The War Of The Worlds ~
By H.G. Wells
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 prac-
ticable 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 hap-
pening 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 un-
buried. 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 mush-
rooms 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 extraor-
dinary 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
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