Dev.SN

Hang Many Comments Here

posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 02 2016, @09:24PM   
from the fill-er-up dept.

This story needs over 200 comments. Preferably in a dozen or so threads. Get to work. A link here.

• Lorem #1 - 61588 chars Lorem #1 - 61588 chars (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

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In ante lacus, laoreet maximus purus non, accumsan iaculis felis. Phasellus congue metus vel sapien hendrerit semper. Nunc commodo purus sem, vitae vulputate sem gravida et. Aenean a nulla ex. Aliquam interdum commodo justo, a vestibulum erat egestas quis. Ut porttitor congue diam eu placerat. Vivamus ut iaculis sapien. Suspendisse eu dui sit amet ipsum tristique dictum. Integer ultricies nisl at ex lacinia, ut vehicula ipsum porta. Curabitur quis mi non elit aliquet facilisis. Nullam ut massa quis risus maximus auctor vel et augue. Quisque sodales turpis ex, ut fringilla dui molestie eu. Etiam at ultrices erat. Phasellus ac massa vel sem feugiat mollis non et mauris. Praesent tempor venenatis eros, vitae tincidunt tellus. Phasellus condimentum est tincidunt varius imperdiet.

  Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In feugiat nisi nisl, nec faucibus sem faucibus id. Duis eget ligula interdum, tincidunt lorem sed, semper sem. Mauris erat risus, cursus eu justo sed, vestibulum blandit metus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum pellentesque metus sem, ut dapibus ante lobortis vel. Donec sed feugiat nisl. In ut neque venenatis, dignissim turpis sit amet, elementum leo. Integer non libero elementum, fringilla mauris ac, venenatis tortor. Praesent a vulputate velit, eu posuere purus. Morbi odio sem, placerat non pharetra sit amet, lobortis sit amet mi. Mauris id luctus ex. Proin sed lobortis orci, ac lobortis massa. Sed et ante ut metus luctus fringilla sed nec elit.

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

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

  Praesent scelerisque tristique tellus sit amet imperdiet. Ut vitae dolor ac sapien tincidunt posuere cursus et nulla. Phasellus sit amet bibendum velit, id bibendum nisi. Nam fringilla dolor eget odio aliquet, aliquet porta lacus dictum. Suspendisse placerat, libero a cursus posuere, enim ligula lacinia mi, eget cursus justo eros sed urna. Aenean eros turpis, consectetur et nulla vitae, condimentum finibus nibh. In maximus nulla iaculis purus commodo bibendum. Donec varius facilisis arcu, ut ullamcorper ex ultrices eu. Quisque sed aliquam quam. Aliquam gravida cursus eleifend. Sed enim nisl, pretium ut posuere id, tristique sed ante. Donec dictum risus nec nunc feugiat viverra. Phasellus id ex a quam tempus condimentum. Donec vehicula convallis facilisis.

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

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

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

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

  Curabitur hendrerit odio sed massa feugiat, eu porta ipsum rutrum. Nullam ullamcorper elit sed risus sagittis ornare vel et orci. Phasellus viverra finibus ultrices. Curabitur vulputate, ex id placerat porta, arcu lorem ultricies turpis, ac suscipit mauris leo eget sapien. Donec sed malesuada nisi, sit amet posuere risus. Nulla a ullamcorper ligula. Suspendisse sed fringilla ex. Donec nec massa elementum neque faucibus dapibus. Aenean dignissim ullamcorper turpis vel consequat. Mauris malesuada lacus ante, facilisis ullamcorper nisl consectetur elementum. Cras eget malesuada sapien, at tincidunt nibh. Aliquam nec dolor a dolor porttitor commodo ac a massa. Morbi pulvinar augue at erat condimentum, efficitur consectetur mi commodo.

  Ut varius eget massa sagittis sollicitudin. Etiam ut tellus sodales, placerat nulla vel, egestas mauris. Praesent ante arcu, malesuada vel placerat nec, tempor quis lectus. Mauris vel metus vitae est fermentum commodo. Nunc suscipit porta sodales. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Vivamus iaculis et leo scelerisque condimentum. Nulla ultricies erat ligula, in laoreet orci fermentum a. Aliquam vitae nisi scelerisque, porttitor sem in, dictum mi.

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

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

  Donec eu felis urna. Vestibulum quis lacinia sem. Pellentesque quis nulla erat. Ut ut nibh ac arcu tempor ultricies id et metus. Nullam dictum a diam eget accumsan. Pellentesque feugiat lacus non euismod eleifend. Donec tortor tortor, tincidunt a gravida vel, tempor et est. Nam nulla est, tristique non lacus sit amet, convallis malesuada nisl.

  Mauris libero ipsum, gravida et elementum non, aliquam quis lorem. Aenean ac tempus risus, vitae sodales ante. Curabitur congue tellus vitae elementum sollicitudin. Nam enim libero, vestibulum vel arcu sed, feugiat dignissim augue. Nullam lacinia sit amet neque id bibendum. Quisque non lorem diam. Curabitur efficitur erat id congue cursus. Aliquam sollicitudin, dolor eget sodales malesuada, quam mauris eleifend justo, vel tempor elit neque ut libero. Praesent ex sapien, consectetur id neque vel, pharetra laoreet massa. Aliquam elit neque, efficitur interdum odio quis, pulvinar ultrices lectus. Mauris euismod, orci at eleifend dapibus, mauris urna interdum odio, eu malesuada purus tellus ac ex. Integer facilisis urna tortor, sit amet eleifend dolor posuere sed. Aliquam malesuada, dui in lobortis tempus, purus ligula dictum lorem, ac tempus erat lacus vitae purus.

  Pellentesque egestas, tortor non eleifend varius, quam sapien tincidunt lectus, vel consectetur orci ligula in risus. Vestibulum quis erat placerat, semper lorem a, vulputate turpis. Aenean erat justo, sollicitudin id maximus at, gravida non magna. Curabitur eu justo id diam laoreet faucibus ut nec neque. Maecenas auctor augue id libero ornare, nec tempus urna mattis. Sed ut congue est. Curabitur lobortis, diam id tempus accumsan, lacus magna sodales arcu, at bibendum mauris mauris mollis sem. Sed consequat neque sit amet ornare finibus. Curabitur nec ipsum nec est vestibulum mollis. Vestibulum ut orci feugiat, maximus quam non, luctus metus. Aliquam erat volutpat. Duis eu dui ut lacus vestibulum bibendum vel et turpis. Curabitur nec lacus egestas, convallis tellus non, ornare lacus.

  Aliquam tincidunt dolor vel ipsum tempor, eget dictum tortor imperdiet. Praesent sed quam eros. Sed convallis odio sed tempus tincidunt. Ut hendrerit eu lectus eu imperdiet. Curabitur vitae enim lacinia, lobortis purus vitae, consequat mauris. Morbi fermentum erat eu tristique porta. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Integer mollis nulla ut ultrices pulvinar. Integer a ligula nisl. Praesent non tincidunt nibh, sed tincidunt nisi. Donec dignissim dictum ante non molestie. Pellentesque at porta massa, nec mattis nibh.

  Nunc aliquet lacus ut ipsum ultricies dignissim. Nam ac lorem non ante molestie vulputate a et mi. Morbi pretium nibh non dolor vestibulum, ac ornare ligula ultricies. Sed aliquet lacus purus. Donec luctus neque id nunc tincidunt, sed commodo enim malesuada. Donec at metus in odio finibus tempus. Phasellus at lacinia leo. Nunc pharetra eu purus id sollicitudin. Maecenas eu lectus a leo porttitor pellentesque non sed metus. Nullam in odio a augue luctus mattis. Quisque euismod est in ipsum laoreet, in bibendum magna scelerisque. Suspendisse nec mattis nisi, vel blandit nisi. Duis quis tempus nisi, at malesuada elit. Curabitur sodales dapibus fringilla. Fusce et aliquam libero, sed pulvinar erat.

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

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

  In tempus neque ac nulla aliquet maximus in sed urna. Curabitur fermentum, lorem et interdum convallis, enim erat laoreet diam, id venenatis nulla nulla id nisl. Aliquam tempor congue massa tincidunt gravida. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In interdum et elit eget molestie. Morbi eget ex ac sapien malesuada fringilla. Vestibulum vulputate in odio aliquam imperdiet. Aenean aliquet fermentum ligula, sit amet tincidunt ipsum tempus a.

  Proin convallis dolor ut turpis ultricies, vel iaculis mi semper. Donec non leo dolor. Nunc et pulvinar justo. Ut cursus euismod quam, porta facilisis metus venenatis vitae. Sed eu varius lectus. In odio nulla, blandit ut diam vel, bibendum eleifend sem. Pellentesque fermentum nisl in vehicula luctus. Duis et aliquam mi, ut dictum arcu. Aliquam erat volutpat. Pellentesque vel porta urna, nec vehicula lectus. Vivamus congue turpis mauris, ut pellentesque massa facilisis sed. Duis ex ligula, porta vel diam vel, condimentum tempor neque. Aliquam erat volutpat. Praesent gravida odio nibh, vitae dapibus dolor maximus in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• This means war! -- The War of the Worlds This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (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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  Parent

  • Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (Score: 1) by mrpg on Monday December 05 2016, @08:31PM

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

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

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

    Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Author: Oscar Wilde

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

    Language: English

    Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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

    Produced by Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.

    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    by
    Oscar Wilde

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

    THE PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (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.

    Parent

    • Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:08AM

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

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

      poppycock Sir, a plague upon your whores!

      --
      It's always my fault...

      Parent

    • Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:09AM (1 child)

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

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

      --
      It's always my fault...

      Parent

      • Re:This means war! -- The War of the Worlds (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:10AM

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

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

        --
        It's always my fault...

        Parent