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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.

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