The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells [little red riding hood ebook free .txt] 📗

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.

 

All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting

destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only

seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine

the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.

 

Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the

splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear

sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs

caught the light and glared with a white intensity.

 

Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;

westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the

Martians, the green waves of Regent’s Park, the Langham Hotel, the

dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant

mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the

sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far

away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal

Palace glittered like two silver rods. The dome