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tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things, the

artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

 

“We’re working well,” he said. He put down his spade. “Let us

knock off a bit” he said. “I think it’s time we reconnoitred from the

roof of the house.”

 

I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his

spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so

did he at once.

 

“Why were you walking about the common,” I said, “instead of being

here?”

 

“Taking the air,” he said. “I was coming back. It’s safer by

night.”

 

“But the work?”

 

“Oh, one can’t always work,” he said, and in a flash I saw the man

plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. “We ought to reconnoitre

now,” he said, “because if any come near they may hear the spades and

drop upon us unawares.”

 

I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the roof

and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians were

to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under

shelter of the parapet.

 

From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney,

but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the

low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the

trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and

dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was

strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing

water for their propagation. About us neither had gained a footing;

laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of

laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond

Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the

northward hills.

 

The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still

remained in London.

 

“One night last week,” he said, “some fools got the electric light

in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze,

crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and

shouting till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came

they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham

and looking down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there. It

must have given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the road

towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened

to run away.”

 

Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!

 

From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his

grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently

of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than

half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to

understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid

on doing nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was no

question that he personally was to capture and fight the great

machine.

 

After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed

disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was

nothing loath. He became suddenly very generous, and when we had

eaten he went away and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit

these, and his optimism glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming

as a great occasion.

 

“There’s some champagne in the cellar,” he said.

 

“We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy,” said I.

 

“No,” said he; “I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We’ve a

heavy enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather strength

while we may. Look at these blistered hands!”

 

And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing

cards after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and after dividing

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

derelict… .

 

In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black

powder. It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling.

It crept almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing

alternation of two notes, “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” keeping on

perpetually. When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in

volume, and houses and buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off

again. It came in a full tide down Exhibition Road. I stopped,

staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remote

wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice

for its fear and solitude.

 

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” wailed that superhuman note—great waves

of sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tall

buildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the

iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into the Natural

History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in

order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground,

where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition

Road. All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and

still, and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. At

the top, near the park gate, I came upon a strange sight—a bus

overturned, and the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over

this for a time, and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine.

The voice grew stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above

the housetops on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to

the northwest.

 

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to

me, from the district about Regent’s Park. The desolating cry worked

upon my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing

took possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and

now again hungry and thirsty.

 

It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this city

of the dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying in

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