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1Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought over the skeletons of the dead the Martians had
2consumed, there was not a living thing in the pit. I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes. All the machinery had
3gone. Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one corner, certain bars of aluminium in another, the black
4birds, and the skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty circular pit in the sand. Slowly I thrust myself
5out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the north,
6and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along
7the rubbish afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of escape had come. I began to tremble. I
8hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, I
9scrambled to the top of the mound in which I had been buried so long. I looked about again. To the northward, too, no
10Martian was visible. When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been a straggling street of
11comfortable white and red houses, interspersed with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork,
12clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial
13growth to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the
14still living stems. The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned; their walls stood, sometimes
15to the second story, with smashed windows and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms.
16Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling for its refuse. A number of other birds hopped about among the
17ruins. Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men there were none. The day seemed, by
18contrast with my recent confinement, dazzlingly bright, the sky a glowing blue. A gentle breeze kept the red weed that
19covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying. And oh! the sweetness of the air! VI. THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.
20For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I
21had thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had not realised what had been happening to the
22world, had not anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in ruins--I found
23about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet. For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range
24of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his
25burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first
26inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement,
27a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be
28as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away. But so soon as this
29strangeness had been realised it passed, and my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
30direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint,
31and I went knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of
32hiding. The wall was some six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my feet to the
33crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and
34tumble into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of
35immature carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and crimson
36trees towards Kew--it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more
37food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region of the pit. Some
38way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of
39flowing shallow water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served only to whet my hunger. At first
40I was surprised at this flood in a hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the tropical
41exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of
42unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing
43and Titanic water fronds speedily choked both those rivers. At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost
44in a tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad and shallow stream across the meadows
45of Hampton and Twickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the Thames valley were
46for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the Martians had caused was
47concealed. In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is
48believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all
49terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe
50struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and
51brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last
52vestiges out to sea. My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my thirst. I drank a great deal of it
53and, moved by an impulse, gnawed some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly, metallic taste. I
54found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but
55the flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means
56of occasional ruins of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this spate and made my way to the
57hill going up towards Roehampton and came out on Putney Common. Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar
58to the wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I
59would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors closed, as if they had
60been left for a day by the owners, or as if their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the tall
61trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also
62raided a couple of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked. I rested for the remainder of the
63daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on. All this time I saw no human beings,
64and no signs of the Martians. I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried circuitously away from the
65advances I made them. Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean--and in
66the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though
67I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them.
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