War of the Worlds - Bk1, Ch1 (The War of the Worlds)

01This is a LibriVox recording.

02All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

03For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

04War of the Worlds by H.

05G.

06Wells Book 1.

07The Coming of the Martians Chapter 1.

08The Eve of War No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences, greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own.

09That as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were being scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

10With infinite complacency, men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

11It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.

12No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable.

13It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days.

14At most, terrestrial men fancied that there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

15Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellect, intellect vast and cruel and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

16And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

17The planet Mars, I scarcely need to remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140 million miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.

18It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world, and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course.

19The fact that it is scarcely one-seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin.

20It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

21Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer up to the very end of the nineteenth century expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, and indeed at all beyond its earthly level.

22Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning, but nearer its end.

23The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour.

24Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region, the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter.

25Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change, huge snow caps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones.

26That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.

27The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers and hardened their hearts.

28And looking across space with instruments and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35 million of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

29And before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

30The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of 50 years.

31Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

32The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety.

33Their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours, and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity.

34Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the 19th century.

35Men like Schiaparelli watched the Red Planet.

36It is odd, by and by, that for countless centuries, Mars has been the star of war, but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they map so well.

37All that time, the Martians must have been getting ready.

38During the opposition of 1894, a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Periton in Nice, and then by other observers.

39English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature, dated August 2nd.

40I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun in the vast pit sunk into their planet from which their shots were fired at us.

41Peculiar markings, as yet explained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.

42The storm burst upon us six years ago now.

43As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet.

44It had occurred towards midnight of the 12th.

45The spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this Earth.

46This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve.

47He compared it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet.

48As flaming gases rushed out of a gun, a singularly appropriate phrase it proved.

49Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race.

50I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy and the well-known astronomer at Ottershore.

51He was immensely excited at the news and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in the scrutiny of the red planet.

52In spite of all that had happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly.

53The black and silent observatory.

54The shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner.

55The steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope.

56The little slit in the roof.

57An oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it.

58Ogilvy moved about invisible but audible.

59Looking through the telescope one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planets swimming in the field.

60It seemed such a little thing so bright and small and still faintly marked with transverse stripes and slightly flattened from the perfect round.

61But so little it was so silvery warm a pinhead of light.

62It was as if it quivered but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.

63As I watched the planet seemed to go larger and smaller and to advance and recede but that was simply that my eye was tired.

64Forty millions of miles it was from us.

65More than forty millions of miles of void.

66Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

67near it in the field I remember were three faint points of light three telescopic stars infinitely remote and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space.

68You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night.

69In a telescope it seems far profounder and invisible to me because it was so remote and small flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance drawing nearer every minute by so many thousands of miles came the thing they were sending us the thing that was to bring so much struggle and calamity and death to the earth.

70I never dreamed of it then as I watched no one on earth dreamed of that unerring missile.

71That night too there was another jetting out of gas from the distant planet.

72I saw it a reddish flash at the edge the slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer struck midnight and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my place.

73The night was warm and I was thirsty and I went stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness to the little table where the siphon stood while Ogilvy exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.

74That night another invisible missile started on its way to earth from Mars just a second or so under 24 hours after the first one.

75I remember how I sat on the table there in the blackness with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes.

76I wished I had a light to smoke by little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had seen and all that it would presently bring me.

77Ogilvy watched till one and then gave it up and we lit the lantern and walked over to his house.

78Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people sleeping in peace.

79He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us.

80His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress.

81He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

82The chances against anything man-like on Mars are a million to one he said.

83Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight and again the night after and so for ten nights a flame each night.

84Why the shot ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain.

85It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience.

86Dense clouds of smoke or dust visible through a powerful telescope on earth as little grey fluctuating patches spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.

87Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last and popular notes appeared here, there and everywhere concerning the volcanoes upon Mars.

88The serio-comic periodical punch, I remember, made a happy use of it in the political cartoon.

89And all unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer.

90It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their pretty concerns as they did.

91I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.

92People in these latter times scarcely realised the abundance and enterprise of our 19th century papers.

93For my part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.

94One night, the first missile then could scarcely have been 10 million miles away, I went for a walk with my wife.

95It was starlight and I explained the signs of the zodiac to her and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward towards which so many telescopes were pointed.

96It was a warm night, coming home, a party of excursionists from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing music.

97There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed.

98From the railway station in the distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance.

99My wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky.

100It seemed so safe and tranquil.

101End of chapter one the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the