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1As I crossed the bridge, the sound of "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came
2like a thunderclap. The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing
3black. All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness. Night, the mother
4of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable;
5by virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the
6passing of something--I knew not what--and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet. London
7about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my
8imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. In front of me the
9road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could not
10bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road, and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness towards
11Kilburn. I hid from the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But
12before the dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more towards Regent's Park.
13I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, the curve
14of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like the
15others. An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would save myself even the trouble of killing
16myself. I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a
17multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running
18along the road. I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's Terrace (I waded breast-high across a torrent of
19water that was rushing down from the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass before the rising
20of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and
21largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the
22sky line an eager dog ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no
23fear, only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood hung lank
24shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore. In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and
25stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here
26and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their
27overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a
28row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were
29unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things
30that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth. For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen
31had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of
32things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind
33we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause
34putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars,
35and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.
36Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was
37inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all
38comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in
39vain. Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a
40death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time this death was
41incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I
42believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain
43them in the night. I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the
44world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their
45power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards
46the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below
47me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been
48experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At the
49sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered
50red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill. I turned and looked down
51the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight, just as
52death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to
53die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted. They glittered now, harmless
54tripod towers of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun. All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from
55everlasting destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre
56robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses. Eastward, over
57the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear
58sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught the light and glared with a white intensity.
59Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses; westward the great city was dimmed; and southward,
60beyond the Martians, the green waves of Regent's Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the Albert Hall, the Imperial
61Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of
62Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace
63glittered like two silver rods. The dome of St. Paul's was dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first
64time, by a huge gaping cavity on its western side. And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
65churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that
66had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised
67that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine
68be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that was near akin to tears.
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