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.
II.
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.
III.
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, anæmic, 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.
IV.
THE DEATH OF THE CURATE.
It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the last
time, and presently found myself alone. Instead of keeping close to me
and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone back into the
scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought. I went back quickly and
quietly into the scullery. In the darkness I heard the curate drinking.
I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a bottle of burgundy.
For a few minutes there was a tussle. The bottle struck the floor and
broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood panting and threatening each
other. In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and told
him of my determination to begin a discipline. I divided the food in
the pantry, into rations to last us ten days. I would not let him eat
any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to get at
the food. I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake. All day and
all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and he weeping and
complaining of his immediate hunger. It was, I know, a night and a day,
but to me it seemed—it seems now—an interminable length of time.
And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open conflict. For
two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling contests. There
were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times when I cajoled and
persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him with the last bottle of
burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which I could get water.
But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond reason. He
would neither desist from his attacks on the food nor from his noisy
babbling to himself. The rudimentary precautions to keep our
imprisonment endurable he would not observe. Slowly I began to realise
the complete overthrow of his intelligence, to perceive that my sole
companion in this close and sickly darkness was a man insane.
From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own mind wandered
at times. I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I slept. It sounds
paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness and insanity
of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man.
On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and
nothing I could do would moderate his speech.
“It is just, O God!” he would say, over and over again. “It is just. On
me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen
short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust,
and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly—my God, what
folly!—when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called
upon them to repent—repent! . . . Oppressors of the poor and needy! . .
. The wine press of God!”
Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I withheld from
him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening. He began to raise
his voice—I prayed him not to. He perceived a hold on me—he threatened
he would shout and bring the Martians upon us. For a time that scared
me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of escape beyond
estimating. I defied him, although I felt no assurance that he might
not do this thing. But that day, at any rate, he did not. He talked
with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part of the eighth
and ninth days—threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane
and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God’s service, such
as made me pity him. Then he slept awhile, and began again with renewed
strength, so loudly that I must needs make him desist.
“Be still!” I implored.
He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness near the
copper.
“I have been still too long,” he said, in a tone that must have reached
the pit, “and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this unfaithful
city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of the earth by
reason of the other voices of the trumpet——”
“Shut up!” I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the Martians
should hear us. “For God’s sake——”
“Nay,” shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing likewise
and extending his arms. “Speak! The word of the Lord is upon me!”
In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.
“I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long delayed.”
I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the wall. In a
flash I was after him. I was fierce with fear. Before he was halfway
across the kitchen I had overtaken him. With one last touch of humanity
I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt. He went headlong
forward and lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled over him and stood
panting. He lay still.
Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping
plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall was darkened. I looked
up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming slowly across
the hole. One of its gripping limbs curled amid the debris; another
limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams. I stood
petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the
edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes
of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came
feeling slowly through the hole.
I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the
scullery door. The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more, in the
room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements, this way
and that. For a while I stood fascinated by that slow, fitful advance.
Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the scullery. I
trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright. I opened the door
of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness staring at the
faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening. Had the Martian
seen me? What was it doing now?
Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and then
it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a faint
metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring. Then a
heavy body—I knew too well what—was dragged across the floor of the
kitchen towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the
door and peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright outer
sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine,
scrutinizing the curate’s head. I thought at once that it would infer
my presence from the mark of the blow I had given him.
I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to cover
myself up as much as I could, and as noiselessly as possible in the
darkness, among the firewood and coal therein. Every now and then I
paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its tentacles through
the opening again.
Then the faint metallic jingle returned. I traced it slowly feeling
over the kitchen. Presently I heard it nearer—in the scullery, as I
judged. I thought that its length might be insufficient to reach me. I
prayed copiously. It passed, scraping faintly across the cellar door.
An age of almost intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it
fumbling at the latch! It had found the door! The Martians understood
doors!
It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door
opened.
In the darkness I could just see the thing—like an elephant’s trunk
more than anything else—waving towards me and touching and examining
the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a black worm swaying its
blind head to and fro.
Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot. I was on the verge of
screaming; I bit my hand. For a time the tentacle was silent. I could
have fancied it had been withdrawn. Presently, with an abrupt click, it
gripped something—I thought it had me!—and seemed to go out of the
cellar again. For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it had taken a
lump of coal to examine.
I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, which had
become cramped, and then listened. I whispered passionate prayers for
safety.
Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me again.
Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the walls and tapping
the furniture.
While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar door
and closed it. I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins
rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against the
cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity of suspense.
Had it gone?
At last I decided that it had.
It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day in the
close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even to
crawl out for the drink for which I craved. It was the eleventh day
before I ventured so far from my security.
V.
THE STILLNESS.
My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door
between the kitchen and the scullery. But the pantry was empty; every
scrap of food had gone. Apparently, the Martian had taken it all on the
previous day. At that discovery I despaired for the first time. I took
no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day.
At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed
sensibly. I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of
despondent wretchedness. My mind ran on eating. I thought I had become
deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear from the
pit had ceased absolutely. I did not feel strong enough to crawl
noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there.
On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the chance of
alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water pump that
stood by the sink, and got a couple of glassfuls of blackened and
tainted rain water. I was greatly refreshed by this, and emboldened by
the fact that no enquiring tentacle followed the noise of my pumping.
During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought much of
the curate and of the manner of his death.
On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and thought
disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of escape.
Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death of the
curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a keen
pain that urged me to drink again and again. The light that came into
the scullery was no longer grey, but red. To my disordered imagination
it seemed the colour of blood.
On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to
find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in
the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured
obscurity.
It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious, familiar
sequence of sounds in the kitchen, and, listening, identified it as the
snuffing and scratching of a dog. Going into the kitchen, I saw a dog’s
nose peering in through a break among the ruddy fronds. This greatly
surprised me. At the scent of me he barked shortly.
I thought if I could induce him to come into the place quietly I should
be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in any case, it would be
advisable to kill him, lest his actions attracted the attention of the
Martians.
I crept forward, saying “Good dog!” very softly; but he suddenly
withdrew his head and disappeared.
I listened—I was not deaf—but certainly the pit was still. I heard a
sound like the flutter of a bird’s wings, and a hoarse croaking, but
that was all.
For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to move
aside the red plants that obscured it. Once or twice I heard a faint
pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and thither on the
sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but that was
all. At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.
Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought over
the skeletons of the dead the Martians had consumed, there was not a
living thing in the pit.
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 practicable 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.