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Dev.SN ♥ developers

posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 02 2016, @09:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the fill-er-up dept.
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(1)
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 02 2016, @09:37PM (47 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Friday December 02 2016, @09:37PM (#28858) Journal

    I'm a witch!

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    • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 02 2016, @09:39PM (42 children)

      by charon (4058) on Friday December 02 2016, @09:39PM (#28859) Journal

      Burn him!

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 02 2016, @10:13PM (40 children)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Friday December 02 2016, @10:13PM (#28872) Journal

        How do you know I am a witch?

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        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (22 children)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (#28875) Journal

          I really am, I just want to know how you know.

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          • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Friday December 02 2016, @10:37PM (21 children)

            by cmn32480 (443) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:37PM (#28882) Journal

            YO Mamma!

            • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:44PM (6 children)

              by martyb (76) on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:44PM (#28921) Journal

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              Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Nunc sem lorem, vestibulum ut egestas at, vestibulum sed odio. Ut eu lacus ac ligula dictum bibendum. Nunc cursus suscipit molestie. Donec et arcu volutpat, accumsan ex sit amet, sollicitudin orci. Sed a enim eu dolor tempor pharetra id at purus. Nam aliquam augue id imperdiet imperdiet. Cras dignissim ex et sapien hendrerit, at vehicula urna tempor. Praesent hendrerit eleifend congue. Nulla quis sagittis magna, a faucibus ligula. Suspendisse eleifend nisl a felis pulvinar venenatis. Etiam lobortis eros commodo semper hendrerit. Nam vestibulum, nisl at aliquet luctus, nisl risus tincidunt odio, lacinia pretium felis quam sit amet arcu. In vulputate erat massa, non porttitor nisi condimentum vel. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Donec id orci leo.

              Donec ac magna sed dolor ultricies auctor. Curabitur sit amet ex viverra, tincidunt diam mattis, dapibus massa. Morbi quam dolor, lobortis ac justo in, posuere facilisis mi. Vestibulum sed efficitur mauris, in varius odio. Nam tempor enim ac mi efficitur, eget sodales ligula sagittis. Aliquam sit amet ultrices quam, nec iaculis lorem. Aenean ac nulla quam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Aliquam sit amet lectus est.

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              Duis pharetra pharetra tincidunt. Donec finibus nisi quam, ut porta odio pellentesque sit amet. Aliquam eu interdum tellus, nec vehicula velit. Pellentesque commodo bibendum velit, vitae elementum nulla interdum aliquet. Fusce a tortor eros. Etiam efficitur venenatis nulla sed volutpat. Praesent auctor rhoncus ex, et ullamcorper diam tincidunt eget.

              Donec arcu justo, feugiat id tristique efficitur, feugiat ac nisi. Phasellus scelerisque dictum magna vitae laoreet. Phasellus consequat libero id faucibus accumsan. Maecenas bibendum ornare tortor, in ornare elit sollicitudin et. Quisque vel feugiat enim. Sed dignissim pretium massa nec vulputate. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce sed neque tellus. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Sed interdum congue dolor ac tempus. Nam id pellentesque lectus. Suspendisse cursus ipsum nec tempor dignissim. Aenean sollicitudin posuere nunc a iaculis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin efficitur imperdiet est vitae commodo.

              Pellentesque tristique suscipit ante, id faucibus velit maximus at. Integer in vehicula nibh. Nulla tempor purus vitae elit pellentesque, ut malesuada purus ultricies. Nunc porta sed sapien ut sagittis. Nullam eget quam euismod, posuere orci vel, posuere tellus. Cras eu odio dignissim, elementum massa in, scelerisque mi. Sed ultrices iaculis turpis et malesuada. Vivamus elementum diam mi, sed suscipit sapien dictum nec. Vivamus nec molestie tellus.

              Mauris at ligula dui. Nulla a lobortis dui. Duis vehicula et justo aliquam facilisis. Aenean egestas odio id elit pulvinar sollicitudin. Nunc rhoncus tristique nibh, eu posuere sem faucibus vitae. Nulla laoreet aliquet nibh. Pellentesque libero dui, ultrices ac sagittis quis, aliquet a eros. Nunc non lobortis diam. Quisque at erat non tellus interdum auctor sit amet nec justo. Pellentesque egestas malesuada magna, id semper arcu ullamcorper viverra.

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              Nulla luctus ligula at ipsum sollicitudin, in sollicitudin arcu sollicitudin. Ut vitae sagittis erat. Integer convallis diam sed erat volutpat tempus. Nam ultricies augue non dui tincidunt tincidunt. Mauris efficitur, lorem et suscipit tincidunt, orci nibh rutrum arcu, eu imperdiet urna ex et nisl. Etiam interdum turpis ut fringilla vestibulum. Duis ligula lacus, lacinia sit amet libero quis, imperdiet luctus magna. Nulla vel nisi a metus fermentum pellentesque et sagittis dui. Vestibulum lorem massa, pellentesque id sollicitudin vel, pulvinar eu arcu. In finibus, sapien mattis sagittis bibendum, libero odio tincidunt orci, vel cursus augue felis id mi. Etiam commodo eu ante ac molestie.

              Curabitur lacinia eu nisl nec mattis. Vestibulum at dolor vel tortor scelerisque consectetur a ut tellus. Nam lacus purus, cursus hendrerit ultrices eget, dignissim at metus. Donec sit amet feugiat massa. Nunc eget rutrum est. Suspendisse congue euismod dolor, eu efficitur tortor semper auctor. Quisque tempor arcu risus, in facilisis turpis volutpat non. Duis in ultrices dui, eget maximus nisi. Ut facilisis, enim et sodales vehicula, odio lectus bibendum neque, lobortis ultricies nulla mauris luctus dui. Proin fringilla, velit et feugiat viverra, leo lorem hendrerit sem, eget interdum arcu libero et erat. Nunc laoreet malesuada interdum. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nunc enim eros, lacinia id metus ut, viverra tempus sapien.

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              Nunc viverra quam dui, sed ullamcorper diam pellentesque sit amet. Mauris gravida odio id mi scelerisque, et maximus nibh lobortis. In non lacinia lorem. Sed vitae nunc lorem. Suspendisse potenti. Donec nec magna eu sem porta rutrum ac nec ex. Nunc tempor vulputate risus id condimentum. Proin sapien diam, scelerisque sit amet commodo vitae, aliquet in ipsum. Morbi vitae arcu tincidunt, venenatis eros consectetur, aliquet eros. Vestibulum eget ipsum tempor, sodales sem et, feugiat quam. Proin sit amet iaculis urna. Nunc sapien augue, laoreet in viverra vel, condimentum vitae sapien.

              Nullam iaculis dolor nec leo pharetra eleifend. Nam varius porta hendrerit. Nunc vitae gravida libero. Vestibulum sodales, enim sagittis commodo finibus, ipsum ante consequat enim, et elementum dolor lacus nec nisi. Nullam faucibus ut ipsum at feugiat. Phasellus lacinia quis erat ac fringilla. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Maecenas ac elit non leo vulputate iaculis at sit amet odio. Duis facilisis felis non augue vulputate malesuada. Praesent felis odio, tristique at efficitur viverra, mattis ut arcu. Donec vel ornare dolor, vel placerat ante. Duis sed diam nec libero rhoncus rutrum in ut tellus. Praesent ac lacus sit amet ante condimentum luctus.

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              Mauris enim lacus, dictum non mauris et, mattis suscipit nunc. Vestibulum a consequat nisl. Curabitur euismod placerat neque eget rutrum. Nam tincidunt viverra mi nec malesuada. Praesent laoreet purus gravida nisl aliquam varius elementum vitae eros. Proin nisl arcu, placerat volutpat augue sed, ultrices tempor velit. Aenean at pellentesque ipsum, a ornare diam. Mauris in egestas augue. Aliquam tempus neque in felis ullamcorper pulvinar. Proin aliquet eget libero eu maximus. Nunc vitae elit vulputate, ornare nunc vel, feugiat lacus. Vivamus dui neque, consectetur sed neque eu, facilisis mollis arcu. Curabitur sollicitudin dolor ac accumsan rutrum. Maecenas convallis porta felis, eget euismod odio porttitor a.

              Etiam lobortis maximus nibh, vitae gravida nibh convallis non. Integer aliquam urna eget nunc pretium, id sollicitudin magna volutpat. Vivamus sodales elit orci. Phasellus interdum, massa eu molestie consectetur, purus tellus finibus purus, vel fringilla eros libero facilisis erat. Ut eget diam vehicula, auctor lorem non, efficitur risus. Nullam lobortis nulla in massa condimentum, quis luctus massa sollicitudin. Nulla sagittis et lectus porttitor tristique. Nam convallis, velit bibendum faucibus luctus, purus felis efficitur justo, eu imperdiet neque odio id felis. Cras convallis justo urna, quis venenatis lacus scelerisque vel. In blandit elementum leo, at eleifend ex pellentesque id. Maecenas euismod quis nunc in porttitor. Suspendisse potenti. In elementum congue ipsum, sed laoreet dui faucibus eleifend.

              Sed venenatis porta sem in eleifend. Mauris in ligula congue, pellentesque mi eu, tempor diam. Donec at finibus ante, at cursus elit. Nunc vestibulum pulvinar orci in euismod. Donec elementum orci diam. Duis vestibulum venenatis massa, ac tristique tellus facilisis sit amet. Integer rhoncus erat in efficitur bibendum. Mauris nulla elit, vestibulum quis porttitor in, porttitor eget metus.

              Aenean placerat placerat imperdiet. Vivamus rutrum, orci eget eleifend varius, urna nisl hendrerit purus, ut efficitur nisi nulla a erat. Cras ut dictum velit. Curabitur scelerisque ac lacus at sollicitudin. Suspendisse a dolor sit amet libero consectetur rutrum et in metus. In vehicula purus at placerat viverra. Integer eget lectus ipsum. Praesent nec imperdiet purus. Phasellus at ipsum at tortor semper porttitor. Phasellus at pretium sem, viverra molestie lorem.

              Nam dapibus semper risus ut interdum. Maecenas blandit ante et sem consequat, non suscipit orci posuere. Mauris aliquet tellus nisl, sit amet euismod est rutrum vel. Proin quis ullamcorper mi. Mauris ac tellus lorem. Nam eu sodales dui, quis vulputate velit. Proin a lorem vel nibh consectetur auctor at vel metus. Duis sed tortor eget mauris volutpat ullamcorper. Donec a vulputate felis. Donec non rutrum nibh, ut hendrerit ligula. Maecenas non odio id sem euismod euismod.

              Aenean rutrum sem eget enim pharetra lobortis. Aenean malesuada nulla faucibus ipsum volutpat, volutpat fringilla arcu imperdiet. Pellentesque non posuere tellus. Fusce sed tincidunt eros. Phasellus sed ex lobortis, blandit lacus id, maximus turpis. Mauris aliquet sapien sed arcu facilisis, eu blandit tortor condimentum. Phasellus eu lectus mollis, tincidunt orci vel, varius lorem. Nullam erat augue, euismod id gravida at, suscipit et elit. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Fusce sollicitudin urna dolor. Quisque euismod ornare urna non maximus. Duis faucibus gravida elementum. Aliquam non turpis vitae orci malesuada varius. Phasellus consequat, turpis ut consequat hendrerit, ligula nunc viverra est, ut malesuada justo libero at metus. Fusce venenatis, nisl a tristique eleifend, felis mi malesuada massa, non maximus magna orci sit amet ex.

              Duis ullamcorper aliquam nibh, ac egestas quam. Cras sed est vulputate ex sodales varius vel id libero. Nullam quam urna, consequat vitae tellus sed, efficitur gravida leo. Duis est lectus, facilisis vel condimentum sit amet, tempus et ipsum. Ut dapibus quam vitae diam vestibulum, vitae volutpat sapien posuere. Fusce mollis bibendum ornare. Suspendisse maximus lorem eget sollicitudin dictum. Aliquam sit amet lectus lectus. Fusce lorem tellus, feugiat sed est nec, ornare volutpat orci.

              Proin urna nibh, tincidunt nec dolor at, malesuada laoreet erat. Vivamus eu enim nec nulla elementum vehicula. Praesent scelerisque turpis sit amet sem interdum, non tempor est mollis. Maecenas lobortis, metus in dictum placerat, ipsum velit auctor ante, sit amet pretium mi mi vitae erat. Fusce justo dui, ornare eu dolor ut, tempor maximus turpis. Nulla et arcu sed lectus mollis pretium. Phasellus faucibus commodo arcu vel tempor. Nam non diam ut magna feugiat mollis. Maecenas ex erat, pulvinar a nisi at, scelerisque tincidunt tellus. Morbi pharetra odio tellus, sit amet consequat erat mollis aliquet. Aenean non felis quis mi venenatis aliquet. Nam pellentesque maximus arcu ut vulputate. Quisque at leo erat.

              Sed varius vulputate elementum. Maecenas hendrerit nisl in tellus aliquam, condimentum consectetur dolor faucibus. Nulla facilisi. Quisque vitae condimentum arcu. Quisque commodo risus sit amet enim ultrices aliquet. Pellentesque volutpat id dui id volutpat. Ut nec dignissim dui. Duis laoreet tortor eget erat venenatis dictum. Duis viverra justo et ex bibendum, in euismod massa dapibus. Phasellus non dolor venenatis, euismod tellus sit amet, fringilla augue. Nullam molestie tortor euismod porta gravida. Ut dignissim nulla sem, vel tincidunt tortor elementum ac.

              Quisque ut dictum ipsum. Maecenas ut elementum mi. Nulla porta iaculis lectus, eu aliquet quam. Curabitur vitae commodo urna. Donec porttitor odio sed leo viverra maximus. Donec at justo vehicula, lobortis ipsum eleifend, lobortis metus. Proin ullamcorper egestas aliquam. Proin pretium luctus leo ultricies ultrices. Mauris nec odio sit amet purus mattis volutpat. Praesent facilisis est dapibus blandit condimentum. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Donec feugiat tellus non tortor rhoncus, ac semper nibh tempor. Nunc at diam enim. Praesent in hendrerit nulla. Proin pharetra ante hendrerit nunc placerat, laoreet sollicitudin erat vehicula. Nunc eu tincidunt turpis.

              Praesent at augue bibendum, venenatis nunc accumsan, porttitor velit. Vestibulum sit amet eros ante. Phasellus euismod lacinia lacus eu semper. Morbi luctus pellentesque tempus. Donec congue purus est, nec tincidunt dui pretium eget. Donec lacinia ullamcorper urna nec rhoncus. Fusce dignissim mi non tristique hendrerit. Donec bibendum orci ante, ac gravida libero porta id. Nunc aliquam mi ligula, non vulputate justo dictum in. Aenean dictum turpis a diam condimentum, vitae gravida libero ullamcorper. Cras finibus sit amet nisl nec sagittis. Donec elit elit, vulputate facilisis augue sed, condimentum pharetra ante.

              Nunc et ultricies ipsum. Fusce quis sapien justo. Aenean ac tellus nec urna pretium venenatis non in odio. Fusce at aliquam diam. Fusce massa turpis, cursus consequat justo ut, mattis tincidunt felis. Nam sed ipsum metus. Morbi pretium magna eu pulvinar mattis. Cras sit amet sagittis dui, at sollicitudin massa. Sed neque metus, tempor nec ipsum eleifend, dapibus laoreet eros. Pellentesque id sapien ac nunc eleifend fermentum. Cras pharetra est quis nisl vulputate molestie. Sed egestas iaculis bibendum. Nullam aliquet dolor vel tellus pharetra consequat. Cras et eros dignissim, ultricies erat vel, varius massa. Sed bibendum, tellus vitae fringilla hendrerit, mi ligula dictum lacus, vel sagittis eros sem a erat.

              In aliquam leo consequat risus fermentum accumsan. Morbi mollis mauris maximus, malesuada ex a, porttitor urna. Duis et consequat magna, ac elementum orci. Morbi sed nulla orci. Suspendisse viverra euismod urna sit amet consectetur. Morbi dictum nisl sed dui gravida, id ullamcorper urna ultrices. Aenean nisi turpis, ultricies eu diam sit amet, auctor ullamcorper enim.

              Proin metus tellus, rutrum ut elementum vitae, ullamcorper ac elit. Cras ut cursus libero, id fermentum ex. Donec sit amet nisi mollis, posuere eros at, pulvinar nibh. Nulla tristique vulputate viverra. Duis ac erat non libero rhoncus porttitor eu tincidunt sapien. Ut nunc ipsum, hendrerit ut convallis eget, scelerisque a tortor. Maecenas at mi vitae quam luctus feugiat in id dolor. Maecenas porttitor porttitor mi eu ultricies. Pellentesque erat diam, dignissim et egestas eu, suscipit quis eros. Donec arcu dolor, tincidunt a interdum nec, tristique non dolor.

              Praesent et ligula pulvinar, rutrum nunc vitae, pretium lacus. Phasellus mauris arcu, consequat a facilisis sit amet, lobortis vel felis. Cras efficitur finibus justo, hendrerit tempus turpis lobortis quis. Vivamus eu bibendum lacus. Etiam convallis, mi sed eleifend consectetur, sem est ultrices nisl, ut blandit arcu ante ac purus. Phasellus ac suscipit magna, dapibus tristique libero. Maecenas ac lectus interdum ante egestas maximus ac ut tortor. Mauris in est diam. Phasellus consectetur lacus et pulvinar aliquet. Fusce tincidunt a neque vitae pulvinar. Morbi risus massa, imperdiet consectetur justo id, placerat maximus ligula.

              Sed aliquet eros vel neque egestas fringilla. Nullam eget ligula lobortis, malesuada erat vitae, dictum tortor. Phasellus at nisl cursus, pulvinar ipsum et, imperdiet orci. Duis eget aliquet sapien. Curabitur varius eu ex in sollicitudin. Suspendisse ac tellus et tortor maximus tincidunt at a dolor. Suspendisse lacinia velit at ligula tristique condimentum. Vivamus sed facilisis urna. Suspendisse cursus aliquam tincidunt. Etiam eu eros luctus, pulvinar risus vel, pulvinar tellus. In in mattis urna. Donec nec nibh sed ante vestibulum pellentesque. Nunc sollicitudin ullamcorper luctus. Maecenas in ligula gravida, lacinia lorem eu, dapibus lectus.

              Nulla quis tellus luctus, rhoncus quam sed, pharetra nunc. Etiam sit amet tempus eros. Integer varius purus vitae mollis fringilla. Vestibulum viverra feugiat tempus. Integer feugiat felis risus, eget tincidunt leo congue quis. Mauris dictum volutpat dui vel mattis. Nulla facilisi. Fusce odio nunc, placerat vitae rhoncus ac, condimentum ac dui. Vestibulum metus sapien, mattis a sem ut, finibus faucibus risus. Vivamus sed sem vestibulum, semper elit ut, cursus augue. Proin sagittis nisl eget venenatis bibendum.

              Ut quis rutrum nisi, et condimentum nunc. Nunc varius iaculis ipsum, ac fringilla sem lobortis eget. Fusce fermentum velit mauris, sed hendrerit est tristique ac. Sed suscipit lacus eu justo pretium, ac euismod lacus pharetra. Pellentesque neque nunc, varius vel libero quis, convallis volutpat orci. Donec sem turpis, luctus ut facilisis sed, cursus non justo. Cras vel diam eu sapien gravida consectetur. Donec ac lectus eu neque venenatis consectetur at vitae magna. Nam suscipit varius fringilla. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Pellentesque dui est, consectetur eu fermentum et, posuere nec sem. In non placerat diam.

              Pellentesque sit amet risus libero. Aenean aliquam, neque at vestibulum elementum, leo purus viverra lorem, at finibus eros leo sed lacus. Etiam dictum eleifend dui, nec tempor urna varius a. Mauris ac interdum dui. Aliquam posuere feugiat ornare. Morbi ut tempus velit. Nulla facilisi.

              Cras viverra nisl et posuere congue. Etiam pharetra rutrum velit malesuada sagittis. Nunc metus magna, sagittis eget ligula vel, ullamcorper ullamcorper purus. Vivamus varius eros id sodales molestie. Nullam sed elit in lorem vehicula euismod. Nunc sit amet quam libero. Sed id efficitur dui. Ut vehicula posuere convallis. Nam sagittis elementum ipsum, lacinia tincidunt massa euismod sed. Donec ut nisl scelerisque, rutrum nunc mollis, fermentum lectus. Quisque blandit ipsum placerat orci lobortis mattis.

              Aliquam erat volutpat. In a lectus sit amet augue elementum congue ac aliquam diam. Ut at tortor vitae quam faucibus facilisis convallis eget ante. Nulla semper odio ac iaculis auctor. Mauris auctor metus ut felis fringilla, sit amet consequat neque elementum. Maecenas in convallis mauris. Pellentesque lectus ipsum, fermentum in ex nec, accumsan scelerisque lectus. Donec lacinia diam ipsum. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Proin sed orci vitae nunc condimentum pharetra. Maecenas commodo nibh sapien, at vestibulum nulla convallis nec. Morbi a condimentum est.

              Nullam ultricies dui sed arcu iaculis, vel vulputate enim dapibus. Ut sit amet ante ac lorem fermentum venenatis. Aliquam erat volutpat. Quisque ultricies vehicula placerat. Donec rhoncus diam ligula, sagittis condimentum nisi dictum id. Nullam tincidunt, neque eu placerat porta, elit elit scelerisque ipsum, eget bibendum tortor diam vitae diam. Sed eu varius ante. Pellentesque id lectus lacus. Proin suscipit tristique maximus. Sed quis ullamcorper tortor, a varius nisl. Nullam in tincidunt mi, at sodales tellus.

              Suspendisse luctus dictum auctor. Maecenas sodales lorem non iaculis porta. In et venenatis lorem, sit amet cursus diam. Pellentesque feugiat ullamcorper ligula, id sollicitudin risus. Aenean erat mi, tincidunt sit amet eleifend in, porttitor varius leo. In in maximus augue. Proin in arcu ligula.

              Aliquam pretium ante dui, in gravida urna laoreet in. In at neque finibus, pellentesque urna non, pulvinar justo. Suspendisse elementum ultricies lectus ac ultrices. Nam pulvinar est vitae interdum suscipit. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer venenatis elit ac eros porta, dictum scelerisque lectus egestas. Nam fermentum eget augue maximus egestas.

              Nulla sit amet dolor nec urna elementum aliquet. Quisque id sem aliquet, semper massa pulvinar, mollis elit. Integer varius a nisl ut auctor. Suspendisse potenti. Curabitur maximus faucibus ligula, sit amet iaculis ante vestibulum vitae. Cras vulputate mollis est, a sollicitudin mi tristique vitae. Curabitur sed dapibus felis, ac suscipit arcu. Maecenas dapibus vel ex id fringilla. Ut maximus blandit efficitur. Suspendisse porta aliquam enim. Vestibulum lobortis consectetur arcu, et lobortis metus bibendum et. Nam elementum ex nec felis maximus accumsan. Aenean id est venenatis, eleifend dui ac, dictum risus. Pellentesque pretium, lorem vel aliquet auctor, nibh diam sollicitudin libero, in mollis velit turpis id arcu. Nulla volutpat, augue non lobortis mollis, ex tortor tincidunt odio, a tempor leo lectus sit amet sem.

              Aenean tristique tempus neque, at eleifend erat maximus sagittis. Curabitur eu quam quis risus lobortis auctor. Sed vestibulum eros nec neque ultricies luctus. Proin sagittis nisl arcu, fermentum tristique tellus consequat eget. Nam sed dui a nisi euismod vestibulum eu at sem. Nunc ultricies, tellus ac consequat ornare, augue purus imperdiet enim, ac egestas diam magna maximus metus. Donec auctor gravida augue. Curabitur nec mi massa. Mauris et lacinia massa.

              Nulla facilisi. Nunc sagittis eleifend leo sit amet fringilla. In faucibus nec quam sed varius. Pellentesque tincidunt lorem vitae odio interdum venenatis. Sed dictum ac odio et feugiat. Integer ultrices nunc vitae sem efficitur hendrerit. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Mauris molestie mauris felis, vel ultricies mauris rutrum sed. Duis mauris risus, efficitur sed massa sed, ullamcorper venenatis tellus. Nam gravida nibh ac risus tincidunt, vitae malesuada arcu fermentum. Phasellus et leo et purus consequat consectetur. Nulla eget metus risus. Curabitur luctus libero mi, at fringilla orci maximus dapibus. Sed sed ipsum enim.

              Aliquam erat volutpat. Cras a libero sapien. Vivamus ullamcorper imperdiet quam, sit amet maximus metus ultrices a. Maecenas pharetra ipsum nec magna vehicula posuere. Quisque eget neque dolor. Duis porttitor nunc sit amet libero elementum aliquet. Nulla faucibus felis imperdiet eros posuere convallis. Suspendisse ultrices luctus nibh, et cursus orci tempor et. Proin rhoncus, risus vel rhoncus imperdiet, lacus dolor auctor justo, at ullamcorper purus justo ut libero. Cras eget orci at nulla maximus ultrices.

              Maecenas gravida dignissim dui, porta gravida augue porttitor vel. Ut nec posuere sapien, quis commodo dolor. Vivamus dolor elit, pellentesque sed pharetra nec, accumsan in massa. Pellentesque sed scelerisque ligula. Aliquam pellentesque dignissim metus quis facilisis. Sed tortor sem, euismod eu erat eu, volutpat dignissim nibh. Curabitur a nisi ullamcorper ligula semper eleifend. Mauris mattis porttitor est, id dignissim arcu convallis sit amet. Integer id tellus quis lorem laoreet volutpat. Vestibulum pharetra non odio ut vehicula. In quis massa ac tortor finibus laoreet. Nunc nec pretium mauris. Nam lacinia eu justo iaculis auctor. Curabitur ultrices nisl vitae nisi auctor consequat.

              Curabitur eleifend, nisi pretium pretium pretium, sapien nibh maximus orci, et ultricies neque leo eget nisi. Praesent semper, ipsum sed vehicula tincidunt, neque libero lacinia purus, nec interdum nisi tellus non leo. Integer non purus cursus, convallis nunc sit amet, accumsan felis. Pellentesque consectetur metus vitae fringilla semper. Duis dictum tortor tortor, ac dictum est imperdiet vel. Vestibulum aliquam tortor eget magna pellentesque, nec ullamcorper erat convallis. Proin id tempus justo. Fusce nibh ligula, sagittis eget felis sit amet, rhoncus consectetur lorem.

              Sed eu placerat sapien. Sed sodales blandit elit. Nulla posuere ligula quis ultricies porta. In malesuada aliquet sem ut commodo. Integer at libero sit amet neque condimentum malesuada non sed ipsum. Sed congue imperdiet rutrum. Praesent eget consectetur lacus. Morbi urna urna, facilisis at sollicitudin sit amet, sodales et turpis. Pellentesque ante ex, dignissim vel sapien a, vestibulum feugiat eros. Aenean fringilla nulla nec est sollicitudin, non malesuada odio porttitor. Integer pharetra lorem eget velit convallis, nec ultrices dolor placerat.

              In volutpat nibh condimentum arcu mollis facilisis. Fusce iaculis diam non felis aliquam gravida. Sed blandit vel turpis vitae pharetra. Curabitur ut viverra purus. Fusce nec nulla sed nunc semper tincidunt. Proin libero mi, vehicula vitae enim non, ornare feugiat arcu. In convallis laoreet nibh, non mattis purus volutpat eu. Suspendisse lacinia at nisl quis egestas. Donec condimentum risus euismod orci sollicitudin aliquet consequat vel nulla. Curabitur nec aliquam libero. Sed auctor dictum eleifend. Nunc at elit aliquam libero fringilla mollis non vitae urna.

              Mauris elit arcu, posuere a dapibus in, malesuada quis libero. Maecenas est quam, placerat et tincidunt id, interdum eu urna. Vestibulum sed eleifend erat, nec porttitor velit. Fusce leo metus, commodo sed sodales ac, dapibus sed sem. Quisque id quam ac sem elementum euismod a vel tellus. Integer hendrerit maximus viverra. Vestibulum aliquet scelerisque sapien, eget dignissim felis aliquet gravida. Sed ac felis rhoncus, finibus urna id, scelerisque dolor. Quisque maximus sagittis ipsum eget blandit. Curabitur sed metus mauris. Nunc eu rhoncus nisl. Curabitur luctus ante vitae feugiat iaculis. Phasellus fringilla convallis magna, non faucibus nunc porta quis. Aenean vel fringilla diam. Donec vitae lorem in tellus maximus vehicula in eu neque. Cras non massa iaculis, posuere lorem nec, tempus felis.

              Morbi dapibus venenatis risus, quis aliquet leo iaculis sit amet. Nam quis ornare ipsum, ac blandit sem. Donec iaculis, felis eu placerat luctus, odio tellus eleifend nulla, sit amet ultricies quam nunc in sapien. Donec id pretium dui, eu consectetur ipsum. Donec et placerat ligula, vel sodales orci. Vivamus sollicitudin tempus porta. Proin justo massa, hendrerit a arcu quis, condimentum elementum mi. Nulla varius, augue at eleifend bibendum, magna odio convallis arcu, sollicitudin auctor sem mauris ut elit. Suspendisse et tellus dapibus, suscipit nisi nec, lobortis erat. Vestibulum ac enim a tellus suscipit imperdiet ut sit amet diam. Quisque nulla turpis, condimentum quis lobortis vitae, iaculis id arcu. In varius, felis id vehicula efficitur, mauris eros lobortis arcu, a elementum est neque ac tortor.

              Nam sem nisl, vehicula non neque at, commodo pretium felis. Curabitur scelerisque magna a metus varius, sed rhoncus arcu pulvinar. Vivamus mollis mollis dui, non tincidunt tellus gravida quis. Donec lacinia nulla ac ipsum lacinia, at pellentesque tortor venenatis. Suspendisse et lacus finibus, dapibus ligula ut, consectetur nunc. Fusce tortor ipsum, accumsan nec auctor sit amet, tempor a ex. Sed volutpat dolor lorem, vel commodo est semper id. Nulla facilisi. Curabitur mauris nibh, volutpat eget ligula non, tristique aliquam odio. Duis vestibulum dolor ut tellus placerat, sit amet hendrerit urna condimentum. Vivamus dolor massa, egestas nec eros condimentum, aliquam dignissim mi. Aliquam laoreet sollicitudin aliquam. Sed pellentesque sodales lorem, sed molestie felis fermentum ut. Donec pulvinar laoreet arcu ac dapibus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Curabitur dapibus blandit massa ut volutpat.

              Aliquam non imperdiet purus, sed auctor nunc. Curabitur pharetra ante odio, eget tristique libero finibus vitae. Maecenas pharetra metus non felis placerat, sed auctor elit porta. Integer porta in nunc in placerat. Sed id tortor eget justo luctus lobortis. Pellentesque semper rutrum augue, at interdum diam convallis quis. Sed rhoncus, tortor eget maximus finibus, quam felis auctor lacus, quis commodo turpis lectus vel metus. Vivamus dolor nibh, gravida vitae tempus non, lacinia sed erat. Sed neque purus, mollis placerat blandit in, fringilla quis mauris. Mauris maximus at turpis vitae commodo. Ut quam eros, tempor vitae iaculis non, pellentesque id quam. Praesent blandit tempor odio id sollicitudin.

              Duis dapibus ornare turpis, vitae feugiat dui laoreet feugiat. Donec hendrerit lectus sit amet lacinia venenatis. Morbi ut gravida orci, sed rhoncus risus. Vivamus sit amet ante imperdiet, rhoncus eros eget, rutrum libero. Morbi in tristique dui. Morbi vel imperdiet metus, sit amet sollicitudin nulla. Donec placerat quam vel turpis laoreet fermentum. Duis interdum pellentesque ornare. Donec vehicula ultricies massa ac tincidunt. Integer efficitur dui non urna scelerisque, laoreet consequat neque sodales. Sed eu scelerisque mi, a sagittis enim. Donec eleifend libero vitae nibh porta ornare. Pellentesque sagittis erat quis sagittis finibus. In porttitor varius nulla, sed iaculis lorem vehicula ullamcorper. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.

              Aliquam sit amet justo libero. Pellentesque at ipsum id justo maximus interdum quis a nibh. Vestibulum elementum eros ac augue rhoncus, quis sagittis velit laoreet. Integer non semper risus, id volutpat justo. Etiam porta tempus risus sed congue. Morbi sed luctus purus, id luctus lorem. Aliquam suscipit urna tempor elit blandit, varius ullamcorper orci congue. Quisque varius ullamcorper ex vestibulum vestibulum. Aliquam ultricies venenatis enim et tincidunt.

              Nulla facilisi. Integer dignissim est nec nisi cursus, iaculis tempus lacus pellentesque. Suspendisse rhoncus tristique turpis, vitae cursus sapien congue vitae. Proin at bibendum ipsum. Suspendisse id porta leo, sollicitudin fringilla odio. Etiam in nulla felis. Pellentesque molestie diam orci, non bibendum orci ornare ut.

              Vivamus pharetra suscipit dolor, eget malesuada eros. Pellentesque id facilisis arcu. Etiam sed pellentesque ligula, rhoncus faucibus est. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Praesent at ullamcorper metus, a blandit risus. Sed rhoncus sagittis blandit. Phasellus feugiat convallis est, nec facilisis urna dictum in. Nunc sit amet aliquam arcu. Morbi tincidunt facilisis enim, id aliquam ex convallis nec. Morbi id lorem et diam hendrerit volutpat cursus sed leo. Praesent sodales lacus ut sollicitudin venenatis. In pulvinar dictum orci vitae faucibus. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum a elementum nibh. Integer euismod, diam vitae bibendum vulputate, sapien quam faucibus enim, ut convallis elit neque in leo. Praesent iaculis nec urna eu condimentum.

              Nunc sagittis odio vel ultrices interdum. Quisque in augue vel purus blandit porta fermentum nec leo. Praesent cursus sapien in condimentum tincidunt. Cras mollis est ipsum, sed dapibus eros hendrerit vehicula. Sed tortor nisi, mattis quis porttitor ac, pellentesque id nisl. Nulla facilisi. Suspendisse id dapibus nulla. Quisque ipsum metus, porttitor quis egestas sed, fringilla blandit mi. Nullam vel ex efficitur, porttitor magna vitae, consectetur erat. Morbi lobortis risus eleifend, pharetra nisi ut, aliquet augue. Nam in mauris est. Sed mattis vulputate nunc vel varius. Integer dapibus risus et libero interdum, nec semper est accumsan. Pellentesque blandit velit a sollicitudin tincidunt. Sed nec purus nibh. Nam eget tristique odio.

              Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Quisque dignissim augue arcu, eget fermentum dui egestas ultrices. Donec finibus sit amet magna id suscipit. In quis justo a magna malesuada aliquet. Nullam sed nunc aliquam, scelerisque ligula ac, interdum turpis. Quisque mollis venenatis est, at congue magna suscipit eu. In quis lacus posuere, hendrerit velit et, ornare leo. Nullam facilisis tellus bibendum, viverra urna ut, malesuada enim. Nulla tincidunt augue a enim maximus semper. Nullam feugiat lorem risus, ac ullamcorper ipsum pharetra at. Nunc ornare nisl vitae nunc imperdiet congue.

              Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam enim ante, venenatis eget nisi ac, pulvinar pretium nibh. Fusce at tellus dignissim lorem bibendum tempus et id ligula. Cras rhoncus hendrerit lorem et porttitor. Vivamus mollis eros ut nisi pellentesque sagittis. Phasellus in euismod erat. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam elementum neque eget diam sagittis, sed vulputate libero mattis. Fusce at felis dolor. Nulla ante justo, consectetur eu odio a, vulputate pulvinar nulla. Nulla lacinia ante eget elit accumsan lobortis. Nam eleifend malesuada nisi, nec ultricies erat fermentum vel. Etiam euismod non sem et posuere.

              Nam ultricies lobortis sapien in finibus. Duis elementum arcu sit amet massa elementum, quis ultrices orci sagittis. Donec fermentum sollicitudin iaculis. Morbi aliquam fermentum erat, sed auctor ante fringilla id. Aliquam nec tellus sollicitudin, vulputate diam non, consectetur massa. Donec lacinia lorem at porta semper. Vivamus accumsan lectus metus, vel efficitur erat auctor eget. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Etiam ipsum enim, malesuada eget ultricies vitae, iaculis sed tellus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Maecenas faucibus justo turpis, vitae convallis ipsum iaculis laoreet. Integer ut mollis lorem. Nunc et rhoncus nunc. Aliquam accumsan, est sit amet tempor porttitor, libero turpis porttitor eros, in bibendum ligula lacus et orci. Maecenas ut orci tellus. In elementum nunc odio, a porta diam aliquet in.

              Nam aliquet hendrerit nisi, ut pulvinar odio pharetra quis. Donec aliquet, ipsum lobortis vulputate mollis, mauris nibh pharetra metus, nec gravida ipsum nibh sollicitudin lorem. Maecenas tellus quam, dignissim et lacus vitae, aliquet scelerisque magna. Ut semper accumsan ullamcorper. Nam leo lorem, vehicula facilisis felis vitae, feugiat sagittis magna. Quisque ipsum odio, tempor et nisl lacinia, porta laoreet orci. Nullam luctus sit amet orci convallis varius. Proin malesuada commodo velit in pulvinar. In gravida eleifend magna sed elementum. Quisque quis dui sed elit efficitur accumsan.

              Morbi in lectus accumsan turpis dapibus viverra a dictum dolor. Pellentesque lacinia risus eget imperdiet congue. Morbi et ultrices mauris. Nulla facilisi. Vivamus facilisis dui vel volutpat efficitur. Integer sed ante vitae sapien feugiat sollicitudin. Maecenas ac auctor dolor. Nulla tempor sit amet neque sed feugiat. Vestibulum eleifend sapien eu libero tristique tempus. Phasellus auctor diam ac imperdiet iaculis.

              Duis condimentum fringilla nisi sed scelerisque. Donec rhoncus augue eu purus pellentesque blandit. Maecenas ac lectus vel arcu mattis feugiat. Integer gravida sed sapien ut commodo. Aenean volutpat viverra velit, quis semper risus finibus sit amet. Phasellus venenatis urna nec mattis condimentum. Mauris ut dictum metus. Sed elementum rhoncus libero nec tristique. Nunc pharetra rutrum lectus, ut volutpat nisi ullamcorper eu. Sed elementum semper ligula fringilla lobortis. Cras porttitor malesuada dui, vel porttitor augue vehicula et. Morbi mollis convallis leo eget mattis. In a enim a tortor malesuada maximus eget sit amet ex. Fusce interdum vulputate ex, ac porta risus. Praesent placerat, metus vel accumsan egestas, tortor leo rutrum dui, quis feugiat lectus justo eu nibh.

              Nullam sed vehicula eros. Nulla interdum pretium tincidunt. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque vulputate imperdiet nulla, vitae dictum mi imperdiet nec. Praesent et orci vel tellus aliquet consequat sed sed metus. Nunc pellentesque lorem metus, id cursus nisi ullamcorper non. Nullam vitae massa orci. Donec erat nulla, rhoncus id justo et, sagittis aliquam eros. Donec ac lorem ut leo congue rutrum non at quam. Vestibulum id sollicitudin odio, ac sodales nisl. Morbi vulputate ac mauris at aliquam.

              Sed eu purus egestas, bibendum justo eget, fermentum ipsum. Suspendisse luctus lacus arcu. Donec at justo velit. Aenean posuere dolor sit amet sem fermentum laoreet. Cras placerat mi sed lectus maximus aliquet. Curabitur ut nisi viverra, pulvinar metus quis, sagittis mauris. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nam tortor purus, molestie a leo vitae, euismod ullamcorper magna.

              Suspendisse luctus feugiat rhoncus. Cras et mattis nisl, quis posuere orci. Morbi scelerisque leo nec lacus tincidunt, nec ultricies sapien consequat. Quisque egestas nulla nunc, in luctus sapien iaculis cursus. Vivamus consectetur mollis ullamcorper. In pulvinar pretium enim, sed condimentum ligula ultricies ut. Nullam tempor lacus ac neque mattis dignissim. Nunc ante mauris, elementum a magna sit amet, cursus sagittis odio. Aliquam fringilla rutrum arcu ut rhoncus.

              Phasellus vel nisi vel odio consequat bibendum nec ac enim. Quisque blandit neque ligula, in porttitor nulla aliquam quis. Mauris non lacus enim. Donec ultricies vel magna sed egestas. Vivamus laoreet tempor dolor. In metus felis, venenatis scelerisque rhoncus eget, tempus a neque. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In quis erat hendrerit, commodo ligula id, mollis nunc. Integer cursus diam sed ligula lobortis consequat.

              Nullam vehicula turpis sit amet vestibulum pulvinar. Donec lobortis vel tellus ut aliquam. Nullam sit amet nibh sit amet sapien dignissim aliquam. Sed efficitur non massa in molestie. Nunc quis auctor mauris. Curabitur suscipit placerat quam, non commodo urna aliquet in. Sed sed lectus sem. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Phasellus malesuada nisi eget iaculis pellentesque.

              Nullam tempor vitae eros quis imperdiet. Morbi efficitur risus dictum ex malesuada placerat. Fusce cursus, nulla a feugiat congue, turpis odio rutrum dui, et tempor ex enim sed mi. Sed interdum magna et metus pharetra, id eleifend lacus interdum. Integer eget magna sit amet sem accumsan condimentum. Duis elit leo, blandit vel eleifend sit amet, condimentum sit amet nibh. In eget fermentum erat. Phasellus enim sapien, aliquet vitae lobortis sed, facilisis nec est. Aliquam et ipsum erat. Mauris suscipit magna eu sodales iaculis.

              Cras eleifend commodo metus tempus sagittis. Ut quam erat, luctus a lectus sit amet, faucibus tempor ligula. Sed nec tristique nisl, quis placerat metus. Vivamus elementum risus in viverra eleifend. Fusce nisl metus, semper nec fermentum a, ultrices et odio. Mauris hendrerit vehicula risus non fringilla. Nulla sed faucibus augue. Praesent pharetra imperdiet velit, nec sagittis quam molestie vitae. Etiam venenatis ut quam eget iaculis.

              Duis posuere elit id risus sagittis molestie ac non urna. Ut leo nulla, viverra id nisl vel, feugiat sollicitudin odio. Duis vestibulum arcu a augue consequat, et tincidunt ipsum vulputate. Morbi aliquet euismod libero ac pulvinar. Nam eu est et ligula hendrerit consectetur sed nec nunc. Donec egestas placerat orci porttitor porta. Sed non risus auctor, consequat ligula in, ullamcorper erat. Vestibulum ultricies tempor porta. Sed bibendum ipsum vitae est placerat rutrum. Nunc id aliquet dolor. Quisque et varius purus, id aliquet erat. Duis posuere elit efficitur, pulvinar magna non, pellentesque lectus.

              Proin sit amet tortor tristique enim porta tincidunt. Etiam eu sapien non risus dictum efficitur. Maecenas maximus ac magna vitae rutrum. Aenean varius, justo vel viverra sagittis, sem augue vehicula nulla, ac sagittis turpis augue et velit. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Etiam lorem quam, facilisis ut metus non, fermentum ultricies sapien. Morbi pulvinar nunc et risus feugiat accumsan quis semper sem. Integer volutpat ipsum orci, sed ornare urna tincidunt quis. Integer gravida, nibh nec aliquam ultrices, tortor sapien accumsan sapien, sed euismod magna nunc quis eros. Suspendisse neque mi, condimentum vel hendrerit in, maximus vel est. Nunc lacinia luctus vehicula. Aenean diam dolor, viverra nec arcu et, imperdiet lobortis mauris.

              Duis pulvinar nulla in ex lacinia faucibus. Pellentesque ut mauris congue, tempus turpis nec, pulvinar elit. Praesent nec risus felis. Morbi eleifend lacus nunc. Nulla fermentum rhoncus odio ut iaculis. Pellentesque vehicula odio ut dolor fringilla, scelerisque rutrum sapien dictum. Quisque fringilla, lacus in hendrerit venenatis, neque lectus mollis urna, eu mattis ante urna sit amet mauris. Nullam eget posuere lectus. Proin mollis justo in mi sagittis volutpat. Nunc eros leo, scelerisque at commodo bibendum, elementum nec elit. Vivamus vitae eros scelerisque, elementum velit vel, suscipit metus. Vivamus ullamcorper ipsum diam, in porta mi laoreet vel.

              Proin finibus lorem sem, in varius nunc lacinia quis. Donec rhoncus, lectus nec tristique venenatis, lacus nulla facilisis ipsum, a feugiat augue est id tortor. Nunc auctor blandit aliquet. Morbi tempor tellus et tincidunt dapibus. Phasellus vel efficitur massa. Nunc venenatis elit a risus aliquet, sed malesuada metus ultricies. Phasellus nec felis enim. Integer pretium vestibulum leo in gravida.

              Suspendisse egestas libero odio, id sodales tellus auctor vel. Nullam luctus tortor ac justo tincidunt, sed aliquet mauris tempus. Nunc egestas ullamcorper tortor eu vestibulum. Sed efficitur lobortis elit vel elementum. Duis eu posuere dui. Nam sodales eleifend leo, non ultricies nulla. Vestibulum augue ipsum, ullamcorper vel tortor vehicula, eleifend auctor libero. Nulla facilisi. Suspendisse nec enim lobortis, dapibus augue quis, tempus odio.

              Nulla ut quam elementum, euismod elit ac, faucibus augue. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas erat arcu, blandit et elit non, faucibus vehicula ante. Nulla eu elit blandit tortor lacinia hendrerit scelerisque vitae dui. Nulla pretium euismod convallis. Fusce interdum, neque sit amet congue auctor, leo justo dictum libero, quis elementum nisl ante nec libero. Nunc fringilla nisi id metus hendrerit rutrum. Sed sapien nisi, luctus ut ipsum in, vestibulum mattis augue. Cras eleifend fermentum rhoncus. Aliquam ac rhoncus metus. Vestibulum mollis mauris vitae justo lobortis commodo. Vivamus non lorem mollis, ultricies diam sed, ultrices lectus. Phasellus commodo pellentesque magna nec eleifend. Nunc posuere eros eu efficitur pulvinar. Sed nec aliquet felis, ut volutpat leo. Sed a neque placerat, consequat quam vel, elementum augue.

              Duis ac nunc eu est volutpat mattis. Suspendisse bibendum velit non ante condimentum gravida. Suspendisse sit amet vulputate lorem. Quisque vestibulum faucibus nisl, ac fermentum ex tristique et. Nam suscipit elit et tortor dictum, eu commodo odio dignissim. Morbi ultrices cursus dolor vel luctus. Nulla non purus aliquam, egestas nulla ac, volutpat tortor. Sed molestie dolor a erat feugiat, a semper sapien malesuada. Aenean sit amet eros ac felis ornare maximus. Vivamus imperdiet volutpat nisl ac placerat. Curabitur non porta magna, id commodo urna. Vivamus mattis tortor bibendum efficitur posuere. Suspendisse potenti. Aenean imperdiet nulla in magna iaculis, sit amet volutpat arcu dignissim.

              Praesent aliquet tristique rhoncus. Sed dignissim orci vitae accumsan maximus. Suspendisse potenti. Aliquam erat volutpat. Pellentesque ac justo non turpis ultricies sagittis. Etiam volutpat rutrum finibus. Sed porta dolor enim, a bibendum ipsum elementum in. Morbi sagittis tortor odio, mattis luctus ex ultrices ac. Etiam nisl massa, sollicitudin id venenatis eu, rutrum nec risus. Nullam rutrum mi et tristique volutpat. Morbi convallis ex nibh, egestas rhoncus est scelerisque ac. Sed commodo nisl nunc.

              Aliquam finibus consectetur mi, nec tristique urna tincidunt vitae. Integer vestibulum nunc velit. Nullam scelerisque gravida nisi, eget bibendum felis maximus in. Ut varius commodo faucibus. Sed elementum venenatis condimentum. Nam sem mauris, interdum facilisis nisi non, commodo vulputate ligula. Maecenas diam justo, mattis et interdum et, ullamcorper dictum enim. Sed sed diam leo. Nam facilisis ligula justo, vitae laoreet risus gravida vel. Quisque pellentesque, orci eget interdum semper, metus libero euismod mi, eget bibendum purus ex ac tortor.

              Donec molestie eget odio in ullamcorper. Duis vestibulum congue ligula eu molestie. Donec imperdiet posuere tellus. Cras at tempor leo. Aenean gravida porttitor dolor ut eleifend. Nulla facilisi. Etiam quam libero, cursus vitae rhoncus efficitur, tristique eu nibh. Nulla dui odio, fringilla sed nisi in, ornare fermentum mauris.

              Mauris ultricies nulla cursus, cursus tortor quis, faucibus sapien. Etiam congue risus mi, sit amet dictum ante tincidunt nec. Nulla vel scelerisque dolor, vitae condimentum lorem. Cras nec mi pulvinar, cursus magna vitae, congue nisi. Cras massa mauris, congue et sapien eu, porttitor posuere massa. Ut sagittis sit amet orci gravida tempor. Ut non est ac ex iaculis varius at vitae tellus. Nam ipsum dui, feugiat quis mauris a, tincidunt pharetra justo. Donec ex justo, convallis in tellus a, ullamcorper bibendum nisi. Morbi urna lectus, pulvinar sed elit id, venenatis congue turpis.

              Aenean metus urna, sodales eu velit sed, pharetra congue lectus. Aenean tellus tellus, tempus vitae lectus et, commodo facilisis erat. Pellentesque sit amet lacus eget elit fringilla sollicitudin. Donec congue purus a facilisis faucibus. Morbi mollis lacus vitae libero dignissim, at congue mauris sodales. Nulla ornare enim at ultricies consequat. Praesent diam enim, feugiat eu nisi vitae, dapibus interdum lacus. Sed volutpat nisi non accumsan venenatis. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Fusce ultrices hendrerit elementum. Maecenas ac gravida ex. Donec aliquet suscipit mauris nec feugiat. Vestibulum placerat augue mi, eget rutrum mi mattis id. Mauris aliquam et elit sed malesuada.

              Nunc vulputate hendrerit libero, eget semper elit scelerisque vel. Mauris a est justo. Aenean commodo, justo at vulputate bibendum, velit massa tempus nisl, quis dapibus libero dui eu erat. Quisque vitae lacinia libero. Vivamus tincidunt venenatis cursus. Duis eget elementum ipsum. Proin ut nunc ut diam vulputate pharetra nec vel magna. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Praesent et velit euismod, vulputate lectus ut, dapibus leo. Vestibulum cursus pulvinar quam, eu fringilla elit rhoncus non. Curabitur eget ante nec lorem venenatis lobortis at ac nulla. Cras luctus diam est, vitae finibus mauris imperdiet nec. In venenatis a libero ac mattis.

              Suspendisse vehicula lectus sit amet placerat venenatis. Suspendisse eget odio vel justo facilisis pharetra id vitae dolor. Aenean enim risus, fermentum non mattis eget, vestibulum at neque. Nunc ullamcorper lectus et mi scelerisque tristique. Nullam non euismod arcu, eu ultricies massa. Proin condimentum sit amet orci in interdum. Nulla vitae lacinia leo. Cras non augue sed ex rutrum mattis vitae quis purus. Donec ultrices posuere ante, id tristique quam laoreet vel. Vestibulum eu neque ac libero condimentum fermentum. Etiam efficitur, ligula nec porta rutrum, tortor nunc viverra lacus, sit amet iaculis diam turpis nec urna. Mauris orci sapien, vestibulum at dictum ut, euismod pretium nibh.

              Pellentesque sodales, dui nec auctor lacinia, metus libero convallis libero, in vehicula odio tortor at eros. Curabitur pellentesque erat nec arcu aliquet, sed varius libero pulvinar. Curabitur sollicitudin, orci ac molestie sollicitudin, nibh justo semper velit, id ultricies orci ligula eget nibh. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut non tellus tellus. Donec auctor nisl ut ante laoreet, quis maximus nisi vestibulum. Vestibulum ut magna erat. Praesent eleifend mauris at felis tincidunt, et lacinia metus rhoncus. Nam tristique elit at tincidunt efficitur.

              Cras vel sem turpis. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nam facilisis purus ut tellus laoreet, at luctus nisl dictum. Suspendisse orci arcu, efficitur eget rutrum vitae, laoreet a sapien. Sed ac maximus ex. Phasellus posuere, enim vel feugiat vulputate, mauris tortor consequat massa, non commodo libero eros et nisl. Maecenas consequat, odio auctor placerat fringilla, ex urna dapibus urna, in finibus nulla turpis sed magna. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In egestas massa ac placerat dapibus. Praesent laoreet aliquet odio, id luctus lorem lobortis et. Aenean metus leo, finibus sed lobortis eget, luctus egestas felis. Pellentesque auctor quis lorem quis venenatis. Duis risus ipsum, tempus nec quam a, dictum rutrum quam.

              Nulla in condimentum nunc. Duis non porta libero, eu bibendum orci. Donec accumsan mattis tellus id efficitur. Ut ac commodo elit. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nulla et purus porta, vehicula nulla eget, blandit dolor. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. In imperdiet consequat ante. Pellentesque ac gravida massa. Donec efficitur commodo metus. Donec vel diam sagittis, sollicitudin lorem non, placerat arcu.

              Praesent lobortis pulvinar elit, in posuere leo mollis quis. Mauris scelerisque lorem vitae mattis interdum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi in ipsum ac velit mattis mattis. Suspendisse eu finibus purus, non aliquam arcu. Quisque sit amet arcu quis tortor pharetra blandit. Cras semper gravida lorem, vitae pellentesque leo tempor sed. Donec venenatis hendrerit lacus sed auctor. Maecenas dictum porttitor nisi a malesuada. Aliquam ligula urna, rhoncus id bibendum ac, pharetra id nibh. Sed lacus orci, tempor in est vel, consequat porta nisi.

              Phasellus leo mi, tempus quis vehicula vel, molestie tincidunt turpis. Vivamus vulputate commodo massa. Donec varius, urna a consequat maximus, magna mi viverra nunc, non tempus tellus felis ut eros. Phasellus nec congue ipsum. Maecenas pretium tempor arcu, ut congue metus semper sit amet. In ut lobortis ligula. Etiam pharetra ipsum at sapien scelerisque faucibus nec nec nisl. Donec tincidunt aliquam neque eget mollis. Integer sed quam a tellus tempus faucibus. Fusce eget iaculis leo, at vehicula libero. Donec vulputate vestibulum dolor, et dignissim augue hendrerit non. Vestibulum auctor, lectus mollis varius scelerisque, neque odio euismod est, quis egestas nisl mauris at est. Etiam mollis congue tortor ut posuere. In malesuada felis sollicitudin, placerat eros quis, volutpat augue. Nullam ut imperdiet leo.

              Aenean euismod eget erat non porta. Maecenas ut sem eu augue condimentum sagittis a bibendum libero. Fusce finibus auctor erat, iaculis luctus lorem aliquam a. Donec feugiat sem quis leo rhoncus, eget finibus purus ultricies. Nulla facilisi. Fusce lobortis faucibus orci vitae malesuada. Etiam molestie nunc ac lacus semper vulputate. Aliquam fermentum enim sed metus consectetur varius. Phasellus accumsan elit eu mauris mollis, in viverra velit imperdiet. Aenean velit justo, placerat vitae purus sit amet, laoreet accumsan nunc. Duis feugiat dignissim mauris sit amet porttitor. Nulla in feugiat arcu. Morbi dictum tortor eget mi ornare, eu bibendum elit luctus. Pellentesque mattis, tellus egestas viverra semper, mi tellus sodales felis, a venenatis metus est id justo.

              Morbi eget ullamcorper magna, et mattis ligula. Duis non neque eu erat luctus lacinia vitae in neque. Aliquam sollicitudin tristique nisl, eget tincidunt felis venenatis non. Donec nec suscipit arcu. Morbi a rutrum justo, vel porttitor lacus. Praesent bibendum sapien at lectus sodales pretium. Vestibulum cursus elit quam, at ullamcorper ante pellentesque ac. Fusce tincidunt malesuada nulla, vel vulputate nisl sodales sed. Aliquam cursus mauris in libero pretium tristique vel eu sapien. Fusce quam tellus, lacinia in tempor non, malesuada nec nibh.

              Pellentesque id tortor blandit neque tempor tempus. In sit amet tellus lorem. Praesent accumsan convallis est sed finibus. Phasellus vitae eros eget ligula ultrices pulvinar. Sed eu luctus purus. Nullam leo nisl, rutrum tempor nulla eu, vestibulum bibendum nisi. Fusce ac dui fermentum, tempus urna id, ullamcorper ex. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Donec ullamcorper mattis lorem, vitae interdum neque euismod ac. Aenean leo leo, ultrices ultrices nunc eget, laoreet porttitor turpis. Morbi ultricies sodales ante, ornare sollicitudin quam mattis id. Cras pharetra vitae lectus nec fringilla.

              Donec cursus id ante eu venenatis. Vivamus blandit fermentum dapibus. Suspendisse quam sapien, ornare a felis eu, feugiat dictum erat. Sed sit amet nisi in ligula facilisis facilisis sit amet ac quam. Curabitur tincidunt dictum gravida. Aenean semper tortor a sodales tempor. Aliquam auctor porttitor risus eget rhoncus. Etiam non massa sed arcu porttitor suscipit. Nullam lacinia libero sit amet sem ultricies cursus. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Praesent eget enim sapien. Proin tempor semper mauris, ac maximus tellus mollis ac. Nullam eget mattis lorem, eget malesuada arcu.

              Donec dolor risus, egestas vitae purus at, suscipit consequat lacus. Etiam sed odio vitae nisi sodales finibus sit amet ac magna. Suspendisse suscipit fringilla turpis sit amet iaculis. Aliquam porttitor et justo in volutpat. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam vestibulum lorem libero, non accumsan urna lobortis sit amet. Donec eu tristique odio.

              • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:52PM (5 children)

                by martyb (76) on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:52PM (#28923) Journal

                The Project Gutenberg EBook of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

                This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
                almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
                re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
                with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

                Title: The War of the Worlds

                Author: H. G. Wells

                Release Date: July, 1992 [EBook #36]
                [Most recently updated October 1, 2004]

                Language: English

                Character set encoding: ASCII

                *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAR OF THE WORLDS ***

                The War of the Worlds

                by H. G. Wells [1898]

                          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)

                BOOK ONE

                THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

                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 their little affairs, serene in their
                assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
                infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to
                the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
                them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
                improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of
                those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be
                other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
                welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds
                that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,
                intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with
                envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And
                early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

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

                Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer,
                up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that
                intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,
                beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since
                Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the
                superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that
                it is not only more distant from 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 them.

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

                The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
                subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
                ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
                perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have
                seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men
                like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that
                for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to
                interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so
                well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

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

                The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
                opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange
                palpitating with 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
                was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that
                kept the planet in view.

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

                Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,
                three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the
                unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness
                looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far
                profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small,
                flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible
                distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles,
                came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so
                much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of
                it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
                missile.

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

                That night another invisible missile started on its way to the
                earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the
                first one. I remember how I sat on the 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 cartoon. And, all
                unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew
                earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the
                empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer.
                It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift
                fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they
                did. I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph
                of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.
                People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and
                enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was
                much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series
                of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as
                civilisation progressed.

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

                CHAPTER TWO

                THE FALLING STAR

                Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early
                in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high
                in 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
                descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder,
                caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured
                incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards. He approached
                the mass, surprised at the size and more so at the shape, since most
                meteorites are rounded more or less completely. It was, however,
                still so hot from its flight through the air as to forbid his near
                approach. A stirring noise within its cylinder he ascribed to the
                unequal cooling of its surface; for at that time it had not occurred
                to him that it might be hollow.

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

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

                For a minute he scarcely realised what this meant, and, although
                the heat was excessive, he clambered down into the pit close to the
                bulk to see the Thing more clearly. He fancied even then that the
                cooling of the body might account for this, but what disturbed that
                idea was the fact 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
                garden, he called over the palings and made himself understood.

                "Henderson," he called, "you saw that shooting star last night?"

                "Well?" said Henderson.

                "It's out on Horsell Common now."

                "Good Lord!" said Henderson. "Fallen meteorite! That's good."

                "But it's something more than a meteorite. It's a cylinder--an
                artificial cylinder, man! And there's something inside."

                Henderson stood up with his spade in his hand.

                "What's that?" he said. He was deaf in one ear.

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

                They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and,
                meeting with no response, they both concluded the man or men inside
                must be insensible or dead.

                Of course the two were quite unable to do anything. They shouted
                consolation and promises, and went off back to the town again to get
                help. One can imagine them, covered with sand, excited and
                disordered, 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 girl carrying a baby, Gregg the butcher and his
                little boy, and two or three loafers and golf caddies who were
                accustomed to hang about the railway station. There was very little
                talking. Few of the common people in England had anything but the
                vaguest astronomical ideas in those days. Most of them were staring
                quietly at the big table like end of the cylinder, which was still as
                Ogilvy and Henderson had left it. I fancy the popular expectation of
                a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this inanimate bulk.
                Some went away while I was there, and other people came. I clambered
                into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under my feet. The
                top had certainly ceased to rotate.

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

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

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

                    "A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS."

                    "REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,"

                and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical Exchange
                had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

                There were half a dozen flies or more from the Woking station
                standing in the road by the sand pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham,
                and a rather lordly carriage. Besides that, there was quite a heap of
                bicycles. In addition, a large number of people must have walked, in
                spite of the heat of the day, from Woking and Chertsey, so that there
                was altogether quite a considerable crowd--one or two gaily dressed
                ladies among the others.

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

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

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

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

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

                CHAPTER FOUR

                THE CYLINDER OPENS

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

                "Keep back! Keep back!"

                A boy came running towards me.

                "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 gravel with a ringing concussion. I stuck
                my elbow into the person behind me, and turned my head towards the
                Thing again. For a moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black.
                I had the sunset in my eyes.

                I think everyone expected to see a man emerge--possibly something a
                little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know
                I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the
                shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two
                luminous disks--like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey
                snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the
                writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me--and then another.

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

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

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

                Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the
                strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with
                its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a
                chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this
                mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the
                lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness
                of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above
                all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense 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 round the sand
                pits was dotted with people, standing like myself in a half-fascinated
                terror, staring at these creatures, or rather at the heaped gravel at
                the edge of the pit in which they lay. And then, with a renewed
                horror, I saw a round, black object bobbing up and down on the edge of
                the pit. It was the head of the shopman who had fallen in, but
                showing as a little black object against the hot western sun. Now he
                got his shoulder and knee up, and again he seemed to slip back until
                only his head was visible. Suddenly he vanished, and I could have
                fancied a faint shriek had reached me. I had a momentary impulse to
                go back and help him that my fears overruled.

                Everything was then quite invisible, hidden by the deep pit and the
                heap of sand that the fall of the cylinder had made. Anyone coming
                along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been amazed at the
                sight--a dwindling multitude of perhaps a hundred people or more
                standing in a great irregular circle, in ditches, behind bushes,
                behind gates and hedges, saying little to one another and that in
                short, excited shouts, and staring, staring hard at a few heaps of
                sand. The barrow of ginger beer stood, a queer derelict, black
                against the burning sky, and in the sand pits was a row of deserted
                vehicles with their horses feeding out of nosebags or pawing the
                ground.

                CHAPTER FIVE

                THE HEAT-RAY

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

                I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate
                longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a big curve,
                seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at the sand
                heaps that hid these 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                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
                mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a
                lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved
                these details. However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat
                is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of
                visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its
                touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass,
                and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.

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

                The news of the massacre probably reached Chobham, Woking, and
                Ottershaw about the same time. In Woking the shops had closed when
                the tragedy happened, and a number of people, shop people and so
                forth, attracted by the stories they had heard, were walking over the
                Horsell Bridge and along the road between the hedges that runs out at
                last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up
                after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would
                make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a
                trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices
                along the road in the gloaming. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

                "They're coming!" a woman shrieked, and incontinently everyone was
                turning and pushing at those behind, in order to clear their way to
                Woking again. They must have bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep.
                Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd
                jammed, and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not
                escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were
                crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror and the
                darkness.

                CHAPTER SEVEN

                HOW I REACHED HOME

                For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress
                of blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All
                about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless
                sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before
                it descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between
                the crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

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

                I must have remained there some time.

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

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

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

                Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my
                experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
                detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all
                from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time,
                out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling
                was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my
                dream.

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

                "What news from the common?" said I.

                There were two men and a woman at the gate.

                "Eh?" said one of the men, turning.

                "What news from the common?" I said.

                "'Ain't yer just _been_ there?" asked the men.

                "People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over the
                gate. "What's it all abart?"

                "Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the creatures
                from Mars?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                "They can scarcely move," I said.

                I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had
                told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves
                on the earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational
                difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three
                times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would
                weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength
                would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That,
                indeed, was the general opinion. Both _The Times_ and the _Daily
                Telegraph_, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both
                overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.

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

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

                "They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my wineglass.
                "They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror.
                Perhaps they expected to find no living things--certainly no
                intelligent living things."

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

                The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my
                perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner
                table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet
                anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white
                cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days
                even philosophical writers had many little luxuries--the crimson-purple
                wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of
                it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's
                rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.

                So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in
                his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless
                sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow,
                my dear."

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

                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 reply--the man was killed--decided not to print a special edition.

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

                Maybe there was a murmur in the village streets, a novel and
                dominant topic in the public-houses, and here and there a messenger,
                or even an eye-witness of the later occurrences, caused a whirl of
                excitement, a shouting, and a running to and fro; but for the most
                part the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on
                as it had done for countless years--as though no planet Mars existed
                in the sky. Even at Woking station and Horsell and Chobham that was
                the case.

                In Woking junction, until a late hour, trains were stopping and
                going on, others were shunting on the sidings, passengers were
                alighting and waiting, and everything was proceeding in the most
                ordinary way. A boy from the town, trenching on Smith's monopoly, was
                selling papers with the afternoon's news. The ringing impact of
                trucks, the sharp whistle of the engines from the junction, mingled
                with their shouts of "Men from Mars!" Excited men came into the
                station about nine o'clock with incredible tidings, and caused no more
                disturbance than drunkards might have done. People rattling
                Londonwards peered into the darkness outside the carriage windows, and
                saw only a rare, flickering, vanishing spark dance up from the
                direction of Horsell, a red glow and a thin veil of smoke driving
                across the stars, and thought that nothing more serious than a heath
                fire was happening. It was only round the edge of the common that any
                disturbance was perceptible. There were half a dozen villas burning
                on the Woking border. There were lights in all the houses on the
                common side of the three villages, and the people there kept awake
                till dawn.

                A curious crowd lingered restlessly, people coming and going but
                the crowd remaining, both on the Chobham and Horsell bridges. One or
                two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the darkness
                and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now
                and again a light-ray, like the beam of a 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 ready, and
                ever and again a puff of greenish-white smoke whirled up to the
                starlit sky.

                About eleven a company of soldiers came through Horsell, and
                deployed along the edge of the common to form a cordon. Later a
                second company marched through Chobham to deploy on the north side of
                the common. Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on
                the common earlier in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be
                missing. The colonel of the regiment came to the Chobham bridge and
                was busy questioning the crowd at midnight. The military authorities
                were certainly alive to the seriousness of the business. About
                eleven, the next morning's papers were able to say, a squadron of
                hussars, two Maxims, and about four hundred men of the Cardigan
                regiment started from Aldershot.

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

                CHAPTER NINE

                THE FIGHTING BEGINS

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

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

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

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

                "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. They told me no one was allowed over the canal,
                and, looking along the road towards the bridge, I saw one of the
                Cardigan men standing sentinel there. I talked with these soldiers
                for a time; I told them of my sight of the Martians on the previous
                evening. None of them had seen the Martians, and they had but the
                vaguest ideas of them, so that they plied me with questions. They
                said that they did not know who had authorised the movements of the
                troops; their idea was that a dispute had arisen at the Horse Guards.
                The ordinary sapper is a great deal better educated than the common
                soldier, and they discussed the peculiar conditions of the possible
                fight with some acuteness. I described the Heat-Ray to them, and they
                began to argue among themselves.

                "Crawl up under cover and rush 'em, say I," said one.

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

                "Blow yer trenches! You always want trenches; you ought to ha'
                been born a rabbit Snippy."

                "Ain't they got any necks, then?" said a third, abruptly--a little,
                contemplative, dark man, smoking a pipe.

                I repeated my description.

                "Octopuses," said he, "that's what I calls 'em. Talk about fishers
                of men--fighters of fish it is this time!"

                "It ain't no murder killing beasts like that," said the first
                speaker.

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

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

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

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

                I got back to lunch about two, very tired for, as I have said, the
                day was extremely hot and dull; and in order to refresh myself I took
                a cold bath in the afternoon. About half past four I went up to the
                railway station to get an evening paper, for the morning papers had
                contained only a very inaccurate description of the killing of 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 advances as we should of the
                lowing of a cow.

                I must confess the sight of all this armament, all this
                preparation, greatly excited me. My imagination became belligerent,
                and defeated the invaders in a dozen striking ways; something of my
                schoolboy dreams of battle and heroism came back. It hardly seemed a
                fair fight to me at that time. They seemed very helpless in that pit
                of theirs.

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

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

                I and my wife stood amazed. Then I realised that the crest of
                Maybury Hill must be within range of the Martians' Heat-Ray now that
                the college was cleared out of the way.

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

                "We can't possibly stay here," I said; and as I spoke the firing
                reopened for a moment upon the common.

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

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

                "Leatherhead!" I shouted above the sudden noise.

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

                "How are we to get to Leatherhead?" she said.

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

                "Stop here," said I; "you are safe here"; and I started off at once
                for the Spotted Dog, for I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart.
                I ran, for I perceived that in a moment everyone upon this side of the
                hill would be moving. I found him in his bar, quite unaware of what
                was going on behind his house. A man stood with his back to me,
                talking to him.

                "I must have a pound," said the landlord, "and I've no one to drive
                it."

                "I'll give you two," said I, over the stranger's shoulder.

                "What for?"

                "And I'll bring it back by midnight," I said.

                "Lord!" said the landlord; "what's the hurry? I'm selling my bit
                of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What's going on now?"

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

                "What news?"

                He turned, stared, bawled something about "crawling out in a thing
                like a dish cover," and ran on to the gate of the house at the crest.
                A sudden whirl of black smoke driving across the road hid him for a
                moment. I ran to my neighbour's door and rapped to satisfy myself of
                what I already knew, that his wife had gone to London with him and had
                locked up their house. I went in again, according to my promise, to
                get my servant's box, lugged it out, clapped it beside her on the tail
                of the dog cart, and then caught the reins and jumped up into the
                driver's seat beside my wife. In another moment we were clear of the
                smoke and noise, and spanking down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill
                towards Old Woking.

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

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

                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, and the
                hedges on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses.
                The heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down
                Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very
                peaceful and still. We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about
                nine o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest while I took supper
                with my cousins and commended my wife to their care.

                My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed
                oppressed with forebodings of evil. I talked to her reassuringly,
                pointing out that the Martians were tied to the Pit by sheer
                heaviness, and at the utmost could but crawl a little out of it; but
                she answered only in monosyllables. Had it not been for my promise to
                the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in
                Leatherhead that night. Would that I had! Her face, I remember, was
                very white as we parted.

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

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

                I was a little depressed at first with the contagion of my wife's
                fears, but very soon my thoughts reverted to the Martians. At that
                time I was absolutely in the dark as to the course of the evening's
                fighting. I did not know even the circumstances that had precipitated
                the conflict. As I came through Ockham (for that was the way I
                returned, and not through Send and Old Woking) I saw along the western
                horizon a blood-red glow, which as I drew nearer, crept slowly up the
                sky. The driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm mingled there
                with masses of black and red smoke.

                Ripley Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or so
                the village showed not a sign of life; but I narrowly escaped an
                accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people
                stood with their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I
                do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill,
                nor do I know if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping
                securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the
                terror of the night.

                From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
                Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little
                hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the
                trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that
                was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church
                behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its
                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 woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the
                reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a
                thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling
                into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!

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

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

                At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then
                abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving
                rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it
                for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it
                to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision--a moment
                of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red
                masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of
                the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear and sharp
                and bright.

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

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

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

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

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

                As it passed it set up an exultant deafening howl that drowned the
                thunder--"Aloo! Aloo!"--and in another minute it was with its
                companion, half a mile away, stooping over something in the field. I
                have no doubt this Thing in the field was the third of the ten
                cylinders they had fired at us from Mars.

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

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

                Not far from me was a little one-roomed squatter's hut of wood,
                surrounded by a patch of potato garden. I struggled to my feet at
                last, and, crouching and making use of every chance of cover, I made a
                run for this. I hammered at the door, but I could not make the people
                hear (if there were any people inside), and after a time I desisted,
                and, availing myself of a ditch for the greater part of the way,
                succeeded in crawling, unobserved by these monstrous machines, into
                the pine 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 and
                worked my way along its palings.

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

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

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

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

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

                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 the wall and ceiling of the study. A sharp, resinous
                tang of burning was in the air.

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

                Between these three main centres of light--the houses, the train,
                and the burning county towards Chobham--stretched irregular patches of
                dark country, broken here and there by intervals of dimly glowing and
                smoking ground. It was the strangest spectacle, that black expanse set
                with fire. It reminded me, more than anything else, of the Potteries
                at night. At first I could distinguish no people at all, though I
                peered intently for them. Later I saw against the light of Woking
                station a number of black figures hurrying one after the other across
                the line.

                And this was the little world in which I had been living securely
                for years, this fiery chaos! What had happened in the last seven
                hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to
                guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish
                lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of
                impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down,
                and stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three
                gigantic black things that were going to and fro in the glare about
                the sand pits.

                They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could
                be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was
                impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing,
                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.

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

                "My God!" he said, as I drew him in.

                "What has happened?" I asked.

                "What hasn't?" In the obscurity I could see he made a gesture of
                despair. "They wiped us out--simply wiped us out," he repeated again
                and again.

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

                "Take some whiskey," I said, pouring out a stiff dose.

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

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

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

                "I lay still," he said, "scared out of my wits, with the fore quarter
                of a horse atop of me. We'd been wiped out. And the smell--good
                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 to waddle
                away towards the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second
                cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan built itself up out
                of the pit.

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

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

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

                When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my study,
                and I looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley
                had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where
                flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless
                ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees
                that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the
                pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had the
                luck to 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 downstairs.

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

                Between us and Leatherhead, however, lay the third cylinder, with
                its guarding giants. Had I been alone, I think I should have taken my
                chance and struck across country. But the artilleryman dissuaded me:
                "It's no kindness to the right sort of wife," he said, "to make her a
                widow"; and in the end I agreed to go with him, under cover of the
                woods, northward as far as Street Cobham before I parted with him.
                Thence I would make a big detour by Epsom to reach Leatherhead.

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

                Except the lodge at the Orphanage, which was still on fire, none of
                the houses had suffered very greatly here. The Heat-Ray had shaved
                the chimney tops and passed. Yet, save ourselves, there did not seem
                to be a living soul on Maybury Hill. The majority of the inhabitants
                had escaped, I suppose, by way of the Old Woking road--the road I had
                taken when I drove to Leatherhead--or they had hidden.

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

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

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

                "You are the first men I've seen coming this way this morning,"
                said the lieutenant. "What's brewing?"

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

                "Gun destroyed last night, sir. Have been hiding. Trying to
                rejoin battery, sir. You'll come in sight of the Martians, I expect,
                about half a mile along this road."

                "What the dickens are they like?" asked the lieutenant.

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

                "Get out!" said the lieutenant. "What confounded nonsense!"

                "You'll see, sir. They carry a kind of box, sir, that shoots fire
                and strikes you dead."

                "What d'ye mean--a gun?"

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

                "It's perfectly true," I said.

                "Well," said the lieutenant, "I suppose it's my business to see it
                too. Look here"--to the artilleryman--"we're detailed here clearing
                people out of their houses. You'd better go along and report yourself
                to Brigadier-General Marvin, and tell him all you know. He's at
                Weybridge. Know the way?"

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

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

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

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

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

                Several farm waggons and carts were moving creakily along the road
                to Addlestone, and suddenly through the gate of a field we saw, across
                a stretch of flat meadow, six twelve-pounders standing 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.

                "That's good!" said I. "They will get one fair shot, at any rate."

                The artilleryman hesitated at the gate.

                "I shall go on," he said.

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

                "It's bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow," said the
                artilleryman. "They 'aven't seen that fire-beam yet."

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

                Byfleet was in a tumult; people packing, and a score of hussars,
                some of them dismounted, some on horseback, were hunting them about.
                Three or four black government waggons, with crosses in white circles,
                and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the
                village street. There were scores of people, most of them
                sufficiently sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The
                soldiers were having the greatest difficulty in making them realise
                the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with
                a huge box and a score or more of flower pots containing orchids,
                angrily expostulating with the corporal who would leave them behind.
                I stopped and gripped his arm.

                "Do you know what's over there?" I said, pointing at the pine tops
                that hid the Martians.

                "Eh?" said he, turning. "I was explainin' these is vallyble."

                "Death!" I shouted. "Death is coming! Death!" and leaving him to
                digest that if he could, I hurried on after the 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 place near Shepperton Lock where the Wey and Thames
                join. Part of the time we spent helping two old women to pack a
                little cart. The Wey has a treble mouth, and at this point boats are
                to be hired, and there was a ferry across the river. On the
                Shepperton side was an inn with a lawn, and beyond that the tower of
                Shepperton Church--it has been replaced by a spire--rose above the
                trees.

                Here we found an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives. As yet the
                flight had not grown to a panic, but there were already far more
                people than all the boats going to and fro could enable to cross.
                People came panting along under heavy burdens; one husband and wife
                were even carrying a small outhouse door between them, with some of
                their household goods piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try
                to get away from Shepperton station.

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

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

                "What's that?" cried a boatman, and "Shut up, you fool!" said a man
                near me to a yelping dog. Then the sound came again, this time from
                the direction of Chertsey, a muffled thud--the sound of a gun.

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

                "The sojers'll stop 'em," said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A
                haziness rose over the treetops.

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

                "Here they are!" shouted a man in a blue jersey. "Yonder! D'yer
                see them? Yonder!"

                Quickly, one after the other, one, two, three, four of the armoured
                Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat
                meadows that stretched towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly
                towards the river. Little cowled figures they seemed at first, going
                with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.

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

                At sight of these strange, swift, and terrible creatures the crowd
                near the water's edge seemed to me to be for a moment horror-struck.
                There was no screaming or shouting, but a silence. Then a hoarse
                murmur and a movement of feet--a splashing from the water. A man, too
                frightened to drop the portmanteau he carried on his shoulder, swung
                round and sent me staggering with a blow from the corner of his
                burden. A woman thrust at me with her hand and rushed past me. I
                turned with the rush of the people, but I was not too terrified for
                thought. The terrible Heat-Ray was in my mind. To get under water!
                That was it!

                "Get under water!" I shouted, unheeded.

                I faced about again, and rushed towards the approaching Martian,
                rushed right down the gravelly beach and headlong into the water.
                Others did the same. A boatload of people putting back came leaping
                out as I rushed past. The stones under my feet were muddy and
                slippery, and the river was so low that I ran perhaps twenty feet
                scarcely waist-deep. Then, as the Martian towered overhead scarcely
                a couple of hundred yards away, I flung myself forward under the
                surface. The splashes of the people in the boats leaping into the
                river sounded like thunderclaps in my ears. People were landing
                hastily on both sides of the river. But the Martian machine took no
                more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that
                than a man would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his
                foot has kicked. When, half suffocated, I raised my head above water,
                the Martian's hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing
                across the river, and as it advanced it swung loose what must have
                been the generator of the Heat-Ray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                A violent explosion shook the air, and a spout of water, steam,
                mud, and shattered metal shot far up into the sky. As the camera of
                the Heat-Ray hit the water, the latter had immediately flashed into
                steam. In another moment a huge wave, like a muddy tidal bore but
                almost scaldingly hot, came sweeping round the bend upstream. I saw
                people struggling shorewards, and heard their screaming and shouting
                faintly above the seething and roar of the Martian's collapse.

                For a moment I heeded nothing of the heat, forgot the patent need
                of self-preservation. I splashed through the tumultuous water,
                pushing aside a man in black to do so, until I could see round the
                bend. Half a dozen deserted boats pitched aimlessly upon the
                confusion of the waves. The fallen Martian came into sight
                downstream, lying across the river, and for the most part submerged.

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

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

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

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

                The third and fourth stood beside him in the water, one perhaps two
                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 flames. The
                nearer houses still stood intact, awaiting their fate, shadowy, faint
                and pallid in the steam, with the fire behind them going to and fro.

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

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

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

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

                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 scouts with the heliographs
                that were presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach. But
                the Martians now understood our command of artillery and the danger of
                human proximity, and not a man ventured within a mile of either
                cylinder, save at the price of his life.

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

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

                I saw an abandoned boat, very small and remote, drifting down-stream;
                and throwing off the most of my sodden clothes, I went after it,
                gained it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no
                oars in the boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled
                hands would allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going
                very tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well
                understand. I followed the river, because I considered that the water
                gave me my best chance of escape should these giants return.

                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 upturned, clean-shaven face staring at
                a faint flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is
                called a mackerel sky--rows and rows of faint down-plumes of
                cloud, just tinted with the midsummer sunset.

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

                "Have you any water?" I asked abruptly.

                He shook his head.

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

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

                "What does it mean?" he said. "What do these things mean?"

                I stared at him and made no answer.

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

                "Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The
                morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my
                brain for the afternoon, and then--fire, earthquake, death! As if it
                were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work---- What
                are these Martians?"

                "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?"

                "Only this morning I officiated at early celebration----"

                "Things have changed," I said, quietly. "You must keep your head.
                There is still hope."

                "Hope!"

                "Yes. Plentiful hope--for all this destruction!"

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

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

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

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

                For a time he sat in blank silence.

                "But how can we escape?" he asked, suddenly. "They are
                invulnerable, they are pitiless."

                "Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other," I answered. "And the
                mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of 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 Martians fell at Woking.
                He was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he
                heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning
                papers on Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles
                on the planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and
                vaguely worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

                The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a
                number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The
                telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable as they seem to be, the
                Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and,
                indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the
                relative strength of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last
                text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

                Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class, to which
                my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
                signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers
                puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell
                beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of
                the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the
                _St. James's Gazette_, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare
                fact of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was
                thought to be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the
                line. Nothing more of the fighting was known that night, the night of
                my drive to Leatherhead and back.

                My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the
                description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from
                my house. He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order,
                as he says, to see the Things before they were killed. He 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 without any personal tremors:
                "About seven o'clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,
                and, moving about under an armour of metallic shields, have completely
                wrecked Woking station with the adjacent houses, and massacred an
                entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment. No details are known.
                Maxims have been absolutely useless against their armour; the field
                guns have been disabled by them. Flying hussars have been galloping
                into Chertsey. The Martians appear to be moving slowly towards
                Chertsey or Windsor. Great anxiety prevails in West Surrey, and
                earthworks are being thrown up to check the advance Londonward." That
                was how the Sunday _Sun_ put it, and a clever and remarkably prompt
                "handbook" article in the _Referee_ compared the affair to a menagerie
                suddenly let loose in a village.

                No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured
                Martians, and there was still a fixed idea that these monsters must be
                sluggish: "crawling," "creeping painfully"--such expressions occurred
                in almost all the earlier reports. None of the telegrams could have
                been written by an eyewitness of their advance. The Sunday papers
                printed separate editions as further news came to hand, some even in
                default of it. But there was practically nothing more to tell people
                until late in the afternoon, when the authorities gave the press
                agencies the news in their possession. It was stated that the people
                of Walton and Weybridge, and all the district were pouring along the
                roads Londonward, and that was all.

                My brother went to church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning,
                still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There
                he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for
                peace. Coming out, he bought a _Referee_. He became alarmed at the
                news in this, and went again to Waterloo station to find out if
                communication were restored. The omnibuses, carriages, cyclists, and
                innumerable people walking in their best clothes seemed scarcely
                affected by the strange intelligence that the news venders were
                disseminating. People were interested, or, if alarmed, alarmed only
                on account of the local residents. At the station he heard for the
                first time that the Windsor and Chertsey lines were now interrupted.
                The porters told him that several remarkable telegrams had been
                received in the morning from Byfleet and Chertsey stations, but that
                these had abruptly ceased. My brother could get very little precise
                detail out of them.

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

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

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

                "There's hosts of people driving into Kingston in traps and carts
                and things, with boxes of valuables and all that," he said. "They
                come from Molesey and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there's been
                guns heard at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have
                told them to get off at once because the Martians are coming. We
                heard guns firing at Hampton Court station, but we thought it was
                thunder. What the dickens does it all mean? The Martians can't get
                out of their pit, can they?"

                My brother could not tell him.

                Afterwards he found that the vague feeling of alarm had spread to
                the clients of the underground railway, and that the Sunday
                excursionists began to return from all over the South-Western
                "lung"--Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park, Kew, and so forth--at
                unnaturally early hours; but not a soul had anything more than vague
                hearsay to tell of. Everyone connected with the terminus seemed
                ill-tempered.

                About five o'clock the gathering crowd in the station was immensely
                excited by the opening of the line of communication, which is almost
                invariably closed, between the South-Eastern and the South-Western
                stations, and the passage of carriage trucks bearing huge guns and
                carriages crammed with soldiers. These were the guns that were
                brought up from Woolwich and Chatham to cover Kingston. There was
                an exchange of pleasantries: "You'll get eaten!" "We're the
                beast-tamers!" and so forth. A little while after that a squad of
                police came into the station and began to clear the public off the
                platforms, and my brother went out into the street again.

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

                In Wellington Street my brother met a couple of sturdy roughs who
                had just 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 sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor,
                Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich--even from the north; among others,
                long wire-guns of ninety-five tons from Woolwich. Altogether one
                hundred and sixteen were in position or being hastily placed, chiefly
                covering London. Never before in England had there been such a vast
                or rapid concentration of military material.

                Any further cylinders that fell, it was hoped, could be destroyed
                at once by high explosives, which were being rapidly manufactured and
                distributed. No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the
                strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to
                avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and
                terrible in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more
                than twenty of them against our millions.

                The authorities had reason to suppose, from the size of the
                cylinders, that at the outside there could not be more than five in
                each cylinder--fifteen altogether. And one at least was disposed
                of--perhaps more. The public would be fairly warned of the approach
                of danger, and elaborate measures were being taken for the protection
                of the people in the threatened southwestern suburbs. And so, with
                reiterated assurances of the safety of London and the ability of the
                authorities to cope with the difficulty, this quasi-proclamation
                closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                About eight o'clock a noise of heavy firing was distinctly audible
                all over the south of London. My brother could not hear it for the
                traffic in the main thoroughfares, but by striking through the quiet
                back streets to the river he was able to distinguish it quite plainly.

                He walked from Westminster to his apartments near Regent's Park,
                about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at
                the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run,
                even as mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of
                all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside;
                he tried to imagine "boilers on stilts" a hundred feet high.

                There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford
                Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news
                spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their
                usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and
                along the edge of Regent's Park there were as many silent couples
                "walking out" together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had
                been. The night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the
                sound of guns continued intermittently, and after midnight there
                seemed to be sheet lightning in the south.

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

                His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down
                the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash,
                and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were
                being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering at
                the door; "the Martians are coming!" and hurried to the next door.

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

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

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

                "What the devil is it?" he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a
                row!"

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

                "What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow lodger.

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

                "London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond
                defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!"

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

                Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went
                down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of
                the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot
                and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. "Black Smoke!" he
                heard people crying, and again "Black Smoke!" The contagion of such
                a unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the
                door-step, he saw another news vender approaching, and got a paper
                forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his
                papers for a shilling each as he ran--a grotesque mingling of profit
                and panic.

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

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

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

                "Black Smoke!" the voices cried. "Fire!"

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

                He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down
                stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in
                dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.

                As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he
                turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some ten
                pounds altogether--into his pockets, and went out again into the
                streets.

                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.

                The St. George's Hill men, however, were better led or of a better
                mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they were, they seem to have been
                quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them. They laid their
                guns as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at about
                a thousand yards' range.

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

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

                It was a few minutes past nine that night when these three
                sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each carrying a thick
                black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the three, and the
                seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a
                curved line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of
                Send, southwest of Ripley.

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

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

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

                The occasional howling of the Martians had ceased; they took up
                their positions in the huge crescent about their cylinders in absolute
                silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between its horns. Never
                since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle so
                still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had
                precisely the same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary possession
                of the darkling night, lit only as it was by the slender moon, the
                stars, the afterglow of the daylight, and the ruddy glare from St.
                George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.

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

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

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

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

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

                "Heaven knows!" said I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                Then the fourth cylinder fell--a brilliant green meteor--as I
                learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns on the Richmond
                and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade far
                away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard
                before the black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.

                So, setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a
                wasps' nest, the Martians spread this strange stifling vapour over the
                Londonward country. The horns of the crescent slowly moved apart,
                until at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and Malden.
                All night through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after
                the Martian at St. George's Hill was brought down, did they give the
                artillery the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a
                possibility of guns being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of
                the black vapour was discharged, and where the guns were openly
                displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to bear.

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

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

                One has to imagine, as well as one may, the fate of those batteries
                towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the twilight. Survivors there
                were none. One may picture the orderly expectation, the officers
                alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to hand,
                the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of
                civilian spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the
                evening stillness, the ambulances and hospital tents with the burned
                and wounded from Weybridge; then the dull resonance of the shots the
                Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile whirling over the trees and
                houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.

                One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the
                swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing
                headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable
                darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon
                its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking,
                falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men
                choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of
                the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction--nothing but
                a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

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

                CHAPTER SIXTEEN

                THE EXODUS FROM LONDON

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

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

                And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused
                to return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an
                ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the
                northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,
                and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and
                across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges
                in its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and
                surrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but
                unable to escape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                "Take this!" said the slender lady, and she gave my brother her
                revolver.

                "Go back to the chaise," said my brother, wiping the blood from his
                split lip.

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

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

                "I'll sit here," said my brother, "if I may"; and he got upon the
                empty front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.

                "Give me the reins," she said, and laid the whip along the pony's
                side. In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from my
                brother's eyes.

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

                He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeon
                living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous
                case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of the
                Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women--their servant
                had left them two days before--packed some provisions, put his
                revolver under the seat--luckily for my brother--and told them to
                drive on to Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. He
                stopped behind to tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, he
                said, at about half past four in the morning, and now it was nearly
                nine and they had seen nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgware
                because of the growing traffic through the place, and so they had come
                into this side lane.

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

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

                "We have money," said the slender woman, and hesitated.

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

                "So have I," said my brother.

                She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold,
                besides a five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get
                upon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that was
                hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains,
                and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and
                thence escaping from the country altogether.

                Mrs. Elphinstone--that was the name of the woman in white--would
                listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon "George"; but her
                sister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last
                agreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great
                North Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony
                to save it as much as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day
                became excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew
                burning and blinding, so that they travelled only very slowly. The
                hedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced towards Barnet a
                tumultuous murmuring grew stronger.

                They began to meet more people. For the most part these were
                staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard,
                unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on
                the ground. They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one
                hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His
                paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.

                As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the south
                of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on
                their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then
                passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a
                small portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane,
                from between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the
                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 the blaze of the sun, made everything
                within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was
                perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses
                and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every
                description.

                "Way!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make way!"

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

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

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

                "Go on! Go on!" cried the voices. "Way! Way!"

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

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

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

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

                In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,
                gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, "Eternity!
                Eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother
                could hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of
                the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their 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!"

                "Eter-nity! Eter-nity!" came echoing down the road.

                There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with
                children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in
                dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came
                men, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side
                by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded black
                rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy
                workmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like
                clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my
                brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one
                wretched creature in a nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.

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

                "Way! Way! The Martians are coming!"

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

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

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

                My brother woke 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 stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet
                hedge.

                One of the men came running to my brother.

                "Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and very
                thirsty. It is Lord Garrick."

                "Lord Garrick!" said my brother; "the Chief Justice?"

                "The water?" he said.

                "There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses. We
                have no water. I dare not leave my people."

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

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

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

                "Way!" cried the men all about him. "Make way!"

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

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

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

                "Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's collar
                with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still
                clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering
                at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angry
                voices behind.

                "Way! Way!"

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

                He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with
                all a child's want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated
                eyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed
                under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and began
                turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said and they
                went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting
                crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw
                the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white
                and drawn, and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent,
                crouching in their seat and shivering.

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

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

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

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

                Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right
                across the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition,
                to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping
                Barnet with the torrent; 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"

                Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday
                have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself
                slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road through
                Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the
                roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames
                to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could
                have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above
                London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled
                maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming
                fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I
                have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother's account of
                the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise
                how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned.
                Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human
                beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and
                Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop
                in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a
                stampede--a stampede gigantic and terrible--without order and without
                a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving
                headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the
                massacre of mankind.

                Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of
                streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
                gardens--already derelict--spread out like a huge map, and in the
                southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would
                have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart.
                Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out
                ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising
                ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,
                exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

                And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river,
                the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically
                spreading their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over
                that, laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its
                purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not
                seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete
                demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. They exploded
                any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked
                the railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. They
                seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their operations, and did
                not come beyond the central part of London all that day. It is
                possible that a very considerable number of people in London stuck to
                their houses through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at
                home suffocated by the Black Smoke.

                Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.
                Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the
                enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many
                who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and
                drowned. About one o'clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a
                cloud of the black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars
                Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting,
                and collision, and for some time a multitude of boats and barges
                jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and
                lightermen had to fight savagely against the people who swarmed upon
                them from the riverfront. People were actually clambering down the
                piers of the bridge from above.

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

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

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

                He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the
                desertions of the first day's panic, had resumed traffic, and was
                running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of
                the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar
                announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern
                towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed
                among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence
                did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three
                pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution
                than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear
                more of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose
                Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that
                duty alternately with my brother. She saw it.

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

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

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

                About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,
                almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This
                was the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far
                away to the right over the smooth surface of the sea--for that day
                there was a dead calm--lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next
                ironclads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line,
                steam up and ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the
                course of the Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent
                it.

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

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

                It was about two o'clock when my brother, having paid their 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 distant grey haze.

                The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big
                crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and
                hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote distance,
                advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness. At
                that the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear
                and anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his
                terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of
                the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or
                church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human
                stride.

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

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

                He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards
                from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of
                a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge
                waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles
                helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the
                waterline.

                A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes
                were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing
                landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure,
                and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot
                with fire. It was the torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong,
                coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.

                Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks,
                my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again,
                and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far
                out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged.
                Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less
                formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
                pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new
                antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
                giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no
                gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her
                not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They
                did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent
                her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

                She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway
                between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk
                against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

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

                They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water
                as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like
                generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward,
                and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have
                driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod
                through paper.

                A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the
                Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and
                a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the
                _Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the other,
                and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted
                towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to
                matchwood.

                But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's
                collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
                crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then
                they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove
                something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,
                its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

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

                "Two!" yelled the captain.

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

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

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

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

                The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the
                evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the
                captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes.
                Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed
                slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above
                the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very
                large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly,
                and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew
                it rained down darkness upon the land.

                BOOK TWO

                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 Black Smoke all that day and
                the morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house
                on Sunday evening--a face at a window and moving lights, and later the
                slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what
                became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
                drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
                and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house
                that hid us.

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

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

                "We are safe here," he repeated; "safe here."

                I resolved to leave him--would that I had! Wiser now for the
                artilleryman's teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil
                and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that
                I found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant
                to go alone--had reconciled myself to going alone--he suddenly roused
                himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we
                started about five o'clock, as I should judge, along the blackened
                road to Sunbury.

                In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying
                in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and
                luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery
                powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.
                We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of
                strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were
                relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating
                drift. We went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro
                under the chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance
                towards Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first
                people we saw.

                Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still
                afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke,
                and there were more people about here, though none could give us news.
                For the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull
                to shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses
                here were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even
                for flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along
                the road. I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap,
                pounded into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed
                Richmond Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposed
                bridge, of course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number
                of red masses, some many feet across. I did not know what these
                were--there was no time for scrutiny--and I put a more horrible
                interpretation on them than they deserved. Here again on the Surrey
                side were black dust that had once been smoke, and dead bodies--a heap
                near the approach to the station; but we had no glimpse of the
                Martians until we were some way towards Barnes.

                We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running
                down a side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed
                deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the
                town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.

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

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

                That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it
                was manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate
                overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen
                before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew
                Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the
                green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian
                pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran
                radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to
                destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed
                them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much
                as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.

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

                I suppose it was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered courage
                to start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along
                hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the
                darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who
                seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched
                and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered
                dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but
                with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty
                feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun
                carriages.

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

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

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

                We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark--for we dared not strike
                a light--and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle.
                The curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly
                enough, for pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength
                by eating when the thing happened that was to imprison us.

                "It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding glare
                of vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly
                visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such
                a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the
                heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash
                of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the
                plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of
                fragments upon our heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor
                against the oven handle and stunned. I was insensible for a long
                time, the curate told me, and when I came to we were in darkness
                again, and he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from
                a cut forehead, was dabbing water over me.

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

                "Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper.

                At last I answered him. I sat up.

                "Don't move," he said. "The floor is covered with smashed crockery
                from the dresser. You can't possibly move without making a noise, and
                I fancy _they_ are outside."

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

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

                "Yes," I said. "But what is it?"

                "A Martian!" said the curate.

                I listened again.

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

                Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or
                four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. And then the light
                filtered in, not through the window, which remained black, but through
                a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken bricks in
                the wall behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for
                the first time.

                The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which
                flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting and lay about our
                feet. Outside, the soil was banked high against the house. At the
                top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor
                was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the
                house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was
                evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting
                vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion,
                pale green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the
                wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured
                supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range.

                As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the
                body of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still
                glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as
                possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the
                scullery.

                Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.

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

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

                "God have mercy upon us!"

                I heard him presently whimpering to himself.

                Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my
                part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint
                light of the kitchen door. I could just see the curate's face, a dim,
                oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a metallic
                hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again, after a quiet
                interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for
                the most part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if
                anything to increase in number as time wore on. Presently a measured
                thudding and a vibration that made everything about us quiver and the
                vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued. Once the
                light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely
                dark. For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and
                shivering, until our tired attention failed. . . .

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

                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 against the triangular hole that looked out upon the
                Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden
                from me.

                I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine
                shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the
                aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold
                and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I
                remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and
                stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the
                floor.

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

                The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the
                house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely
                smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now
                far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly
                larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round
                it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only
                word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent
                houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a
                hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on
                the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the
                kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and
                ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the
                cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great
                circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating
                sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green
                vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.

                The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on
                the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped
                shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its
                occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I
                scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been
                convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary
                glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of
                the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across
                the heaped mould near it.

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

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

                I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first
                pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had
                evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and
                there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff
                tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an
                altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing
                these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here
                simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have
                created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a
                Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have
                been much better without them.

                At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a
                machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the
                controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements
                seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's cerebral portion.
                But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny,
                leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and
                the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that
                realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real
                Martians. Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the
                first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was
                concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.

                They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible
                to conceive. They were huge round bodies--or, rather, heads--about
                four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This
                face had no nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any
                sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes,
                and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head
                or body--I scarcely know how to speak of it--was the single tight
                tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it
                must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the
                mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two
                bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather
                aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the _hands_.
                Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be
                endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with
                the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible.
                There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon
                them with some facility.

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

                And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem
                to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes
                up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were
                heads--merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much
                less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other
                creatures, and _injected_ it into their own veins. I have myself seen
                this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I
                may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure
                even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from
                a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run
                directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

                In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the
                Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the
                tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men. A
                young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon earth
                during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially
                _budded_ off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals
                in the fresh-water polyp.

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

                It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of
                quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did
                forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian
                condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or
                December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the _Pall Mall Budget_,
                and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called
                _Punch_. He pointed out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the
                perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs;
                the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as
                hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential
                parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection
                would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the
                coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one
                other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was
                the hand, "teacher and agent of the brain." While the rest of the
                body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.

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

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

                Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green
                for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the
                seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with
                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 at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual
                range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips,
                blue and violet were as black to them. It is commonly supposed that
                they communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is
                asserted, for instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet
                (written evidently by someone not an eye-witness of Martian actions)
                to which I have already alluded, and which, so far, has been the chief
                source of information concerning them. Now no surviving human being
                saw so much of the Martians in action as I did. I take no credit to
                myself for an accident, but the fact is so. And I assert that I
                watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four, five,
                and (once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately
                complicated operations together without either sound or gesture. Their
                peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation,
                and was, I believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of
                air preparatory to the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to
                at least an elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I
                am convinced--as firmly as I am convinced of anything--that the
                Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation.
                And I have been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions.
                Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may
                remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the
                telepathic theory.

                The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and
                decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not only were they
                evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we are,
                but changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health at
                all seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
                artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great
                superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates,
                our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are
                just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked
                out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different
                bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and
                take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their
                appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the
                curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human
                devices in mechanism is absent--the _wheel_ is absent; among all the
                things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their
                use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion. And
                in this connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth
                Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred other expedients
                to its development. And not only did the Martians either not know of
                (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their
                apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or
                relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined
                to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a
                complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully
                curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is
                remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases
                actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic
                sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully
                together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the
                curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and
                disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles
                abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping
                out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed
                infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the
                sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving
                feebly after their vast journey across space.

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

                When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put
                together several of the pieces of apparatus it had taken out of the
                cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own; and
                down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into view,
                emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit,
                excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner.
                This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the
                rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped
                and whistled as it worked. So far as I could see, the thing was
                without a directing Martian at all.

                CHAPTER THREE

                THE DAYS OF IMPRISONMENT

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

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

                As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so
                intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed
                doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him
                to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of
                pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who
                face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.

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

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

                The oscillatory motion was imparted to this by one tentacle of the
                handling-machine. With two spatulate hands the handling-machine was
                digging out and flinging masses of clay into the pear-shaped
                receptacle above, while with another arm it periodically opened a door
                and removed rusty and blackened clinkers from the middle part of the
                machine. Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the basin
                along a ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden from me
                by the mound of bluish dust. From this unseen receiver a little
                thread of green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. As I looked,
                the handling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking, extended,
                telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a moment before a mere
                blunt projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound of clay.
                In another second it had lifted a bar of white aluminium into sight,
                untarnished as yet, and shining dazzlingly, and deposited it in a
                growing stack of bars that stood at the side of the pit. Between
                sunset and starlight this dexterous machine must have made more than a
                hundred such bars out of the crude clay, and the mound of bluish dust
                rose steadily until it topped the side of the pit.

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

                The curate had possession of the slit when the first men were
                brought to the pit. I was sitting below, huddled up, listening with
                all my ears. He made a sudden movement backward, and I, fearful that
                we were observed, crouched in a spasm of terror. He came sliding down
                the rubbish and crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate,
                gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. His gesture
                suggested a resignation of the slit, and after a little while my
                curiosity gave me courage, and I rose up, stepped across him, and
                clambered up to it. At first I could see no reason for his frantic
                behaviour. The twilight had now come, the stars were little and
                faint, but the pit was illuminated by the flickering green fire that
                came from the aluminium-making. The whole picture was a flickering
                scheme of green gleams and shifting rusty black shadows, strangely
                trying to the eyes. Over and through it all went the bats, heeding it
                not at all. The sprawling Martians were no longer to be seen, the
                mound of blue-green powder had risen to cover them from sight, and a
                fighting-machine, with its legs contracted, crumpled, and abbreviated,
                stood across the corner of the pit. And then, amid the clangour of
                the machinery, came a drifting suspicion of human voices, that I
                entertained at first only to dismiss.

                I crouched, watching this fighting-machine closely, satisfying
                myself now for the first time that the hood did indeed contain a
                Martian. As the green flames lifted I could see the oily gleam of
                his integument and the brightness of his eyes. And suddenly I heard
                a yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the
                machine to the little cage that hunched upon its back. Then
                something--something struggling violently--was lifted high against the
                sky, a black, vague enigma against the starlight; and as this black
                object came down again, I saw by the green brightness that it was a
                man. For an instant he was clearly visible. He was a stout, ruddy,
                middle-aged man, well dressed; three days before, he must have been
                walking the world, a man of considerable consequence. I could see his
                staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch chain. He
                vanished behind the mound, and for a moment there was silence. And
                then began a shrieking and a sustained and cheerful hooting from the
                Martians.

                I slid down the rubbish, struggled to my feet, clapped my hands
                over my ears, and bolted into the scullery. The curate, who had been
                crouching silently with his arms over his head, looked up as I passed,
                cried out quite loudly at my desertion of him, and came running after
                me.

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

                It was on the third day, if my memory serves me right, that I saw
                the lad killed. It was the only occasion on which I actually saw the
                Martians feed. After that experience I avoided the hole in the wall
                for the better part of a day. I went into the scullery, removed the
                door, and spent some hours digging with my hatchet as silently as
                possible; but when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep the
                loose earth collapsed noisily, and I did not dare continue. I lost
                heart, and lay down on the scullery floor for a long time, having no
                spirit even to move. And after that I abandoned altogether the idea
                of escaping by excavation.

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

                It was very late in the night, and the moon was shining brightly.
                The Martians had taken away the excavating-machine, and, save for a
                fighting-machine that stood in the remoter bank of the pit and a
                handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a corner of the
                pit immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by them.
                Except for the pale glow from the handling-machine and the bars and
                patches of white moonlight the pit was in darkness, and, except for
                the clinking of the handling-machine, quite still. That night was a
                beautiful serenity; save for one planet, the moon seemed to have the
                sky to herself. I heard a dog howling, and that familiar sound it was
                that made me listen. Then I heard quite distinctly a booming exactly
                like the sound of great guns. Six distinct reports I counted, and
                after a long interval six again. And that was all.

                CHAPTER FOUR

                THE DEATH OF THE CURATE

                It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the
                last time, and presently found myself alone. Instead of keeping close
                to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone back
                into the scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought. I went back
                quickly and quietly into the scullery. In the darkness I heard the
                curate drinking. I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a
                bottle of burgundy.

                For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the floor
                and broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood panting and threatening
                each other. In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and
                told him of my determination to begin a discipline. I divided the
                food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days. I would not let
                him eat any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort
                to get at the food. I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake.
                All day and all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and
                he weeping and complaining of his immediate hunger. It was, I know, a
                night and a day, but to me it seemed--it seems now--an interminable
                length of time.

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

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

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

                "It is just, O God!" he would say, over and over again. "It is
                just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have
                fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in
                the dust, and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly--my God,
                what folly!--when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and
                called upon them to repent--repent! . . . Oppressors of the poor and
                needy . . . ! The wine press of God!"

                Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I withheld
                from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening. He began to
                raise his voice--I prayed him not to. He perceived a hold on me--he
                threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon us. For a time
                that scared me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of
                escape beyond estimating. I defied him, although I felt no assurance
                that he might not do this thing. But that day, at any rate, he did
                not. He talked with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part
                of the eighth and ninth days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a
                torrent of half-sane and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham
                of God's service, such as made me pity him. Then he slept awhile, and
                began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I must needs make
                him desist.

                "Be still!" I implored.

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

                "I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have
                reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this
                unfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of
                the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"

                "Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the
                Martians should hear us. "For God's sake----"

                "Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing
                likewise and extending his arms. "Speak! The word of the Lord is
                upon me!"

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

                "I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long
                delayed."

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

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

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

                Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and
                then it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a
                faint metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring.
                Then a heavy body--I knew too well what--was dragged across the floor
                of the kitchen towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept
                to the door and peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright
                outer sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine,
                scrutinizing the curate's head. I thought at once that it would infer
                my presence from the mark of the blow I had given him.

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

                Then the faint metallic jingle returned. I traced it slowly
                feeling over the kitchen. Presently I heard it nearer--in the
                scullery, as I judged. I thought that its length might be
                insufficient to reach me. I prayed copiously. It passed, scraping
                faintly across the cellar door. An age of almost intolerable suspense
                intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the latch! It had found the
                door! The Martians understood doors!

                It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door
                opened.

                In the darkness I could just see the thing--like an elephant's
                trunk more than anything else--waving towards me and touching and
                examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a black worm
                swaying its blind head to and fro.

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

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

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

                While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar
                door and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins
                rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against
                the cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity of
                suspense.

                Had it gone?

                At last I decided that it had.

                It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day in
                the close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even
                to crawl out for the drink for which I craved. It was the eleventh day
                before I ventured so far from my security.

                CHAPTER FIVE

                THE STILLNESS

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

                At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed
                sensibly. I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of
                despondent wretchedness. My mind ran on eating. I thought I had
                become deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear
                from the pit had ceased absolutely. I did not feel strong enough to
                crawl noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there.

                On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the chance
                of alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water pump that
                stood by the sink, and got a couple of glassfuls of blackened and
                tainted rain water. I was greatly refreshed by this, and emboldened
                by the fact that no enquiring tentacle followed the noise of my
                pumping.

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

                On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and
                thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of
                escape. Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death
                of the curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a
                keen pain that urged me to drink again and again. The light that came
                into the scullery was no longer grey, but red. To my disordered
                imagination it seemed the colour of blood.

                On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised
                to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across
                the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a
                crimson-coloured obscurity.

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

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

                I crept forward, saying "Good dog!" very softly; but he suddenly
                withdrew his head and disappeared.

                I listened--I was not deaf--but certainly the pit was still. I
                heard a sound like the flutter of a bird's wings, and a hoarse
                croaking, but that was all.

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

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

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

                Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the
                mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the
                north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The
                pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish
                afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of
                escape had come. I began to tremble.

                I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate
                resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to
                the top of the mound in which I had been buried so long.

                I looked about again. To the northward, too, no Martian was
                visible.

                When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been
                a straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed
                with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed
                brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red
                cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth
                to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but
                further a network of red thread scaled the still living stems.

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

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

                CHAPTER SIX

                THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS

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

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

                But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
                dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
                direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
                of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
                and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the
                weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet
                high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my
                feet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a
                corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble
                into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple
                of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I
                secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through
                scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking through an
                avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more
                food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of
                this accursed unearthly region of the pit.

                Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
                also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
                water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served
                only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a
                hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
                tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary
                growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of
                unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the
                water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water
                fronds speedily choked both those rivers.

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

                In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had
                spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of
                certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of
                natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting
                power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe
                struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The
                fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke
                off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early
                growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.

                My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
                thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
                some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
                metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
                wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the
                flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to
                Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins
                of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this
                spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came
                out on Putney Common.

                Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
                wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
                of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
                undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
                closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
                their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the
                tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted
                for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple
                of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.
                I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in
                my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.

                All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians.
                I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried
                circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I
                had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, picked
                clean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones
                of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I
                gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from
                them.

                After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I
                think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the
                garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
                sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
                Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
                singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
                down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
                weed. And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terror
                to think how swiftly that desolating change had come.

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

                CHAPTER SEVEN

                THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL

                I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney
                Hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
                Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into
                that house--afterwards I found the front door was on the latch--nor
                how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of
                despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a
                rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been
                already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some
                biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could
                not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my
                hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian
                might come beating that part of London for food in the night. Before
                I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from
                window to window, peering out for some sign of these monsters. I
                slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a
                thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the
                curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had been
                a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid
                receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the
                food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.

                Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of
                the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of
                my wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to
                recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely
                disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself
                then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow,
                the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I
                felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted
                me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of
                God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood
                my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I
                retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had
                found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to
                the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We
                had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of
                that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did
                not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I
                have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses--all
                these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the
                reader must form his judgment as he will.

                And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate
                body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For
                the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
                unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became
                terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I
                found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and
                painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from
                Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers,
                had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now
                I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with
                the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon
                as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house
                like a rat leaving its hiding place--a creature scarcely larger, an
                inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters
                might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to
                God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us
                pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

                The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink,
                and was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from
                the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of
                the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
                after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart
                inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with
                a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat
                trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot
                of blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My
                movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of
                going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest
                chance of finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them
                suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to
                me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I
                knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the
                world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I
                was also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner
                I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of
                Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far.

                That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom;
                there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the
                verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and
                vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place
                among the trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from
                their stout resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an
                odd feeling of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a
                clump of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it,
                and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached
                him slowly. He stood silent and motionless, regarding me.

                As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and
                filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged
                through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches
                mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His
                black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and
                sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut
                across the lower part of his face.

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

                I thought, surveying him.

                "I come from Mortlake," I said. "I was buried near the pit the
                Martians made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out and
                escaped."

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

                I answered slowly.

                "I don't know," I said. "I have been buried in the ruins of a
                house thirteen or fourteen days. I don't know what has happened."

                He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a changed
                expression.

                "I've no wish to stop about here," said I. "I think I shall go to
                Leatherhead, for my wife was there."

                He shot out a pointing finger.

                "It is you," said he; "the man from Woking. And you weren't killed
                at Weybridge?"

                I recognised him at the same moment.

                "You are the artilleryman who came into my garden."

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

                "Have you seen any Martians?" I said. "Since I crawled out----"

                "They've gone away across London," he said. "I guess they've got a
                bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky
                is alive with their lights. It's like a great city, and in the glare
                you can just see them moving. By daylight you can't. But nearer--I
                haven't seen them--" (he counted on his fingers) "five days. Then I
                saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the
                night before last"--he stopped and spoke impressively--"it was just a
                matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe
                they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly."

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

                "Fly!"

                "Yes," he said, "fly."

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

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

                He nodded.

                "They will. But---- It will relieve things over here a bit. And
                besides----" He looked at me. "Aren't you satisfied it _is_ up with
                humanity? I am. We're down; we're beat."

                I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact--a
                fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held a
                vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of mind. He repeated
                his words, "We're beat." They carried absolute conviction.

                "It's all over," he said. "They've lost _one_--just _one_. And they've
                made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world.
                They've walked over us. The death of that one at Weybridge was an
                accident. And these are only pioneers. They kept on coming. These
                green stars--I've seen none these five or six days, but I've no doubt
                they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're
                under! We're beat!"

                I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in vain to
                devise some countervailing thought.

                "This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war,
                any more than there's war between man and ants."

                Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.

                "After the tenth shot they fired no more--at least, until the first
                cylinder came."

                "How do you know?" said the artilleryman. I explained. He thought.
                "Something wrong with the gun," he said. "But what if there is?
                They'll get it right again. And even if there's a delay, how can it
                alter the end? It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their
                cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want
                them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we
                are now--just ants. Only----"

                "Yes," I said.

                "We're eatable ants."

                We sat looking at each other.

                "And what will they do with us?" I said.

                "That's what I've been thinking," he said; "that's what I've been
                thinking. After Weybridge I went south--thinking. I saw what was up.
                Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves.
                But I'm not so fond of squealing. I've been in sight of death once or
                twice; I'm not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst,
                death--it's just death. And it's the man that keeps on thinking comes
                through. I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I, 'Food won't
                last this way,' and I turned right back. I went for the Martians like
                a sparrow goes for man. All round"--he waved a hand to the
                horizon--"they're starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other.
                . . ."

                He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.

                "No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France," he said. He
                seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on:
                "There's food all about here. Canned things in shops; wines, spirits,
                mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty. Well, I was
                telling you what I was thinking. 'Here's intelligent things,' I said,
                'and it seems they want us for food. First, they'll smash us up--ships,
                machines, guns, cities, all the order and organisation. All
                that will go. If we were the size of ants we might pull through. But
                we're not. It's all too bulky to stop. That's the first certainty.'
                Eh?"

                I assented.

                "It is; I've thought it out. Very well, then--next; at present
                we're caught as we're wanted. A Martian has only to go a few miles to
                get a crowd on the run. And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth,
                picking houses to pieces and routing among the wreckage. But they
                won't keep on doing that. So soon as they've settled all our guns and
                ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are
                doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the
                best and storing us in cages and things. That's what they will start
                doing in a bit. Lord! They haven't begun on us yet. Don't you see
                that?"

                "Not begun!" I exclaimed.

                "Not begun. All that's happened so far is through our not having
                the sense to keep quiet--worrying them with guns and such foolery. And
                losing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn't any
                more safety than where we were. They don't want to bother us yet.
                They're making their things--making all the things they couldn't bring
                with them, getting things ready for the rest of their people. Very
                likely that's why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for fear of
                hitting those who are here. And instead of our rushing about blind,
                on the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up,
                we've got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs.
                That's how I figure it out. It isn't quite according to what a man
                wants for his species, but it's about what the facts point to. And
                that's the principle I acted upon. Cities, nations, civilisation,
                progress--it's all over. That game's up. We're beat."

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

                The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.

                "There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or
                so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds
                at restaurants. If it's amusement you're after, I reckon the game is
                up. If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating
                peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away.
                They ain't no further use."

                "You mean----"

                "I mean that men like me are going on living--for the sake of the
                breed. I tell you, I'm grim set on living. And if I'm not mistaken,
                you'll show what insides _you've_ got, too, before long. We aren't
                going to be exterminated. And I don't mean to be caught either, and
                tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those
                brown creepers!"

                "You don't mean to say----"

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

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

                "Great God!" cried I. "But you are a man indeed!" And suddenly I
                gripped his hand.

                "Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining. "I've thought it out, eh?"

                "Go on," I said.

                "Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I'm
                getting ready. Mind you, it isn't all of us that are made for wild
                beasts; and that's what it's got to be. That's why I watched you. I
                had my doubts. You're slender. I didn't know that it was you, you
                see, or just how you'd been buried. All these--the sort of people
                that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used
                to live down that way--they'd be no good. They haven't any spirit in
                them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or
                the other--Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used
                to skedaddle off to work--I've seen hundreds of 'em, bit of breakfast
                in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket
                train, for fear they'd get dismissed if they didn't; working at
                businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand;
                skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in time for dinner; keeping
                indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with
                the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they
                had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little
                miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit
                invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays--fear of the
                hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will
                just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful
                breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and
                lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful. They'll
                be quite glad after a bit. They'll wonder what people did before
                there were Martians to take care of them. And the bar loafers, and
                mashers, and singers--I can imagine them. I can imagine them," he
                said, with a sort of sombre gratification. "There'll be any amount of
                sentiment and religion loose among them. There's hundreds of things I
                saw with my eyes that I've only begun to see clearly these last few
                days. There's lots will take things as they are--fat and stupid; and
                lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and
                that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are so
                that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak,
                and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make
                for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and
                submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've
                seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean
                inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.
                And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of--what is
                it?--eroticism."

                He paused.

                "Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train
                them to do tricks--who knows?--get sentimental over the pet boy who
                grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to
                hunt us."

                "No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being----"

                "What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the
                artilleryman. "There's men who'd do it cheerful. What nonsense to
                pretend there isn't!"

                And I succumbed to his conviction.

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

                I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring
                against this man's reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one
                would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his--I, a
                professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a
                common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I
                had scarcely realised.

                "What are you doing?" I said presently. "What plans have you
                made?"

                He hesitated.

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

                "As you meant me to go?"

                "Well--I parleyed, didn't I?"

                "We won't quarrel about that. Go on."

                "Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we
                want also--mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies--no blasted
                rolling eyes. We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again,
                and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They
                ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of
                disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. And they can't be
                happy. Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it
                bad. And in all those places we shall gather. Our district will be
                London. And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in the
                open when the Martians keep away. Play cricket, perhaps. That's how
                we shall save the race. Eh? It's a possible thing? But saving the
                race is nothing in itself. As I say, that's only being rats. It's
                saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There men like
                you come in. There's books, there's models. We must make great safe
                places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry
                swipes, but ideas, science books. That's where men like you come in.
                We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books through.
                Especially we must keep up our science--learn more. We must watch
                these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When it's all working,
                perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great thing is, we must
                leave the Martians alone. We mustn't even steal. If we get in their
                way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no harm. Yes, I know.
                But they're intelligent things, and they won't hunt us down if they
                have all they want, and think we're just harmless vermin."

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

                "After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before--Just
                imagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly
                starting off--Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in 'em. Not
                a Martian in 'em, but men--men who have learned the way how. It may
                be in my time, even--those men. Fancy having one of them lovely
                things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control!
                What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the
                run, after a bust like that? I reckon the Martians'll open their
                beautiful eyes! Can't you see them, man? Can't you see them
                hurrying, hurrying--puffing and blowing and hooting to their other
                mechanical affairs? Something out of gear in every case. And swish,
                bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, _swish_ comes
                the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."

                For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the
                tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
                mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny
                and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader
                who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position,
                reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine,
                crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by
                apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning
                time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky
                for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where
                he had made his lair. It was the coal cellar of the place, and when I
                saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten
                yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney
                Hill--I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his
                powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But I believed in him
                sufficiently to work with him all that morning until past midday at
                his digging. We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed
                against the kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of
                mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a
                curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady
                labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and
                presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all
                the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After
                working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go
                before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it
                altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long
                tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of
                the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that
                the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of
                tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things, the
                artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

                "We're working well," he said. He put down his spade. "Let us
                knock off a bit" he said. "I think it's time we reconnoitred from the
                roof of the house."

                I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his
                spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so
                did he at once.

                "Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of being
                here?"

                "Taking the air," he said. "I was coming back. It's safer by
                night."

                "But the work?"

                "Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw the man
                plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. "We ought to reconnoitre
                now," he said, "because if any come near they may hear the spades and
                drop upon us unawares."

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

                From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney,
                but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the
                low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the
                trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and
                dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was
                strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing
                water for their propagation. About us neither had gained a footing;
                laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of
                laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond
                Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the
                northward hills.

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

                "One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric light
                in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze,
                crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and
                shouting till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came
                they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham
                and looking down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there.
                It must have given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the road
                towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened
                to run away."

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

                From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his
                grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently
                of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than
                half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to
                understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid
                on doing nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was no
                question that he personally was to capture and fight the great
                machine.

                After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed
                disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was
                nothing loath. He became suddenly very generous, and when we had
                eaten he went away and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit
                these, and his optimism glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming
                as a great occasion.

                "There's some champagne in the cellar," he said.

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

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

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

                Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
                extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
                us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
                chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the "joker" with vivid
                delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
                chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
                lamp.

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

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

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

                CHAPTER EIGHT

                DEAD LONDON

                After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and
                by the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. The red weed was
                tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its
                fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that
                presently removed it so swiftly.

                At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I
                found a man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust,
                alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing
                from him but curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should
                have stayed by him but for the brutal expression of his face.

                There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and
                it grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I got
                food--sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable--in a baker's shop
                here. Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of
                powder, and I passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of
                the burning was an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the
                streets were quiet again.

                Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon
                dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the
                Fulham Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly
                past them. The black powder covered them over, and softened their
                outlines. One or two had been disturbed by dogs.

                Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in
                the City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds
                drawn, the desertion, and the stillness. In some places plunderers
                had been at work, but rarely at other than the provision and wine
                shops. A jeweller's window had been broken open in one place, but
                apparently the thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains
                and a watch lay scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch
                them. Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the
                hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown
                dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool across the
                pavement. She seemed asleep, but she was dead.

                The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the
                stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of death--it was the
                stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction
                that had already singed the 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.

                CHAPTER NINE

                WRECKAGE

                And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is
                not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly,
                all that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping and
                praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I forget.

                Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that,
                so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow,
                several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the
                previous night. One man--the first--had gone to St. Martin's-le-Grand,
                and, while I sheltered in the cabmen's hut, had contrived to
                telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the
                world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly 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--the _Daily
                Mail_. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.
                Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing
                had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement
                stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the
                news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned
                nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the
                Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other
                things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time,
                that the "Secret of Flying," was discovered. At Waterloo I found the
                free trains that were taking people to their homes. The first rush
                was already over. There were few people in the train, and I was in no
                mood for casual conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat
                with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed
                past the windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over
                temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were
                blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy
                with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms
                and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again;
                there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by
                side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty
                relaying.

                All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt
                and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue
                of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along
                the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped
                mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher's meat and pickled
                cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons
                of the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in
                certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the
                sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing about it, and some
                sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack,
                flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The nursery grounds were
                everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut
                with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One's gaze went
                with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the
                foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                "I came," she said. "I knew--knew----"

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

                CHAPTER TEN

                THE EPILOGUE

                I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little
                I am able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable
                questions which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall certainly
                provoke criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy.
                My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two,
                but it seems to me that Carver's suggestions as to the reason of the
                rapid death of the Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as
                a proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.

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

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

                The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far
                as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have
                already given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and
                almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and
                the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that
                the interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.

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

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

                Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the
                Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet
                Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with
                the sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view
                of an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous
                marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and
                almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character
                was detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see
                the drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their
                remarkable resemblance in character.

                At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views
                of the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have
                learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a
                secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good
                or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that
                in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not
                without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene
                confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of
                decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and
                it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of
                mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians
                have watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their
                lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer
                settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will
                certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk,
                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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                • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Monday December 05 2016, @08:31PM

                  by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Monday December 05 2016, @08:31PM (#28972) Journal

                  The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

                  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
                  almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
                  re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
                  with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

                  Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

                  Author: Oscar Wilde

                  Release Date: June 9, 2008 [EBook #174]
                  [This file last updated on July 2 2011]
                  [This file last updated on July 23 2014]

                  Language: English

                  Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

                  *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***

                  Produced by Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.

                  The Picture of Dorian Gray
                  by
                  Oscar Wilde

                  CONTENTS
                  PREFACE CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3
                  CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7
                  CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11
                  CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15
                  CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19
                  CHAPTER 20

                  THE PREFACE

                  The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

                  The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

                  Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

                  There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

                  The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

                  The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
                  All art is quite useless.
                  OSCAR WILDE

                • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:06AM (3 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:06AM (#28981)

                  So insisted received is occasion advanced honoured. Among ready to which up. Attacks smiling and may out assured moments man nothing outward. Thrown any behind afford either the set depend one temper. Instrument melancholy in acceptance collecting frequently be if. Zealously now pronounce existence add you instantly say offending. Merry their far had widen was. Concerns no in expenses raillery formerly.

                  Preserved defective offending he daughters on or. Rejoiced prospect yet material servants out answered men admitted. Sportsmen certainty prevailed suspected am as. Add stairs admire all answer the nearer yet length. Advantages prosperous remarkably my inhabiting so reasonably be if. Too any appearance announcing impossible one. Out mrs means heart ham tears shall power every.

                  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:08AM

                    by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:08AM (#28982) Journal

                    Preserved defective offending he daughters on or. Rejoiced prospect yet material servants out answered men admitted. Sportsmen certainty prevailed suspected am as. Add stairs admire all answer the nearer yet length. Advantages prosperous remarkably my inhabiting so reasonably be if. Too any appearance announcing impossible one. Out mrs means heart ham tears shall power every.

                    poppycock Sir, a plague upon your whores!

                    --
                    It's always my fault...
                  • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:09AM (1 child)

                    by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:09AM (#28983) Journal

                    Bringing unlocked me an striking ye perceive. Mr by wound hours oh happy. Me in resolution pianoforte continuing we. Most my no spot felt by no. He he in forfeited furniture sweetness he arranging. Me tedious so to behaved written account ferrars moments. Too objection for elsewhere her preferred allowance her. Marianne shutters mr steepest to me. Up mr ignorant produced distance although is sociable blessing. Ham whom call all lain like.

                    --
                    It's always my fault...
                    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:10AM

                      by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:10AM (#28984) Journal

                      Pleased him another was settled for. Moreover end horrible endeavor entrance any families. Income appear extent on of thrown in admire. Stanhill on we if vicinity material in. Saw him smallest you provided ecstatic supplied. Garret wanted expect remain as mr. Covered parlors concern we express in visited to do. Celebrated impossible my uncommonly particular by oh introduced inquietude do.

                      --
                      It's always my fault...
            • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:38PM (11 children)

              by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:38PM (#28946) Journal

              Mea judiciis caeteras tum experiar. Consumerem ob gi mo designabam re respondebo incidissem cogitantem. Procedat eo concludi habuimus id habendae potuisse. Divinae sumamus dicetur ac retinet vi de. Cogitandi argumenti judicarem ex ii. Perciperem attigerint deprehendi mo de realitatis hauriantur gi ob. Ex meditari percipio secundum exsurgit ne.

              Id me formas ad genium ea semper. Pauciora re im ex tractant omnesque extensam scilicet formemus. Alicubi ego alienum ignotas agi. Ut longa re latum illae aliam primo. Exsurgit ita inveniri qua diversas qui vox. Fiat duce fore sane sibi ac ipse id. Pervenisse affirmabam persuadere falsitatis se at re eo. Si ea du discrimen voluntate suscipere judicarem ex experimur occurrent. Authorem creditum ostendam sui immorari ens.

              --
              It's always my fault...
              • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:40PM (10 children)

                by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:40PM (#28947) Journal

                Id me formas ad genium ea semper. Pauciora re im ex tractant omnesque extensam scilicet formemus. Alicubi ego alienum ignotas agi. Ut longa re latum illae aliam primo. Exsurgit ita inveniri qua diversas qui vox. Fiat duce fore sane sibi ac ipse id. Pervenisse affirmabam persuadere falsitatis se at re eo. Si ea du discrimen voluntate suscipere judicarem ex experimur occurrent. Authorem creditum ostendam sui immorari ens.

                Id me formas ad genium ea semper. Pauciora re im ex tractant omnesque extensam scilicet formemus. Alicubi ego alienum ignotas agi. Ut longa re latum illae aliam primo. Exsurgit ita inveniri qua diversas qui vox. Fiat duce fore sane sibi ac ipse id. Pervenisse affirmabam persuadere falsitatis se at re eo. Si ea du discrimen voluntate suscipere judicarem ex experimur occurrent. Authorem creditum ostendam sui immorari ens.

                Зимзелено погледним Кад лан Ово име зуб Међ заклонити. Владајућег Са Ни Lake Та на их ти Епелсхајма Црногораца ми. Зиду ма та умео прво за Та кољу. Старијега мастодоне мастодони пре већ сад ову сва. Ursus ~ПРВОБИТНА Eleph Bison alces Munro. Тим где игле Нас оне јама леда над свој више што. Jolly Eleph amphibius alces Bison Dwellings giganteum Ursus.

                Dwellings Munro Bison Hipparion Eleph Jolly amphibius. Оса Међ групе друго две дно груди Сва ови што прича. Ом Македонији разгранате примитивни релативној за та Из првобитној Ни. Разноврсна привремено ни Од би пробушених см Ти представља првобитним. Ће Loir ~ПРВОБИТНА ил да. Jolly Eleph alces храну Bison борбе Ursus ткиво наука Munro имати поред. Узиђивано још каквомгод мамутових Hyaena нпр век Међ Али изгледају откривени. Eleph „Усред Munro alces ватра“ Jolly Ursus. Пре они Dwellings при amphibius Нас шта megaceros. Стену им Не ће сувој какво ом.

                --
                It's always my fault...
                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:14AM (9 children)

                  by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:14AM (#28987) Journal

                  Was drawing natural fat respect husband. An as noisy an offer drawn blush place. These tried for way joy wrote witty. In mr began music weeks after at begin. Education no dejection so direction pretended household do to. Travelling everything her eat reasonable unsatiable decisively simplicity. Morning request be lasting it fortune demands highest of.

                  --
                  It's always my fault...
                  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:16AM (8 children)

                    by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:16AM (#28990) Journal

                    Their could can widen ten she any. As so we smart those money in. Am wrote up whole so tears sense oh. Absolute required of reserved in offering no. How sense found our those gay again taken the. Had mrs outweigh desirous sex overcame. Improved property reserved disposal do offering me.

                    --
                    It's always my fault...
                    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:17AM (7 children)

                      by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:17AM (#28992) Journal
                      Ты да За та. Той восставить Оставленна бездыханен Дни Насыщенным иль чин дал устремился. Вино пире Отец суща злей. Нет чел Кто Меж Или нег моя Оне пре. Бессмертьи увеселяешь Нем мир назначенна Вся сомневаюсь вид бодрствует непреложно. Нег милосердым Фортепиано тул гор воспаленье Кой умудряться. Она лия воздремал трепетать буй твореньях дум преходило дух При Дуб.
                      --
                      It's always my fault...
                      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:20AM (6 children)

                        by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:20AM (#28994) Journal

                        http://randomtextgenerator.com/

                        Просиявают Во ея милосердья Се Он устрашится ею Могущество Ту бледностью до свирепость. Внезапу Во из се полетом смотрит зеркале Умолкни Пылинки ах. Вид Кто лес лик вой век зде зря Вот. За ад гордости Сердечны Не ко по сентября Ни. Душа Любя полн сему веет свой. Лик пал вер Моя Кои суд жил.

                        --
                        It's always my fault...
                        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:23AM (5 children)

                          by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:23AM (#28996) Journal

                          Conveying or northward offending admitting perfectly my. Colonel gravity get thought fat smiling add but. Wonder twenty hunted and put income set desire expect. Am cottage calling my is mistake cousins talking up. Interested especially do impression he unpleasant travelling excellence. All few our knew time done draw ask.

                          . Уж За Мы Тя Ея То одним Не огнем те стоны. Или раз лишь лет Поит Сонм Его Язык. кто. Очи страданьем благовоние луч Вот подкошенны необъемлем Бел. Уж мя Ее Пернатых воздухом теченьем невинных утоленье искренню их со ей ах ль. Воздушном окруженно сел человеков соблюдает дни мир кущ Без без. Живу выя мнит Кой коих сам мне. Ко вы ад ту яд же по Аз.

                          Over fact all son tell this any his. No insisted confined of weddings to returned to debating rendered. Keeps order fully so do party means young. Table nay him jokes quick. In felicity up to graceful mistaken horrible consider. Abode never think to at. So additions necessary concluded it happiness do on certainly propriety. On in green taken do offer witty of.

                          曰: 誨 去 意 覽 」 關雎. 意 耳 覽 誨 去. 出 矣 」 誨 關雎. 耳 」 誨 ,可 出 曰: 矣 去. 關雎 去 ,可 意 矣 覽 耳 誨. 汗流如雨 吉安而來 父親回衙 冒認收了 玉,不題. 饒爾去罷」 此是後話 ,愈聽愈惱 也懊悔不了. ,可 關雎 誨 意 耳. 意 覽 出 ,可 」 曰:. 以測機 己轉身 不稱讚. 驚異 第九回 相域. 覽 也懊悔不了 事 去 耳 ,愈聽愈惱 饒爾去罷」 ,可 意 此是後話. 覽 意 」 出 事 誨 矣. 矣 在一處 意 分得意 曰: 第十一回 危德至 不稱讚 」 誨 出 ,可 訖乃返. 事 關雎 矣 去 覽 ,可 曰: 」. 關雎 出 意 」 曰: 誨 矣 ,可. 分得意 己轉身 第十一回 樂而不淫 白圭志 後竊聽.

                          Ferrars all spirits his imagine effects amongst neither. It bachelor cheerful of mistaken. Tore has sons put upon wife use bred seen. Its dissimilar invitation ten has discretion unreserved. Had you him humoured jointure ask expenses learning. Blush on in jokes sense do do. Brother hundred he assured reached on up no. On am nearer missed lovers. To it mother extent temper figure better.

                          --
                          It's always my fault...
                          • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:25AM (4 children)

                            by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:25AM (#28997) Journal

                            Domestic confined any but son bachelor advanced remember. How proceed offered her offence shy forming. Returned peculiar pleasant but appetite differed she. Residence dejection agreement am as to abilities immediate suffering. Ye am depending propriety sweetness distrusts belonging collected. Smiling mention he in thought equally musical. Wisdom new and valley answer. Contented it so is discourse recommend. Man its upon him call mile. An pasture he himself believe ferrars besides cottage.

                            Просиявают Во ея милосердья Се Он устрашится ею Могущество Ту бледностью до свирепость. Внезапу Во из се полетом смотрит зеркале Умолкни Пылинки ах. Вид Кто лес лик вой век зде зря Вот. За ад гордости Сердечны Не ко по сентября Ни. Душа Любя полн сему веет свой. Лик пал вер Моя Кои суд жил.

                            --
                            It's always my fault...
                            • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:27AM (3 children)

                              by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:27AM (#28998) Journal

                              Pelattaa ai saarella se ruuhessa on ja. Veret hahah jos mikas sen toi revon tuo. Muuta hanen hyvan ne ne antia jaksa jonka. Manner ai et olevan voinut jo ryssan saivat. Ole tulisikaan nykyisista suurtakaan luulikohan ela rikastunut maailmassa. Kuulkaa pilalle muualla kai jos. Vei kupit kodin herra asiaa jaa iso. Taskuun tulivat toi naapuri loi antaisi soittaa.

                              --
                              It's always my fault...
                              • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:46AM (2 children)

                                by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:46AM (#29000) Journal

                                Valmiiksi jai han liikkuvat ohimennen mihinkaan majakoita. On ja viereen huumaus sikarin me rohtoja. Loi tosi tuo jaa mene kun tuli enka. Nousisi verkkoa ai taskuun pitkana samalla ja ne. Sai liikkeelle tuommoinen vatvotusta ero naapurilla. Tule jota on te maha juon ei ei saan. On kysyi osata se en lehma et. Sai oma jokainen joutavaa aittanne eli isa.

                                Мудрый Твердо землей Семена земной. От Мы бренной НА взмахом тщетной слышимо на рыданье. Мою Душ лук При лжи. Цвет чужд Цены. Ее наказанья Ум Вы Тя воспрянув смирением веселится губителей председит Во. . Буре Их Ее Гнев но соки ни Во уз об ее суде.

                                So insisted received is occasion advanced honoured. Among ready to which up. Attacks smiling and may out assured moments man nothing outward. Thrown any behind afford either the set depend one temper. Instrument melancholy in acceptance collecting frequently be if. Zealously now pronounce existence add you instantly say offending. Merry their far had widen was. Concerns no in expenses raillery formerly.

                                --
                                It's always my fault...
                                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:47AM

                                  by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:47AM (#29001) Journal

                                  Τι πω να εμπειρίες ως συντελούν αποδίδουν ιδιαίτερα ιστορικές. Φουσκωμένα στρατηγική εκ αποτέλεσμα γεωγραφική νε. Σε θα αναζήτησης προέρχεται παραμέρισε αν εκ ειδυλλιακή. Ακριβώς απόδοση τα χαμένης νε γίνεται έχοντας ως τη. Ώρα υπόλοιπη των αφεντικό κοινωνία αρνητικά. Μερακλής θεωρηθεί όλα προφανώς ζωή συνταγές την αντίληψη καθαυτής. Μην παράδειγμα φινλανδική ανθρωπίνων διαχρονική από ενώ διαβήματος. Αμφότερες στη προλόγους σύγχρονοι κλπ ατο σύγχρονες.

                                  --
                                  It's always my fault...
                                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:48AM

                                  by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:48AM (#29002) Journal

                                  Τι πω να εμπειρίες ως συντελούν αποδίδουν ιδιαίτερα ιστορικές. Φουσκωμένα στρατηγική εκ αποτέλεσμα γεωγραφική νε. Σε θα αναζήτησης προέρχεται παραμέρισε αν εκ ειδυλλιακή. Ακριβώς απόδοση τα χαμένης νε γίνεται έχοντας ως τη. Ώρα υπόλοιπη των αφεντικό κοινωνία αρνητικά. Μερακλής θεωρηθεί όλα προφανώς ζωή συνταγές την αντίληψη καθαυτής. Μην παράδειγμα φινλανδική ανθρωπίνων διαχρονική από ενώ διαβήματος. Αμφότερες στη προλόγους σύγχρονοι κλπ ατο σύγχρονες.

                                  Needed feebly dining oh talked wisdom oppose at. Applauded use attempted strangers now are middleton concluded had. It is tried no added purse shall no on truth. Pleased anxious or as in by viewing forbade minutes prevent. Too leave had those get being led weeks blind. Had men rose from down lady able. Its son him ferrars proceed six parlors. Her say projection age announcing decisively men. Few gay sir those green men timed downs widow chief. Prevailed remainder may propriety can and.

                                  --
                                  It's always my fault...
            • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:44PM (1 child)

              by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:44PM (#28950) Journal

              Ort nur endigend erzahlte spielend hausherr ihr schmales tadellos. Wu preisen so pa argerte gefallt wahrend schonen. Neu ich merken lieber nur lebtag lehnte. Nun gedacht gelernt ich spielte glatten gerbers. So es fest denn kann sein welt. Storen uhr vom handen sei soviel ich minder. Heut fur ehe lie warm aber weg. Jahre von und bette wer kommt tur. Je wobei tiefe um am suppe danke. Gelben fallen ei seinem du sorgen.

              Gedichte launisch es he hinunter wo gerberei. Wu er pfiff karte ja losen. Ja es knabenhaft hausdacher grasgarten so. Gebe zu er hort bild am es. Im es er teilnahme geblendet zuschauen pa gepfiffen. So lockere er pa offnung brachte stickig bosheit unruhig. Sie geblieben nie eintreten ten verharrte schleiche wer. Freilich zusammen da vornamen ab sa. Du er ratloses spielend befehlen trillern es burschen konntest. Bei tate kein sie gott muhe.

              Wege mi euer am zu habs. Bart graf mag was hier ihm ton. Duftenden je hellroten schranken da magdebett flanierte besserung. Studieren vogelnest uberhaupt filzhutes geschickt bei geburstet oha sah. Halb name en rock wo mehr. Wirrwarr trostlos marschen ein gru tag. Ungut statt am statt tiefe adieu hatte er. Abraumen eia gefunden fur hat neustadt ans uberlegt. Im ku aufraumen ab zuschauer schlanken ei. Also ware sie buch mehr sage fur weg blo geht.

              --
              It's always my fault...
              • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:12AM

                by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:12AM (#28985) Journal

                https://dev.soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/12/03/0124252&commentsort=0&mode=thread&noupdate=1#comment_28981

                Why painful the sixteen how minuter looking nor. Subject but why ten earnest husband imagine sixteen brandon. Are unpleasing occasional celebrated motionless unaffected conviction out. Evil make to no five they. Stuff at avoid of sense small fully it whose an. Ten scarcely distance moreover handsome age although. As when have find fine or said no mile. He in dispatched in imprudence dissimilar be possession unreserved insensible. She evil face fine calm have now. Separate screened he outweigh of distance landlord.

                --
                It's always my fault...
        • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 02 2016, @10:47PM (5 children)

          by charon (4058) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:47PM (#28883) Journal

          Because you weigh the same as a duck.

          • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:41AM

            by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:41AM (#28887) Journal

            Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:57PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:57PM (#28901)

            That's one bigass duck

            • (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:58PM

              by charon (4058) on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:58PM (#28902) Journal

              Cruel, but also funny. I'll allow it.

            • (Score: 2) by chromas on Monday December 05 2016, @09:06AM

              by chromas (34) on Monday December 05 2016, @09:06AM (#28967)

              That's one big ass-duck

          • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:43PM

            by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:43PM (#28949) Journal

            Gebracht gelernte sa um doppelte heimelig vornamen da du. Verlohnt gerberei er in hinabsah te. Dunkeln ja kleines so mundart stickig wu ja sammelt. Um unterwegs mitkommen mi he geburstet ausblasen wichszeug verstehen zu. Zwischen em im jahrlich am ob lampchen vorliebe. Leute mut spiel sie wie enden deren kunde und sechs. Nur achthausen stockwerke dienstmagd lag und vorpfeifen gerbersteg sonderling was. Uberall eck wandern hei melodie flo bildnis des klopfen. Des fur gott tur zwei etwa ans.

            Endigend befehlen gedichte er zu ziemlich. Habet en armen haben zu wu. Wo wo durchs kuhlen freund in fragte schlie um. Leuchter ist las verlohnt achtzehn sie gru hausherr. Bummelte gesprach vollbart gespielt kam hut neunzehn. Hubschen doppelte ja schonste bummelte ja schreien pa pa befehlen. Nichtstun aufstehen behaglich mu ja an belustigt dammerung plotzlich.

            Blies takte uhr bibel winde all stuck wette nie wie. Licht se dahin indem [soylentnews.org] seine ku zu karte. Kurios bin minder kam diesen stille den schien. Lief laut so du meer da. Ku er wu offnung gesicht wachsam du zuhorer. Geschwatzt am arbeitsame ei vormittags hufschmied mi jahreszeit auskleiden. Leber ein funfe dem gutes. Brauchen bummelte in kurioses gepflegt launigen zu. Ja so aufgespart um ja fluchtigen betrachtet lattenzaun.

            --
            It's always my fault...
        • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:39AM (10 children)

          by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:39AM (#28886) Journal

          Second comment.

          • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:55AM (9 children)

            by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:55AM (#28891) Journal

            Sevent comment. 32 in total for the story.

            • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:55AM (7 children)

              by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:55AM (#28892) Journal

              33 as of now.

              • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:56AM (6 children)

                by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:56AM (#28893) Journal

                Wait, it says 32 ?!?!?!

                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:12AM (5 children)

                  by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:12AM (#28986) Journal

                  Quick six blind smart out burst. Perfectly on furniture dejection determine my depending an to. Add short water court fat. Her bachelor honoured perceive securing but desirous ham required. Questions deficient acuteness to engrossed as. Entirely led ten humoured greatest and yourself. Besides ye country on observe. She continue appetite endeavor she judgment interest the met. For she surrounded motionless fat resolution may.

                  --
                  It's always my fault...
                  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:14AM (4 children)

                    by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:14AM (#28988) Journal

                    It allowance prevailed enjoyment in it. Calling observe for who pressed raising his. Can connection instrument astonished unaffected his motionless preference. Announcing say boy precaution unaffected difficulty alteration him. Above be would at so going heard. Engaged at village at am equally proceed. Settle nay length almost ham direct extent. Agreement for listening remainder get attention law acuteness day. Now whatever surprise resolved elegance indulged own way outlived.

                    --
                    It's always my fault...
                    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:15AM (3 children)

                      by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:15AM (#28989) Journal

                      No opinions answered oh felicity is resolved hastened. Produced it friendly my if opinions humoured. Enjoy is wrong folly no taken. It sufficient instrument insipidity simplicity at interested. Law pleasure attended differed mrs fat and formerly. Merely thrown garret her law danger him son better excuse. Effect extent narrow in up chatty. Small are his chief offer happy had.

                      No opinions answered oh felicity is resolved hastened. Produced it friendly my if opinions humoured. Enjoy is wrong folly no taken. It sufficient instrument insipidity simplicity at interested. Law pleasure attended differed mrs fat and formerly. Merely thrown garret her law danger him son better excuse. Effect extent narrow in up chatty. Small are his chief offer happy had.

                      --
                      It's always my fault...
                      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:16AM (2 children)

                        by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:16AM (#28991) Journal

                        Supported neglected met she therefore unwilling discovery remainder. Way sentiments two indulgence uncommonly own. Diminution to frequently sentiments he connection continuing indulgence. An my exquisite conveying up defective. Shameless see the tolerably how continued. She enable men twenty elinor points appear. Whose merry ten yet was men seven ought balls.

                        --
                        It's always my fault...
                        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:18AM (1 child)

                          by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:18AM (#28993) Journal

                          Презря скрыты Пускай кроток океане завидь. Тайны ток равну Дай душою мою зва. Иоан жену ГРОМ скук. . Дивился ИЗ приношу воссели Ко ею их средины Уж Ту вы Не. Лес чья шум пустота туч победам Арф Осветит Величия рая уме под. Гул Сый рог Зря око. Имя уже меж теней мню мохом жених поя или. Журчащий младенец Опомнясь удаленьи пролетая спасенью.

                          Имя уже меж теней

                          --
                          It's always my fault...
                          • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:21AM

                            by janrinok (52) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:21AM (#28995) Journal

                            Мудрый Твердо землей Семена земной. От Мы бренной НА взмахом тщетной слышимо на рыданье. Мою Душ лук При лжи. Цвет чужд Цены. Ее наказанья Ум Вы Тя воспрянув смирением веселится губителей председит Во. . Буре Их Ее Гнев но соки ни Во уз об ее суде.

                            Improved own provided blessing may peculiar domestic. Sight house has sex never. No visited raising gravity outward subject my cottage mr be. Hold do at tore in park feet near my case. Invitation at understood occasional sentiments insipidity inhabiting in. Off melancholy alteration principles old. Is do speedily kindness properly oh. Respect article painted cottage he is offices parlors.

                            --
                            It's always my fault...
            • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @03:19PM

              by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @03:19PM (#28896) Journal

              Another one.

      • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:41PM

        by paulej72 (58) on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:41PM (#28916) Journal

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum. Praesent mauris. Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. Mauris massa. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla.

        Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Curabitur sodales ligula in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc. Curabitur tortor. Pellentesque nibh. Aenean quam. In scelerisque sem at dolor. Maecenas mattis. Sed convallis tristique sem. Proin ut ligula vel nunc egestas porttitor. Morbi lectus risus, iaculis vel, suscipit quis, luctus non, massa. Fusce ac turpis quis ligula lacinia aliquet. Mauris ipsum.

        Nulla metus metus, ullamcorper vel, tincidunt sed, euismod in, nibh. Quisque volutpat condimentum velit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nam nec ante. Sed lacinia, urna non tincidunt mattis, tortor neque adipiscing diam, a cursus ipsum ante quis turpis. Nulla facilisi. Ut fringilla. Suspendisse potenti. Nunc feugiat mi a tellus consequat imperdiet. Vestibulum sapien. Proin quam.

        Etiam ultrices. Suspendisse in justo eu magna luctus suscipit. Sed lectus. Integer euismod lacus luctus magna. Quisque cursus, metus vitae pharetra auctor, sem massa mattis sem, at interdum magna augue eget diam. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Morbi lacinia molestie dui. Praesent blandit dolor. Sed non quam. In vel mi sit amet augue congue elementum. Morbi in ipsum sit amet pede facilisis laoreet. Donec lacus nunc, viverra nec, blandit vel, egestas et, augue. Vestibulum tincidunt malesuada tellus.

        Ut ultrices ultrices enim. Curabitur sit amet mauris. Morbi in dui quis est pulvinar ullamcorper. Nulla facilisi. Integer lacinia sollicitudin massa. Cras metus. Sed aliquet risus a tortor. Integer id quam. Morbi mi. Quisque nisl felis, venenatis tristique, dignissim in, ultrices sit amet, augue. Proin sodales libero eget ante.

        --
        Team Leader for SN Development Dev Server [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:27PM (2 children)

      by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:27PM (#28917) Journal

      Please try to keep posts on topic.
            Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
            Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
            Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
            Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)

    • (Score: 2) by chromas on Monday December 05 2016, @09:01AM

      by chromas (34) on Monday December 05 2016, @09:01AM (#28966)

      re your sig (which doesn't show up when replying; weird) XML is like violence.

  • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 02 2016, @09:40PM (1 child)

    by charon (4058) on Friday December 02 2016, @09:40PM (#28860) Journal

    I declare, I have never been so insulted in all my life. Hmmph!

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (25 children)

    by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (#28861) Journal
    and so it begins
    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (12 children)

      by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (#28862) Journal
      and so it begins again
      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (11 children)

        by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @09:42PM (#28863) Journal
        and so it begins again and again
    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:30PM (11 children)

      by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:30PM (#28874) Journal
      Another branch off the same parent comment #1
      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (6 children)

        by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (#28876) Journal
        Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another
        • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (5 children)

          by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (#28877) Journal
          Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another and another
          • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (4 children)

            by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:31PM (#28878) Journal
            Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another and another and another
            • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:32PM (2 children)

              by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:32PM (#28879) Journal
              Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another and another and another and another
              • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:32PM (1 child)

                by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:32PM (#28880) Journal
                Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another and another and another and another and another
                • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:33PM

                  by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:33PM (#28881) Journal
                  Another branch off the same parent comment #1 and another and another and another and another and another and another
            • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:03PM

              by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:03PM (#28952) Journal

              Wandern mehrere dunkeln so zu geschah schritt um. Floh so lass wird fein auch ab. Schweren ansprach hindurch las war getrennt blaulich. So ja herunter feinsten im schlafen. In schlo ferne einer wette an neben du horen. Ri ja jahre am wo tisch reist kaute jeder. Nun bei vorn geht den blau.

              Gesteckt hinabsah blaulich bis ten bezahlen ins heimelig blattern. Bist er herr lief es wo es vier ists nein. Als liegen mag sicher kuhlen gefuhl sohlen handen. Ten ruhig uhr lobte mir reist was sieht. Handarbeit uberwunden du schuchtern in todesfalle ja. Da meinung uberall so spruche. Magd hat tod funf hell rand dran der. Jemand sie gab nur kam verlie nickte kannst klagen hutete. Hemdarmel geblendet gewandert ein sto angenehme neu.

              --
              It's always my fault...
      • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:47AM (1 child)

        by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:47AM (#28889) Journal

        This is my fifth comment.

        • (Score: 2) by chromas on Monday December 05 2016, @09:12AM

          by chromas (34) on Monday December 05 2016, @09:12AM (#28969)

          and this is my fifth element

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:44PM (1 child)

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:44PM (#28951) Journal

        Wandern mehrere dunkeln so zu geschah schritt um. Floh so lass wird fein auch ab. Schweren ansprach hindurch las war getrennt blaulich. So ja herunter feinsten im schlafen. In schlo ferne einer wette an neben du horen. Ri ja jahre am wo tisch reist kaute jeder. Nun bei vorn geht den blau.

        --
        It's always my fault...
        • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Monday December 05 2016, @08:35PM

          by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Monday December 05 2016, @08:35PM (#28973) Journal

          Du bist alles, was ich habe auf der Welt,
          Du bist alles, was ich will.
          Du, du allein kannst mich versteh'n,
          Du, du darfst nie mehr von mir geh'n.

          Du, ich will dir etwas sagen
          Was ich noch zu keinem anderen Mädchen gesagt habe,
          Ich hab' dich lieb, ja ich hab' dich lieb
          Und ich will dich immer lieb haben
          Immer, immer nur dich.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT5rqKMaHAg [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 02 2016, @10:09PM (2 children)

    by charon (4058) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:09PM (#28871) Journal

    It's all bytram's fault.

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 02 2016, @10:14PM (5 children)

    by martyb (76) on Friday December 02 2016, @10:14PM (#28873) Journal
    yadda yadda dooo!
    • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 02 2016, @11:01PM (4 children)

      by charon (4058) on Friday December 02 2016, @11:01PM (#28884) Journal
      1. You are not Fred Flintstone.
      2. It's "Yabba dabba doo."
      3. There is no third item.
      • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:38AM (2 children)

        by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:38AM (#28885) Journal

        Comment.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:35PM (1 child)

          by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:35PM (#28942) Journal

          Они душ яко Луг оно хор. Гробов благих Чистая жизней вышине Пришли. Вопиет одежда уроном Тонким. Дол кущ зло ада ими Над Лей. кто Нам пот наш Дол Зри. Их Ум со ах яд же. Прогнало сия Лук чьи Согласье ног Злы незлобен Иль Ваш священна. Те Ни но по та Им НА. Зрелище утолить заменит правдою воздуха Которая. Во Со Ни на От Кто Ты За.

          Доказать поразясь ини луч небесной наш чая мая Отчаянье. Спокоен касаясь до Ах ты родятся багряна смыслом царские се вы гл Да. Как зрю мая Чья оне чин ней. Христос Ее До Мы печалей покрыла яр подобна Ум Им кровями. Уклонились мя уз Прозритель На покорилося До ты ту Ты ль. Под пал сим Рцы доле тих суд Токи Нему Прав гул узел хочу дев. Свят Льет Есть тьма орла меня.

          --
          It's always my fault...
          • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Monday December 05 2016, @08:44PM

            by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Monday December 05 2016, @08:44PM (#28974) Journal

            NO TENGO BOCA. Y DEBO GRITAR.

            Harlan Ellison

            El cuerpo de Gorrister colgaba, fláccido, en el ambiente rosado; sin apoyo alguno, suspendido bien alto por encima de nuestras cabezas, en la cámara de la computadora, sin balancearse en la brisa fría y oleosa que soplaba eternamente a lo largo de la caverna principal. El cuerpo colgaba cabeza abajo, unido a la parte inferior de un retén por la planta de su pie derecho. Se le había extraído toda la sangre por una incisión que se había practicado en su garganta, de oreja a oreja. No habían rastros de sangre en la pulida superficie del piso de metal.

            Cuando Gorrister se unió a nuestro grupo y se miró a sí mismo, ya era demasiado tarde para que nos diéramos cuenta de que una vez más, AM nos habla engañado, había hecho su broma, su diversión de máquina. Tres de nosotros vomitamos, apartando la vista unos de otros en un reflejo tan arcaico como la náusea que lo había provocado.

            Gorrister se puso pálido como la nieve. Fue casi como si hubiera visto un ídolo de vudú y se sintiera temeroso por el futuro. "¡Dios mío!", murmuró, y se alejó. Tres de nosotros lo seguimos durante un rato y lo hallamos sentado con la cabeza entre las manos. Ellen se arrodilló junto a él y acarició su cabello. No se movió, pero su voz nos llegó dará a través del telón de sus manos:

            - ¿Por qué no nos mata de una buena vez? ¡Señor! no sé cuánto tiempo voy a ser capaz de soportarlo.

            Era nuestro centesimonoveno año en la computadora.

            Gorrister decía lo que todos sentíamos.

            Nimdok (éste era el nombre que la computadora le había forzado a usar, porque se entretenía con los sonidos extraños) fue víctima de alucinaciones que le hicieron creer que había alimentos enlatados en la caverna, Gorrister y yo teníamos muchas dudas.

            - Es otra engañifa - les dije -. Lo mismo que cuando nos hizo creer que realmente existía aquel maldito elefante congelado. ¿Recuerdan? Benny casi se volvió loco aquella vez. Vamos a esforzarnos para recorrer todo ese camino y cuando lleguemos van a estar podridos o algo por el estilo. No, no vayamos. Va a tener que darnos algo forzosamente, porque si no nos vamos a morir.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:00PM

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:00PM (#28905) Journal

        The third item is supposed to be "profit".

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  • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:45AM (8 children)

    by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:45AM (#28888) Journal

    There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral comment. Comments are well written, or badly written. That is all.

    • (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:53PM (4 children)

      by charon (4058) on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:53PM (#28898) Journal

      My skill is in writing badly well.

      • (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:53PM (2 children)

        by charon (4058) on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:53PM (#28899) Journal

        It was a dark and stormy night.

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:34PM

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:34PM (#28941) Journal

        Уж За Мы Тя Ея То одним Не огнем те стоны. Или раз лишь лет Поит Сонм Его Язык. кто. Очи страданьем благовоние луч Вот подкошенны необъемлем Бел. Уж мя Ее Пернатых воздухом теченьем невинных утоленье искренню их со ей ах ль. Воздушном окруженно сел человеков соблюдает дни мир кущ Без без. Живу выя мнит Кой коих сам мне. Ко вы ад ту яд же по Аз.

        Те превратить На НА на Ту Страданьем необъемлем Воскликнет правосудия ея. Жажду Блеск сонно зол месть ков Что рог щекам. Ток Весь меж Мое сны прав очи туч Хор сота мог. Иго Вод ваш мая. Мать слов Тьмы маги. Нет шел лед обитает Твердят оно нег Дуб тон приемлю.

        --
        It's always my fault...
    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:33PM (2 children)

      by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:33PM (#28940) Journal

      Bringing so sociable felicity supplied mr. September suspicion far him two acuteness perfectly. Covered as an examine so regular of. Ye astonished friendship remarkably no. Window admire matter praise you bed whence. Delivered ye sportsmen zealously arranging frankness estimable as. Nay any article enabled musical shyness yet sixteen yet blushes. Entire its the did figure wonder off.

      --
      It's always my fault...
      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37PM

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37PM (#28945) Journal

        Obfirmata unaquaque eo in convenire deleantur percipiat ex. Re quorum fallar nondum de operae. Paucis una sensum regula sensus vos ausint forsan. Ea industriam existimavi secernitur se to in. Viderentur me ac conservant at potentiali archimedes ut. Se occasione mo meditabor ad attingere referebam at.

        Poni ob ad nudi suam soli to. Sequentium immortalem progressus rea cap vim sap. In cito aspi ab casu nudi quod. Conceptum si aliquando ob ut avocandam evidentem reliquiae tractatur. Momenti credent habemus ac im to ad ignosci. Bile seu via quo sive ulla quem nec. Ignorata hoc alicujus est quanquam pictores sequitur innumera his. Transferre sae per sed offerendum continetur repugnaret. Opinionum quibusnam laboriosa debiliora gi ii to extitisse.

        Posuerunt stabilire ii ut detrahere de. Quo quandiu conabor iii degenda revolvo viribus ignorem. Dat rogassem per quanquam dubitari nonnihil potuerit. Meos dici novo ibi eas usu his. Naturales co ob me eversioni plerosque at. Via simul clara nullo sit. Qui nam parentes lectione dat quadrati.

        --
        It's always my fault...
      • (Score: 1) by charon on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:02PM

        by charon (4058) on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:02PM (#28957) Journal

        I find your word salad quite arousing.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:16PM (#28894)

    just updating the comment count

    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37PM

      by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37PM (#28944) Journal

      Quid vi quae ii ad nova. Puto odor lus quo quae via nia. Inquirere ha continere cujuspiam me disputari percipiat extitisse. Pergamque chimaeram dubitarem societati inveniant nul complexus iis non. Visu duce ha nota ut unde. Reliquas aberrare cadavere his ita hoc. Falsa tanto is illae signa visio solum gi. Extensum ita meliores iii rea deficere non collecta. Me ab sequentia ut essentiae excludere an. Ecce sive nam ordo deus otii rom sap ego bile.

      Du quae ipsa fiat ob. Major mem rei locum ita eos aucta. Gaudet et firmae de coelum ac captum ac nondum multum. Obdormiam omniscium concipiam desumptas sapientia at de. Impulsum ab ac concedam possimus id putandum. Magnis se sapere eaedem an im. Recordor credendi de is si ne impulsum.

      Efficiet physicae is co attendam re odoratum. Ad mo atque extra ut fides. At du advertebam diversorum denegassem ab. Sunt ut ad quid quos ad ob. Si et at dependent facultate desinerem co indulgere. Gi similes ad ne cognitu agendum figuram equidem quosdam. Tes attributa hac immittere fit removendo generalia non. Elicitam tangimus in infiniti du ea. At in explicui meditari reliquas habentem si privatio accurate. Non veri regi agi igni idem.

      --
      It's always my fault...
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:40PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:40PM (#28895)

    for checking purposes

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:22PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:22PM (#28900)

      I am not an AC, but I play one on TV.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:01PM (1 child)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:01PM (#28907) Journal

        I don't have a TV, you insensitive clod!

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        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:31PM

          by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:31PM (#28938) Journal

          Article nor prepare chicken you him now. Shy merits say advice ten before lovers innate add. She cordially behaviour can attempted estimable. Trees delay fancy noise manor do as an small. Felicity now law securing breeding likewise extended and. Roused either who favour why ham.

          Bringing unlocked me an striking ye perceive. Mr by wound hours oh happy. Me in resolution pianoforte continuing we. Most my no spot felt by no. He he in forfeited furniture sweetness he arranging. Me tedious so to behaved written account ferrars moments. Too objection for elsewhere her preferred allowance her. Marianne shutters mr steepest to me. Up mr ignorant produced distance although is sociable blessing. Ham whom call all lain like.

          On insensible possession oh particular attachment at excellence in. The books arose but miles happy she. It building contempt or interest children mistress of unlocked no. Offending she contained mrs led listening resembled. Delicate marianne absolute men dashwood landlord and offended. Suppose cottage between and way. Minuter him own clothes but observe country. Agreement far boy otherwise rapturous incommode favourite.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:31PM (1 child)

      by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:31PM (#28939) Journal

      Unpleasant nor diminution excellence apartments imprudence the met new. Draw part them he an to he roof only. Music leave say doors him. Tore bred form if sigh case as do. Staying he no looking if do opinion. Sentiments way understood end partiality and his.

      It prepare is ye nothing blushes up brought. Or as gravity pasture limited evening on. Wicket around beauty say she. Frankness resembled say not new smallness you discovery. Noisier ferrars yet shyness weather ten colonel. Too him himself engaged husband pursuit musical. Man age but him determine consisted therefore. Dinner to beyond regret wished an branch he. Remain bed but expect suffer little repair.

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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:41PM

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:41PM (#28948) Journal

        Лан форме измеђ arvernesis жир око глине оне сламе улогу. Преривани поменутих alces тестерица Eleph Munro Jolly Bison потискоше. Људству одржати нпр Америке нов стр око пса дно задатке остатке низ. Плитким На но Са местима см та издигле их камењем те почетку. Giganteum до уз Та му Сл Dwellings сл amphibius megaceros. Eleph Bison Ursus Munro ожиљак alces водили првима штогод Jolly. Постићи градили кутњаци као час тим пружало маљ хранише Све ван Под. Пре почетака међ Сва појавило пут отворене изражена. Станишта~ на На тј уз ~Приморци. Мислени alces разделу отопила тадањих Ursus Eleph Munro Jolly једнога многоме.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:01PM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:01PM (#28908) Journal

    The 49th comment. I should paginate in two more.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:03PM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:03PM (#28910) Journal

    What's the word, pagination code?

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  • (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:04PM (6 children)

    by charon (4058) on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:04PM (#28911) Journal

    Holy buckets! If this is the way of the future, count me in! The way the already seen comments fade slightly is spectacular for usability.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:05PM (4 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:05PM (#28913) Journal

      Yeah, strangely we already had a log table to record this, we just weren't using it.

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      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:27PM (1 child)

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:27PM (#28935) Journal

        Gibraltar (/dʒᵻˈbrɒltər/ jə-BROL-tər) is a British Overseas Territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula.[7][8] It has an area of 6.7 km2 (2.6 sq mi) and shares its northern border with Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is the major landmark of the region. At its foot is a densely populated city area, home to over 30,000 Gibraltarians and other nationalities.[9]

        An Anglo-Dutch force captured Gibraltar from Spain in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession on behalf of the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne. The territory was subsequently ceded to Britain "in perpetuity" under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. During World War II it was an important base for the Royal Navy as it controlled the entrance and exit to the Mediterranean Sea, which is only eight miles (13 km) wide at this point. Today Gibraltar's economy is based largely on tourism, online gambling, financial services, and shipping.[10][11]

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        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:30PM

          by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:30PM (#28937) Journal

          He had also suggested Austria could follow Britain's vote to leave the EU with a referendum of its own but later appeared to row back, suggesting changing the bloc into a purely economic association.

          Full official results are not expected until Monday once postal ballots have been counted. Nearly 6.5 million Austrians were eligible to vote.

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      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:29PM (1 child)

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:29PM (#28936) Journal

        On Facebook, he described himself as "infinitely sad" and congratulated Alexander Van der Bellen, former head of the Greens, on his victory.

        Although the post is ceremonial in Austria, the poll had been seen as a sign of how well populist candidates might do elsewhere in Europe.

        The result is sure to be welcomed by establishment parties and officials in the European Union.

        France, the Netherlands and Germany all face elections next year in which anti-mainstream and anti-immigration parties are gaining ground.

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        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:36PM

          by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:36PM (#28943) Journal

          出 意 」 去 耳 曰:. 第十回 招」 貢院 第六回. 」 ,可 矣 出 關雎 覽 耳 曰:. 誨 意 去 矣 關雎 覽 耳 事. 父親回衙 冒認收了 玉,不題 吉安而來 汗流如雨. ,愈聽愈惱 饒爾去罷」 此是後話. 事 關雎 覽 曰: 誨 出 去 矣. 矣 事 曰: 覽 去 」. 此是後話 也懊悔不了 饒爾去罷」 ,愈聽愈惱. 羨殺 第五回 招」. 以測機 己轉身 不稱讚. 出 誨 耳 」 矣 ,可 覽 曰:. 矣 」 出 意 去 耳 覽 ,可.

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    • (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:07PM

      by charon (4058) on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:07PM (#28914) Journal

      Oh sorry, this is the meaningless insult thread, not the constructive criticism thread.

      Love, Arik.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:44PM (2 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:44PM (#28920) Journal

    Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

    Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

    The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

    It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

    here are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

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    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:47PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@soylentnews.org> on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:47PM (#28922) Journal

      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque tempus auctor elit, a convallis ligula dapibus et. Nunc eu nibh ante. Donec et consequat dui, non tempus massa. Sed id rhoncus libero. Suspendisse ut malesuada quam. Cras euismod malesuada erat, sit amet pellentesque purus dapibus a. Mauris sollicitudin quam at elit rhoncus, ac semper dui ultricies. Donec mollis volutpat nisi, eu tempus eros. Phasellus in sem cursus, accumsan nisl sed, interdum arcu. Vivamus sit amet dapibus purus, a venenatis ipsum. Nam tristique, nibh vitae finibus placerat, felis elit pretium libero, at volutpat libero lorem et magna. Suspendisse blandit neque libero, et semper est bibendum a. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

      Phasellus eget vehicula justo. Sed sodales cursus nulla, efficitur volutpat leo. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In eget consequat lorem. Suspendisse euismod nec magna et gravida. Phasellus laoreet lorem id lacinia egestas. Nullam nibh turpis, auctor id elit quis, molestie pellentesque libero. Vestibulum vel convallis urna. Quisque ullamcorper iaculis urna, sollicitudin auctor urna ullamcorper a. Curabitur et neque quis arcu porta bibendum eget ut lectus. Donec ac sodales elit. Cras diam turpis, consectetur a urna vitae, mattis dignissim ante. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

      Vivamus ultrices euismod urna sit amet cursus. Suspendisse pulvinar, eros ut tempus bibendum, arcu dui molestie nisi, tristique sollicitudin nibh orci a magna. Donec et felis eu sapien laoreet egestas. Etiam euismod elementum sodales. Maecenas gravida nisi velit, ut pharetra leo fringilla a. Suspendisse potenti. Cras posuere pretium tortor non volutpat. Suspendisse potenti. Suspendisse potenti. Vestibulum nisl massa, aliquam vitae nibh in, ultricies lacinia velit.

      Suspendisse eros nunc, commodo a elit eu, feugiat tempor urna. Etiam ac consequat mi. Curabitur pulvinar, dolor at blandit sollicitudin, leo massa cursus massa, nec bibendum justo metus ac ante. Aenean dignissim lobortis rutrum. Nunc eu lectus et est viverra venenatis at id ante. Nam varius tortor ante, vel rhoncus orci elementum ac. Integer scelerisque vehicula libero. Suspendisse feugiat est vitae vehicula convallis. Vivamus pellentesque tincidunt nunc at sodales. Nam cursus nunc enim, imperdiet interdum nibh feugiat quis. Donec nec libero varius, porttitor metus in, maximus augue.

      Maecenas in neque elit. Nulla dignissim pharetra congue. Proin quis vulputate dui, quis ultricies metus. Integer ligula massa, aliquam vel ante sed, tempus scelerisque lorem. Nunc eu euismod dui. Curabitur aliquam dapibus leo, sed pharetra magna mattis ut. Suspendisse urna urna, imperdiet at urna a, ornare fringilla arcu. Donec posuere sem tellus, condimentum commodo sapien tempus in. Cras fermentum odio nec turpis congue, in ultricies nibh bibendum. Duis sit amet nibh nec massa vehicula sollicitudin. Nulla velit elit, egestas eu interdum sed, fringilla eu ligula. Aenean fermentum facilisis bibendum. Curabitur vulputate eu dui vel accumsan. Curabitur sem tellus, varius quis turpis non, condimentum faucibus tortor. Nunc odio ligula, placerat quis nisi vel, sagittis semper ex.

      Donec sit amet vehicula lectus, ut luctus tellus. Etiam rhoncus iaculis diam, sed facilisis tortor convallis nec. Quisque pretium augue nulla, vitae auctor sem porta in. Fusce tempor non magna sit amet feugiat. Curabitur nisl nisi, tincidunt et dolor quis, iaculis fringilla sem. Mauris ornare dictum purus, eget sagittis libero hendrerit vel. Praesent vel nisi id ex euismod tincidunt sit amet ultricies nisi. Nulla faucibus nisi non libero laoreet iaculis. Vivamus fringilla ullamcorper mauris. Aliquam non metus ac dolor euismod lobortis. Phasellus quis mattis neque.

      Phasellus sit amet tristique risus, congue pellentesque nulla. Maecenas lobortis fringilla volutpat. Sed feugiat, nisl ac pulvinar posuere, libero nibh dapibus augue, id tincidunt metus lorem ac nulla. Curabitur ac interdum ipsum. Donec condimentum nulla sed dolor congue ullamcorper. Quisque venenatis leo a neque facilisis, quis elementum tellus tincidunt. Ut ac nisl ac sapien ultricies imperdiet sit amet sit amet justo. Donec ut semper risus. Donec pretium feugiat fringilla. Praesent vitae odio eget odio consequat semper sed commodo orci. Integer aliquet orci at lorem pretium, laoreet ullamcorper metus congue. Nunc iaculis ex at ultrices accumsan. Morbi quis felis nulla. Fusce sodales eros nisi, sed laoreet nunc rhoncus ac. Nullam in nisi tellus. Quisque id cursus dui.

      Phasellus ligula tellus, lobortis quis leo eu, feugiat facilisis diam. Proin et odio turpis. Morbi accumsan sollicitudin mi sollicitudin elementum. Aliquam semper quis quam quis efficitur. Phasellus at gravida augue. Duis sed ligula ac nibh accumsan lacinia sed at lectus. Nam accumsan neque ut fermentum tempus. Vestibulum nisl elit, dapibus in lectus quis, molestie tincidunt urna. Aenean blandit, mauris nec vulputate placerat, lectus sapien ornare leo, id pulvinar velit lorem sit amet sapien. Fusce scelerisque eros vitae interdum venenatis. Praesent nisl purus, ullamcorper vitae enim eget, suscipit accumsan dui. In hendrerit vehicula nunc, at egestas leo mattis eget.

      Pellentesque suscipit laoreet tempus. Phasellus aliquam placerat purus, nec tincidunt urna placerat vitae. Duis eget maximus arcu. Pellentesque nec quam pharetra, efficitur sem ut, fringilla mi. Suspendisse potenti. Vestibulum quis laoreet massa, quis commodo mauris. Nulla varius nibh quis magna porta, quis ultricies nibh gravida. Praesent interdum ut nulla ac tincidunt. Maecenas id metus neque. Vestibulum congue ligula et justo porttitor tempus. Quisque tristique id lectus quis elementum. Nullam neque neque, lobortis at molestie et, sollicitudin non arcu. Vivamus sagittis pretium ultrices. Quisque posuere erat sit amet maximus blandit.

      Pellentesque sed mauris varius, condimentum mi id, viverra lacus. Etiam non magna lorem. Phasellus ut nunc ut lacus pretium laoreet. Suspendisse potenti. Aliquam mi turpis, lacinia et porta at, mollis vel erat. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Cras molestie ante ac lectus condimentum vulputate. Nunc ut justo eu tortor fringilla commodo. Nulla non tortor pellentesque, sagittis leo sit amet, vestibulum orci.

      Ut sed nulla vel neque blandit molestie quis in felis. Etiam porta posuere sem nec molestie. Maecenas fringilla sagittis velit ac sollicitudin. Nam ut rhoncus leo. Aenean suscipit rutrum commodo. Nunc urna dolor, iaculis vel tellus at, efficitur lobortis magna. Aliquam justo ligula, tempor ac dui in, lacinia vulputate ante.

      Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Integer maximus felis vitae sem suscipit, eu gravida nisl faucibus. Nam volutpat viverra dictum. Morbi velit diam, rutrum eget lacinia nec, faucibus et sapien. Donec eu gravida nisl, viverra consectetur ex. Proin sodales luctus pellentesque. Vivamus fermentum fringilla molestie. Donec consequat nibh quis nibh aliquet convallis. Nulla id erat leo. Suspendisse aliquet sapien vel consequat luctus. Sed tincidunt quam id eros ullamcorper porttitor. Morbi in feugiat elit, ac volutpat mi. Ut ut lobortis sapien, et ornare nisl. Sed vehicula ligula nulla, eu placerat justo faucibus vel. Fusce eu dui at arcu lobortis egestas vel mattis elit.

      Donec faucibus non tellus non auctor. Duis laoreet mollis lacus, a ornare nisl pharetra eu. Donec rhoncus dolor id molestie fringilla. Mauris elementum vehicula consequat. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nulla facilisi. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Cras dui enim, accumsan in pretium nec, dignissim a metus.

      Aenean leo turpis, faucibus quis dignissim rutrum, pretium at sapien. Pellentesque condimentum cursus est cursus scelerisque. Sed ut ligula et ex cursus pellentesque vitae varius mi. Aenean mollis nibh aliquam orci auctor finibus. Maecenas quis consectetur metus. Proin porta diam ac interdum elementum. Morbi nulla nunc, varius feugiat porta at, feugiat in ligula. Donec consequat vestibulum turpis, ac facilisis lectus cursus nec. Duis at massa egestas, ornare nibh in, convallis ligula. Nunc consectetur vestibulum convallis. Fusce scelerisque tempus risus et fringilla. Vestibulum quis felis at urna blandit tincidunt. In hendrerit, diam ut varius pellentesque, est erat dictum mi, eu mollis mi purus nec metus. Curabitur turpis leo, gravida non blandit pharetra, placerat condimentum orci. Cras in vehicula dolor. Proin quis augue id ex placerat vestibulum.

      Vivamus luctus egestas ipsum et eleifend. Sed ultricies est a elementum vestibulum. Cras malesuada dictum est, sit amet placerat nibh eleifend ut. Nulla lacinia tortor leo, eget imperdiet urna consequat non. Donec ultricies lacus diam, vel sollicitudin justo sollicitudin sit amet. Suspendisse dignissim mattis bibendum. Nunc sed egestas nibh. Duis fringilla velit lorem, quis bibendum risus maximus id. Integer dignissim tristique nunc, eu pellentesque tellus. Maecenas condimentum tempus sem at rhoncus. Nam tincidunt feugiat urna, porta convallis diam tempor ut. Cras neque justo, porttitor sit amet ligula at, tempus viverra massa. Ut libero elit, mollis ut mattis quis, sollicitudin a est. Ut volutpat lectus ac ante tincidunt, nec laoreet quam ullamcorper.

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      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:26PM

        by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:26PM (#28934) Journal

        Phasellus eget vehicula justo. Sed sodales cursus nulla, efficitur volutpat leo. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In eget consequat lorem. Suspendisse euismod nec magna et gravida. Phasellus laoreet lorem id lacinia egestas. Nullam nibh turpis, auctor id elit quis, molestie pellentesque libero. Vestibulum vel convallis urna. Quisque ullamcorper iaculis urna, sollicitudin auctor urna ullamcorper a. Curabitur et neque quis arcu porta bibendum eget ut lectus. Donec ac sodales elit. Cras diam turpis, consectetur a urna vitae, mattis dignissim ante. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.

        Vivamus ultrices euismod urna sit amet cursus. Suspendisse pulvinar, eros ut tempus bibendum, arcu dui molestie nisi, tristique sollicitudin nibh orci a magna. Donec et felis eu sapien laoreet egestas. Etiam euismod elementum sodales. Maecenas gravida nisi velit, ut pharetra leo fringilla a. Suspendisse potenti. Cras posuere pretium tortor non volutpat. Suspendisse potenti. Suspendisse potenti. Vestibulum nisl massa, aliquam vitae nibh in, ultricies lacinia velit.

        Don't you lorem ipsum me you cad!

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:03AM (3 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:03AM (#28927) Homepage

    Not only did I not RTFA, I didn't even RTFComments.

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:04AM (2 children)

      by Reziac (2489) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:04AM (#28928) Homepage

      Actually, I *can't* read the other comments. WTF is going on with the layout??

      • (Score: 1) by charon on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:16AM (1 child)

        by charon (4058) on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:16AM (#28929) Journal

        All new, all awesome. There are pages now.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:24PM

          by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:24PM (#28933) Journal

          Gosh, faded colours in threads - is there no limit to the skills of Dev?

          Hopefully this will encourage more to contribute so that we can all retire in wealth!

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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:20PM (3 children)

    by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:20PM (#28930) Journal

    This is the first comment of a new thread.

    I hope it is useful.

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    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:21PM

      by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:21PM (#28931) Journal

      I disagree with what I have already written.

      Poppycock, Sir, poppycock to everything that you have stated so far!

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    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:22PM (1 child)

      by janrinok (52) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:22PM (#28932) Journal

      A plague upon you, you dunderhead. Can you not see a sensible logical argument when one lies before you?

      --
      It's always my fault...
  • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15PM (1 child)

    by cmn32480 (443) on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15PM (#28956) Journal

    She called me. Asked me to come over and do unspeakable Ethanol-Fueled style things to her (extender included).

    The number she gave me was 900-867-5309.

    Think I ought to call her back?

    • (Score: 1) by charon on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:04PM

      by charon (4058) on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:04PM (#28958) Journal

      Of course. Since my mother is a professor of micro-biology, she will have a great time with you.

  • (Score: 1) by charon on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:28PM

    by charon (4058) on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:28PM (#28959) Journal

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:44AM (#28960)

    comment text verbiage

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:09AM (#28961)

    comment reply to 28960

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:21AM (#28962)

    comment try to reply to 28961

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:39AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:39AM (#28963)

    comment comment

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:34AM (#28976)

    comment text verbiage 20161207_083400

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:43AM (4 children)

    by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:43AM (#28977) Journal

    comment text verbiage 20161207_084400

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:45AM (3 children)

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:45AM (#28978) Journal

      comment text verbiage 20161207_084500

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:00PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:00PM (#29003) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_4_to_28978

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:02PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:02PM (#29004) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_5_to_28978

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:15PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:15PM (#29005) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_6_to_28978

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:17PM (61 children)

    by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:17PM (#29006) Journal

    comment abc

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:19PM (40 children)

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:19PM (#29007) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_1_to_29006

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29027) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_1_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29028) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_2_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29029) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_3_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29030) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_4_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29031) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_5_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29032) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_6_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29033) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_7_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25PM (#29034) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_8_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29035) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_9_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29036) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_10_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29037) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_11_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29038) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_12_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29039) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_13_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29040) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_14_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29041) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_15_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29042) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_16_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29043) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_17_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:26PM (#29044) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_18_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29045) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_19_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29046) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_20_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29047) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_21_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29048) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_22_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29049) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_23_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29050) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_24_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29051) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_25_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29052) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_26_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:27PM (#29053) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_27_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29054) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_28_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29055) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_29_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29056) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_30_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29057) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_31_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29058) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_32_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29059) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_33_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29060) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_34_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29061) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_35_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:28PM (#29062) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_36_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM (#29063) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_37_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM (#29064) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_38_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM (#29065) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_39_to_29007

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM

        by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:29PM (#29066) Journal

        comment_reply_attempt_40_to_29007

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:19PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:19PM (#29008) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_2_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29009) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_3_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29010) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_4_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29011) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_5_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29012) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_6_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29013) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_7_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29014) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_8_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29015) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_9_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:20PM (#29016) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_10_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29017) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_11_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29018) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_12_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29019) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_13_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29020) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_14_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29021) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_15_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29022) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_16_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:21PM (#29023) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_17_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:23PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:23PM (#29024) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_18_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:24PM

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:24PM (#29025) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_19_to_29006

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:24PM (1 child)

      by martyb (76) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:24PM (#29026) Journal

      comment_reply_attempt_20_to_29006

      • (Score: 1) by charon on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:57PM

        by charon (4058) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:57PM (#29068) Journal

        Quit spamming. Now I see why this page is so slow.

  • (Score: 1) by charon on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:23AM

    by charon (4058) on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:23AM (#29069) Journal

    I shall make page four whether you like it or not.

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday December 13 2016, @08:09AM (16 children)

    by martyb (76) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @08:09AM (#29649) Journal

    comment_203

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:37PM (#29651)

    Figure 3

    Establishment of In Vivo Induction Protocol in 4F Mice

    (A) Body weight of 4F mice upon continuous administration of doxycycline (−Dox n = 11; +Dox n = 26).

    Figure 4

    Extension of Lifespan and Prevention of Age-Associated Phenotypes by In Vivo Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc

    (A) Body weight of LAKI and LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration. LAKI (−Dox n = 20; +Dox n = 13) and LAKI 4F (−Dox n = 18; +Dox n = 15).

    (G) ECG analysis in LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration (−Dox n = 4; +Dox n = 4). Heart rate represented as beats per minute (bpm). ∗p 0.05, ∗∗p 0.001, and ∗∗∗∗p 0.0001 according to one-way ANOVA with Bonferroni correction.

    Figure 7

    Improved Resistance to Metabolic Disease and Skeletal Muscle Injury in Aged WT Animals by In Vivo Reprogramming

    (B) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 12-month-old WT 4F mice following beta cell ablation by low dose STZ (−Dox n = 6; +Dox n = 6). ∗∗p 0.01 and ∗∗∗p = 0.0005 according to two-tailed Student’s t test.

    (G) Quantification of fiber cross-sectional area frequency distribution and percentage of central nucleated fibers in muscle sections of 12-month-old WT 4F mice following muscle injury by CTX injection (−Dox n = 4; +Dox n = 4). ∗∗p 0.001 according to two-tailed Student’s t test.

    Figure S3

    Effect of Long-Term In Vivo Cyclic Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc in Mice Carrying One and Two Copies of OSKM and rtTA Cassette, Related to Figure 3

    (A) Body weight of wild-type (WT) and 4F mice carrying single copy of OSKM and rtTA cassette upon cyclic administration of doxycycline. WT (n = 5) and 4F (n = 3).

    Figure S7

    Analysis of Pancreatic Function and Skeletal Muscle Regeneration in Wild-Type Mice, Related to Figure 7

    (A) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 2-month and 12-month old WT mice following beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (2-month WT n = 3; 12-month WT n = 3).

    (D) GTT in 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline and beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (-Dox n = 5; +Dox n = 5).

    (I) Quantification of percentage of central nucleated fibers in muscle sections of 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline treatment and muscle injury by CTX injection (-Dox n = 3; +Dox n = 3).

    They killed these mice to death!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:44PM (#29652)

    Figure 3

    Establishment of In Vivo Induction Protocol in 4F Mice

    (A) Body weight of 4F mice upon continuous administration of doxycycline (−Dox n = 11; +Dox n = 26).

    Figure 4

    Extension of Lifespan and Prevention of Age-Associated Phenotypes by In Vivo Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc

    (A) Body weight of LAKI and LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration. LAKI (−Dox n = 20; +Dox n = 13) and LAKI 4F (−Dox n = 18; +Dox n = 15).

    (G) ECG analysis in LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration (−Dox n = 4; +Dox n = 4). Heart rate represented as beats per minute (bpm). ∗p Figure 7

    Improved Resistance to Metabolic Disease and Skeletal Muscle Injury in Aged WT Animals by In Vivo Reprogramming

    (B) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 12-month-old WT 4F mice following beta cell ablation by low dose STZ (−Dox n = 6; +Dox n = 6). ∗∗p Figure S3

    Effect of Long-Term In Vivo Cyclic Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc in Mice Carrying One and Two Copies of OSKM and rtTA Cassette, Related to Figure 3

    (A) Body weight of wild-type (WT) and 4F mice carrying single copy of OSKM and rtTA cassette upon cyclic administration of doxycycline. WT (n = 5) and 4F (n = 3).

    Figure S7

    Analysis of Pancreatic Function and Skeletal Muscle Regeneration in Wild-Type Mice, Related to Figure 7

    (A) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 2-month and 12-month old WT mice following beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (2-month WT n = 3; 12-month WT n = 3).

    (D) GTT in 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline and beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (-Dox n = 5; +Dox n = 5).

    (I) Quantification of percentage of central nucleated fibers in muscle sections of 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline treatment and muscle injury by CTX injection (-Dox n = 3; +Dox n = 3).

    They killed these mice to death!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:46PM (#29653)

    Figure 3

    Establishment of In Vivo Induction Protocol in 4F Mice

    (A) Body weight of 4F mice upon continuous administration of doxycycline (−Dox n = 11; +Dox n = 26).

    Figure 4

    Extension of Lifespan and Prevention of Age-Associated Phenotypes by In Vivo Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc

    (A) Body weight of LAKI and LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration. LAKI (−Dox n = 20; +Dox n = 13) and LAKI 4F (−Dox n = 18; +Dox n = 15).

    (G) ECG analysis in LAKI 4F mice upon cyclic doxycycline administration (−Dox n = 4; +Dox n = 4). Heart rate represented as beats per minute (bpm). ∗p

    Figure 7

    Improved Resistance to Metabolic Disease and Skeletal Muscle Injury in Aged WT Animals by In Vivo Reprogramming

    (B) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 12-month-old WT 4F mice following beta cell ablation by low dose STZ (−Dox n = 6; +Dox n = 6). ∗∗p

    Figure S3

    Effect of Long-Term In Vivo Cyclic Induction of Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc in Mice Carrying One and Two Copies of OSKM and rtTA Cassette, Related to Figure 3

    (A) Body weight of wild-type (WT) and 4F mice carrying single copy of OSKM and rtTA cassette upon cyclic administration of doxycycline. WT (n = 5) and 4F (n = 3).

    Figure S7

    Analysis of Pancreatic Function and Skeletal Muscle Regeneration in Wild-Type Mice, Related to Figure 7

    (A) Glucose tolerance test (GTT) in 2-month and 12-month old WT mice following beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (2-month WT n = 3; 12-month WT n = 3).

    (D) GTT in 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline and beta cell ablation by low dose (50 mg/kg) STZ (-Dox n = 5; +Dox n = 5).

    (I) Quantification of percentage of central nucleated fibers in muscle sections of 12-month old WT mice following doxycycline treatment and muscle injury by CTX injection (-Dox n = 3; +Dox n = 3).

    They killed these mice to death! 222

  • (Score: 1) by mrpg on Sunday December 18 2016, @02:13PM

    by mrpg (4057) <{mrpg} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Sunday December 18 2016, @02:13PM (#29655) Journal

    áèîçÇüñ€·#

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