第 18 页

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