The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 9 Audio |
After I had parted from the
artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by the High Street across the bridge to
Fulham. The red weed was tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge
roadway; but its fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading
disease that presently removed it so swiftly.
At the corner of the lane that
runs to Putney Bridge station I found a man lying. He was as black as a sweep
with the black dust, alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get
nothing from him but curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should have
stayed by him but for the brutal expression of his face.
There was black dust along the
roadway from the bridge onwards, and it grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were
horribly quiet. I got food--sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable--in a
baker's shop here. Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of
powder, and I passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning
was an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet again.
Here I came once more upon the
black powder in the streets and upon dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen
in the length of the Fulham Road. They had been dead many days, so that I
hurried quickly past them. The black powder covered them over, and softened
their outlines. One or two had been disturbed by dogs.
Where there was no black powder,
it was curiously like a Sunday in the City, with the closed shops, the houses
locked up and the blinds drawn, the desertion, and the stillness. In some places
plunderers had been at work, but rarely at other than the provision and wine
shops. A jeweller's window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the
thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay scattered
on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Farther on was a tattered
woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and
bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool
across the pavement. She seemed asleep, but she was dead.
The farther I penetrated into
London, the profounder grew the stillness. But it was not so much the stillness
of death--it was the stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the
destruction that had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis,
and had annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses and
leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and derelict....
In South Kensington the streets
were clear of dead and of black powder. It was near South Kensington that I
first heard the howling. It crept almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a
sobbing alternation of two notes, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on
perpetually. When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and
houses and buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full
tide down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens,
wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of
houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude.
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," wailed
that superhuman note--great waves of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit
roadway, between the tall buildings on each side. I turned northwards,
marvelling, towards the iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into
the Natural History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in
order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground, where quick
hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition Road. All the large
mansions on each side of the road were empty and still, and my footsteps echoed
against the sides of the houses. At the top, near the park gate, I came upon a
strange sight--a bus overturned, and the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I
puzzled over this for a time, and then went on to the bridge over the
Serpentine. The voice grew stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing
above the housetops on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the
northwest.
"Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," cried
the voice, coming, as it seemed to me, from the district about Regent's Park.
The desolating cry worked upon my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed.
The wailing took possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and
now again hungry and thirsty.
It was already past noon. Why
was I wandering alone in this city of the dead? Why was I alone when all London
was lying in state, and in its black shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind
ran on old friends that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the poisons in
the chemists' shops, of the liquors the wine merchants stored; I recalled the
two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared the city with
myself....
I came into Oxford Street by the
Marble Arch, and here again were black powder and several bodies, and an evil,
ominous smell from the gratings of the cellars of some of the houses. I grew
very thirsty after the heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I managed to
break into a public-house and get food and drink. I was weary after eating, and
went into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a black horsehair sofa I
found there.
I awoke to find that dismal
howling still in my ears, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla." It was now dusk, and after I
had routed out some biscuits and a cheese in the bar--there was a meat safe, but
it contained nothing but maggots--I wandered on through the silent residential
squares to Baker Street--Portman Square is the only one I can name--and so came
out at last upon Regent's Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker Street, I
saw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset the hood of the
Martian giant from which this howling proceeded. I was not terrified. I came
upon him as if it were a matter of course. I watched him for some time, but he
did not move. He appeared to be standing and yelling, for no reason that I could
discover.
I tried to formulate a plan of
action. That perpetual sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," confused my mind.
Perhaps I was too tired to be very fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know
the reason of this monotonous crying than afraid. I turned back away from the
park and struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went along under
the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling Martian
from the direction of St. John's Wood. A couple of hundred yards out of Baker
Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a dog with a piece of putrescent
red meat in his jaws coming headlong towards me, and then a pack of starving
mongrels in pursuit of him. He made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he
feared I might prove a fresh competitor. As the yelping died away down the
silent road, the wailing sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," reasserted itself.
I came upon the wrecked
handling-machine halfway to St. John's Wood station. At first I thought a house
had fallen across the road. It was only as I clambered among the ruins that I
saw, with a start, this mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and
smashed and twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It
seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been
overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have happened
by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its Martian. I could not
clamber among the ruins to see it, and the twilight was now so far advanced that
the blood with which its seat was smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian
that the dogs had left, were invisible to me.
Wondering still more at all that
I had seen, I pushed on towards Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the
trees, I saw a second Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park
towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the
smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the Regent's
Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
As I crossed the bridge, the
sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The
silence came like a thunderclap.
The dusky houses about me stood
faint and tall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing black. All about
me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the
dimness. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by virtue
of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had upheld
me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something--I knew not what--and then
a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet.
London about me gazed at me
spectrally. The windows in the white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls.
About me my imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized
me, a horror of my temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as
though it was tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I
could not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road, and ran
headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from the night
and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter in Harrow
Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still in
the sky I turned once more towards Regent's Park. I missed my way among the
streets, and presently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early
dawn, the curve of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading
stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.
An insane resolve possessed me.
I would die and end it. And I would save myself even the trouble of killing
myself. I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer
and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and
clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running
along the road.
I hurried through the red weed
that choked St. Edmund's Terrace (I waded breast-high across a torrent of water
that was rushing down from the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged
upon the grass before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about
the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and largest
place the Martians had made--and from behind these heaps there rose a thin smoke
against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog ran and disappeared. The
thought that had flashed into my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no fear,
only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless
monster. Out of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds
pecked and tore.
In another moment I had
scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of
the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and
there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And
scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid
handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were
the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria
against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being
slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that
God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as
indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded
our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the
beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting
power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that
cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are
altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these
invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to
work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed,
dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll
of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his
against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty
as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
Here and there they were
scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken
by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could
be. To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that
these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment
I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had
repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.
I stood staring into the pit,
and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to
fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines,
so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their
tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the
light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly
in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat
and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been
experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them.
Death had come not a day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up
at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered
red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of
Primrose Hill.
I turned and looked down the
slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two
Martians that I had seen overnight, just as death had overtaken them. The one
had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last
to die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery
was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in
the brightness of the rising sun.
All about the pit, and saved as
by a miracle from everlasting destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities.
Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely
imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
Eastward, over the blackened
ruins of the Albert Terrace and the splintered spire of the church, the sun
blazed dazzling in a clear sky, and here and there some facet in the great
wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with a white intensity.
Northward were Kilburn and
Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and
southward, beyond the Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the Langham
Hotel, the dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant
mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the
jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the
Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two silver
rods. The dome of St. Paul's was dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw
for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on its western side.
And as I looked at this wide
expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought
of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had
gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that
had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and
that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine
be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that was near akin to
tears.
The torment was over. Even that
day the healing would begin. The survivors of the people scattered over the
country--leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd--the
thousands who had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing
stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the
vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the destroyer was
stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of houses that stared so
dismally at the sunlit grass of the hill, would presently be echoing with the
hammers of the restorers and ringing with the tapping of their trowels. At the
thought I extended my hands towards the sky and began thanking God. In a year,
thought I--in a year...
With overwhelming force came the
thought of myself, of my wife, and the old life of hope and tender helpfulness
that had ceased for ever.
And now comes the strangest
thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is not altogether strange. I remember,
clearly and coldly and vividly, all that I did that day until the time that I
stood weeping and praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I
forget.
Of the next three days I know
nothing. I have learned since that, so far from my being the first discoverer of
the Martian overthrow, several such wanderers as myself had already discovered
this on the previous night. One man--the first--had gone to St.
Martin's-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, had contrived to
telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the world; a
thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly flashed into frantic
illuminations; they knew of it in Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at
the time when I stood upon the verge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy,
as I have heard, shouting and staying their work to shake hands and shout, were
making up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church
bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news, until all
England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along
every country lane shouting of unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring
figures of despair. And for the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea,
across the Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All the
shipping in the world seemed going Londonward in those days. But of all this I
have no memory. I drifted--a demented man. I found myself in a house of kindly
people, who had found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through
the streets of St. John's Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some
insane doggerel about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left
Alive!" Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name,
much as I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give here,
nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and protected me from
myself. Apparently they had learned something of my story from me during the
days of my lapse.
Very gently, when my mind was
assured again, did they break to me what they had learned of the fate of
Leatherhead. Two days after I was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every
soul in it, by a Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed,
without any provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere
wantonness of power.
I was a lonely man, and they
were very kind to me. I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bore with me. I
remained with them four days after my recovery. All that time I felt a vague, a
growing craving to look once more on whatever remained of the little life that
seemed so happy and bright in my past. It was a mere hopeless desire to feast
upon my misery. They dissuaded me. They did all they could to divert me from
this morbidity. But at last I could resist the impulse no longer, and, promising
faithfully to return to them, and parting, as I will confess, from these
four-day friends with tears, I went out again into the streets that had lately
been so dark and strange and empty.
Already they were busy with
returning people; in places even there were shops open, and I saw a drinking
fountain running water.
I remember how mockingly bright
the day seemed as I went back on my melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at
Woking, how busy the streets and vivid the moving life about me. So many people
were abroad everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it seemed
incredible that any great proportion of the population could have been slain.
But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I met, how shaggy the
hair of the men, how large and bright their eyes, and that every other man still
wore his dirty rags. Their faces seemed all with one of two expressions--a
leaping exultation and energy or a grim resolution. Save for the expression of
the faces, London seemed a city of tramps. The vestries were indiscriminately
distributing bread sent us by the French government. The ribs of the few horses
showed dismally. Haggard special constables with white badges stood at the
corners of every street. I saw little of the mischief wrought by the Martians
until I reached Wellington Street, and there I saw the red weed clambering over
the buttresses of Waterloo Bridge.
At the corner of the bridge,
too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time--a sheet of paper
flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it
in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication--theDaily
Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most
of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused
himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page.
The matter he printed was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found
its way back. I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the
examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among
other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that
the "Secret of Flying," was discovered. At Waterloo I found the free trains that
were taking people to their homes. The first rush was already over. There were
few people in the train, and I was in no mood for casual conversation. I got a
compartment to myself, and sat with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit
devastation that flowed past the windows. And just outside the terminus the
train jolted over temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses
were blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy with
powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms and rain, and
at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds of
out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side with the customary navvies,
and we were jolted over a hasty relaying.
All down the line from there the
aspect of the country was gaunt and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had
suffered. Walton, by virtue of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of
any place along the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a
heaped mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher's meat and pickled
cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons of the
red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in certain nursery
grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the sixth cylinder. A number of
people were standing about it, and some sappers were busy in the midst of it.
Over it flaunted a Union Jack, flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The
nursery grounds were everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid
colour cut with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One's gaze went
with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the foreground
to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.
The line on the London side of
Woking station was still undergoing repair, so I descended at Byfleet station
and took the road to Maybury, past the place where I and the artilleryman had
talked to the hussars, and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me
in the thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find, among a
tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with the whitened bones of
the horse scattered and gnawed. For a time I stood regarding these vestiges....
Then I returned through the pine
wood, neck-high with red weed here and there, to find the landlord of the
Spotted Dog had already found burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A
man standing at an open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
I looked at my house with a
quick flash of hope that faded immediately. The door had been forced; it was
unfast and was opening slowly as I approached.
It slammed again. The curtains
of my study fluttered out of the open window from which I and the artilleryman
had watched the dawn. No one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just
as I had left them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the
house felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had
crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the catastrophe.
Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.
I followed them to my study, and
found lying on my writing-table still, with the selenite paper weight upon it,
the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder.
For a space I stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the
probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising
process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: "In about two
hundred years," I had written, "we may expect----" The sentence ended abruptly.
I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by,
and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I
remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had
listened to his odd story of "Men from Mars."
I came down and went into the
dining room. There were the mutton and the bread, both far gone now in decay,
and a beer bottle overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My
home was desolate. I perceived the folly of the faint hope I had cherished so
long. And then a strange thing occurred. "It is no use," said a voice. "The
house is deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to
torment yourself. No one escaped but you."
I was startled. Had I spoken my
thought aloud? I turned, and the French window was open behind me. I made a step
to it, and stood looking out.
And there, amazed and afraid,
even as I stood amazed and afraid, were my cousin and my wife--my wife white and
tearless. She gave a faint cry.
"I came," she said. "I
knew--knew----"
She put her hand to her
throat--swayed. I made a step forward, and caught her in my arms.
I cannot but regret, now that I
am concluding my story, how little I am able to contribute to the discussion of
the many debatable questions which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall
certainly provoke criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy.
My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but it
seems to me that Carver's suggestions as to the reason of the rapid death of the
Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as a proven conclusion. I have
assumed that in the body of my narrative.
At any rate, in all the bodies
of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those
already known as terrestrial species were found. That they did not bury any of
their dead, and the reckless slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire
ignorance of the putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no
means a proven conclusion.
Neither is the composition of
the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the
generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the
Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further
investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder points
unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group of
three lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form
a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the
blood. But such unproven speculations will scarcely be of interest to the
general reader, to whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that
drifted down the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at the
time, and now none is forthcoming.
The results of an anatomical
examination of the Martians, so far as the prowling dogs had left such an
examination possible, I have already given. But everyone is familiar with the
magnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History
Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that
the interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.
A question of graver and
universal interest is the possibility of another attack from the Martians. I do
not think that nearly enough attention is being given to this aspect of the
matter. At present the planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to
opposition I, for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we
should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be possible to define the
position of the gun from which the shots are discharged, to keep a sustained
watch upon this part of the planet, and to anticipate the arrival of the next
attack.
In that case the cylinder might
be destroyed with dynamite or artillery before it was sufficiently cool for the
Martians to emerge, or they might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the
screw opened. It seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure
of their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
Lessing has advanced excellent
reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a
landing on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in
alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of
view of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous
marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost
simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was detected
upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the drawings of these
appearances in order to appreciate fully their remarkable resemblance in
character.
At any rate, whether we expect
another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified
by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being
fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen
good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the
larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its
ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the
future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human
science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the
conception of the commonweal of mankind. It may be that across the immensity of
space the Martians have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned
their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement.
Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of
the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the
shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to
all the sons of men.
The broadening of men's views
that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there
was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed
beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the
Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is
impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth
uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has
begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision
I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed
of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But
that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of
the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future
ordained.
I must confess the stress and
danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my
mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the
healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and
about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass
me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle,
children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry
again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see
the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded
in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow
fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold
and wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy
multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they
are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and
wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a
galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but
a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim
and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the
vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on
the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there
still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw
it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great
day....
And strangest of all is it to
hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she
has counted me, among the dead.
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