The war of the worlds
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have fancied it had been withdrawn.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.
V.
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!
VI.
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