Chapter FIVE THE STILLNESS
Chapter SIX THE WORK OF FIFTEEN
DAYS
Chapter SEVEN THE MAN ON PUTNEY
HILL
Chapter EIGHT DEAD LONDON
Chapter NINE WRECKAGE
Chapter TEN THE EPILOGUE

Part I. THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be

inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the

World? . . . And how are all things made for
man?

KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of
Melancholy)

CHAPTER ONE THE EVE OF THE WAR

No one would have believed in the last
years of the nineteenth century that this
world was being watched keenly and
closely by intelligences greater than man's
and yet as mortal as his own; that as men
busied themselves about their various
concerns they were scrutinised and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a
man with a microscope might scrutinise the
transient creatures that swarm and multiply
in a drop of water. With infinite complacency
men went to and fro over this globe about

-1-

time's beginning but nearer its end.

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

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

-2-

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

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

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

-3-

table there in the blackness, with patches of
green and crimson swimming before my
eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke by, little
suspecting the meaning of the minute
gleam I had seen and all that it would
presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one,
and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern
and walked over to his house. Down below
in the darkness were Ottershaw and
Chertsey and all their hundreds of people,
sleeping in peace.

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

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

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

Even the daily papers woke up to the
disturbances at last, and popular notes
appeared here, there, and everywhere
concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The
seriocomic periodical Punch, I remember,
made a happy use of it in the political

-4-

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

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

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

The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in
sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir
tree it had shivered to fragments in its

-5-

that the ash was falling only from the end of
the cylinder.

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

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

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

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

-6-

running up the little street in the bright
sunlight just as the shop folks were taking
down their shutters and people were
opening their bedroom windows.
Henderson went into the railway station at
once, in order to telegraph the news to
London. The newspaper articles had
prepared men's minds for the reception of
the idea.

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

CHAPTER THREE ON HORSELL
COMMON

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

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

Among these were a couple of cyclists, a
jobbing gardener I employed sometimes, a

-7-

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

-8-

against the lemon yellow of the sky--a
couple of hundred people, perhaps. There
were raised voices, and some sort of
struggle appeared to be going on about the
pit. Strange imaginings passed through my
mind. As I drew nearer I heard Stent's voice:

"Keep back! Keep back!"

A boy came running towards me.

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

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

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

"Keep back!" said several.

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

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

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

The end of the cylinder was being screwed
out from within. Nearly two feet of shining
screw projected. Somebody blundered
against me, and I narrowly missed being
pitched onto the top of the screw. I turned,
and as I did so the screw must have come
out, for the lid of the cylinder fell upon the

-9-

There was a mouth under the eyes, the
lipless brim of which quivered and panted,
and dropped saliva. The whole creature
heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank
tentacular appendage gripped the edge of
the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

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

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

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

There, among some young pine trees and
furze bushes, I stopped, panting, and
waited further developments. The common

-10-

I felt a passionate longing to peer into it. I
began walking, therefore, in a big curve,
seeking some point of vantage and
continually looking at the sand heaps that
hid these new-comers to our earth. Once a
leash of thin black whips, like the arms of an
octopus, flashed across the sunset and was
immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a
thin rod rose up, joint by joint, bearing at its
apex a circular disk that spun with a
wobbling motion. What could be going on
there?

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

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

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

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

-11-

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

-12-

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.

CHAPTER SIX 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

-13-

by the excitement of the occasion.

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

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

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

-14-

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!

-15-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They can scarcely move," I said.

I began to comfort her and myself by
repeating all that Ogilvy had told me of the
impossibility of the Martians establishing
themselves on the earth. In particular I laid
stress on the gravitational difficulty. On the
surface of the earth the force of gravity is
three times what it is on the surface of Mars.
A Martian, therefore, would weigh three
times more than on Mars, albeit his

-16-

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.

CHAPTER EIGHT 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

-17-

that nothing more serious than a heath fire
was happening. It was only round the edge
of the common that any disturbance was
perceptible. There were half a dozen villas
burning on the Woking border. There were
lights in all the houses on the common side
of the three villages, and the people there
kept awake till dawn.

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

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

All night long the Martians were hammering
and stirring, sleepless, indefatigable, at
work upon the machines they were making

-18-

surrounded by troops, and that guns were
expected. Then--a familiar, reassuring
note--I heard a train running towards
Woking.

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

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

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

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

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

After breakfast, instead of working, I
decided to walk down towards the
common. Under the railway bridge I found a
group of soldiers--sappers, I think, men in
small round caps, dirty red jackets
unbuttoned, and showing their blue shirts,
dark trousers, and boots coming to the calf.

-19-

carn tell what they might do."

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

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

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

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

-20-

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

-21-

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.

CHAPTER TEN 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,

-22-

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 tree-tops and roofs
black and sharp against the red.

Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit
the road about me and showed the distant

-23-

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,

-24-

this. I hammered at the door, but I could not
make the people hear (if there were any
people inside), and after a time I desisted,
and, availing myself of a ditch for the
greater part of the way, succeeded in
crawling, unobserved by these monstrous
machines, into the pine woods towards
Maybury.

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

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

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

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

-25-

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

CHAPTER ELEVEN 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, went into the dining
room and drank some whiskey, and then I
was moved to change my clothes.

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

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

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

-26-

particularly at the three gigantic black things
that were going to and fro in the glare about
the sand pits.

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

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

"Hist!" said I, in a whisper.

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

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

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"God knows."

"Are you trying to hide?"

"That's it."

"Come into the house," I said.

-27-

ground. At the same moment the gun
exploded behind him, the ammunition blew
up, there was fire all about him, and he
found himself lying under a heap of charred
dead men and dead horses.

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

"Wiped out!" he said.

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

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

-28-

bushes and broken rose trees outside the
window grew distinct. It would seem that a
number of men or animals had rushed
across the lawn. I began to see his face,
blackened and haggard, as no doubt mine
was also.

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWELVE 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

-29-

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

-30-

artilleryman--"we're detailed here clearing
people out of their houses. You'd better go
along and report yourself to Brigadier-
General Marvin, and tell him all you know.
He's at Weybridge. Know the way?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

-31-

"Death!" I shouted. "Death is coming!
Death!" and leaving him to digest that if he
could, I hurried on after the artillery-man. At
the corner I looked back. The soldier had left
him, and he was 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

-32-

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,

-33-

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

-34-

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

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

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

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

The air was full of sound, a deafening and
confusing conflict of noises--the
clangorous din of the Martians, the crash of
falling houses, the thud of trees, fences,
sheds flashing into flame, and the crackling
and roaring of fire. Dense black smoke was
leaping up to mingle with the steam from the
river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro
over Weybridge its impact was marked by
flashes of incandescent white, that gave
place at once to a smoky dance of lurid

-35-

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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN HOW I FELL IN WITH
THE CURATE

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

But they were in no hurry. Cylinder followed
cylinder on its interplanetary flight; every
twenty-four hours brought them
reinforcement. And meanwhile the military
and naval authorities, now fully alive to the
tremendous power of their antagonists,
worked with furious energy. Every minute a
fresh gun came into position until, before
twilight, every copse, every row of suburban
villas on the hilly slopes about Kingston and
Richmond, masked an expectant black
muzzle. And through the charred and
desolated area--perhaps twenty square
miles altogether--that encircled the Martian
encampment on Horsell Common, through
charred and ruined villages among the
green trees, through the blackened and
smoking arcades that had been but a day
ago pine spinneys, crawled the devoted

-36-

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

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

I do not clearly remember the arrival of the
curate, so that probably I dozed. I became
aware of him as a seated figure in soot-
smudged shirt sleeves, and with his

-37-

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

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

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

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

Presently he began waving his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are we far from Sunbury?"

-38-

them was killed yonder not three hours ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Listen!" he said.

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

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN IN LONDON

My younger brother was in London when the

-39-

dispatched a telegram, which never
reached me, about four o'clock, and spent
the evening at a music hall.

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

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

The habit of personal security, moreover, is
so deeply fixed in the Londoner's mind, and
startling intelligence so much a matter of
course in the papers, that they could read

-40-

went again to Waterloo station to find out if
communication were restored. The
omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and
innumerable people walking in their best
clothes seemed scarcely affected by the
strange intelligence that the news venders
were disseminating. People were
interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only on
account of the local residents. At the station
he heard for the first time that the Windsor
and Chertsey lines were now interrupted.
The porters told him that several remarkable
telegrams had been received in the morning
from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that
these had abruptly ceased. My brother
could get very little precise detail out of
them.

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

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

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

"There's hosts of people driving into
Kingston in traps and carts and things, with
boxes of valuables and all that," he said.
"They come from Molesey and Weybridge
and Walton, and they say there's been guns
heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that
mounted soldiers have told them to get off
at once because the Martians are coming.

-41-

There was talk of a floating body. One of the
men there, a reservist he said he was, told
my brother he had seen the heliograph
flickering in the west.

In Wellington Street my brother met a couple
of sturdy roughs who had just been rushed
out of Fleet Street with still-wet
newspapers and staring placards.
"Dreadful catastrophe!" they bawled one to
the other down Wellington Street. "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 spiderlike
machines, nearly a hundred feet high,
capable of the speed of an express train,
and able to shoot out a beam of intense
heat." Masked batteries, chiefly of field
guns, had been planted in the country about
Horsell Common, and especially between
the Woking district and London. Five of the
machines had been seen moving towards
the Thames, and one, by a happy chance,
had been destroyed. In the other cases the
shells had missed, and the batteries had
been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays.
Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned,
but the tone of the dispatch 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

-42-

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

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

My brother turned down towards Victoria,
and met a number of such people. He had a
vague idea that he might see something of
me. He noticed an unusual number of police
regulating the traffic. Some of the refugees
were exchanging news with the people on
the omnibuses. One was professing to have
seen the Martians. "Boilers on stilts, I tell

-43-

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

-44-

"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

-45-

room, put all his available money--some
ten pounds altogether--into his pockets,
and went out again into the streets.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN WHAT HAD
HAPPENED IN SURREY

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

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

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

-46-

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.

-47-

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

-48-

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

-49-

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

-50-

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.

-51-

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

-52-

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.

-53-

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

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

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

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

My brother stopped.

For the main road was a boiling stream of
people, a torrent of human beings rushing
northward, one pressing on another. A
great bank of dust, white and luminous in

-54-

whole population in movement. It is hard to
imagine that host. It had no character of its
own. The figures poured out past the
corner, and receded with their backs to the
group in the lane. Along the margin came
those who were on foot threatened by the
wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering
into one another.

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

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

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

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

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

-55-

people drove into its mouth; weaklings
elbowed out of the stream, who for the most
part rested but a moment before plunging
into it again. A little way down the lane, with
two friends bending over him, lay a man
with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody
rags. He was a lucky man to have friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-56-

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

-57-

said, giving it to her, "if he presses us too
hard. No!--point it at his horse."

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

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

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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE "THUNDER
CHILD"

-58-

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

-59-

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

-60-

journeyings. Her great idea was to return to
Stanmore. Things had been always well
and safe at Stanmore. They would find
George at Stanmore.

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

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

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

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

-61-

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

-62-

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

-63-

PART II. THE EARTH UNDER THE
MARTIANS

CHAPTER ONE 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 thought of how I was cut off from her,
of all that might happen to her in my
absence. My cousin I knew was brave
enough for any emergency, but he was not
the sort of man to realise danger quickly, to
rise promptly. What was needed now was
not bravery, but circumspection. My only
consolation was to believe that the Martians
were moving London-ward 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

-64-

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

-65-

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

-66-

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

-67-

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.

CHAPTER TWO 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

-68-

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

-69-

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,

-70-

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

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two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at
the expense of the rest of the body. Without
the body the brain would, of course,
become a mere selfish intelligence, without
any of the emotional substratum of the
human being.

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

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

The Martians had what appears to have
been an auditory organ, a single round drum

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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

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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 and drank
impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals.
He slept little.

As the days wore on, his utter carelessness
of any consideration so intensified our
distress and danger that I had, much as I
loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at
last to blows. That brought him to reason for

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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

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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

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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