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ELECBOOK CLASSICS
The War of the
Worlds
H. G. Wells
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The War of the Worlds
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
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The War of the Worlds
The War of the
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H. G. Wells
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Contents
Click on number to go to page
Project Gutenberg Etexts.................................................................................5
BOOK ONE: The Coming of the Martians..................................................14
CHAPTER ONE: The Eve Of The War.......................................................15
CHAPTER TWO: The Falling Star .............................................................22
CHAPTER THREE: On Horsell Common ..................................................26
CHAPTER FOUR: The Cylinder Opens .....................................................30
CHAPTER FIVE: The Heat-Ray .................................................................34
CHAPTER SIX: The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road................................39
CHAPTER SEVEN: How I Reached Home ................................................42
CHAPTER EIGHT: Friday Night ................................................................47
CHAPTER NINE: The Fighting Begins ......................................................50
CHAPTER TEN: In the Storm.....................................................................57
CHAPTER ELEVEN: At the Window ........................................................64
CHAPTER TWELVE: What I Saw of the Destruction of
Weybridge and Shepperton ...........................................................................70
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: How I Fell in with the Curate ..............................82
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: In London...........................................................88
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: What had Happened in Surrey ..............................100
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Exodus From London....................................109
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The “Thunder Child” .....................................122
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BOOK TWO: The Earth under the Martians .............................................132
CHAPTER ONE: Under Foot ....................................................................133
CHAPTER TWO: What we Saw from the Ruined House.........................141
CHAPTER THREE: The Days of Imprisonment ......................................151
CHAPTER FOUR: The Death of the Curate .............................................157
CHAPTER FIVE: The Stillness.................................................................162
CHAPTER SIX: The Work of Fifteen Days..............................................165
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Man On Putney Hill..........................................169
CHAPTER EIGHT: Dead London.............................................................185
CHAPTER NINE: Wreckage.....................................................................194
CHAPTER TEN: The Epilogue .................................................................200
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But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?—
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
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BOOK ONE:
The Coming of the Martians
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CHAPTER ONE:
The Eve Of The War
N
o one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth
century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that
as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised
and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their
little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is
possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a
thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought
of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those
departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men
upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a
missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our
minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool
and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came
the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the
sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it
receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be,
if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before
this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its
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course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth
must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could
begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of
animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the
very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life
might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor
was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with
scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it
necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but
nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already
gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a
mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday
temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much
more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third
of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt
about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last
stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a
presentday problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of
necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened
their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences
such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own
warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy
atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud
wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded
seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least
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as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side
of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it
would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is
far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded
only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is,
indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after
generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what
ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon
animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.
The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the
space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours—and
to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity.
Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble
far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red
planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the
star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the
markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated
part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and
then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of
Nature dated August 2. I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been
the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which
their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen
H. G. Wells
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near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached
opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange
palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent
gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the
spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming
gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth.
This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He
compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of
the planet, “as flaming gases rushed out of a gun.”
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was
nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and
the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever
threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I
not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was
immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me
up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.
In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very
distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a
feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork
of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the
stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible.
Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little
round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright
and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly
flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a
pin’s-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope
vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to
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advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty
millions of miles it was from us—more than forty millions of miles of void.
Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the
material universe swims.
Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, three
telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomable
darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty
starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to me
because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me
across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many
thousands of miles, came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was
to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth. I never
dreamed of it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
missile.
That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the distant
planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest projection of the
outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and
he took my place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I went
stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness, to the little
table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas
that came out towards us.
That night another invisible missile started on its way to the earth from
Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the first one. I
remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness, with patches of green
and crimson swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke by,
little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had seen and all that it
would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched till one, and then gave it up; and
we lit the lantern and walked over to his house. Down below in the darkness
were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in
H. G. Wells
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