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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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  • (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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          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.

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          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
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              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

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              *** 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!

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                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.

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                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.

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                  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.

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            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.

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              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.

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                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.

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                      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.

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          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.

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            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.

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        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.

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                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.

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                  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.

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                    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

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                      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.

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                        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.

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    Team Leader for SN Development Dev Server [soylentnews.org]