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1I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a
2loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I turned to
3see how much of our rampart remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the debris, and by
4raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburban
5roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld. The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the
6house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The
7cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly larger than the pit I had looked
8into at Woking. The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only word--and lay
9in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a
10hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by
11a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on
12every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the
13Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green
14vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole. The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on the
15farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by
16its occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder,
17although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy
18in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped
19mould near it. The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that
20have since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to
21terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs,
22and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of
23its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined
24the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and
25deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it. Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not
26see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an
27extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen these structures, and have only the
28ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely
29realise that living quality. I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive
30account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge
31ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether
32misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them
33here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I saw
34in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them. At
35first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering
36integument, the controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent
37of the crab's cerebral portion. But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery integument to
38that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that
39realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians. Already I had had a transient impression of
40these, and the first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was concealed and motionless, and under no
41urgency of action. They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round
42bodies--or, rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no
43nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured
44eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body--I scarcely know how to speak of
45it--was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost
46useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two
47bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor
48Howes, the hands. Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on
49these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to
50suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility. The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as
51dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous
52nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the
53heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was
54only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin. And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as
55it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not
56exist in the Martians. They were heads--merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest.
57Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen
58this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I
59could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most
60cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . . The bare idea of
61this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our
62carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit. The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are
63undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive
64process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood.
65The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds. Men go happy
66or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all
67these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion. Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is
68partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These
69creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious
70skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having
71round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder,
72and all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon
73our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.
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