第 17 页

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