The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (best large ereader TXT) 📖

CHAPTER ONE

THE EVE OF THE WAR

 

No 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 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

present-day 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 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 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