BOOK TWO 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.