1 The War of the Worlds

     2 

     3 by H. G. Wells [1898]

     4 

     5 

     6      But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be

     7      inhabited? .  .  .  Are we or they Lords of the

     8      World? .  .  .  And how are all things made for man?--

     9           KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

    10 

    11 CHAPTER ONE

    12 

    13 THE EVE OF THE WAR

    14 

    15 

    16 No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth

    17 century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by

    18 intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as

    19 men busied themselves about their various concerns they were

    20 scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a

    21 microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and

    22 multiply in a drop of water.  With infinite complacency men went to

    23 and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their

    24 assurance of their empire over matter.  It is possible that the

    25 infusoria under the microscope do the same.  No one gave a thought to

    26 the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of

    27 them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or

    28 improbable.  It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of

    29 those departed days.  At most terrestrial men fancied there might be

    30 other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to

    31 welcome a missionary enterprise.  Yet across the gulf of space, minds

    32 that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,

    33 intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with

    34 envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.  And

    35 early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

    36 

    37 The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the

    38 sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it

    39 receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.

    40 It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our

    41 world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its

    42 surface must have begun its course.  The fact that it is scarcely one

    43 seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling

    44 to the temperature at which life could begin.  It has air and water

    45 and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

    46 

    47 Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer,

    48 up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that

    49 intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all,

    50 beyond its earthly level.  Nor was it generally understood that since

    51 Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the

    52 superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that

    53 it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.

    54 

    55 The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has

    56 already gone far indeed with our neighbour.  Its physical condition is

    57 still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial

    58 region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest

    59 winter.  Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have

    60 shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow

    61 seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and

    62 periodically inundate its temperate zones.  That last stage of

    63 exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a

    64 present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.  The immediate

    65 pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their

    66 powers, and hardened their hearts.  And looking across space with

    67 instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of,

    68 they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of

    69 them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with

    70 vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of

    71 fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad

    72 stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

    73 

    74 And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them

    75 at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.  The

    76 intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant

    77 struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief

    78 of the minds upon Mars.  Their world is far gone in its cooling and

    79 this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they

    80 regard as inferior animals.  To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,

    81 their only escape from the destruction that, generation after

    82 generation, creeps upon them.

    83 

    84 And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what

    85 ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only

    86 upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its

    87 inferior races.  The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,

    88 were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged

    89 by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.  Are we such

    90 apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same

    91 spirit?

    92 

    93 The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing

    94 subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of

    95 ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh

    96 perfect unanimity.  Had our instruments permitted it, we might have

    97 seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century.  Men

    98 like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that

    99 for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to

   100 interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so

   101 well.  All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

   102 

   103 During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the

   104 illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by

   105 Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.  English readers heard

   106 of it first in the issue of _Nature_ dated August 2.  I am inclined to

   107 think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in

   108 the vast pit sunk into their planet, from which their shots were fired

   109 at us.  Peculiar markings, as yet unexplained, were seen near the site

   110 of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

   111 

   112 The storm burst upon us six years ago now.  As Mars approached

   113 opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange

   114 palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of

   115 incandescent gas upon the planet.  It had occurred towards midnight of

   116 the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted,

   117 indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an

   118 enormous velocity towards this earth.  This jet of fire had become

   119 invisible about a quarter past twelve.  He compared it to a colossal

   120 puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as

   121 flaming gases rushed out of a gun."

   122 

   123 A singularly appropriate phrase it proved.  Yet the next day there

   124 was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the _Daily

   125 Telegraph_, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest

   126 dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of

   127 the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer,

   128 at Ottershaw.  He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess

   129 of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a

   130 scrutiny of the red planet.

   131 

   132 In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that

   133 vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed

   134 lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the

   135 steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in

   136 the roof--an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.

   137 Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible.  Looking through the

   138 telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet

   139 swimming in the field.  It seemed such a little thing, so bright and

   140 small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly

   141 flattened from the perfect round.  But so little it was, so silvery

   142 warm--a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this

   143 was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that

   144 kept the planet in view.

   145 

   146 As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to

   147 advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired.  Forty

   148 millions of miles it was from us--more than forty millions of miles of

   149 void.  Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust

   150 of the material universe swims.

   151 

   152 Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light,

   153 three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the

   154 unfathomable darkness of empty space.  You know how that blackness

   155 looks on a frosty starlight night.  In a telescope it seems far

   156 profounder.  And invisible to me because it was so remote and small,

   157 flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible

   158 distance, drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles,

   159 came the Thing they were sending us, the Thing that was to bring so

   160 much struggle and calamity and death to the earth.  I never dreamed of

   161 it then as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring

   162 missile.

   163 

   164 That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from the

   165 distant planet.  I saw it.  A reddish flash at the edge, the slightest

   166 projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight; and

   167 at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place.  The night was warm and I

   168 was thirsty, and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way

   169 in the darkness, to the little table where the siphon stood, while

   170 Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

   171 

   172 That night another invisible missile started on its way to the

   173 earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four hours after the

   174 first one.  I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness,

   175 with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes.  I wished I

   176 had a light to smoke by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute

   177 gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me.  Ogilvy

   178 watched till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and

   179 walked over to his house.