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

CHAPTER TWO

WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE

 

After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have

dozed again, for when presently I looked round I was alone. The

thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered

for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of

the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the

room, lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the

Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden

from me.

 

I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine

shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the

aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold

and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I

remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and

stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the

floor.

 

I touched the curate’s leg, and he started so violently that a mass

of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I

gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we

crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our rampart

remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open

in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was

able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet

suburban roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.

 

The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the

house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely

smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now

far beneath the original foundations—deep in a hole, already vastly

larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round

it had splashed under that tremendous impact—“splashed” is the only

word—and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent

houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a

hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on

the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the

kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and

ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the

cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great

circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating

sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green

vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.

 

The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on

the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped

shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its

occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I

scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been

convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary

glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of

the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across

the heaped mould near it.

 

The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was

one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous

impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first, it

presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and

with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and

clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted,

but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods,

plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened

the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted

out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.

 

Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did

not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The

fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary

pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen

these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or

the imperfect descriptions of such eyewitnesses as myself to go upon,

scarcely realise that living quality.

 

I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first

pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had

evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and

there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff

tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an

altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing

these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here

simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have

created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a

Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have

been much better without them.

 

At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a

machine, but as a crablike creature with a glittering integument, the

controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles actuated its movements

seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab’s cerebral portion.

But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny,

leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and

the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that

realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real

Martians. Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the

first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I was

concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.

 

They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible

to conceive. They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about

four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This

face had no nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any

sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes,

and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head

or body—I scarcely know how to speak of it—was the single tight

tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it

must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the

mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two

bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather

aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the HANDS.

Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be

endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with

the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible.

There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon

them with some facility.

 

The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since

shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure

was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile

tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth

opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused

by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only

too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.

 

And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem

to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes

up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were

heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much

less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other

creatures, and INJECTED it into their own veins. I have myself seen

this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I

may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure

even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from

a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run

directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal… .

 

The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at

the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our

carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.

 

The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are

undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and

energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are

half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning

heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their

reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our

minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy

livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above

all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.

 

Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment

is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they

had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to

judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands,

were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the

silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet

high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets.

Two or three of