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

CHAPTER SIX

THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS

 

For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my

safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had

thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had

not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated

this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see

Sheen in ruins—I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of

another planet.

 

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of

men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I

felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly

confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations

of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew

quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of

dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an

animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be

as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire

of man had passed away.

 

But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my

dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the

direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch

of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the

weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet

high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my

feet to the crest. 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 tumble

into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple

of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I

secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through

scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew—it was like walking through an

avenue of gigantic blood drops—possessed with two ideas: to get more

food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of

this accursed unearthly region of the pit.

 

Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which

also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow

water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served

only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a

hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the

tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary

growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of

unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the

water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water

fronds speedily choked both those rivers.

 

At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a

tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in

a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and

Twickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the

ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red

swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the

Martians had caused was concealed.

 

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had

spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of

certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of

natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting

power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe

struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The

fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke

off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early

growth carried their last vestiges 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 and, moved by an impulse, gnawed

some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,

metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to

wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the

flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to

Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins

of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this

spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came

out on Putney Common.

 

Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the

wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation

of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly

undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors

closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if

their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the

tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted

for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple

of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.

I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in

my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.

 

All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians.

I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried

circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I

had seen two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked

clean—and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones

of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I

gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from

them.

 

After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I

think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the

garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,

sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon

Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was

singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and

down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the

weed. And over all—silence. It filled me with indescribable terror

to think how swiftly that desolating change had come.

 

For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence,

and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the

top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms

dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I

proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of

mankind was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished

in this part of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and

left the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now

they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone

northward.