The War of the Worlds

ge to Fulham. The red weed was tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its

with the black dust, alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing from him but curses

ur, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable--in a baker's shop here. Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I passe

dozen in the length of the Fulham Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past the

than the provision and wine shops. A jeweller's window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Fa

ess of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction that had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had

on of two notes, "Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on perpetually. When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a f

f the towers, in order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground, where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition Road. All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and still, and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. At the top, near the park gate, I came

nt's Park. The desolating cry worked upon my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The waili

k shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind ran on old friends that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the poisons in the chemists" shops,

f the cellars of some of the houses. I grew very thirsty after the heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I managed to break into a public-h

silent residential squares to Baker Street --Portman Square is the only one I can name--and so came out at last upon Regent's Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker Street, I saw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset the hood o

, intending to skirt the park, went along under the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling Martian from the direction of St. John's Wood. A couple of hundred yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a dog with a piece of putrescent red meat

smashed and twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have happened by a handling-machine es

d Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins a

ulla, ulla, ulla," ceased. It was, as it were

dimness. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by virtue of it London had still seemed a

ying across the pathway. I could not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road, and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and while t

marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of bla

een heaped about the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog ran and disappeared. The

strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handlingmachines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--DEAD!--slain by the putre

ing power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many-those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance --our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already wh

ble as any death could be. To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that had been alive and so terrible to men we

strange out of the shadows towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our dense

h had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice had gone on perpet

great Mother of Cities. Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smo

f the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky, and here and there some facet

bert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the Surrey h

of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back

, growing stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismall

yself, of my wife, and the old life of hope a