The War of the Worlds Book One The Coming of the Martians Chapter One - The Eve of the War 5Chapter Two - The Falling Star 11Chapter Three - On Horsell Common 15Chapter Four - The Cylinder Opens 18Chapter Five - The Heat-Ray 21Chapter Six - The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road 25Chapter Seven - How I Reached Home 28Chapter Eight - Friday Night 32Chapter Nine - The Fighting Begins 35Chapter Ten - In the Storm 41Chapter Eleven - At the Window 47Chapter Twelve - What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton 53Chapter Thirteen - How I Fell in With the Curate 64Chapter Fourteen - In London 70Chapter Fifteen - What Had Happened in Surrey 80Chapter Sixteen - The Exodus From London 87Chapter Seventeen - The "Thunder Child" 99Book Two The Earth Under the Martians Chapter One - Under Foot 108Chapter Two - What We Saw From the Ruined House 115Chapter Three - The Days of Imprisonment 123Chapter Four - The Death of the Curate 128Chapter Five - The Stillness 133Chapter Six - The Work of Fifteen Days 136Chapter Seven - The Man on Putney Hill 139Chapter Eight - Dead London 154Chapter Nine - Wreckage 162Chapter Ten - The Epilogue 167Chapter OneThe Eve of the WarNo one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were 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. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No 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. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It 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. The 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. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.Yet 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, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. |
