War of the Worlds

London between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we
played for parish points.  Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to
the sober reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable,
I found the card game and several others we played extremely
interesting.

Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the "joker" with vivid
delight.  Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
chess games.  When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
lamp.

After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the
artilleryman finished the champagne.  We went on smoking the cigars.
He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his species I had
encountered in the morning.  He was still optimistic, but it was a
less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism.  I remember he wound up with
my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable
intermittence.  I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the
lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the
Highgate hills.

At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley.  The
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed
up and vanished in the deep blue night.  All the rest of London
was black.  Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale,
violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze.  For
a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be
the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded.  With that
realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of
things, awoke again.  I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear,
glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the
darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.

I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the
grotesque changes of the day.  I recalled my mental states from the
midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing.  I had a violent
revulsion of feeling.  I remember I flung away the cigar with a
certain wasteful symbolism.  My folly came to me with glaring
exaggeration.  I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was
filled with remorse.  I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined
dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into
London.  There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning
what the Martians and my fellowmen were doing.  I was still upon the
roof when the late moon rose.



CHAPTER EIGHT

DEAD LONDON


After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and
by the High Street across the bridge to Fulham.  The red weed was
tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its
fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that
presently removed it so swiftly.

At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I
found a man lying.  He was as black as a sweep with the black dust,
alive, but helplessly and speechlessly drunk.  I could get nothing
from him but curses and furious lunges at my head.  I think I should
have stayed by him but for the brutal expression of his face.

There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and
it grew thicker in Fulham.  The streets were horribly quiet.  I got
food--sour, 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 passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of
the burning was an absolute relief.  Going on towards Brompton, the
streets were quiet again.

Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon
dead bodies.  I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the
Fulham Road.  They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly
past them.  The black powder covered them over, and softened their
outlines.  One or two had been disturbed by dogs.

Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in
the City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds
drawn, the desertion, and the stillness.  In some places plunderers
had been at work, but rarely at other 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.  Farther on was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the
hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown
dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool across the
pavement.  She seemed asleep, but she was dead.

The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the
stillness.  But it was not so much the stillness of death--it was the
stillness of suspense, of expectation.  At any time the destruction
that had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis,
and had annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these
houses and leave them smoking ruins.  It was a city condemned and