The war of the worlds
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.