Thames.
|
|
I expected nothing but death.
|
|
|
|
I have a dim memory of the foot of a Martian coming down within
|
|
a score of yards of my head, driving straight into the loose gravel,
|
|
whirling it this way and that, and lifting again; of a long suspense,
|
|
and then of the four carrying the debris of their comrade between
|
|
them, now clear and presently faint through a veil of smoke, receding
|
|
interminably, as it seemed to me, across a vast space of river and
|
|
meadow. And then, very slowly; I realised that by a miracle I had
|
|
escaped.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 14: In London
|
|
|
|
My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at
|
|
Woking. He was a medical student, working for an imminent
|
|
examination, and he heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday
|
|
morning. The morning papers on Saturday contained, in addition to
|
|
lengthy special articles on the planet Mars, on life in the planets,
|
|
and so forth, a brief and vaguely worded telegram, all the more
|
|
striking for its brevity.
|
|
|
|
The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd had killed a
|
|
number of people with a quick-firing gun so the story ran. The
|
|
telegram concluded with the words "Formidable as they seem to be, the
|
|
Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen,
|
|
and, indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the
|
|
relative strength of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last
|
|
text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
|
|
|
|
Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class, to
|
|
which my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there
|
|
were no signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The
|
|
afternoon papers puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had
|
|
nothing to tell beyond the movements of troops about the common, and
|
|
the burning of the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until
|
|
eight. Then the St. James's Gazette in an extra-special edition,
|
|
announced the bare fact of the interruption of telegraphic
|
|
communication. This was thought to be due to the falling of burning
|
|
pine trees across the line. Nothing more of the fighting was known
|
|
that night, the night of my drive to Leatherhead and back.
|
|
|
|
My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the
|
|
description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from
|
|
my house. He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in
|
|
order, as he says, to see the Things before they were killed. He
|
|
despatched a telegram, which never reached me, about four o'clock,
|
|
and spent the evening at a music hall.
|
|
|
|
In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and
|
|
my brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the
|
|
midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an
|
|
accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The
|
|
nature of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway
|
|
authorities did not clearly know at that time. There was very little
|
|
excitement in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that
|
|
anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction
|
|
had occurred, were running the theatre trains which usually passed
|
|
through Woking round by Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy
|
|
making the necessary arrangements to alter the route of the
|
|
Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal
|
|
newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to
|
|
whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview
|
|
him. Few people, excepting the railway officials, connected the
|
|
breakdown with the Martians.
|
|
|
|
I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday
|
|
morning "all London was electrified by the news from Woking." As a
|
|
matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that every extravagant
|
|
phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the
|
|
panic of Monday morning. Those who did took some time to realise all
|
|
that the hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The
|
|
majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.
|
|
|
|
The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in
|
|
the Londoner's mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of
|
|
course in the papers, that they could read without any personal
|
|
tremors: "About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the
|
|
cylinder, and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have
|
|
completely wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and
|
|
massacred an entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details
|
|
are known. Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour;
|
|
the field guns have been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been
|
|
galloping into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly
|
|
towards Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey,
|
|
and earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward."
|
|
That was how the Sunday Sun put it, and a clever and remarkably
|
|
prompt "handbook" article in the Referee compared the affair to a
|
|
menagerie suddenly let loose in a village.
|
|
|
|
No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
|
|
Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must
|
|
be sluggish: "crawling," "creeping painfully"--such expressions
|
|
occurred in almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams
|
|
could have been written by an eye-witness of their advance. The
|
|
Sunday papers printed separate editions as further news came to hand,
|
|
some even in default of it. But there was practically nothing more
|
|
to tell people until late in the afternoon, when the authorities gave
|
|
the press agencies the news in their possession. It was stated that
|
|
the people of Walton and Weybridge, and all the district, were
|
|
pouring along the roads Londonward, and that was all.
|
|
|
|
My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the
|
|
morning, still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous
|
|
night. There he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special
|
|
prayer for peace. Coming out, he bought a Referee. He became
|
|
alarmed at the news in this, and went again to Waterloo station to
|
|
find out if communication were restored. The omnibuses, carriages,
|
|
cyclists, and innumerable people walking in their best clothes seemed
|
|
scarcely affected by the strange intelligence that the news venders
|
|
were disseminating. People were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed
|
|
only on account of the local residents. At the station he heard for
|
|
the first time that the Windsor and Chertsey lines were now
|
|
interrupted. The porters told him that several remarkable telegrams
|
|
had been received in the morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations,
|
|
but that these had abruptly ceased. My brother could get very little
|
|
precise detail out of them.
|
|
|
|
"There's fighting going on about Weybridge," was the extent of
|
|
their information.
|
|
|
|
The train service was now very much disorganised. Quite a
|
|
number of people who had been expecting friends from places on the
|
|
South-Western network were standing about the station. One
|
|
grey-headed old gentleman came and abused the South-Western Company
|
|
bitterly to my brother. "It wants showing up," he said.
|
|
|
|
One or two trains came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston,
|
|
containing people who had gone out for a day's boating and found the
|
|
locks closed and a feeling of panic in the air. A man in a blue and
|
|
white blazer addressed my brother, full of strange tidings.
|
|
|
|
"There's hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and
|
|
carts and things, with boxes of valuables and all that," he said.
|
|
"They come from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say
|
|
there's been guns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted
|
|
soldiers have told them to get off at once before the Martians are
|
|
coming. We heard guns firing at Hampton Court station, but we
|
|
thought it was thunder. What the dickens does it all mean? The
|
|
Martians can't get out of their pit, can they?"
|
|
|
|
My brother could not tell him.
|
|
|
|
Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread
|
|
to the clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday
|
|
excursionists began to return from all over the South-Western
|
|
"lung"--Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth--at
|
|
unnaturally early hours; but not a soul had anything more than vague
|
|
hearsay to tell of. Everyone connected with the terminus seemed
|
|
ill-tempered.
|
|
|
|
About five o'clock the gathering crowd in the station was
|
|
immensely excited by the opening of the line of communication, which
|
|
is almost invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the
|
|
South-Western stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing
|
|
huge guns and carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns
|
|
that were brought up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston.
|
|
There was an exchange of pleasantries: "You'll get eaten!" "We're
|
|
the beast-tamers!" and so forth. A little while after that a squad
|
|
of police came into the station and began to clear the public off the
|
|
platforms, and my brother went out into the street again.
|
|
|
|
The church bells were ringing for evensong, and a squad of
|
|
Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road. On the
|
|
bridge a number of loafers were watching a curious brown scum that
|
|
came drifting down the stream in patches. The sun was just setting,
|
|
and the Clock Tower and the Houses of Parliament rose against one of
|
|
the most peaceful skies it is possible to imagine, a sky of gold,
|
|
barred with long transverse stripes of reddish-purple cloud. There
|
|
was talk of a floating body. One of the men there, a reservist he
|
|
said he was, told my brother he had seen the heliograph flickering in
|
|
the west.
|
|
|
|
In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs
|
|
who had just rushed out of Fleet Street with still wet newspapers and
|
|
staring placards. "Dreadful catastrophe!" They bawled one to the
|
|
other down Wellington Street. "Fighting at Weybridge! Full
|
|
description! Repulse of the Martians! London in Danger!" He had to
|
|
give threepence for a copy of that paper.
|
|
|
|
Then it was, and then only, that he realised something of the
|
|
full power and terror of these monsters. He learned that they were
|
|
not merely a handful of small sluggish creatures, but that they were
|
|
minds swaying vast mechanical bodies; and that they could move
|
|
swiftly and smite with such power that even the mightiest guns could
|
|
not stand against them.
|
|
|
|
They were described as "vast spider like machines, nearly a
|
|
hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able
|
|
to shoot out a beam of intense heat." Masked batteries, chiefly of
|
|
field guns, had been planted in the country about Horsell Common, and
|
|
especially between the Woking district and London. Five of the
|
|
machines had been seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy
|
|
chance, had been destroyed. In the other cases the shells had
|
|
missed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by the
|
|
Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned, but the tone of
|
|
the despatch was optimistic.
|
|
|
|
The Martians had been repulsed; they were not invulnerable.
|
|
They had retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the
|
|
circle about Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing
|
|
forward upon them from all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from
|
|
Windsor, Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich--even from the north; among
|
|
others, long wire-guns of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether
|
|
one hundred and sixteen were in position or being hastily placed,
|
|
chiefly covering London. Never before in England had there been such
|
|
a vast or rapid concentration of military material.
|
|
|
|
Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be
|
|
destroyed at once by high explosives, which were being rapidly
|
|
manufactured and distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the
|
|
situation was of the strangest and gravest description, but the
|
|
public was exhorted to avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the
|
|
Martians were strange and terrible in the extreme, but at the outside
|
|
there could not be more than twenty of them against our millions.
|
|
|
|
The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the
|
|
cylinders, that at the outside there could not be more than five in
|
|
each cylinder--fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed
|
|
of--perhaps more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach
|
|
of danger, and elaborate measures were being taken for the protection
|
|
of the people in the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with
|
|
reiterated assurances of the safety of London and the ability of the
|
|
authorities to cope with the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation
|
|
closed.
|
|
|
|
This was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was
|
|
still wet, and there had been no time to add a word of comment. It
|
|
was curious, my brother said, to see how ruthlessly the usual
|
|
contents of the paper had been hacked and taken out to give this
|
|
place.
|
|
|
|
All down Wellington Street people could be seen fluttering out
|
|
the pink sheets and reading, and the Strand was suddenly noisy with
|
|
the voices of an army of hawkers following these pioneers. Men came
|
|
scrambling off buses to secure copies. Certainly this news excited
|
|
people intensely, whatever their previous apathy. The shutters of a
|
|
map shop in the Strand were being taken down, my brother said, and a
|
|
man in his Sunday raiment, lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible
|
|
inside the window hastily fastening maps of Surrey to the glass.
|
|
|
|
Going on along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, the paper in his
|
|
hand, my brother saw some of the fugitives from West Surrey. There
|
|
was a man with his wife and two boys and some articles of furniture
|
|
in a cart such as greengrocers use. He was driving from the
|
|
direction of Westminster Bridge; and close behind him came a hay
|
|
waggon with five or six respectable-looking people in it, and some
|
|
boxes and bundles. The faces of these people were haggard, and their
|
|
entire appearance contrasted conspicuously with the Sabbath-best
|
|
appearance of the people on the omnibuses. People in fashionable
|
|
clothing peeped at them out of cabs. They stopped at the Square as
|
|
if undecided which way to take, and finally turned eastward along the
|
|
Strand. Some way behind these came a man in workday clothes, riding
|
|
one of those oldfashioned tricycles with a small front wheel. He was
|
|
dirty and white in the face.
|
|
|
|
My brother turned down towards Victoria, and met a number of
|
|
such people. He had a vague idea that he might see something of me.
|
|
He noticed an unusual number of police regulating the traffic. Some
|
|
of the refugees were exchanging news with the people on the
|
|
omnibuses. One was professing to have seen the Martians. "Boilers
|
|
on stilts, I tell you, striding along like men." Most of them were
|
|
excited and animated by their strange experience.
|
|
|
|
Beyond Victoria the public-houses were doing a lively trade with
|
|
these arrivals. At all the street corners groups of people were
|
|
reading papers, talking excitedly, or staring at these unusual Sunday
|
|
visitors. They seemed to increase as night drew on, until at last
|
|
the roads, my brother said, were like Epsom High Street on a Derby
|
|
Day. My brother addressed several of these fugitives and got
|
|
unsatisfactory answers from most.
|
|
|
|
None of them could tell him any news of Woking except one man,
|
|
who assured him that Woking had been entirely destroyed on the
|
|
previous night.
|
|
|
|
"I come from Byfleet," he said; "man on a bicycle came through
|
|
the place in the early morning, and ran from door to door warning us
|
|
to come away. Then came soldiers. We went out to look, and there
|
|
were clouds of smoke to the south--nothing but smoke, and not a soul
|
|
coming that way. Then we heard the guns at Chertsey, and folks
|
|
coming from Weybridge. So I've locked up my house and come on."
|
|
|
|
At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the
|
|
authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the
|
|
invaders without all this inconvenience.
|
|
|
|
About eight o'clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly
|
|
audible all over the south of London. My brother could not hear it
|
|
for the traffic in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through
|
|
the quiet back streets to the river he was able to distinguish it
|
|
quite plainly.
|
|
|
|
He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent's Park,
|
|
about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at
|
|
the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run,
|
|
even as mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of
|
|
all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic
|
|
countryside; he tried to imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet
|
|
high.
|
|
|
|
There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
|
|
Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the
|
|
news spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of
|
|
their usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups,
|
|
and along the edge of Regent's Park there were as many silent couples
|
|
"walking out" together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there
|
|
had been. The night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the
|
|
sound of guns continued intermittently, and after midnight there
|
|
seemed to be sheet lightning in the south.
|
|
|
|
He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to
|
|
me. He was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly.
|
|
He returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his
|
|
examination notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was
|
|
awakened from lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound
|
|
of door knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a
|
|
clamour of bells. Red reflections danced on the ceiling. For a
|
|
moment he lay astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world
|
|
gone mad. Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the window.
|
|
|
|
His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down
|
|
the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash,
|
|
and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were
|
|
being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering at
|
|
the door; "the Martians are coming!" and hurried to the next door.
|
|
|
|
The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street
|
|
Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing
|
|
sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors
|
|
opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from
|
|
darkness into yellow illumination.
|
|
|
|
Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting
|
|
abruptly into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax
|
|
under the window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on
|
|
the rear of this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long
|
|
procession of flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm
|
|
station, where the North-Western special trains were loading up,
|
|
instead of coming down the gradient into Euston.
|
|
|
|
For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank
|
|
astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door,
|
|
and delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind
|
|
him opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in,
|
|
dressed only in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about
|
|
his waist, his hair, disordered from his pillow.
|
|
|
|
"What the devil is it?" be asked. "A fire? What a devil of a
|
|
row!"
|
|
|
|
They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to
|
|
hear what the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the
|
|
side streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.
|
|
|
|
"What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow
|
|
lodger.
|
|
|
|
My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with
|
|
each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing
|
|
excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers
|
|
came bawling into the street:
|
|
|
|
"London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond
|
|
defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!"
|
|
|
|
And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on each
|
|
side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the
|
|
hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne
|
|
Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn
|
|
and St. John's Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and
|
|
Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the
|
|
vastness of London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing their
|
|
eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless questions,
|
|
dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew
|
|
through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic. London,
|
|
which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was
|
|
awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of
|
|
danger.
|
|
|
|
Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother
|
|
went down and out into the street, just as the sky between the
|
|
parapets of the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying
|
|
people on foot and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment.
|
|
"Black Smoke!" he heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The
|
|
contagion of such a unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother
|
|
hesitated on the door-step, he saw another news vender approaching,
|
|
and got a paper forthwith. The man was running away with the rest,
|
|
and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran--a grotesque
|
|
mingling of profit and panic.
|
|
|
|
And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic despatch
|
|
of the Commander-in-Chief:
|
|
|
|
"The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black
|
|
and poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our
|
|
batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are
|
|
advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way.
|
|
It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black
|
|
Smoke but in instant flight."
|
|
|
|
That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the
|
|
great six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it
|
|
would be pouring en masse northward.
|
|
|
|
"Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!"
|
|
|
|
The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a
|
|
cart carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the
|
|
water trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in
|
|
the houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished
|
|
lamps. And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady
|
|
and calm.
|
|
|
|
He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and
|
|
down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely
|
|
wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.
|
|
|
|
As my brother began to realise the import of all these things,
|
|
he turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some
|
|
ten pounds altogether--into his pockets, and went out again into the
|
|
streets.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 15: What Had Happened in Surrey
|
|
|
|
It was while the curate had sat and talked so wildly to me under
|
|
the hedge in the flat meadow's near Halliford, and while my brother
|
|
was catching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge, that the
|
|
Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
|
|
the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of
|
|
them remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine
|
|
that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes
|
|
of green smoke.
|
|
|
|
But three certainly came out about eight o'clock and, advancing
|
|
slowly and cautiously, made their way through Byfleet and Pyrford
|
|
towards Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the expectant
|
|
batteries against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in
|
|
a body, but in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his
|
|
nearest fellow. They communicated with one another by means of
|
|
sirenlike howls, running up and down the scale from one note to
|
|
another.
|
|
|
|
It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St.
|
|
George's Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley
|
|
gunners, unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never to have been
|
|
placed in such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual
|
|
volley, and bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village,
|
|
while the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over
|
|
their guns, stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and
|
|
so came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he
|
|
destroyed.
|
|
|
|
The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or of a
|
|
better mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have
|
|
been quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid
|
|
their guns as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired
|
|
at about a thousand yards' range.
|
|
|
|
The shells flashed all round him, and he was seen to advance a
|
|
few paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody yelled together, and the
|
|
guns were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown Martian set up a
|
|
prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,
|
|
answering him appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem
|
|
that a leg of the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The
|
|
whole of the second volley flew wide of the Martian on the ground,
|
|
and, simultaneously, both his companions brought their Heat-Rays to
|
|
bear on the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine trees all
|
|
about the guns flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who
|
|
were already running over the crest of the hill escaped.
|
|
|
|
After this it would seem that the three took counsel together
|
|
and halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they
|
|
remained absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian
|
|
who bad been overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small
|
|
brown figure, oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of
|
|
blight, and apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About
|
|
nine he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above the trees
|
|
again.
|
|
|
|
It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three
|
|
sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick
|
|
black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the
|
|
seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a
|
|
curved line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of
|
|
Send, southwest of Ripley.
|
|
|
|
A dozen rockets sprang out of the hills before them so soon as
|
|
they began to move, and warned the waiting batteries about Ditton and
|
|
Esher. At the same time four of their fighting machines, similarly
|
|
armed with tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black against
|
|
the western sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we
|
|
hurried wearily and painfully along the road that runs northward out
|
|
of Halliford. They moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for a
|
|
milky mist covered the fields and rose to a third of their height.
|
|
|
|
At this sight the curate cried faintly in his throat, and began
|
|
running; but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, and I
|
|
turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into the
|
|
broad ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was
|
|
doing, and turned to join me.
|
|
|
|
The two halted, the nearer to us standing and facing Sunbury,
|
|
the remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the evening star,
|
|
away towards Staines.
|
|
|
|
The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up
|
|
their positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in
|
|
absolute silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its
|
|
horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a
|
|
battle so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have
|
|
had precisely the same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary
|
|
possession of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender
|
|
moon, the stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare
|
|
from St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.
|
|
|
|
But facing that crescent everywhere--at Staines, Hounslow,
|
|
Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods south of the river, and
|
|
across the flat grass meadows to the north of it, wherever a cluster
|
|
of trees or village houses gave sufficient cover--the guns were
|
|
waiting. The signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through
|
|
the night and vanished, and the spirit of all those watching
|
|
batteries rose to a tense expectation. The Martians had but to
|
|
advance into the line of fire, and instantly those motionless black
|
|
forms of men, those guns glittering so darkly in the early night,
|
|
would explode into a thunderous fury of battle.
|
|
|
|
No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those
|
|
vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle--how
|
|
much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions
|
|
were organised, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret
|
|
our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady
|
|
investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of
|
|
onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might
|
|
exterminate us? (At that time no one knew what food they needed.) A
|
|
hundred such questions struggled together in my mind as I watched
|
|
that vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my mind was the sense
|
|
of all the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had they
|
|
prepared pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a
|
|
snare? Would the Londoners have the heart and courage to make a
|
|
greater Moscow of their mighty province of houses?
|
|
|
|
Then, after an interminable time, as it seemed to us, crouching
|
|
and peering through the hedge, came a sound like the distant
|
|
concussion of a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then the
|
|
Martian beside us raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise,
|
|
with a heavy report that made the ground heave. The one towards
|
|
Staines answered him. There was no flash, no smoke, simply that
|
|
loaded detonation.
|
|
|
|
I was so excited by these heavy minute-guns following one
|
|
another that I so far forgot my personal safety and my scalded hands
|
|
as to clamber up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I did
|
|
so a second report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead
|
|
towards Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some
|
|
such evidence of its work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky
|
|
above, with one solitary star, and the white mist spreading wide and
|
|
low beneath. And there had been no crash, no answering explosion.
|
|
The silence was restored; the minute lengthened to three.
|
|
|
|
"What has happened?" said the curate, standing up beside me.
|
|
|
|
"Heaven knows!" said I.
|
|
|
|
A bat flickered by and vanished. A distant tumult of shouting
|
|
began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian, and saw he was now
|
|
moving eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling motion.
|
|
|
|
Every moment I expected the fire of some hidden battery to
|
|
spring upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken. The figure of
|
|
the Martian grew smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and
|
|
the gathering night had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we
|
|
clambered higher. Towards Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a
|
|
conical hill had suddenly come into being there, hiding our view of
|
|
the farther country; and then, remoter across the river, over Walton,
|
|
we saw another such summit. These hill-like forms grew lower and
|
|
broader even as we stared.
|
|
|
|
Moved by a sudden thought, I looked northward, and there I
|
|
perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had risen.
|
|
|
|
Everything had suddenly became very still. Far away to the
|
|
southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians hooting to one
|
|
another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of
|
|
their guns. But the earthly artillery made no reply.
|
|
|
|
Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later
|
|
I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in
|
|
the twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I
|
|
have described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he
|
|
carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of
|
|
houses, or other possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of
|
|
him. Some fired only one of these, some two--as in the case of the
|
|
one we had seen; the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no
|
|
fewer than five at that time. These canisters smashed on striking
|
|
the ground--they did not explode --and incontinently disengaged an
|
|
enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in
|
|
a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread
|
|
itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that
|
|
vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that
|
|
breathes.
|
|
|
|
It was heavy, this vapour, heavier than the densest smoke, so
|
|
that, after the first tumultuous uprush and outflow of its impact, it
|
|
sank down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner
|
|
rather liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into
|
|
the valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the
|
|
carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And
|
|
where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the
|
|
surface would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank
|
|
slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and
|
|
it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one
|
|
could drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained.
|
|
The vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together
|
|
in banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving
|
|
reluctantly before the wind, and very slowly it combined with the
|
|
mist and moisture of the air, and sank to the earth in the form of
|
|
dust. Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in
|
|
the blue of the spectrum is concerned, we are still entirely ignorant
|
|
of the nature of this substance.
|
|
|
|
Once the tumultuous upheaval of its dispersion was over, the
|
|
black smoke clung so closely to the ground, even before its
|
|
precipitation, that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper
|
|
stories of high houses and on great trees, there was a chance of
|
|
escaping its poison altogether, as was proved even that night at
|
|
Street Cobham and Ditton.
|
|
|
|
The man who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story
|
|
of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from
|
|
the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts
|
|
out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there,
|
|
weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and
|
|
against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse,
|
|
with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and
|
|
gates, barns, outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the
|
|
sunlight.
|
|
|
|
But that was at Street Cobham, where the black vapour was
|
|
allowed to remain until it sank of its own accord into the ground As
|
|
a rule the Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared the air
|
|
of it again by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.
|
|
|
|
This they did with the vapour banks near us, as we saw in the
|
|
starlight from the window of a deserted house at Upper Halliford,
|
|
whither we had returned. From there we could see the searchlights on
|
|
Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about eleven
|
|
the windows rattled, and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns
|
|
that had been put in position there. These continued intermittently
|
|
for the space of a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the
|
|
invisible Martians at Hampton and Ditton, and then the pale beams of
|
|
the electric light vanished, and were replaced by a bright red glow.
|
|
|
|
Then the fourth cylinder fell--a brilliant green meteor--as I
|
|
learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond
|
|
and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far
|
|
away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard
|
|
before the black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.
|
|
|
|
So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a
|
|
wasps' nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over
|
|
the Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved
|
|
apart, until at last they formed a line front Hanwell to Coombe and
|
|
Malden. All night through their destructive tubes advanced. Never
|
|
once, after the Martian at St. George's Hill was brought down, did
|
|
they give the artillery the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever
|
|
there was a possibility of guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh
|
|
canister of the black vapour was discharged, and where the guns were
|
|
openly displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to bear.
|
|
|
|
By midnight the blazing trees along the slopes of Richmond Park
|
|
and the glare of Kingston Hill threw their light upon a network of
|
|
black smoke, blotting out the whole valley of the Thames and
|
|
extending as far as the eye could reach. And through this two
|
|
Martians slowly waded, and turned their hissing steam jets this way
|
|
and that.
|
|
|
|
They were sparing of the Heat-Ray that night, either because
|
|
they had but a limited supply of material for its production or
|
|
because they did not wish to destroy the country but only to crush
|
|
and overawe the opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they
|
|
certainly succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised
|
|
opposition to their movements. After that no body of men would stand
|
|
against them, so hopeless was the enterprise. Even the crews of the
|
|
torpedo-boats and destroyers that had brought their quick-firers up
|
|
the Thames refused to stop, mutinied, and went down again. The only
|
|
offensive operation men ventured upon after that night was the
|
|
preparation of mines and pitfalls, and even in that their energies
|
|
were frantic and spasmodic.
|
|
|
|
One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those
|
|
batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight.
|
|
Survivors there were none. One may picture the orderly expectation,
|
|
the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition
|
|
piled to hand, the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the
|
|
groups of civilian spectators standing as near as they were
|
|
permitted, the evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents
|
|
with the burned and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance
|
|
of the shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling
|
|
over the trees and houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.
|
|
|
|
One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the
|
|
swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing
|
|
headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable
|
|
darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon
|
|
its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking,
|
|
falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men
|
|
choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of
|
|
the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction--nothing but
|
|
a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
|
|
|
|
Before dawn the black vapour was pouring through the streets of
|
|
Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of government was, with a
|
|
last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to the
|
|
necessity of flight.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 16: The Exodus from London
|
|
|
|
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through
|
|
the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning--the stream
|
|
of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult
|
|
round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about
|
|
the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
|
|
northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and
|
|
by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency,
|
|
losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in
|
|
that swift liquefaction of the social body.
|
|
|
|
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern
|
|
people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and
|
|
trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely for
|
|
standing-room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people
|
|
were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple
|
|
of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers
|
|
were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to
|
|
direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads
|
|
of the people they were called out to protect.
|
|
|
|
And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers
|
|
refused to return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the
|
|
people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and
|
|
along the northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen
|
|
at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the
|
|
Thames and across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over
|
|
the bridges in its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing,
|
|
and surrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive,
|
|
but unable to escape.
|
|
|
|
After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train
|
|
at Chalk Farm--the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods
|
|
yard there ploughed through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart
|
|
men fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his
|
|
furnace--my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across
|
|
through a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost
|
|
in the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got
|
|
was punctured in dragging it through the window, but he got up and
|
|
off, notwithstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist. The
|
|
steep foot of Haverstock Hill was impassable owing to several
|
|
overturned horses, and my brother struck into Belsize Road.
|
|
|
|
So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the
|
|
Edgware Road, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but
|
|
well ahead of the crowd. Along the road people were standing in the
|
|
roadway, curious, wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists,
|
|
some horsemen, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of
|
|
the wheel broke, and the machine became unridable. He left it by the
|
|
roadside and trudged through the village. There were shops half
|
|
opened in the main street of the place, and people crowded on the
|
|
pavement and in the doorways and windows, staring astonished at this
|
|
extraordinary procession of fugitives that was beginning. He
|
|
succeeded in getting some food at an inn.
|
|
|
|
For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do.
|
|
The flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my
|
|
brother, seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh
|
|
news of the invaders from Mars.
|
|
|
|
At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from
|
|
congested. Most of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on
|
|
cycles, but there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages
|
|
hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to
|
|
St. Albans.
|
|
|
|
It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford,
|
|
where some friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to
|
|
strike into a quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a
|
|
stile, and, crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He
|
|
passed near several farmhouses and come little places whose names he
|
|
did not learn. He saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards
|
|
High Barnet, he happened upon two ladies who became his fellow
|
|
travellers. He came upon them just in time to save them.
|
|
|
|
He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a
|
|
couple of men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise
|
|
in which they had been driving, while a third with difficulty held
|
|
the frightened pony's head. One of the ladies, a short woman dressed
|
|
in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure,
|
|
slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her
|
|
disengaged hand.
|
|
|
|
My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and
|
|
hurried towards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned
|
|
towards him, and my brother, realising from his antagonist's face
|
|
that a fight was unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into
|
|
him forthwith and sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.
|
|
|
|
It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid him
|
|
quiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at
|
|
the slender lady's arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip
|
|
stung across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the
|
|
eyes, and the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the
|
|
lane in the direction from which he had come.
|
|
|
|
Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held the
|
|
horse's head, and became aware of the chaise receding from him down
|
|
the lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in it looking
|
|
back. The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he
|
|
stopped him with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he was
|
|
deserted, he dodged round and made off down the lane after the
|
|
chaise, with the sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who
|
|
had turned now, following remotely.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went
|
|
headlong, and he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of
|
|
antagonists again. He would have had little chance against them had
|
|
not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his
|
|
help. It seems she had had a revolver all this time, but it had been
|
|
under the seat when she and her companion were attacked. She fired
|
|
at six yards' distance, narrowly missing my brother. The less
|
|
courageous of the robbers made off, and his companion followed him,
|
|
cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in sight down the lane,
|
|
where the third man lay insensible.
|
|
|
|
"Take this!" said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her
|
|
revolver.
|
|
|
|
"Go back to the chaise," said my brother, wiping the blood from
|
|
his split lip.
|
|
|
|
She turned without a word--they were both panting--and they went
|
|
back to where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightened
|
|
pony.
|
|
|
|
The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother
|
|
looked again they were retreating.
|
|
|
|
"I'll sit here," said my brother, "if I may"; and he got upon
|
|
the empty front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.
|
|
|
|
"Give me the reins," she said, and laid the whip along the
|
|
pony's side. In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men
|
|
from my brother's eyes.
|
|
|
|
So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with
|
|
a cut mouth, a bruised jaw, and blood-stained knuckles, driving along
|
|
an unknown lane with these two women.
|
|
|
|
He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a
|
|
surgeon living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a
|
|
dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his
|
|
way of the Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the
|
|
women--their servant had left them two days before--packed some
|
|
provisions, put his revolver under the seat--luckily for my
|
|
brother--and told them to drive on to Edgware, with the idea of
|
|
getting a train there. He stopped behind to tell the neighbours. He
|
|
would overtake them, he said, at about half past four in the morning,
|
|
and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him. They
|
|
could not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the
|
|
place, and so they had come into this side lane.
|
|
|
|
That was the story they told my brother in fragments when
|
|
presently they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to
|
|
stay with them, at least until they could determine what to do, or
|
|
until the missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot
|
|
with the revolver--a weapon strange to him--in order to give them
|
|
confidence.
|
|
|
|
They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony
|
|
became happy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape out of
|
|
London, and all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The
|
|
sun crept higher in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and
|
|
gave place to an uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers
|
|
came along the lane, and of these my brother gathered such news as he
|
|
could. Every broken answer he had deepened his impression of the
|
|
great disaster that had come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of
|
|
the immediate necessity for prosecuting this flight. He urged the
|
|
matter upon them.
|
|
|
|
"We have money," said the slender woman, and hesitated.
|
|
|
|
Her eyes met my brother's, and her hesitation ended.
|
|
|
|
"So have I," said my brother.
|
|
|
|
She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold,
|
|
besides a five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might
|
|
get upon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought
|
|
that was hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the
|
|
trains, and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards
|
|
Harwich and thence escaping from the country altogether.
|
|
|
|
Mrs. Elphinstone--that was the name of the woman in white--would
|
|
listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon "George"; but her
|
|
sister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last
|
|
agreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great
|
|
North Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony
|
|
to save it as much as possible.
|
|
|
|
As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively hot, and
|
|
under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so that
|
|
they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust.
|
|
And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew
|
|
stronger.
|
|
|
|
They began to meet more people. For the most part these were
|
|
staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard,
|
|
unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on
|
|
the ground. They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one
|
|
hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things.
|
|
His paroxysm of rage over, be went on his way without once looking
|
|
back.
|
|
|
|
As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the
|
|
south of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some
|
|
fields on their left, carrying a child and with two other children;
|
|
and then passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand
|
|
and a small portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the
|
|
lane, from between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with
|
|
the highroad, came a little, cart drawn by a sweating black pony and
|
|
driven by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were
|
|
three girls, East End factory girls, and a couple of little children
|
|
crowded in the cart.
|
|
|
|
"This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?" asked the driver, wild-eyed,
|
|
white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to
|
|
the left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.
|
|
|
|
My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the
|
|
houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of a terrace
|
|
beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs.
|
|
Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red
|
|
flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot,
|
|
blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the
|
|
disorderly mangling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the
|
|
creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round
|
|
sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.
|
|
|
|
"Good heavens!" cried Mrs. Elphinstone. "What is this you are
|
|
driving us into?"
|
|
|
|
My brother stopped.
|
|
|
|
For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of
|
|
human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great
|
|
bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made
|
|
everything within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and
|
|
was perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of
|
|
horses and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of
|
|
every description.
|
|
|
|
"Way!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make way!"
|
|
|
|
It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the
|
|
meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and
|
|
the dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road
|
|
a villa was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across
|
|
the road to add to the confusion.
|
|
|
|
Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy
|
|
bundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue,
|
|
circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my
|
|
brother's threat.
|
|
|
|
So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the
|
|
houses to the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying
|
|
people, pent in between the villas on either side; the black heads,
|
|
the crowded forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the
|
|
corner, hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a
|
|
receding multitude that was swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.
|
|
|
|
"Go on! Go on!" cried the voices. "Way! Way!"
|
|
|
|
One man's hands pressed on the back of another. My brother
|
|
stood at the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced
|
|
slowly, pace by pace, down the lane.
|
|
|
|
Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous
|
|
tumult, but this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to
|
|
imagine that host. It had no character of its own. The figures
|
|
poured out past the corner, and receded with their backs to the group
|
|
in the lane. Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened
|
|
by the wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.
|
|
|
|
The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making
|
|
little way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted
|
|
forward every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing
|
|
so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the
|
|
villas.
|
|
|
|
"Push on!" was the cry. "Push on! They are coming!"
|
|
|
|
In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation
|
|
Army, gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, "Eternity!
|
|
Eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother
|
|
could hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of
|
|
the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horse;
|
|
and quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at
|
|
nothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or
|
|
lay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses' bits
|
|
were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.
|
|
|
|
There were cabs, carriages, shop cars, waggons, beyond counting;
|
|
a mail cart, a road-cleaner's cart marked "Vestry of St. Pancras," a
|
|
huge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer's dray rumbled by
|
|
with its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.
|
|
|
|
"Clear the way!" cried the voice "Clear the way!"
|
|
|
|
"Eter-nity! Eter-nity!" came echoing down the road.
|
|
|
|
There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with
|
|
children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in
|
|
dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came
|
|
men, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side
|
|
by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded black
|
|
rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy
|
|
workmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed
|
|
like clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier
|
|
my brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway potters,
|
|
one wretched creature in a nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.
|
|
|
|
But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host
|
|
had in common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear
|
|
behind them. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a
|
|
waggon, sent the whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man
|
|
so scared and broken that his knees bent under him was galvanised for
|
|
a moment into renewed activity. The heat and dust had already been
|
|
at work upon this multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black
|
|
and cracked. They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid
|
|
the various cries one heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness
|
|
and fatigue; the voices of most of them were hoarse and weak.
|
|
Through it all ran a refrain:
|
|
|
|
"Way! Way! The Martians are coming!"
|
|
|
|
Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened
|
|
slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a
|
|
delusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet a
|
|
kind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of
|
|
the stream, who for the most part rested but a moment before plunging
|
|
into it again. A little way down the lane, with two friends bending
|
|
over him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags.
|
|
He was a lucky man to have friends.
|
|
|
|
A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy
|
|
black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed
|
|
his boot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and hobbled
|
|
on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
|
|
herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.
|
|
|
|
"I can't go on! I can't go on!"
|
|
|
|
My brother woke front his torpor of astonishment and lifted her
|
|
up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So
|
|
soon as my brother touched her she became quite still, as if
|
|
frightened.
|
|
|
|
"Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her
|
|
voice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,
|
|
crying "Mother!"
|
|
|
|
"They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past along
|
|
the lane.
|
|
|
|
Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and my
|
|
brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.
|
|
|
|
The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My
|
|
brother pushed the pony and chaise hack into the hedge, and the man
|
|
drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with
|
|
a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My
|
|
brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something
|
|
on a white stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the
|
|
privet hedge.
|
|
|
|
One of the men came running to my brother.
|
|
|
|
"Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and
|
|
very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick."
|
|
|
|
"Lord Garrick!" said my brother; "the Chief Justice?"
|
|
|
|
"The water?" he said.
|
|
|
|
"There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses.
|
|
We have no water. I dare not leave my people."
|
|
|
|
The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner
|
|
house.
|
|
|
|
"Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are coming!
|
|
Go on."
|
|
|
|
Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded,
|
|
eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my
|
|
brother's eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that
|
|
seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They
|
|
rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and
|
|
horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the
|
|
shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a
|
|
shriek and dodged back, and a wheel shaved him narrowly.
|
|
|
|
"Way!" cried the men all about him. "Make way!"
|
|
|
|
So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands
|
|
open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his
|
|
pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half
|
|
rising, he had been borne down under the horse's hoofs.
|
|
|
|
"Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way,
|
|
tried to clutch the bit of the horse.
|
|
|
|
Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels,
|
|
and saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch's back.
|
|
The driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round
|
|
behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The
|
|
man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to
|
|
rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp
|
|
and dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a
|
|
man on a black horse came to his assistance.
|
|
|
|
"Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's
|
|
collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he
|
|
still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely,
|
|
hammering at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!"
|
|
shouted angry voices behind. "Way! Way!"
|
|
|
|
There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the
|
|
cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and
|
|
the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that
|
|
held his collar. There was a concussion, and the black horse came
|
|
staggering sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof
|
|
missed my brother's foot by a hair's breadth. He released his grip
|
|
on the fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on
|
|
the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was
|
|
hidden and my brother was borne backward and carried past the
|
|
entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover
|
|
it.
|
|
|
|
He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child,
|
|
with all a child's want of sympathetic imagination, staring with
|
|
dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground
|
|
and crushed under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted,
|
|
and began turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he
|
|
said and they went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until
|
|
the fighting crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane
|
|
my brother saw the face of the dying man in the ditch under the
|
|
privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining with perspiration. The
|
|
two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering.
|
|
|
|
Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone
|
|
was white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched
|
|
even to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and perplexed.
|
|
So soon as they had retreated he realized how urgent and unavoidable
|
|
it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone,
|
|
suddenly resolute.
|
|
|
|
"We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again.
|
|
|
|
For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To
|
|
force their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into
|
|
the traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony
|
|
across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a
|
|
long splinter from the chaise. In another moment they were caught
|
|
and swept forward by the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip
|
|
marks red across his face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and
|
|
took the reins from her.
|
|
|
|
"Point the revolver at the man behind," he said, giving it to
|
|
her, "if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at his horse."
|
|
|
|
Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right
|
|
across the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition,
|
|
to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping
|
|
Barnet with the torrent; the were nearly a mile beyond the centre of
|
|
the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the
|
|
way. It was din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the
|
|
town the road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the
|
|
stress.
|
|
|
|
They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of
|
|
the road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great
|
|
multitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at
|
|
the water. And farther on, from a hill near East Barnet, they saw
|
|
two trains running slowly one after the other without signal or
|
|
order--trains swarming with people, with men even among the coals
|
|
behind the engine--going northward along the Great Northern Railway.
|
|
My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that
|
|
time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central
|
|
termini impossible.
|
|
|
|
Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for
|
|
the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of
|
|
them. They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was
|
|
cold, and none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many
|
|
people came hurrying along the road near by their stopping place,
|
|
fleeing from unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction
|
|
from which my brother had come.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 1
|
|
|
|
Chapter 17: The "Thunder Child"
|
|
|
|
Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday
|
|
have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself
|
|
slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road through
|
|
Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the
|
|
roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames
|
|
to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could
|
|
have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above
|
|
London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled
|
|
maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming
|
|
fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I
|
|
have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother's account of
|
|
the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may
|
|
realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those
|
|
concerned. Never before in the history of the world had such a mass
|
|
of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of
|
|
Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been
|
|
but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it
|
|
was a stampede--a stampede gigantic and terrible--without order and
|
|
without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving
|
|
headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the
|
|
massacre of mankind.
|
|
|
|
Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of
|
|
streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
|
|
gardens--already derelict--spread out like a huge map, and in the
|
|
southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have
|
|
seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart.
|
|
Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting
|
|
out ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against
|
|
rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found
|
|
valley, exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting
|
|
paper.
|
|
|
|
And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the
|
|
river, the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and
|
|
methodically spreading their poison cloud over this patch of country
|
|
and then over that, laying it again with their steam jets when it had
|
|
served its purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country.
|
|
They do not seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at
|
|
complete demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. They
|
|
exploded any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph,
|
|
and wrecked the railways here and there. They were hamstringing
|
|
mankind. They seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their
|
|
operations, and did not come beyond the central part of London all
|
|
that day. It is possible that a very considerable number of people
|
|
in London stuck to their houses through Monday morning. Certain it
|
|
is that many died at home suffocated by the Black Smoke.
|
|
|
|
Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.
|
|
Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the
|
|
enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many
|
|
who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and
|
|
drowned. About one o'clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of
|
|
a cloud of the black vapour appeared between the arches of
|
|
Blackfriars Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene of mad
|
|
confusion, fighting, and collision, and for some time a multitude of
|
|
boats and barges jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and
|
|
the sailors and lightermen had to fight savagely against the people
|
|
who swarmed upon them from the riverfront. People were actually
|
|
clambering down the piers of the bridge from above.
|
|
|
|
When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower
|
|
and waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above
|
|
Limehouse.
|
|
|
|
Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell.
|
|
The sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside
|
|
the women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far
|
|
beyond the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon
|
|
getting across the sea, made its way through the swarming country
|
|
towards Colchester. The news that the Martians were now in
|
|
possession of the whole of London was confirmed. They had been seen
|
|
at Highgate, and even, it was said, at Neasden. But they did not
|
|
come into my brother's view until the morrow.
|
|
|
|
That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent
|
|
need of provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property
|
|
ceased to be regarded. Farmers went out to defend their
|
|
cattle-sheds, granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in their
|
|
hands. A number of people now, like my brother, had their faces
|
|
eastward, an there were some desperate souls even going back towards
|
|
London to get food. These were chiefly people from the northern
|
|
suburbs whose knowledge of the Black Smoke came by hearsay. He heard
|
|
that about half the members of the government had gathered at
|
|
Birmingham, and that enormous quantities of high explosives were
|
|
being prepared to be used in automatic mines across the Midland
|
|
counties.
|
|
|
|
He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced
|
|
the desertions of the first day's panic, had resumed traffic, and was
|
|
running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of
|
|
the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar
|
|
announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern
|
|
towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed
|
|
among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this
|
|
intelligence did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed,
|
|
and the three pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the
|
|
bread distribution than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did
|
|
anyone else hear more of it. That night fell the seventh star,
|
|
falling upon Primrose Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was
|
|
watching, for she took that duty, alternately with my brother. She
|
|
saw it.
|
|
|
|
On Wednesday the three fugitives--they had passed the night in a
|
|
field of unripe wheat--reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the
|
|
inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized
|
|
the pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but
|
|
the promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours
|
|
of Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey
|
|
Powder Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.
|
|
|
|
People were watching for Martians here from the church towers.
|
|
My brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on
|
|
at once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of
|
|
them were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham,
|
|
which, strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save
|
|
for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they
|
|
suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of
|
|
shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine.
|
|
|
|
For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they
|
|
came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and
|
|
afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They
|
|
lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last
|
|
towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing
|
|
smacks-English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches
|
|
from the Thames, yachts, electric boats; and beyond were ships of
|
|
large burden, a multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen,
|
|
cattle ships, passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old
|
|
white transport even, neat white and grey liners from Southampton and
|
|
Hamburg; and along the blue coast across the Blackwater my brother
|
|
could make out dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the
|
|
people on the beach, a swarm which also extended up the Blackwater
|
|
almost to Maldon.
|
|
|
|
About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the
|
|
water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship.
|
|
This was the ram Thunder Child. It was the only warship in sight,
|
|
but far away to the right over the smooth surface of the sea--for
|
|
that day there was a dead calm--lay a serpent of black smoke to mark
|
|
the next ironclads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended
|
|
line, steam up and ready for action, across the Thames estuary during
|
|
the course of the Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to
|
|
prevent it.
|
|
|
|
At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the
|
|
assurances of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never
|
|
been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself
|
|
friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor
|
|
woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very
|
|
similar. She had been growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and
|
|
depressed during the two days' journeyings. Her great idea was to
|
|
return to Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at
|
|
Stanmore. They would find George at Stanmore.
|
|
|
|
It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to
|
|
the beach where presently my brother succeeded in attracting the
|
|
attention of some men on a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent
|
|
a boat and drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the three. The
|
|
steamer was going, these men said, to Ostend.
|
|
|
|
It was about two o'clock when my brother, having paid their
|
|
frees at the gangway, found himself safely aboard the steamboat with
|
|
his charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and
|
|
the three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats
|
|
forward.
|
|
|
|
There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, some
|
|
of whom had expended their last money in securing a passage, but the
|
|
captain lay off the Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking
|
|
up passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded.
|
|
He would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound
|
|
of guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer,
|
|
the ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags.
|
|
A jet of smoke sprang out of her funnels.
|
|
|
|
Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came
|
|
from Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder.
|
|
At the same time, far away in the southeast the masts and upperworks
|
|
of three ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath
|
|
clouds of black smoke. But my brother's attention speedily reverted
|
|
to the distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of
|
|
smoke rising out of the distant grey haze.
|
|
|
|
The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the
|
|
big crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue
|
|
and hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote
|
|
distance, advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of
|
|
Foulness. At that the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his
|
|
voice with fear and anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed
|
|
infected with his terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or
|
|
on the seats of the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher
|
|
than the trees or church towers inland, and advancing with a
|
|
leisurely parody of a human stride.
|
|
|
|
It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, more
|
|
amazed than terrified, watching this Titan advancing deliberately
|
|
towards the shipping, wading farther and farther into the water as
|
|
the coast fell away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another,
|
|
striding over some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther
|
|
off, wading deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang
|
|
halfway up between sea and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as
|
|
if to intercept the escape of the multitudinous vessels that were
|
|
crowded between Foulness and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing
|
|
exertions of the engines of the little paddleboat, and the pouring
|
|
foam that her wheels flung behind her, she receded with terrifying
|
|
slowness from this ominous advance.
|
|
|
|
Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of
|
|
shipping already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship
|
|
passing behind another, another coming round from broadside to end
|
|
on, steamships whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being
|
|
let out, launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated
|
|
by this and by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no
|
|
eyes for anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the
|
|
steamboat (she had suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung
|
|
him headlong from the seat upon which he was standing. There was a
|
|
shouting all about him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed
|
|
to be answered faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over
|
|
upon his hands.
|
|
|
|
He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred
|
|
yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the
|
|
blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either
|
|
side in huge waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging
|
|
her paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down
|
|
almost to the waterline.
|
|
|
|
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his
|
|
eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing
|
|
landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure,
|
|
and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot
|
|
with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong,
|
|
coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.
|
|
|
|
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the
|
|
bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the
|
|
Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close together, and
|
|
standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost
|
|
entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective,
|
|
they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose
|
|
wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were
|
|
regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their
|
|
intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as
|
|
themselves. The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full
|
|
speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her
|
|
to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make
|
|
of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom
|
|
forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
|
|
|
|
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed
|
|
halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black
|
|
bulk against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a
|
|
canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side
|
|
and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an
|
|
unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove
|
|
clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with
|
|
the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the
|
|
Martians.
|
|
|
|
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the
|
|
water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the
|
|
camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely
|
|
downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It
|
|
must have driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot
|
|
iron rod through paper.
|
|
|
|
A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then
|
|
the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down,
|
|
and a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns
|
|
of the Thunder Child sounded through the reek, going off one after
|
|
the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
|
|
ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
|
|
smack to matchwood.
|
|
|
|
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's
|
|
collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
|
|
crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And
|
|
then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult,
|
|
drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle
|
|
parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
|
|
|
|
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and
|
|
her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and
|
|
was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear.
|
|
Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels,
|
|
leaped upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her
|
|
explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving
|
|
forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him
|
|
up like a thing of cardboard: My brother shouted involuntarily. A
|
|
boiling tumult of steam hid everything again.
|
|
|
|
"Two!" yelled the captain.
|
|
|
|
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang
|
|
with frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all
|
|
in the crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to
|
|
sea.
|
|
|
|
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third
|
|
Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was
|
|
paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at
|
|
last the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour
|
|
intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could be made out, nor
|
|
could the third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were
|
|
now quite close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
|
|
|
|
The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the
|
|
ironclads receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by
|
|
a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and
|
|
combining in the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering
|
|
to the northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads
|
|
and the steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking
|
|
cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went
|
|
about and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The
|
|
coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of
|
|
clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun.
|
|
|
|
Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the
|
|
vibration of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone
|
|
struggled to the rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding
|
|
furnace of the west, but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A
|
|
mass of smoke rose slanting and barred the face of the sun. The
|
|
steamboat throbbed on its way through an interminable suspense.
|
|
|
|
The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the
|
|
evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the
|
|
captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes.
|
|
Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed
|
|
slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above
|
|
the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very
|
|
large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly,
|
|
and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it
|
|
flew it rained down darkness upon the land.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 1: Under Foot
|
|
|
|
In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures
|
|
to tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last
|
|
two chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at
|
|
Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
|
|
resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day--the
|
|
day of the panic--in a little island of daylight, cut off by the
|
|
Black Smoke from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait
|
|
in aching inactivity during those two weary days.
|
|
|
|
My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at
|
|
Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man.
|
|
I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I though of how I was cut off
|
|
from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I
|
|
knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of
|
|
man to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now
|
|
was not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to
|
|
believe that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her.
|
|
Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew
|
|
very weary and irritable with the curate's perpetual ejaculations; I
|
|
tired of the sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual
|
|
remonstrance I kept away from him, staying in a room--evidently a
|
|
children's schoolroom --containing globes, forms, and copybooks.
|
|
When he followed me thither, I went to a box room at the top of the
|
|
house and, in order to be alone with my aching miseries, locked
|
|
myself in.
|
|
|
|
We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and
|
|
the morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next
|
|
house on Sunday evening--a face at a window and moving lights, and
|
|
later the slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people
|
|
were, nor what became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The
|
|
Black Smoke drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning,
|
|
creeping nearer and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway
|
|
outside the house that hid us.
|
|
|
|
A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff
|
|
with a jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls,
|
|
smashed all the windows it touched, and scalded the curate's hand as
|
|
he fled out of the front room. When at last we crept across the
|
|
sodden rooms and looked out again, the country northward was as
|
|
though a black snowstorm had passed over it. Looking towards the
|
|
river, we were astonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling
|
|
with the black of the scorched meadows.
|
|
|
|
For a time we did not see how this change affected our
|
|
situation, save that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke.
|
|
But later I perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we
|
|
might get away. So soon as I realised that the way of escape was
|
|
open, my dream of action returned. But the curate was lethargic,
|
|
unreasonable.
|
|
|
|
"We are safe here," he repeated; "safe here."
|
|
|
|
I resolved to leave him--would that I had! Wiser now for the
|
|
artilleryman's teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found
|
|
oil and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt
|
|
that I found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I
|
|
meant to go alone--had reconciled myself to going alone--he suddenly
|
|
roused himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the
|
|
afternoon, we started about five o'clock, as I should judge, along
|
|
the blackened road to Sunbury.
|
|
|
|
In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies
|
|
lying in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts
|
|
and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of
|
|
cindery powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of
|
|
Pompeii. We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds
|
|
full of strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our
|
|
eyes were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the
|
|
suffocating drift. We went through Bushey Park, with its deer going
|
|
to and fro under the chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in
|
|
the distance towards Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These
|
|
were the first people we saw.
|
|
|
|
Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were
|
|
still afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black
|
|
Smoke, and there were more people about here, though none could give
|
|
us news. For the most part they were like ourselves, taking
|
|
advantage of a lull to shift their quarters. I have an impression
|
|
that many of the houses here were still occupied by scared
|
|
inhabitants, too frightened even for flight. Here, too, the evidence
|
|
of a hasty rout was abundant along the road. I remember most vividly
|
|
three smashed bicycles in a heap, pounded into the road by the wheels
|
|
of subsequent carts. We crossed Richmond Bridge about half past
|
|
eight. We hurried across the exposed bridge, of course, but I
|
|
noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses, some many
|
|
feet across. I did not know what these were--there was no time for
|
|
scrutiny--and I put a more horrible interpretation on them than they
|
|
deserved. Here again on the Surrey side were black dust that had
|
|
once been smoke, and dead bodies--a heap near the approach to the
|
|
station; but we had no glimpse of the Martians until we were some way
|
|
towards Barnes.
|
|
|
|
We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running
|
|
down a side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed
|
|
deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the
|
|
town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.
|
|
|
|
Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people
|
|
running, and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in
|
|
sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood
|
|
aghast at our danger, and had the Martian looked down we must
|
|
immediately have perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go
|
|
on but turned aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate
|
|
crouched, weeping silently, and refusing to stir again.
|
|
|
|
But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest,
|
|
and in the twilight I ventured out again. I went through a
|
|
shrubbery, and along a passage beside a big house standing in its own
|
|
grounds, and so emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left
|
|
in the shed, but he came hurrying after me.
|
|
|
|
That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For
|
|
it was manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate
|
|
overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen
|
|
before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of
|
|
Kew Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it
|
|
across the green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident
|
|
this Martian pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and
|
|
they ran radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no
|
|
Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently
|
|
he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind
|
|
him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
|
|
|
|
It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have
|
|
any other purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood
|
|
for a moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us
|
|
into a walled garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate
|
|
ditch, and lay there, scarce daring to whisper to each other until
|
|
the stars were out.
|
|
|
|
I suppose it was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered
|
|
courage to start again, no longer venturing into the road, but
|
|
sneaking along hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly
|
|
through the darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the
|
|
Martians, who seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered
|
|
upon a scorched and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a
|
|
number of scattered dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the
|
|
heads and trunks but with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of
|
|
dead horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns
|
|
and smashed gun carriages.
|
|
|
|
Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was
|
|
silent and deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night
|
|
was too dark for us to see into the side roads of the place. In
|
|
Sheen my companion suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and
|
|
we decided to try one of the houses.
|
|
|
|
The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the
|
|
window, was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable
|
|
left in the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water
|
|
to drink; and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our
|
|
next house-breaking.
|
|
|
|
We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards
|
|
Mortlake. Here there stood a white house within a walled garden, and
|
|
in the pantry of this domicile we found a store of food--two loaves
|
|
of bread in a pan, an uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give
|
|
this catalogue so precisely because, as it happened, we were destined
|
|
to subsist upon this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer
|
|
stood under a shelf, and there were two bags of haricot beans and
|
|
some limp lettaces. This pantry opened into a kind of wash-up
|
|
kitchen, and in this was firewood; there was also a cupboard, in
|
|
which we found nearly a dozen of burgundy, tinned soups and salmon,
|
|
and two tins of biscuits.
|
|
|
|
We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark--for we dared not
|
|
strike a light--and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same
|
|
bottle. The curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now,
|
|
oddly enough, for pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his
|
|
strength by eating when the thing happened that was to imprison us.
|
|
|
|
"It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding
|
|
glare of vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out,
|
|
clearly visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then
|
|
followed such a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So
|
|
close on the heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud
|
|
behind me, a clash of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry
|
|
all about us, and the plaster of the ceiling came down upon us,
|
|
smashing into a multitude of fragments upon our heads. I was knocked
|
|
headlong across the floor against the oven handle and stunned. I was
|
|
insensible for a long time, the curate told me, and when I came to we
|
|
were in darkness again, and he, with a face wet, as I found
|
|
afterwards, with blood from a cut forehead, was dabbing water over
|
|
me.
|
|
|
|
For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then
|
|
things came to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.
|
|
|
|
"Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper.
|
|
|
|
At last I answered him. I sat up.
|
|
|
|
"Don't move," he said. "The floor is covered with smashed
|
|
crockery from the dresser. You can't possibly move without making a
|
|
noise, and I fancy they are outside."
|
|
|
|
We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each
|
|
other breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but once something
|
|
near us, some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling
|
|
sound. Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.
|
|
|
|
"That" said the curate, when presently it happened again.
|
|
|
|
"Yes," I said. "But what is it?"
|
|
|
|
"A Martian!" said the curate.
|
|
|
|
I listened again.
|
|
|
|
"It was not like the Heat-Ray," I said, and for a time I was
|
|
inclined to think one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled
|
|
against the house, as I had seen one stumble against the tower of
|
|
Shepperton Church.
|
|
|
|
Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three
|
|
or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. And then the
|
|
light filtered in, not through the window, which remained black, but
|
|
through a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken
|
|
bricks in the wall behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw
|
|
greyly for the first time.
|
|
|
|
The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which
|
|
flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting and lay about
|
|
our feet. Outside, the soil was banked high against the house. At
|
|
the top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The
|
|
floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen
|
|
towards the house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in
|
|
there, it was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed.
|
|
Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in
|
|
the fashion, pale green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels
|
|
below it, the wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple
|
|
of coloured supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen
|
|
range.
|
|
|
|
As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the
|
|
body of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still
|
|
glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly
|
|
as possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of
|
|
the scullery.
|
|
|
|
Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.
|
|
|
|
"The fifth cylinder," I whispered, "the fifth shot from Mars,
|
|
has struck this house and buried us under the ruins!"
|
|
|
|
For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered:
|
|
|
|
"God have mercy upon us!"
|
|
|
|
I heard him presently whimpering to himself.
|
|
|
|
Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my
|
|
part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint
|
|
light of the kitchen door. I could just see the curate's face, a
|
|
dim, oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a
|
|
metallic hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again, after a
|
|
quiet interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine. These
|
|
noises, for the most part problematical, continued intermittently,
|
|
and seemed if anything to increase in number as time wore on.
|
|
Presently a measured thudding and a vibration that made everything
|
|
about us quiver and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began
|
|
and continued. Once the light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen
|
|
doorway became absolutely dark. For many hours we must have crouched
|
|
there, silent and shivering, until our tired attention failed....
|
|
|
|
At last I found myself awake and very hungry. I am inclined to
|
|
believe we must have spent the greater portion of a day before that
|
|
awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me
|
|
to action. I told the curate I was going to seek food, and felt my
|
|
way towards the pantry. He made me no answer, but so soon as I began
|
|
eating the faint noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling
|
|
after me.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 2: What We Saw from the Ruined House
|
|
|
|
After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must
|
|
have dozed again, for when presently I looked round I was alone. The
|
|
thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered
|
|
for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of
|
|
the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the
|
|
room, lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the
|
|
Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden
|
|
from me.
|
|
|
|
I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine
|
|
shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the
|
|
aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold
|
|
and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I
|
|
remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and
|
|
stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the
|
|
floor.
|
|
|
|
I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a
|
|
mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud
|
|
impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long
|
|
time we crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our
|
|
rampart remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical
|
|
slit open in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a
|
|
beam I was able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a
|
|
quiet suburban roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.
|
|
|
|
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the
|
|
house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely
|
|
smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now
|
|
far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly
|
|
larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round
|
|
it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only
|
|
word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent
|
|
houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a
|
|
hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion even on
|
|
the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the
|
|
kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and
|
|
ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the
|
|
cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great
|
|
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating
|
|
sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green
|
|
vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.
|
|
|
|
The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on
|
|
the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped
|
|
shrubbery, one of the great fighting machines, deserted by its
|
|
occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I
|
|
scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been
|
|
convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary
|
|
glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of
|
|
the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across
|
|
the heaped mould near it.
|
|
|
|
The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It
|
|
was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called
|
|
handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an
|
|
enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me
|
|
first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed,
|
|
agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars,
|
|
and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body.
|
|
Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it
|
|
was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the
|
|
covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder.
|
|
These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a
|
|
level surface of earth behind it.
|
|
|
|
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I
|
|
did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The
|
|
fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary
|
|
pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen
|
|
these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists
|
|
or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go
|
|
upon, scarcely realise that living quality.
|
|
|
|
I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first
|
|
pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had
|
|
evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and
|
|
there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff
|
|
tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an
|
|
altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing
|
|
these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here
|
|
simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have
|
|
created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a
|
|
Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would
|
|
have been much better without them.
|
|
|
|
At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a
|
|
machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the
|
|
controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements
|
|
seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's cerebral portion.
|
|
But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny,
|
|
leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and
|
|
the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that
|
|
realization my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real
|
|
Martians. Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the
|
|
first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was
|
|
concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.
|
|
|
|
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is
|
|
possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies--or, rather,
|
|
heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a
|
|
face. This face had no nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to
|
|
have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large
|
|
dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In
|
|
the back of this head or body--I scarcely know how to speak of
|
|
it--was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be
|
|
anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our
|
|
dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost
|
|
whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These
|
|
bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished
|
|
anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw these Martians
|
|
for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves
|
|
on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of
|
|
terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to
|
|
suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some
|
|
facility.
|
|
|
|
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since
|
|
shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure
|
|
was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile
|
|
tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth
|
|
opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused
|
|
by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was
|
|
only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
|
|
|
|
And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may
|
|
seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which
|
|
makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They
|
|
were heads merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat,
|
|
much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of
|
|
other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself
|
|
seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But,
|
|
squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I
|
|
could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say,
|
|
blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human
|
|
being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the
|
|
recipient canal....
|
|
|
|
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but
|
|
at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our
|
|
carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
|
|
|
|
The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are
|
|
undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and
|
|
energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies
|
|
are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning
|
|
heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their
|
|
reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our
|
|
minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy
|
|
livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above
|
|
all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.
|
|
|
|
Their undeniable preference for men as their source of
|
|
nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the
|
|
victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These
|
|
creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into
|
|
human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost
|
|
like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing
|
|
about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in
|
|
flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in
|
|
each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. It was
|
|
just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our
|
|
planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.
|
|
|
|
And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this
|
|
place certain further details which, although they were not all
|
|
evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted
|
|
with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
|
|
|
|
In three other points their physiology differed strangely from
|
|
ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man
|
|
sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to
|
|
recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had
|
|
little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could
|
|
never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they kept in
|
|
action. In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as
|
|
even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.
|
|
|
|
In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the
|
|
Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of
|
|
the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men. A
|
|
young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon
|
|
earth during the war, and it was found attached to its parent,
|
|
partially budded off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the
|
|
young animals in the fresh-water polyp.
|
|
|
|
In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of
|
|
increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the
|
|
primitive method. Among the lower animals, up even to those first
|
|
cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes
|
|
occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its
|
|
competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has
|
|
apparently been the case.
|
|
|
|
It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of
|
|
quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion,
|
|
did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian
|
|
condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or
|
|
December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget,
|
|
and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called
|
|
Punch. He pointed out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that
|
|
the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede
|
|
limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such
|
|
organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer
|
|
essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural
|
|
selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution
|
|
through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal
|
|
necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for
|
|
survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and agent of the brain."
|
|
While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.
|
|
|
|
There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the
|
|
Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a
|
|
suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence.
|
|
To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from
|
|
beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and
|
|
hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate
|
|
tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without
|
|
the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish
|
|
intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human
|
|
being.
|
|
|
|
The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures
|
|
differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial
|
|
particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on
|
|
earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary
|
|
science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers
|
|
and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such
|
|
morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life. And speaking of
|
|
the differences between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may
|
|
allude here to the curious suggestions of the red weed.
|
|
|
|
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having
|
|
green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood red tint. At any
|
|
rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally)
|
|
brought with then, gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths.
|
|
Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any
|
|
footing in competition with terrestrial forms. The red creeper was
|
|
quite a transitory growth, and few people have seen it growing. For
|
|
a time, however, the red weed grew with astonishing vigour and
|
|
luxuriance. It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth
|
|
day of our imprisonment, an its cactus-like branches formed a carmine
|
|
fringe to the edges of our triangular window. And afterwards I found
|
|
it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there
|
|
was a stream of water.
|
|
|
|
The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a
|
|
single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a
|
|
visual range not very different from ours except that, according to
|
|
Philips, blue and violet were as black to them. It is commonly
|
|
supposed that they communicated by sounds and tentacular
|
|
gesticulations; this is asserted, for instance, in the able but
|
|
hastily compiled pamphlet (written evidently by someone not an
|
|
eye-witness to Martian actions) to which I have already alluded, and
|
|
which, so far, has been the chief source of information concerning
|
|
them. Now no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in
|
|
action as I did. I take no credit to myself for an accident, but the
|
|
fact is so. And I assert that I watched them closely time after
|
|
time, and that I have seen four, five, and (once) six of them
|
|
sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated operations
|
|
together without either sound or gesture. Their peculiar hooting
|
|
invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation, and was, I
|
|
believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air
|
|
preparatory to the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to at
|
|
least an elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am
|
|
convinced--as firmly as I am convinced of anything--that the Martians
|
|
interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I
|
|
have been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions.
|
|
Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there
|
|
may remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the
|
|
telepathic theory.
|
|
|
|
The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament
|
|
and decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not only were
|
|
they evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we
|
|
are, but changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their
|
|
health at all seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in
|
|
the other artificial additions to their bodily resources that their
|
|
great superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and
|
|
road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and
|
|
so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the
|
|
Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains,
|
|
wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear
|
|
suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the
|
|
wet. And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a
|
|
man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost
|
|
all human devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among
|
|
all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion
|
|
of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in
|
|
locomotion. And in this connection it is curious to remark that even
|
|
on this earth Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred
|
|
other expedients to its development. And not only did the Martians
|
|
either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel,
|
|
but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed
|
|
pivot, or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout
|
|
confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery
|
|
present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but
|
|
beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of
|
|
detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines
|
|
are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks
|
|
in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely
|
|
and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity.
|
|
In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so
|
|
striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such
|
|
quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my
|
|
first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It
|
|
seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it
|
|
in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and
|
|
moving feebly after their vast journey across space.
|
|
|
|
While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the
|
|
sunlight, and noting each strange detail of their form, the curate
|
|
reminded me of his presence by pulling violently at my arm. I turned
|
|
to a scowling face, and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit,
|
|
which permitted only one of us to peep through; and so I had to
|
|
forego watching them for a time while he enjoyed that privilege.
|
|
|
|
When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put
|
|
together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the
|
|
cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and
|
|
down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view,
|
|
emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit,
|
|
excavating and embarking in a methodical and discriminating manner.
|
|
This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the
|
|
rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped
|
|
and whistled as it worked. So far as I could see, the thing was
|
|
without a directing Martian at all.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 3: The Days of Imprisonment
|
|
|
|
The arrival of a second fighting-machine drove us from our
|
|
peephole into the scullery, for we feared that from his elevation the
|
|
Martian might see down upon us behind our barrier. At a later date
|
|
we began to feel less in danger of their eyes, for to an eye in the
|
|
dale of the sunlight outside our refuge must have been blank
|
|
blackness, but at first the slightest suggestion of approach drove us
|
|
into the scullery in heart-throbbing retreat. Yet terrible as was
|
|
the danger we incurred, the attraction of peeping was for both of us
|
|
irresistible. And I recall now with a sort of wonder that, in spite
|
|
of the infinite danger in which we were between starvation and a
|
|
still more terrible death, we could yet struggle bitterly for that
|
|
horrible privilege of sight. We would race across the kitchen in a
|
|
grotesque way between eagerness and the dread of making a noise, and
|
|
strike each other, and thrust and kick, within a few inches of
|
|
exposure.
|
|
|
|
The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions and
|
|
habits of thought and action, and our danger and isolation only
|
|
accentuated the incompatibility. At Halliford I had already come to
|
|
hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid rigidity
|
|
of mind. His endless muttering monologue vitiated every effort I
|
|
made to think out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent
|
|
up and intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. He was as
|
|
lacking in restraint as a silly woman. He would weep for hours
|
|
together, and I verily believe that to the very end this spoiled
|
|
child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious. And I
|
|
would sit in the darkness unable to keep my mind off him by reason of
|
|
his importunities. He ate more than I did, and it was in vain I
|
|
pointed out that our only chance of life was to stop in the house
|
|
until the Martians had done with their pit, that in that long
|
|
patience a time might presently come when we should need food. He
|
|
ate an drank impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals. He slept
|
|
little.
|
|
|
|
As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration
|
|
so intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed
|
|
doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought
|
|
him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures,
|
|
void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty
|
|
cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.
|
|
|
|
It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but
|
|
I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who have
|
|
escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality,
|
|
my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they
|
|
know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to
|
|
tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have
|
|
gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.
|
|
|
|
And while within we fought out our dark, dim contest of
|
|
whispers, matched food and drink, and gripping hands and blows,
|
|
without, in the pitiless sunlight of that terrible June, was the
|
|
strange wonder, the unfamiliar routine of the Martians in the pit.
|
|
Let me return to those first new experiences of mine. After a long
|
|
time I ventured back to the peephole, to find that the new-comers had
|
|
been reinforced by the occupants of no fewer than three of the
|
|
fighting-machines. These last had brought with them certain fresh
|
|
appliances that stood in an orderly manner about the cylinder. The
|
|
second handling-machine was now completed, and was busied in serving
|
|
one of the novel contrivances the big machine had brought. This was
|
|
a body resembling a milk can in its general form, above which
|
|
oscillated a pear-shaped receptacle, and from which a stream of white
|
|
powder flowed into a circular basin below.
|
|
|
|
The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of
|
|
the handling-machine. With two spatulate hands the handling-machine
|
|
was digging out and flinging masses of clay into the pear-shaped
|
|
receptacle above, while with another arm it periodically opened a
|
|
door and removed rusty and blackened clinkers from the middle part of
|
|
the machine. Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the
|
|
basin along a ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden
|
|
from me by the mound of bluish dust. From this unseen receiver a
|
|
little thread of green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. As
|
|
I looked, the handling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking,
|
|
extended, telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a moment
|
|
before a mere blunt projection, until its end was hidden behind the
|
|
mound of clay. In another second it had lifted a bar of white
|
|
aluminium into sight, untarnished as yet and shining dazzlingly, and
|
|
deposited it in a growing stack of bars that stood at the side of the
|
|
pit. Between sunset and starlight this dexterous machine must have
|
|
made more than a hundred such bars out of the crude clay, and the
|
|
mound of bluish dust rose steadily until it topped the side of the
|
|
pit.
|
|
|
|
The contrast between the swift and complex movements of these
|
|
contrivances and the inert, panting clumsiness of their masters was
|
|
acute, and for days I had to tell myself repeatedly that these latter
|
|
were indeed the living of the two things.
|
|
|
|
The curate had possession of the slit when the first men were
|
|
brought to the pit. I was sitting below, huddled up, listening with
|
|
all my ears. He made a sudden movement backward, and I, fearful that
|
|
we were observed, crouched in a spasm of terror. He came sliding
|
|
down the rubbish and crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate,
|
|
gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. His gesture
|
|
suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a little while my
|
|
curiosity gave me courage, and I rose up, stepped across him, and
|
|
clambered up to it. At first I could see no reason for his frantic
|
|
behaviour. The twilight had now come, the stars were little and
|
|
faint, but the pit was illuminated by the flickering green fire that
|
|
came from the aluminium-making. The whole picture was a flickering
|
|
scheme of green gleams and shifting rusty black shadows, strangely
|
|
trying to the eyes. Over and through it all went the bats, heeding
|
|
it not at all. The sprawling Martians were no longer to be seen, the
|
|
mound of blue-green powder had risen to cover them from sight, and a
|
|
fighting-machine, with its legs contracted, crumpled, and
|
|
abbreviated, stood across the corner of the pit. And then, amid the
|
|
clangour of the machinery, came a drifting suspicion, of human
|
|
voices, that I entertained at first only to dismiss.
|
|
|
|
I crouched, watching this fighting-machine closely, satisfying
|
|
myself now for the first time that the hood did indeed contain a
|
|
Martian. As the green flames lifted I could see the oily gleam of
|
|
his integument and the brightness of his eyes. And suddenly I heard
|
|
a yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the
|
|
machine to the little cage that hunched upon its back. Then
|
|
something--something struggling violently--was lifted high against
|
|
the sky, a black, vague enigma against the starlight; and as this
|
|
black object came down again, I saw by the green brightness that it
|
|
was a man. For an instant he was clearly visible. He was a stout,
|
|
ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed; three days before, he must have
|
|
been walking the world, a man of considerable consequence. I could
|
|
see his staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch
|
|
chain. He vanished behind the mound, and for a moment there was
|
|
silence. And then began a shrieking and a sustained and cheerful
|
|
hooting from the Martians.
|
|
|
|
I slid down the rubbish, struggled to my feet, clapped my hands
|
|
over my ears, and bolted into the scullery. The curate, who had been
|
|
crouching silently with his arms over his head, looked up as I
|
|
passed, cried out quite loudly at my desertion of him, and came
|
|
running after me.
|
|
|
|
That night, as we lurked in the scullery, balanced between our
|
|
horror and the terrible fascination this peeping had, although I felt
|
|
an urgent need of action I tried in vain to conceive some plan of
|
|
escape; but afterwards, during the second day, I was able to consider
|
|
our position with great clearness. The curate, I found, was quite
|
|
incapable of discussion; this new and culminating atrocity had robbed
|
|
him of all vestiges of reason or forethought. Practically he had
|
|
already sunk to the level of an animal. But, as the saying goes, I
|
|
gripped myself with both hands. It grew upon my mind, once I could
|
|
face the facts, that, terrible as our position was, there was as yet
|
|
no justification for absolute despair. Our chief chance lay in the
|
|
possibility of the Martians making the pit nothing more than a
|
|
temporary encampment. Or even if they kept it permanently, they
|
|
might not consider it necessary to guard it, and a chance of escape
|
|
might be afforded us. I also weighed very carefully the possibility
|
|
of our digging a way out in a direction away from the pit, but the
|
|
chances of our emerging within sight of some sentinel
|
|
fighting-machine seemed at first too great. And I should have had to
|
|
do all the digging myself. The curate would certainly have failed
|
|
me.
|
|
|
|
It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that I
|
|
saw the lad killed. It was the only occasion on which I actually saw
|
|
the Martians feed. After that experience I avoided the hole in the
|
|
wall for the better part of a day. I went into the scullery, removed
|
|
the door, and spent some hours digging with my hatchet as silently as
|
|
possible; but when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep the
|
|
loose earth collapsed noisily, and I did not dare continue. I lost
|
|
heart, and lay down on the scullery floor for a long time, having no
|
|
spirit even to move. And after that I abandoned altogether the idea
|
|
of escaping by excavation.
|
|
|
|
It says much for the impression the Martians had made upon me
|
|
that at first I entertained little or no hope of our escape being
|
|
brought about by their overthrow through any human effort. But on
|
|
the fourth or fifth night I heard a sound like heavy guns.
|
|
|
|
It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining
|
|
brightly. The Martians had taken away the excavating machine, and,
|
|
save for a fighting-machine that stood in the remoter bank of the pit
|
|
and a handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a corner of
|
|
the pit immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by
|
|
them. Except for the pale glow from the handling-machine and the
|
|
bars and patches of white moonlight, the pit was in darkness, and
|
|
except for the clinking of the handling-machine, quite still. That
|
|
night was a beautiful serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed
|
|
to have the sky to herself. I heard a dog howling--and that familiar
|
|
sound it was that made me listen. Then I heard quite distinctly a
|
|
booming exactly like the sound of great guns. Six distinct reports I
|
|
counted, and after a long interval six again. And that was all.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 4: The Death of the Curate
|
|
|
|
It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for
|
|
the last time, and presently found myself alone. Instead of keeping
|
|
close to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone
|
|
back into the scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought. I went
|
|
back quickly and quietly into the scullery. In the darkness I heard
|
|
the curate drinking. I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers
|
|
caught a bottle of burgundy.
|
|
|
|
For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the
|
|
floor and broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood panting and
|
|
threatening each other. In the end I planted myself between him and
|
|
the food, and told him of my determination to begin a discipline. I
|
|
divided the food in the pantry into rations to last us ten days. I
|
|
would not let him eat any more that day. In the afternoon he made a
|
|
feeble effort to get at the food. I had been dozing, but in an
|
|
instant I was awake. All day and all night we sat face to face, I
|
|
weary but resolute, and he weeping and complaining of his immediate
|
|
hunger. It was, I know, a night and a day, but to me it seemed--it
|
|
seems now--an interminable length of time.
|
|
|
|
And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open
|
|
conflict. For two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling
|
|
contests. There were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times
|
|
when I cajoled and persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him with
|
|
the last bottle of burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from
|
|
which I could get water. But neither force nor kindness availed; he
|
|
was indeed beyond reason. He would neither desist from his attacks
|
|
on the food nor from his noisy babbling to himself. The rudimentary
|
|
precautions to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not observe.
|
|
Slowly I began to realise the complete overthrow of his intelligence,
|
|
to perceive that my sole companion in this close and sickly darkness
|
|
was a man insane.
|
|
|
|
From certain vague memories, I am inclined to think my own mind
|
|
wandered at times. I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I
|
|
slept. It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the
|
|
weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me
|
|
a sane man.
|
|
|
|
On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering,
|
|
and nothing I could do would moderate his speech.
|
|
|
|
"It is just, O God!-" he would say, over and over again. "It is
|
|
just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we
|
|
have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden
|
|
in the dust, and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly--my
|
|
God, what folly! --when I should have stood up, though I died for it,
|
|
and called upon them to repent--repent! ... Oppressors of the poor
|
|
and needy ...! The wine press of God!"
|
|
|
|
Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I
|
|
withheld from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening.
|
|
He began to raise his voice--I prayed him not to. He perceived a
|
|
hold on me--he threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon
|
|
us. For a time that scared me; but any concession would have
|
|
shortened our chance of escape beyond estimating. I defied him,
|
|
although I felt no assurance that he might not do this thing. But
|
|
that day, at any rate, he did not. He talked with his voice rising
|
|
slowly, through the greater part of the eighth and ninth
|
|
days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane and
|
|
always frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God's service, such
|
|
as made me pity him. Then he slept awhile, and began again with
|
|
renewed strength, so loudly that I must needs make him desist.
|
|
|
|
"Be still!" I implored.
|
|
|
|
He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness
|
|
near the copper.
|
|
|
|
"I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have
|
|
reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this
|
|
unfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of
|
|
the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet---"
|
|
|
|
"Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the
|
|
Martians should hear us. "For God's sake---"
|
|
|
|
"Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing
|
|
likewise and extending his arms. "Speak! The word of the Lord is
|
|
upon me!"
|
|
|
|
In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.
|
|
|
|
"I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long
|
|
delayed."
|
|
|
|
I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the wall.
|
|
In a flash I was after him. I was fierce with fear. Before he was
|
|
halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him. With one last touch
|
|
of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt. He
|
|
went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled
|
|
over him and stood panting. He lay still.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping
|
|
plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall was darkened. I
|
|
looked up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming
|
|
slowly across the hole. One of its gripping limbs curled amid the
|
|
debris; another limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams.
|
|
I stood petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate
|
|
near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large
|
|
dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of
|
|
tentacle came feeling slowly through the hole.
|
|
|
|
I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at
|
|
the scullery door. The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more,
|
|
in the room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements,
|
|
this way and that. For a while I stood fascinated by that slow,
|
|
fitful advance. Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself
|
|
across the scullery. I trembled violently; I could scarcely stand
|
|
upright. I opened the door of the coal cellar, and stood there in
|
|
the darkness staring at the faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and
|
|
listening. Had the Martian seen me? What was it doing now?
|
|
|
|
Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now
|
|
and then it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with
|
|
a faint metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring.
|
|
Then a heavy body--I knew too well what--was dragged across the floor
|
|
of the kitchen towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept
|
|
to the door and peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright
|
|
outer sunlight I saw, the Martian, in its Briareus of a
|
|
handling-machine, scrutinising the curate's head. I thought at once
|
|
that it would infer my presence from the mark of the blow I had given
|
|
him.
|
|
|
|
I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to
|
|
cover myself up as much as I could, and as noiselessly as possible in
|
|
the darkness, among the firewood and coal therein. Every now and
|
|
then I paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its tentacles
|
|
through the opening again.
|
|
|
|
Then the faint metallic, jingle returned. I traced it slowly
|
|
feeling over the kitchen. Presently I heard it nearer--in the
|
|
scullery, as I judged. I thought that its length might be
|
|
insufficient to reach me. I prayed copiously. It passed, scraping
|
|
faintly across the cellar door. An age of almost intolerable
|
|
suspense intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the latch! It had
|
|
found the door. The Martians understood doors!
|
|
|
|
It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door
|
|
opened.
|
|
|
|
In the darkness I could just see the thing--like an elephant's
|
|
trunk more than anything else--waving towards me and touching and
|
|
examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a black
|
|
worm swaying its blind head to and fro.
|
|
|
|
Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot. I was on the verge
|
|
of screaming; I bit my hand. For a time the tentacle was silent. I
|
|
could have fancied it had been withdrawn. Presently, with an abrupt
|
|
click, it gripped something--I thought it had me!--and seemed to go
|
|
out of the cellar again. For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it
|
|
had taken a lump of coal to examine.
|
|
|
|
I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, which
|
|
had become cramped, and then listened. I whispered passionate
|
|
prayers for safety.
|
|
|
|
Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me
|
|
again. Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the walls and
|
|
tapping the furniture.
|
|
|
|
While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar
|
|
door and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the
|
|
biscuit-tins rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump
|
|
against the cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity
|
|
of suspense.
|
|
|
|
Had it gone?
|
|
|
|
At last I decided that it had.
|
|
|
|
It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day
|
|
in the close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring
|
|
even to crawl out for the drink for which I craved. It was the
|
|
eleventh day before I ventured so far from my security.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 5: The Stillness
|
|
|
|
My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the
|
|
door between the kitchen and the scullery. But the pantry was empty;
|
|
every scrap of food had gone. Apparently, the Martian had taken it
|
|
all on the previous day. At that discovery I despaired for the first
|
|
time. I took no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the
|
|
twelfth day.
|
|
|
|
At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed
|
|
sensibly. I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of
|
|
despondent wretchedness. My mind ran on eating. I thought I had
|
|
become deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear
|
|
from the pit had ceased absolutely. I did not feel strong enough to
|
|
crawl noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there.
|
|
|
|
On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the
|
|
chance of alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water
|
|
pump that stood by the sink, and got a couple of glassfuls of
|
|
blackened and tainted rain water. I was greatly refreshed by this,
|
|
and emboldened by the fact that no enquiring tentacle followed the
|
|
noise of my pumping.
|
|
|
|
During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought
|
|
much of the curate and of the manner of his death.
|
|
|
|
On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and
|
|
thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of
|
|
escape. Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the
|
|
death of the curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I
|
|
felt a keen pain that urged me to drink again and again. The light
|
|
that came into the scullery was no longer grey, but red. To my
|
|
disordered imagination it seemed the colour of blood.
|
|
|
|
On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was
|
|
surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right
|
|
across the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into
|
|
a crimson-coloured obscurity.
|
|
|
|
It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious,
|
|
familiar sequence of sounds in the kitchen, and, listening,
|
|
identified it as the snuffing and scratching of a dog. Going into
|
|
the kitchen, I saw a dog's nose peering in through a break among the
|
|
ruddy fronds. This greatly surprised me. At the scent of me he
|
|
barked shortly.
|
|
|
|
I thought if I could induce him to come into the place quietly I
|
|
should be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in any case, it
|
|
would be advisable to kill him, lest his actions attracted the
|
|
attention of the Martians.
|
|
|
|
I crept forward, saying "Good dog!" very softly; but he suddenly
|
|
withdrew his head and disappeared.
|
|
|
|
I listened--I was not deaf--but certainly the pit was still. I
|
|
heard a sound like the flutter of a bird's wings, and a hoarse
|
|
croaking, but that was all.
|
|
|
|
For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to
|
|
move aside the red plants that obscured it. Once or twice I heard a
|
|
faint pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and thither
|
|
on the sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but
|
|
that was all. At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.
|
|
|
|
Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and
|
|
fought over the skeletons of the dead the Martians had consumed,
|
|
there was not a living thing in the pit.
|
|
|
|
I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the
|
|
machinery had gone. Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in
|
|
one corner, certain bars of aluminium in another, the black birds,
|
|
and the skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty
|
|
circular pit in the sand.
|
|
|
|
Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon
|
|
the mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to
|
|
the north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen.
|
|
The pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the
|
|
rubbish afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My
|
|
chance of escape had come. I began to tremble.
|
|
|
|
I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate
|
|
resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to
|
|
the top of the mound in which I had been buried so long.
|
|
|
|
I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was
|
|
visible.
|
|
|
|
When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had
|
|
been a straggling street of comfortable white and red houses,
|
|
interspersed with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of
|
|
smashed brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of
|
|
red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial
|
|
growth to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and
|
|
brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the still living
|
|
stems.
|
|
|
|
The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been
|
|
burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with
|
|
smashed windows and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously
|
|
in their roofless rooms. Below me was the great pit, with the crows
|
|
struggling for its refuse. A number of other birds hopped about
|
|
among the ruins. Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along
|
|
a wall, but traces of men there were none.
|
|
|
|
The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement,
|
|
dazzlingly bright, the sky a glowing blue. A gentle breeze kept the
|
|
red weed that covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently
|
|
swaying. And oh! the sweetness of the air!
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 6: The Work of Fifteen Days
|
|
|
|
For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my
|
|
safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had
|
|
thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I
|
|
had not realised what had been happening to the world, had not
|
|
anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had
|
|
expected to see Sheen in ruins--I found about me the landscape, weird
|
|
and lurid, of another planet.
|
|
|
|
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of
|
|
men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I
|
|
felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly
|
|
confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the
|
|
foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that
|
|
presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many
|
|
days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a
|
|
master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.
|
|
With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide;
|
|
the fear and empire of man had passed away.
|
|
|
|
But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and
|
|
my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In
|
|
the direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a
|
|
patch of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went
|
|
knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of
|
|
the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six
|
|
feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not
|
|
lift my feet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and
|
|
came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top,
|
|
and tumble into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young
|
|
onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature
|
|
carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall,
|
|
went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was
|
|
like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed
|
|
with two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soon and as far as
|
|
my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region of the
|
|
pit.
|
|
|
|
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms
|
|
which also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing
|
|
shallow water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of
|
|
nourishment served only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised
|
|
at this flood in a hot, dry summer, hut afterwards I discovered that
|
|
it was caused by the tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly
|
|
this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became
|
|
gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured
|
|
down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing
|
|
and titanic water fronds speedily choked both those rivers.
|
|
|
|
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a
|
|
tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in
|
|
a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and
|
|
Twickerham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the
|
|
ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red
|
|
swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the
|
|
Martians had caused was concealed.
|
|
|
|
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had
|
|
spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of
|
|
certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of
|
|
natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting
|
|
power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe
|
|
struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The
|
|
fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke
|
|
off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their
|
|
early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.
|
|
|
|
My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
|
|
thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
|
|
some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
|
|
metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
|
|
wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but
|
|
the flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back
|
|
to Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional
|
|
ruins of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out
|
|
of this spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton
|
|
and came out on Putney Common.
|
|
|
|
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
|
|
wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
|
|
of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
|
|
undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
|
|
closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
|
|
their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the
|
|
tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted
|
|
for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple
|
|
of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and
|
|
ransacked. I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a
|
|
shrubbery, being, in my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
|
|
|
|
All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the
|
|
Martians. I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both
|
|
hurried circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near
|
|
Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons,
|
|
picked clean --and in the wood by me I found the crushed and
|
|
scattered bones of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep.
|
|
But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to
|
|
be got from them.
|
|
|
|
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where
|
|
I think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the
|
|
garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
|
|
sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
|
|
Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
|
|
singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
|
|
down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
|
|
weed. And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terror
|
|
to think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
|
|
|
|
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of
|
|
existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.
|
|
Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the
|
|
arms dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body.
|
|
As I proceeded I became more and more convinced that the
|
|
extermination of mankind was, save for such stragglers as myself,
|
|
already accomplished in this part of the world. The Martians, I
|
|
thought, had gone on and left the country desolated, seeking food
|
|
elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or
|
|
it might be they had gone northward.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 7: The Man on Putney Hill
|
|
|
|
I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney
|
|
Hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
|
|
Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking
|
|
into that house--afterwards I found the front door was on the
|
|
latch--nor how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the
|
|
verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom I
|
|
found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had
|
|
been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found
|
|
some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I
|
|
could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed
|
|
my hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some
|
|
Martian might come beating that part of London for food in the night.
|
|
Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled
|
|
from window to window, peering out for some sign of these monsters.
|
|
I slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinking
|
|
consecutively--a thing I do not remember to have done since my last
|
|
argument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental
|
|
condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or
|
|
a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced,
|
|
I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.
|
|
|
|
Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of
|
|
the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of
|
|
my wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to
|
|
recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely
|
|
disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself
|
|
then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty
|
|
blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to
|
|
that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive,
|
|
haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the
|
|
nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the
|
|
darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath
|
|
and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment
|
|
when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and
|
|
pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of
|
|
Weybridge. We had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had
|
|
taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at
|
|
Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do.
|
|
And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was.
|
|
There were no witnesses--all these things I might have concealed.
|
|
But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will.
|
|
|
|
And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a
|
|
prostrate body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of
|
|
my wife. For the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred
|
|
things, and so, unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that
|
|
night became terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at
|
|
the dark. I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have
|
|
suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of
|
|
my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers,
|
|
fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in
|
|
extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely,
|
|
face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in
|
|
this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God,
|
|
crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place--a
|
|
creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any
|
|
passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they
|
|
also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing
|
|
else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that
|
|
suffer our dominion.
|
|
|
|
The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky flowed
|
|
pink, and was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that
|
|
runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor
|
|
vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the
|
|
Sunday night after the fighting began. There was a little
|
|
two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer,
|
|
New Maiden, with a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there
|
|
was a straw hat trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of
|
|
West Hill a lot of blood-stained glass about the overturned water
|
|
trough. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had
|
|
idea of going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the
|
|
poorest chance of finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had
|
|
overtaken them suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence;
|
|
but it seemed to me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey
|
|
people had fled. I knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart
|
|
ached for her and the world of men, but I had no clear idea how the
|
|
finding might be done. I was also sharply aware now of my intense
|
|
loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover of a thicket of
|
|
trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common, stretching wide
|
|
and far.
|
|
|
|
That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom;
|
|
there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on
|
|
the verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and
|
|
vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place
|
|
among the trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from
|
|
their stout resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with
|
|
an odd feeling of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a
|
|
clump of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it,
|
|
and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached
|
|
him slowly. He stood silent and motionless, regarding me.
|
|
|
|
As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty
|
|
and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been
|
|
dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime
|
|
of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly
|
|
patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark
|
|
and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him.
|
|
There was a red cut across the lower part of his face.
|
|
|
|
"Stop!" he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I
|
|
stopped. His voice was hoarse. "Where do you come from?" he said.
|
|
|
|
I thought, surveying him.
|
|
|
|
"I come from Mortlake," I said. "I was buried near the pit the
|
|
Martians made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out and
|
|
escaped."
|
|
|
|
"There is no food about here," he said. "This is my country.
|
|
All this hill down to the river, and back to Clapham, and up to the
|
|
edge of the common. There is only food for one. Which way are you
|
|
going?"
|
|
|
|
I answered slowly.
|
|
|
|
"I don't know," I said. "I have been buried in the ruins of a
|
|
house thirteen or fourteen days. I don't know what has happened."
|
|
|
|
He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a
|
|
changed expression.
|
|
|
|
"I've no wish to stop about here," said I. "I think I shall go
|
|
to Leatherhead, for my wife was there."
|
|
|
|
He shot out a pointing finger.
|
|
|
|
"It is you," said he; "the man from Woking. And you weren't
|
|
killed at Weybridge?"
|
|
|
|
I recognised him at the same moment.
|
|
|
|
"You are the artilleryman who came into my garden."
|
|
|
|
"Good luck!" he said. "We are lucky ones! Fancy you!" He put
|
|
out a hand, and I took it. "I crawled up a drain," he said. "But
|
|
they didn't kill everyone. And after they went away I got off
|
|
towards Walton across the fields. But--- It's not sixteen days
|
|
altogether--and your hair is grey." He looked over his shoulder
|
|
suddenly. "Only a rook," he said. "One gets to know that birds have
|
|
shadows these days. This is a bit open. Let us crawl under those
|
|
bushes and talk."
|
|
|
|
"Have you seen any Martians?" I said. "Since I crawled out---"
|
|
|
|
"They've gone away across London," he said. "I guess they've
|
|
got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way,
|
|
the sky is alive with their lights. It's like a great city, and in
|
|
the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can't. But
|
|
nearer--I haven't seen them--" (he counted on his fingers) "five
|
|
days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something
|
|
big. And the night before last"--he stopped and spoke
|
|
impressively--"it was just a matter of lights, but it was something
|
|
up in the air. I believe they've built a flying-machine, and are
|
|
learning to fly."
|
|
|
|
I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.
|
|
|
|
"Fly!"
|
|
|
|
"Yes," he said, "fly."
|
|
|
|
I went on into a little bower, and sat down.
|
|
|
|
"It is all over with humanity," I said. "If they can do that
|
|
they will simply go round the world."
|
|
|
|
He nodded.
|
|
|
|
"They will. But--- It will relieve things over here a bit. And
|
|
besides--" He looked at me. "Aren't you satisfied it is up with
|
|
humanity? I am. We're down; we're beat."
|
|
|
|
I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this
|
|
fact--a fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held
|
|
a vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of mind. He
|
|
repeated his words, "We're beat." They carried absolute conviction.
|
|
|
|
"It's all over," he said. "They've lost one--just one. And
|
|
they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in
|
|
the world. They've walked over us. The death of that one at
|
|
Weybridge was an accident. And these are only pioneers. They kept
|
|
on coming. These green stars--I've seen none these five or six days,
|
|
but I've no doubt they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's
|
|
to be done. We're under! We're beat!"
|
|
|
|
I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in vain
|
|
to devise some countervailing thought.
|
|
|
|
"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was, a
|
|
war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
|
|
|
|
Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.
|
|
|
|
"After the tenth shot, they fired no more--at least, until the
|
|
first cylinder came."
|
|
|
|
"How do you know?" said the artilleryman. I explained. He
|
|
thought. "Something wrong with the gun," he said. "But what if
|
|
there is? They'll get it right again. And even if there's a delay,
|
|
how can it alter the end? It's just men and ants. There's the ants
|
|
builds their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until
|
|
the men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way.
|
|
That's what we are now--just ants. Only---"
|
|
|
|
"Yes," I said.
|
|
|
|
"We're eatable ants."
|
|
|
|
We sat looking at each other.
|
|
|
|
"And what will they do with us?" I said.
|
|
|
|
"That's what I've been thinking," he said; "that's what I've
|
|
been thinking. After Weybridge I went south--thinking. I saw what
|
|
was up. Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting
|
|
themselves. But I'm not so fond of squealing. I've been in sight of
|
|
death once or twice; I'm not an ornamental soldier, and at the best
|
|
and worst, death--it's just death. And it's the man that keeps on
|
|
thinking comes through. I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I,
|
|
`Food won't last this way,' and I turned right back. I went for the
|
|
Martians like a sparrow goes for man. All round"--he waved a hand to
|
|
the horizon--"they're starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each
|
|
other...."
|
|
|
|
He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.
|
|
|
|
"No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France," he said.
|
|
He seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on:
|
|
"There's food all about here. Canned things in shops; wines,
|
|
spirits, mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty.
|
|
Well, I was telling you what I was thinking. `Here's intelligent
|
|
things,' I said, `and it seems they want us for food. First, they'll
|
|
smash us up--ships, machines, guns, cities, all the order and
|
|
organisation. All that will go. If we were the size of ants we
|
|
might pull through. But we're not. It's all too bulky to stop.
|
|
That's the first certainty.' Eh?"
|
|
|
|
"It is; I've thought it out. Very well, then--next; at present
|
|
we're caught as we're wanted. A Martian has only to go a few miles
|
|
to get a crowd on the run. And I saw one, one day, out by
|
|
Wandsworth, picking houses to pieces and routing among the wreckage.
|
|
But they won't keep on doing that. So soon as they've settled all
|
|
our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things
|
|
they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic,
|
|
picking the best and storing us in cages and things. That's what
|
|
they will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven't begun on us yet.
|
|
Don't you see that?"
|
|
|
|
"Not begun!" I exclaimed.
|
|
|
|
"Not begun. All that's happened so far is through our not
|
|
having the sense to keep quiet--worrying them with guns and such
|
|
foolery. And losing our heads, and rushing off crowds to where there
|
|
wasn't any more safety than where we were. They don't want to bother
|
|
us yet. They're making their things--making all the things they
|
|
couldn't bring with them, getting things ready for the rest of their
|
|
people. Very likely that's why the cylinders have stopped for a bit,
|
|
for fear of hitting those who are here. And instead of our rushing
|
|
about blind, on the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of
|
|
busting them up, we've got to fix ourselves up according to the new
|
|
state of affairs. That's how I figure it out. It isn't quite
|
|
according to what a man wants for his species, but it's about what
|
|
the facts point to. And that's the principle I acted upon. Cities,
|
|
nations, civilisation, progress--it's all over. That game's up.
|
|
We're beat."
|
|
|
|
"But if that is so, what is there to live for?"
|
|
|
|
The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.
|
|
|
|
"There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or
|
|
so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little
|
|
feeds at restaurants. If its amusement you're after, I reckon the
|
|
game is up. If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to
|
|
eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck `em
|
|
away. They ain't no further use.
|
|
|
|
"You mean---"
|
|
|
|
"I mean that men like me are going on living--for the sake of
|
|
the breed. I tell you, I'm grim set on living. And if I'm not
|
|
mistaken, you'll show what insides you've got, too, before long. We
|
|
aren't going to be exterminated. And I don't mean to be caught
|
|
either, and tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh!
|
|
Fancy those brown creepers!"
|
|
|
|
"You don't mean to say---"
|
|
|
|
"I do. I'm going on. Under their feet. I've got it planned;
|
|
I've thought it out. We men are beat. We don't know enough. We've
|
|
got to learn before we've got a chance. And we've got to live and
|
|
keep independent while we learn. See! That's what has to be done."
|
|
|
|
I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man's
|
|
resolution.
|
|
|
|
"Great God!" cried I. "But you are a man indeed!" And suddenly
|
|
I gripped his hand.
|
|
|
|
"Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining. "I've thought it out,
|
|
eh?"
|
|
|
|
"Go on," I said.
|
|
|
|
"Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready.
|
|
I'm getting ready. Mind you, it isn't all of us that are made for
|
|
wild beasts; and that's what it's got to be. That's why I watched
|
|
you. I had my doubts. You're slender. I didn't know that it was
|
|
you, you see, or just how you'd been buried. All these--the sort of
|
|
people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks
|
|
that used to live down that way--they'd be no good. They haven't any
|
|
spirit in them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who
|
|
hasn't one or the other--Lord! What is he but funk and precautions?
|
|
They just used to skedaddle off to work--I've seen hundreds of `em,
|
|
bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their
|
|
little season-ticket train for fear they'd get dismissed if they
|
|
didn't; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to
|
|
understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in time for
|
|
dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets,
|
|
and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted
|
|
them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety
|
|
in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives
|
|
insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on
|
|
Sundays--fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits.
|
|
Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy
|
|
cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or
|
|
so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come
|
|
and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad after a bit. They'll
|
|
wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of
|
|
them. And the bar loafers, and mashers, and singers--I can imagine
|
|
them. I can imagine them," he said, with a sort of sombre
|
|
gratification. "There'll be any amount of sentiment and religion
|
|
loose among them. There's hundreds of things I saw with my eyes that
|
|
I've only begun to see clearly these last few days. There's lots
|
|
will take things as they are--fat and stupid; and lots will be
|
|
worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought
|
|
to be doing something. Now whenever things are so that a lot of
|
|
people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who
|
|
go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of
|
|
do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to
|
|
persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've seen the
|
|
same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside
|
|
out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And
|
|
those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of--what it
|
|
is?--eroticism."
|
|
|
|
He paused.
|
|
|
|
"Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them;
|
|
train them to do tricks--who knows?--get sentimental over the pet boy
|
|
who grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train
|
|
to hunt us."
|
|
|
|
"No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being--"
|
|
|
|
"What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the
|
|
artilleryman. "There's men who'd do it cheerful. What nonsense to
|
|
pretend there isn't!"
|
|
|
|
And I succumbed to his conviction.
|
|
|
|
"If they come after me," he said; "Lord, if they come after me!"
|
|
and subsided into a grim meditation.
|
|
|
|
I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring
|
|
against this man's reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one
|
|
would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his--I, a
|
|
professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a
|
|
common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I
|
|
had scarcely realised.
|
|
|
|
"What are you doing?" I said, presently. "What plans have you
|
|
made?"
|
|
|
|
He hesitated.
|
|
|
|
"Well, it's like this," he said. "What have we to do? We have
|
|
to invent a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be
|
|
sufficiently secure to bring the children up. Yes--wait a bit, and
|
|
I'll make it clearer what I think ought to be done. The tame ones
|
|
will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they'll be big,
|
|
beautiful, richblooded, stupid--rubbish! The risk is that we who
|
|
keep wild will go savage-degenerate into a sort of big, savage
|
|
rat.... You see, how I mean to live is underground I've been
|
|
thinking about the drains. Of course those who don't know drains
|
|
think horrible things; but under this London are miles and
|
|
miles--hundred of miles--and a few days' rain and London empty will
|
|
leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are big enough and airy
|
|
enough for anyone. Then there's cellars, vaults, stores, from which
|
|
bolting passages may be made to the drains. And the railway tunnels
|
|
and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we form a
|
|
band--able-bodied, clean-minded men. We're not going to pick up any
|
|
rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again."
|
|
|
|
"As you meant me to go?"
|
|
|
|
"Well--I parleyed, didn't I?"
|
|
|
|
"We won't quarrel about that. Go on."
|
|
|
|
"Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we
|
|
want also--mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies--no blasted
|
|
rolling eyes. We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again,
|
|
and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They
|
|
ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of
|
|
disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. And they can't be
|
|
happy. Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it
|
|
bad. And in all those places we shall gather. Our district will be
|
|
London. And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in
|
|
the open when the Martians keep away. Play cricket, perhaps. That's
|
|
how we shall save the race. Eh? It's a possible thing? But saving
|
|
the race is nothing in itself. As I say, that's only being rats.
|
|
It's saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There men
|
|
like you come in. There's books, there's models. We must make great
|
|
safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and
|
|
poetry swipes, but ideas, science hooks. That's where men like you
|
|
come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books
|
|
through. Especially we must keep up our science--learn more. We
|
|
must watch these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When it's
|
|
all working, perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great
|
|
thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn't even steal.
|
|
If we get in their way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no
|
|
harm. Yes, I know. But they're intelligent things, and they won't
|
|
hunt us down if they have all they want, and think we're just
|
|
harmless vermin."
|
|
|
|
The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.
|
|
|
|
"After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before
|
|
--Just imagine this: Four or five of their fighting-machines suddenly
|
|
starting off--Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in `em.
|
|
Not a Martian in `em, but men--men who have learned the way how. It
|
|
may be in my time, even--those men. Fancy having one of them lovely
|
|
things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control!
|
|
What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the
|
|
run, after a bust like that? I reckon the Martians'll open their
|
|
beautiful eyes! Can't you see them, man? Can't you see them
|
|
hurrying, hurrying--puffing and blowing and hooting to their other
|
|
mechanical affairs? Something out of gear in every case. And swish,
|
|
bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes
|
|
the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."
|
|
|
|
For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the
|
|
one of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
|
|
mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human
|
|
destiny and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the
|
|
reader who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his
|
|
position, reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject,
|
|
and mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted
|
|
by apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning
|
|
time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky
|
|
for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where
|
|
he had made his lair. It was the coal cellar of the place, and when
|
|
I saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten
|
|
yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney
|
|
Hill--I had my first inkling between his dreams and his powers. Such
|
|
a hole I could have dug in a day. But I believed in him sufficiently
|
|
to work with him all that morning until past midday at his digging.
|
|
We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed against the
|
|
kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock-turtle soup
|
|
and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a curious relief from
|
|
the aching strangeness of the world in this steady labour. As we
|
|
worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and presently
|
|
objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the
|
|
morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After
|
|
working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go
|
|
before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it
|
|
altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long
|
|
tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one
|
|
of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too,
|
|
that the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless
|
|
length of tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things,
|
|
the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.
|
|
|
|
"We're working well," he said. He put down his spade. "Let us
|
|
knock off a bit," he said. "I think it's time we reconnoitred from
|
|
the roof of the house."
|
|
|
|
I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his
|
|
spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and
|
|
so did he at once.
|
|
|
|
"Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of
|
|
being here?"
|
|
|
|
"Taking the air," he said "I was coming back. It's safer by
|
|
night."
|
|
|
|
"But the work?"
|
|
|
|
"Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw the
|
|
man plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. "We ought to
|
|
reconnoitre now," he said, "because if any come near they may bear
|
|
the spades and drop upon us unawares."
|
|
|
|
I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the
|
|
roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians
|
|
were to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down
|
|
under shelter of the parapet.
|
|
|
|
From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of
|
|
Putney, but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed,
|
|
and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper
|
|
swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches
|
|
stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid
|
|
its clusters. It was strange how entirely dependent both these
|
|
things were upon flowing water for their propagation. About us
|
|
neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and
|
|
trees of arborvitae:, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and
|
|
brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington dense smoke was
|
|
rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward hills.
|
|
|
|
The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who
|
|
still remained in London.
|
|
|
|
"One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric
|
|
light in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus
|
|
ablaze, crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women,
|
|
dancing and shouting till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as
|
|
the day came they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by
|
|
the Langham and looking down at them. Heaven knows how long he had
|
|
been there. It must have given some of them a nasty turn. He came
|
|
down the road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk
|
|
or frightened to run away.
|
|
|
|
Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!
|
|
|
|
From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his
|
|
grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so
|
|
eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I
|
|
more than half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning
|
|
to understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he
|
|
laid on doing nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was
|
|
no question that he personally was to capture and fight the great
|
|
machine.
|
|
|
|
After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed
|
|
disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was
|
|
nothing loath. He became suddenly very generous, and when we had
|
|
eaten he went away and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit
|
|
these, and his optimism glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming
|
|
as a great occasion.
|
|
|
|
"There's some champagne in the cellar," he said.
|
|
|
|
"We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy," said I.
|
|
|
|
"No," said he; "I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We've
|
|
a heavy enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather
|
|
strength while we may. Look at these blistered hands!"
|
|
|
|
And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing
|
|
cards after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and after dividing
|
|
London between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we
|
|
played for parish points. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to
|
|
the sober reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable,
|
|
I found the card game and several others we played extremely
|
|
interesting.
|
|
|
|
Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
|
|
extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
|
|
us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
|
|
chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the "joker" with vivid
|
|
delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three
|
|
tough chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and
|
|
lit a lamp.
|
|
|
|
After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the
|
|
artilleryman finished the champagne. We went on smoking the cigars.
|
|
He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his species I had
|
|
encountered in the morning. He was still optimistic, but it was a
|
|
less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism. I remember he wound up
|
|
with my health proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable
|
|
intermittence. I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the
|
|
lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the
|
|
Highgate hills.
|
|
|
|
At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The
|
|
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
|
|
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed
|
|
up and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London was
|
|
black. Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale,
|
|
violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze.
|
|
For a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must
|
|
be the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded. With
|
|
that realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the
|
|
proportion of things, awoke again. I glanced from that to Mars, red
|
|
and clear, glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and
|
|
earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.
|
|
|
|
I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the
|
|
grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the
|
|
midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent
|
|
revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a
|
|
certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring
|
|
exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was
|
|
filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined
|
|
dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into
|
|
London. There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning
|
|
what the Martians and my fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the
|
|
roof when the late moon rose.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 8: Dead London
|
|
|
|
After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill,
|
|
and by the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. The red weed was
|
|
tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but
|
|
its fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease
|
|
that presently removed it so swiftly.
|
|
|
|
At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I
|
|
found a man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust,
|
|
alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing
|
|
from him but curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should
|
|
have stayed by him but for the brutal expression of his face.
|
|
|
|
There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards,
|
|
and it grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I
|
|
got food--sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable--in a baker's
|
|
shop here. Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of
|
|
powder, and I passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of
|
|
the burning was an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the
|
|
streets were quiet again.
|
|
|
|
Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and
|
|
upon dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of
|
|
the Fulham Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried
|
|
quickly past them. The black powder covered them over, and softened
|
|
their outlines. One or two had been disturbed by dogs.
|
|
|
|
Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday
|
|
in the City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the
|
|
blinds drawn, the desertion, and the stillness. In some places
|
|
plunderers had been at work but rarely at other than the provision
|
|
and wine shops. A jeweller's window had been broken open in one
|
|
place, but apparently the thief had been disturbed, and a number of
|
|
gold chains and a watch lay scattered on the pavement. I did not
|
|
trouble to touch them. Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on
|
|
a doorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled down
|
|
her rusty brown dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a
|
|
pool across the pavement. She seemed asleep, but she was dead.
|
|
|
|
The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the
|
|
stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of death--it was the
|
|
stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction
|
|
that had already singed the north-western borders of the metropolis,
|
|
and had annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these
|
|
houses and leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and
|
|
derelict....
|
|
|
|
In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black
|
|
powder. It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling.
|
|
It crept almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing
|
|
alternation of two notes, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on
|
|
perpetually. When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in
|
|
volume, and houses and buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off
|
|
again. It came in a full tide down Exhibition Road. I stopped,
|
|
staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remote
|
|
wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice
|
|
for its fear and solitude.
|
|
|
|
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," wailed that superhuman note great
|
|
waves of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the
|
|
tall buildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling,
|
|
towards the iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into
|
|
the Natural History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the
|
|
towers, in order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to
|
|
the ground, where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the
|
|
Exhibition Road. All the large mansions on each side of the road
|
|
were empty and still, and my footsteps echoed against the sides of
|
|
the houses. At the top, near the park gate, I came upon a strange
|
|
sight--a bus overturned, and the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I
|
|
puzzled over this for a time, and then went on to the bridge over the
|
|
Serpentine. The voice grew stronger and stronger, though I could see
|
|
nothing above the housetops on the north side of the park, save a
|
|
haze of smoke to the northwest.
|
|
|
|
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," cried the voice, coming, as it seemed
|
|
to me, from the district about Regent's Park. The desolating cry
|
|
worked upon my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The
|
|
wailing took possession of me. I found I was intensely weary,
|
|
footsore, and now again hungry and thirsty.
|
|
|
|
It was already past noon. Who was I wandering alone in this
|
|
city of the dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying in
|
|
state, and in its black shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind
|
|
ran on old friends that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the
|
|
poisons in the chemists' shops, of the liquors the wine merchants
|
|
stored; I recalled the two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as
|
|
I knew, shared the city with myself....
|
|
|
|
I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again
|
|
were black powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from
|
|
the gratings of the cellars of some of the houses. I grew very
|
|
thirsty after the heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I
|
|
managed to break into a public-house and get food and drink. I was
|
|
weary after eating, and went into the parlour behind the bar, and
|
|
slept on a black 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 a cheese in the bar--there was a meat safe, but it
|
|
contained nothing but maggots--I wandered on through the silent
|
|
residential squares to Baker Street--Portman Square is the only one I
|
|
can name--and so came out at last upon Regent's Park. And as I
|
|
emerged from the top of Baker Street, I saw far away over the trees
|
|
in the clearness of the sunset the hood of the Martian giant from
|
|
which this howling proceeded. I was not terrified. I came upon him
|
|
as if it were a matter of course. I watched him for some time, but
|
|
he did not move. He appeared to be standing and yelling, for no
|
|
reason that I could discover.
|
|
|
|
I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound of
|
|
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," confused my mind. Perhaps I was too tired
|
|
to be very fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know the reason
|
|
of this monotonous crying than afraid. I turned back away from the
|
|
park and struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went
|
|
along under the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this
|
|
stationary, howling Martian from the direction of St. John's Wood.
|
|
A couple of hundred yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping
|
|
chorus, and saw, first a dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in
|
|
his jaws coming headlong towards me, and then a pack of starving
|
|
mongrels in pursuit of him. He made a wide curve to avoid me, as
|
|
though he feared I might prove a fresh competitor. As the yelping
|
|
died away down the silent road, the wailing sound of "Ulla, ulla,
|
|
ulla, ulla," reasserted itself.
|
|
|
|
I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St.John's
|
|
Wood station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road.
|
|
It was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start,
|
|
this mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and
|
|
twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered.
|
|
It seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had
|
|
been overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this
|
|
might have happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance
|
|
of its Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and
|
|
the twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its
|
|
seat was smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs
|
|
had left, were invisible to me.
|
|
|
|
Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards
|
|
Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second
|
|
Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the
|
|
Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the
|
|
smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found
|
|
the Regent's Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
|
|
|
|
As I crossed the bridge, the sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,"
|
|
ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a
|
|
thunderclap.
|
|
|
|
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the
|
|
trees towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed
|
|
clambered among the runs, writhing to get above me in the dimness.
|
|
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
|
|
that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation had been endurable;
|
|
by virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life
|
|
about me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of
|
|
something--I knew not what--and then a stillness that could be felt.
|
|
Nothing but this gaunt quiet.
|
|
|
|
London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the
|
|
white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my
|
|
imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized
|
|
me, a horror of my temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy
|
|
black as though it was tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying
|
|
across the pathway. I could not bring myself to go on. I turned
|
|
down St. John's Wood Road, and ran headlong from this unendurable
|
|
stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from the night and the silence,
|
|
until long after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But
|
|
before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still
|
|
in the sky I turned once more towards Regent's Park. I missed my way
|
|
among the streets, and presently saw down a long avenue, in the
|
|
half-light of the early dawn, the curve of Primrose Hill. On the
|
|
summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a third Martian, erect
|
|
and motionless like the other.
|
|
|
|
An insane resolve posed me. I would die and end it. And I
|
|
would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on
|
|
recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the
|
|
light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and
|
|
clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I
|
|
began running along the road.
|
|
|
|
I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's Terrace
|
|
(I waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down
|
|
from the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the
|
|
grass before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped
|
|
about the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the
|
|
final and largest place the Martians had made --and from behind these
|
|
heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line
|
|
an eager dog ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into
|
|
my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild,
|
|
trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless
|
|
monster. Out of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the
|
|
hungry birds pecked and tore.
|
|
|
|
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and
|
|
stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me.
|
|
A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within
|
|
it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And
|
|
scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in
|
|
the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent
|
|
and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!,--slain by the
|
|
putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were
|
|
unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all
|
|
man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his
|
|
wisdom, has put upon this earth.
|
|
|
|
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have
|
|
foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs
|
|
of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of
|
|
things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
|
|
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed
|
|
resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to
|
|
many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our
|
|
living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in
|
|
Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and
|
|
fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already
|
|
when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting
|
|
even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a
|
|
billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is
|
|
his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten
|
|
times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in
|
|
vain.
|
|
|
|
Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in
|
|
that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have
|
|
seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also
|
|
at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that
|
|
these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead.
|
|
For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been
|
|
repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain
|
|
them in the night.
|
|
|
|
I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously,
|
|
even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his
|
|
rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great
|
|
and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their
|
|
tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows
|
|
towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over
|
|
the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me.
|
|
Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the
|
|
great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our
|
|
denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come
|
|
not a day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at
|
|
the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the
|
|
tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned
|
|
seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.
|
|
|
|
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where,
|
|
enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen
|
|
overnight, just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even
|
|
as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to
|
|
die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its
|
|
machinery was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripod towers
|
|
of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun.
|
|
|
|
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting
|
|
destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have
|
|
only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely
|
|
imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of
|
|
houses.
|
|
|
|
Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the
|
|
splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear
|
|
sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs
|
|
caught the light and glared with a white intensity.
|
|
|
|
Northward were Kilburn and Hampstead, blue and crowded with
|
|
houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the
|
|
Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the Langham Hotel, the
|
|
dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant
|
|
mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the
|
|
sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far
|
|
away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal
|
|
Palace glittered like two silver rods. The dome of St. Paul's was
|
|
dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, by a
|
|
huge gaping cavity on its western side.
|
|
|
|
And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
|
|
churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous
|
|
hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to
|
|
build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that
|
|
had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled
|
|
back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear
|
|
vast dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave
|
|
of emotion that was near akin to tears.
|
|
|
|
The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin.
|
|
The survivors of the people scattered over the country-- leaderless,
|
|
lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd--the thousands who
|
|
had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing
|
|
stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour
|
|
across the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand
|
|
of the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened
|
|
skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of
|
|
the hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the
|
|
restorers and ringing with the tapping of their troweIs. At the
|
|
thought I extended my hands towards the sky and began thanking God.
|
|
In a year, thought I--in a year ...
|
|
|
|
With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife,
|
|
and the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for
|
|
ever.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 9: Wreckage
|
|
|
|
And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it
|
|
is not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and
|
|
vividly, all that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping
|
|
and praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I
|
|
forget.
|
|
|
|
Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since
|
|
that, so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian
|
|
overthrow, several such wanderers as myself had already discovered
|
|
this on the previous night. One man--the first--had gone to St.
|
|
Martin's-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, had
|
|
contrived to telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed
|
|
all over the world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly
|
|
aprehensions, suddenly flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew
|
|
of it in Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when
|
|
I stood upon the verge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as
|
|
I have heard, shouting and staying their work to shake hands and
|
|
shout, were making up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend upon
|
|
London. The church bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly
|
|
caught the news, until all England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles,
|
|
lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of
|
|
unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair.
|
|
And for the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across
|
|
the Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All
|
|
the shipping in the world seemed going Londonward in those days. But
|
|
of all this I have no memory. I drifted--a demented man. I found
|
|
myself in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day
|
|
wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's
|
|
Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some inane doggerel
|
|
about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!"
|
|
Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose
|
|
name, much as I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not
|
|
even give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered
|
|
me, and protected me from myself. Apparently they had learned
|
|
something of my story from me during the days of my lapse.
|
|
|
|
Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to
|
|
me what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after
|
|
I was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a
|
|
Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any
|
|
provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness
|
|
of power.
|
|
|
|
I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me. I was a
|
|
lonely man and a sad one, and they bore with me. I remained with
|
|
them four days after my recovery. All that time I felt a vague, a
|
|
growing craving to look once more on whatever remained of the little
|
|
life that seemed so happy and bright in my past. It was a mere
|
|
hopeless desire to feast upon my misery. They dissuaded me. They
|
|
did all they could to divert me from this morbidity. But at last I
|
|
could resist the impulse no longer, and, promising faithfully to
|
|
return to them, and parting, as I will confess, from these four-day
|
|
friends with tears, I went out again into the streets that had lately
|
|
been so dark and strange and empty.
|
|
|
|
Already they were busy with returning people; in places even
|
|
there were shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.
|
|
|
|
I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on
|
|
my melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the
|
|
streets and vivid the moving life about me. So many people were
|
|
abroad everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it seemed
|
|
incredible that any great proportion of the population could have
|
|
been slain. But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the
|
|
people I met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright
|
|
their eyes, and that every other man still wore his dirty rags.
|
|
Their faces seemed all with one of two expressions--a leaping
|
|
exultation and energy or a grim resolution. Save for the expression
|
|
of the faces, London seemed a city of tramps. The vestries were
|
|
indiscriminately distributing bread sent us by the French government.
|
|
The ribs of the few horses showed dismally. Haggard special
|
|
constables with white badges stood at the corners of every street. I
|
|
saw little of the mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached
|
|
Wellington Street, and there I saw the red weed clambering over the
|
|
buttresses of Waterloo Bridge.
|
|
|
|
At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common
|
|
contrasts of that grotesque time--a sheet of paper flaunting against
|
|
a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in
|
|
place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume
|
|
publication--the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened
|
|
shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the
|
|
solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a
|
|
grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page. The
|
|
matter he printed was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet
|
|
found its way back. I learned nothing fresh except that already in
|
|
one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded
|
|
astonishing results. Among other things, the article assured me what
|
|
I did not believe at the time, that the "Secret of Flying" was
|
|
discovered. At Waterloo I found the free trains that were taking
|
|
people to their homes. The first rush was already over. There were
|
|
few people in the train, and I was in no mood for casual
|
|
conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat with folded
|
|
arms, looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed past the
|
|
windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over
|
|
temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were
|
|
blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy
|
|
with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms
|
|
and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again;
|
|
there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by
|
|
side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty
|
|
relaying.
|
|
|
|
All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt
|
|
and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by
|
|
virtue of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place
|
|
along the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a
|
|
heaped mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher's meat and
|
|
pickled cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for
|
|
the festoons of the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of
|
|
the line, in certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth
|
|
about the sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing about it,
|
|
and some sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over it flaunted a
|
|
Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The nursery
|
|
grounds were everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of
|
|
livid colour cut with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye.
|
|
One's gaze went with infinite relief from the scorched greys and
|
|
sullen reds of the foreground to the blue-green softness of the
|
|
eastward hills.
|
|
|
|
The line on the London side of Woking station was still
|
|
undergoing repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and took the
|
|
road to Maybury, past the place where I and the artilleryman had
|
|
talked to the hussars, and on by the spot where the Martian had
|
|
appeared to me in the thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I
|
|
turned aside to find, among a tangle of red fronds, the warped and
|
|
broken dog cart with the whitened bones of the horse scattered and
|
|
gnawed. For a time I stood regarding these vestiges....
|
|
|
|
Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed
|
|
here and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already
|
|
found burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing
|
|
at an open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
|
|
|
|
I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded
|
|
immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening
|
|
slowly as I approached.
|
|
|
|
It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the
|
|
open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn.
|
|
No one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had
|
|
left them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the
|
|
house felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where
|
|
I had crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of
|
|
the catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.
|
|
|
|
I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table
|
|
still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I
|
|
had left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a
|
|
space I stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on
|
|
the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the
|
|
civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a
|
|
prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may
|
|
expect--" The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability to
|
|
fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had
|
|
broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I remembered
|
|
how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had
|
|
listened to his odd story of "Men from Mars."
|
|
|
|
I came down and went into the dining room. There were the
|
|
mutton and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle
|
|
overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My home
|
|
was desolate. I perceived the folly of the faint hope I had
|
|
cherished so long. And then a strange thing occurred. "It is no
|
|
use," said a voice. "The house is deserted. No one has been here
|
|
these ten days. Do not stay here to torment yourself. No one
|
|
escaped but you.
|
|
|
|
I was startled. Had I spoken my thought aloud? I turned, and
|
|
the French window was open behind me. I made a step to it, and stood
|
|
looking out.
|
|
|
|
And there, amazed and afraid, even as I stood amazed and afraid,
|
|
were my cousin and my wife--my wife white and tearless. She gave a
|
|
faint cry.
|
|
|
|
"I came," she said. "I knew--knew--- "
|
|
|
|
She put her hand to her throat--swayed. I made a step forward,
|
|
and caught her in my arms.
|
|
|
|
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS -- Book 2
|
|
|
|
Chapter 10: The Epilogue
|
|
|
|
I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how
|
|
little I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many
|
|
debatable questions which are still unsettled. In one respect I
|
|
shall certainly provoke criticism. My particular province is
|
|
speculative philosophy. My knowledge of comparative physiology is
|
|
confined to a book or two, but it seems to me that Carver's
|
|
suggestions as to the reason of the rapid death of the Martians is so
|
|
probable as to be regarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have
|
|
assumed that in the body of my narrative.
|
|
|
|
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were
|
|
examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as
|
|
terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of their
|
|
dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an
|
|
entire ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this
|
|
seems, it is by no means a proven conclusion.
|
|
|
|
Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the
|
|
Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the
|
|
Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and
|
|
South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further
|
|
investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black
|
|
powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with
|
|
a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible
|
|
that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once
|
|
with deadly effect upon some constituent in the blood. But such
|
|
unproven speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general
|
|
reader, to whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that
|
|
drifted down the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was
|
|
examined at the time, and now none is forthcoming.
|
|
|
|
The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far
|
|
as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have
|
|
already given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and
|
|
almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum,
|
|
and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond
|
|
that the interest of their physiology and structure is purely
|
|
scientific.
|
|
|
|
A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility
|
|
of another attack from the Martians. I do not think that nearly
|
|
enough attention is being given to this aspect of the matter. At
|
|
present the planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to
|
|
opposition I, for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In
|
|
any case, we should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be
|
|
possible to define the position of the gun from which the shots are
|
|
discharged, to keep a sustained watch upon this part of the planet,
|
|
and to anticipate the arrival of the next attack.
|
|
|
|
In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or
|
|
artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge,
|
|
or they might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the screw
|
|
opened. It seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the
|
|
failure of their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same
|
|
light.
|
|
|
|
Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the
|
|
Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet
|
|
Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with
|
|
the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of
|
|
view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and
|
|
sinuous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet,
|
|
and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous
|
|
character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One
|
|
needs to see the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate
|
|
fully their remarkable resemblance in character.
|
|
|
|
At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our
|
|
views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events.
|
|
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced
|
|
in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the
|
|
unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It
|
|
may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from
|
|
Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of
|
|
that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful
|
|
source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are
|
|
enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the
|
|
commonweal of mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space
|
|
the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and
|
|
learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a
|
|
securer settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will
|
|
certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk,
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|
and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with
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|
them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
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|
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|
The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely be
|
|
exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion
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|
that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty
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|
surface, of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians
|
|
can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is
|
|
impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this
|
|
earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread
|
|
of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our
|
|
sister planet within its toils.
|
|
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|
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of
|
|
life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system
|
|
throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a
|
|
remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of
|
|
the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps is
|
|
the future ordained.
|
|
|
|
I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an
|
|
abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study
|
|
writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley
|
|
below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about
|
|
me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles
|
|
pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on
|
|
a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague
|
|
and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot,
|
|
brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the
|
|
silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they
|
|
rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer,
|
|
paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold
|
|
and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
|
|
|
|
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and
|
|
the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts
|
|
of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and
|
|
wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of
|
|
life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on
|
|
Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter,
|
|
to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of
|
|
the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to
|
|
see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill,
|
|
to see the sightseers about the Martian machine that stands there
|
|
still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time
|
|
when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the
|
|
dawn of that last great day. ...
|
|
|
|
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to
|
|
think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the
|
|
dead.
|
|
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|
--THE END --
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