August 16, 2025 • 22 mins
19 - War of the Worlds - Bk2, Ch2. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells (H.G. Wells) was published in 1898 at a time when he wrote a series of novels related to a number of historical events of the time. The most important of these was the unification and militarization of Germany. The story, written in a semi-documentary style, is told in the first person by an unnamed observer. It tells of the events which happen mostly in London and the county of Surrey, England, when a number of vessels manned by aliens are fired from Mars and land on Earth.
War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells (H.G. Wells) was published in 1898 at a time when he wrote a series of novels related to a number of historical events of the time. The most important of these was the unification and militarization of Germany. The story, written in a semi-documentary style, is told in the first person by an unnamed observer. It tells of the events which happen mostly in London and the county of Surrey, England, when a number of vessels manned by aliens are fired from Mars and land on Earth.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is a LibriVox recording. All liberriyvox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells,
Book two, Chapter two, What we saw from the ruined house.
(00:28):
After eating, we crept back to the scullery, and there
I must have dozed again, for presently, when I looked round,
I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence.
I whispered for the Curate several times, and at last
felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It
was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room,
(00:50):
lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians.
His shoulders were hunched so that his head was hidden
from me. I could hear a number of noise, almost
like those in an engine shed, and the place rocked
with that beating thud. Through the aperture in the wall,
I could see the top of a tree touched with gold,
(01:10):
and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For
a minute or so I remained watching the Curate, and
then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amid
the broken crockery that littered the floor. I touched the
curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass
of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a
(01:31):
loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out,
and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I
turned to see how much our rampart remained. The detachment
of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in
the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam,
(01:51):
I was able to see out of this gap into
what had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway. Vast, indeed,
was the change that we beheld. The fifth cylinder must
have fallen right in the midst of the house we
had first visited. The building had vanished completely, smashed, pulverized,
and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now far
(02:15):
beneath the original foundations, deep in a hole already vastly
larger than the pit I had looked into at woking
the earth all round. It had splashed under that tremendous impact.
Splashed is the only word, and lay in heaped piles
that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had
behaved exactly like mud. Under the violent blow of a hammer.
(02:39):
Our house had collapsed backward. The front portion, even on
the ground floor, had been destroyed completely by a chance.
The kitchen and scullery had escaped and stood buried now
under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth.
On every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect
we hung now on the very edge of the great
(03:01):
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy
beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and
again a bright green vapor drove up like a veil
across our peep hole. The cylinder was already open in
the center of the pit, and on the farther edge
of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel heaped shrubbery,
(03:22):
one of the great fighting machines, deserted by its occupant,
stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first
I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it
had been convenient to describe them first. On account of
the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation,
and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling
(03:44):
slowly and painfully across the heaped mold near it. The
mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It
was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been
called handling machines, and the study of which has already
given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it
(04:04):
dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider,
with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number
of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about
its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with
three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates,
(04:25):
and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the
walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were
lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth
behind it. Its motion was so swift, complex and perfect
that at first I did not see it as a machine.
In spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting machines were
(04:49):
coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch. But nothing to
compare with this. People who have never seen these structures
and have only the ill imagined efforts of arms artists,
or the imperfect descriptions of such eyewitnesses of myself to
go upon scarcely realize that living quality. I recall particularly
(05:10):
the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give
a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently
made a hasty study of one of the fighting machines,
and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted,
stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an
altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings
(05:35):
had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply
to warn the reader against the impression they may have created.
They were no more like the martians I saw in
action than a Dutch doll is like a human being.
To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better
without them. At first, I say, the handling machine did
(05:55):
not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike
creature with a glittering integument, the controlling martian, whose delicate
tentacles actuated its movements, seeming to be simply the equivalent
of the crab's cerebral portion. But then I perceived the
resemblance of its gray, brown, shiny, leathery integment to that
(06:15):
of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature
of this dexterous workmen dawned upon me. With that realization,
my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
Already I had had a transient impression of these, and
the first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I
(06:38):
was concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.
They were. I now saw the most unearthly creatures it
is possible to conceive. They were huge, round bodies, or
rather heads, about four feet in diameter, each body having
in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils, indeed,
(07:00):
the Martians do not seem to have any sense of smell,
but it had a pair of very large, dark colored eyes,
and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In
the back of this head or body I scarcely know
how to speak of it was the single tight tympanic
surface since known to be anatomically an ear, though it
(07:23):
must have been almost useless in our dense air. In
a group round the mouth was sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles,
arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have
since been named rather aptly by that distinguished anatomist Professor Howes,
the hands. Even as I saw these Martians for the
(07:45):
first time, they seemed to be endeavoring to raise themselves
on these hands. But of course, with the increased weight
of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to
suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them
with some facility. The internal anatomy, I may remark here,
as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The
(08:10):
greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous
nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this
were the bulky lungs into which the mouth opened, and
the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by
the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction, was only too
(08:30):
evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin. And
this was the sum of the Martian organs, strange as
it may seem to a human being, all the complex
apparatus of digestion which makes up. The bulk of our
bodies did not exist. In the Martians, they were heads,
merely heads entrails. They had none. They did not eat,
(08:56):
much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh life, living
blood of other creatures and injected it into their own veins.
I have seen this being done, as I shall mention
in its place, but squeamish as I may seem, I
cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure
even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say blood
(09:19):
obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from
a human being, was run directly by means of a
little pipet into the recipient canal. The bare idea of
this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at
the same time, I think that we should remember how
repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
(09:42):
The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable.
If one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time
and energy occasion by eating and the digestive process. Our
bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and
organs occupied in turning heterogenea food into blood. The digestive
(10:03):
processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our
strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable,
as they have healthy or unhealthy livers or sound gastric glands.
But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations
of mood and emotion. Their undeniable preference for men as
(10:24):
their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature
of the remains of the victims they had brought with
them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from
the shriveled remains that have fallen into human hands, were
bipeds with flimsy silicus skeletons almost like those of the
Silicus sponges, and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high
(10:47):
and having round, erect heads and large eyes in flinty sockets.
Two or three of these seemed to have been brought
in each cylinder, and all were killed before Earth was reached.
It was just as well for them them, for the
mere attempt to stand upright on our body would have
broken every bone in their bodies. And while I am
(11:07):
engaged in this description, I may add in this place
certain further details, which, although they were not all evident
to us at the time, will enable the reader who
is unacquainted with them, to form a clearer picture of
these offensive creatures. In three other points, their physiology differed
strangely from ours. Their organisms did not sleep any more
(11:29):
than the heart of a man sleeps. Since they had
no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was
unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue.
It would seem on Earth they could never have moved
without effort. Yet even to the last they kept in action.
In twenty four hours, they did twenty four hours of work,
(11:51):
as even on Earth. Is perhaps the case with the
ants in the next place. Wonderful as it seems in
a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and
therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from
that difference among men. A young Martian, there can now
be no dispute, was really borne upon Earth during the war,
(12:14):
and it was found attached to its parent, partially budded off,
just as young lillibolbs bud off, or like the young
animals in the fresh water polyp in man. In all
the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has disappeared,
but even on this Earth it was certainly the primitive
method among the lower animals up even to those first
(12:37):
cousins of the vertebrateed animals, the tunicates. The two processes
occur side by side, but finally the sexual methods superseded
its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has
apparently been the case. It is worthy to remark that
a certain speculative writer of quasi scientific repute, writing long
(12:59):
before or the Martian invasion, did forecast for Man a
final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy,
I remember, appeared in November or December eighteen ninety three
in a long defunct publication the pal Mal Budget, and
I recall a caricature of it in a pre Martian
(13:21):
periodical called Punch. He pointed out, writing in a foolish,
facetious tone, that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately
supersede limbs, the perfection of chemical devices digestion, that such
organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were
no longer essential parts of the human body, and that
(13:43):
the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction
of their steadied diminution through the coming ages. The brain
alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of
the body had a strong case for survival, and that
was the hand, teacher and agent of the brain. While
(14:04):
the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.
There is many a true word written in jest, and
here in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual
accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of
the organism by the intelligence. To me, it is quite
credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not
(14:25):
unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands,
the latter giving rise to two bunches of delicate tentacles
at last, at the expense of the rest of the body.
Without the body, the brain would of course become a
mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of
the human being. The last salient point in which the
(14:47):
systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what
one might have thought of very trivial. Particular. Microorganisms, which
cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either
never appeared on or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages
ago a hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of
(15:09):
human life, consumption, cancers, tumors, and such morbidities never enter
the scheme of their life. And speaking of the difference
between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may
allude here to the curious suggestion of the red weed.
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green
(15:29):
as a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood red tint.
At any rate, the seeds that the Martians intentionally or
accidentally brought with them gave rise in all cases to
red coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the red weed, however,
gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms. The red
(15:52):
creeper was quite a transitory growth, and a few people
have seen it growing. For a time. However, the red
weed grew with astonishing vigor and luxuriance. It spread up
the sides of the pit by the third or fourth
day of our imprisonment, and its cactus like branches formed
a carmine fridge to the edges of our triangular window.
(16:12):
And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and
especially wherever there was a stream of water. The Martians
had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a
single round drum at the back of the head body,
and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours,
except that, according to Phillips, blue and violet were as
(16:34):
black to them. It is commonly supposed that they communicated
by sounds and tentacular gesticulations. This is asserted, for instance,
in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet written evidently by
someone not an eyewitness of Martian actions, to which I
have already alluded, and which so far has been the
(16:54):
chief source of information concerning them. Now, no surviving human
being saw so much of the Martians in action as
I did. I take no credit to myself for an accident,
but the fact is so, and I assert that I
watch them closely, time after time, and that I have
seen four, five, and at once six of them sluggishly
(17:16):
performing the most elaborately complicated operations together without either sound
or gesture. Their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding. It has
no modulation, and was I believe, in no sense a signal,
but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation.
(17:38):
I have a certain claim to at least an elementary
knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am convinced
as firmly as I am convinced of anything, that the
Martians interchange thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I have
been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions. Before
the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here and there
(18:01):
may remember, I had ridden with some little vehemence against
the telepathic theory. The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions
of ornament and decorum were necessarily different from ours. And
not only were they evidently much less sensible of changes
of temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do
not seem to have affected their health at all seriously. Yet,
(18:24):
though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
artificial additions to their body resources that their great superiority
over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road skates,
our lilienthal soaring machines, our guns and sticks, and so forth,
are just in the beginning of the evolution that the
Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains,
(18:49):
wearing different bodies according to their needs, just as men
wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry,
or an umbrella in the wet, and of all their appliances,
perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the
cureous fact that what is the dominant feature of almost
all human devices in mechanism is absent. The wheel is absent.
(19:11):
Among all the things they brought to earth, there is
no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One
would have least expected it in locomotion, and in this
connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth,
nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred
other expedients to its development. And not only did the
(19:34):
Martians either not know of which is incredible, or abstain
from the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly, little use
is made of the fixed pivot, or relatively fixed pivot,
with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane, almost all
of the joints of the machinery present a complicated system
(19:54):
of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.
And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable
that the long leverages of their machines are in most
cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the
disks in an elastic sheath. These disks become polarized and
(20:15):
drawn closely and powerfully together when transversed by a current
of electricity. In this way, the curious parallelism to animal motions,
which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder,
was attained. Such quasi muscles abounded in the crablike handling machine, which,
on my first peeping out of the slit I watched
(20:38):
unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the
actual martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting,
stirring in effectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast
journey across space. While I was still watching their sluggish
motions in the sunlight and noting each strange detail of
their form, the Curate reminded me of his presence by
(21:00):
pulling violently at my arm. I turned to a scowling
face and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit, which
permitted only one of us to peep through, and so
I had to forego watching them for a time while
he enjoyed that privilege. When I looked again, the busy
handling machine had already put together several of the pieces
(21:23):
of apparatus. It had taken out of the cylinder into
a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own. And
down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had
come into view, emitting jets of green vapor and working
its way round the pit, excavating and in banking in
a methodical and discriminating manner. This it was which had
(21:47):
caused the regular beating noise and the rhythmic shocks that
had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled
as it worked. So far as I could see, the
thing was without a direct martian at all. End of
Chapter two
This is a LibriVox recording. All liberriyvox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells,
Book two, Chapter two, What we saw from the ruined house.
(00:28):
After eating, we crept back to the scullery, and there
I must have dozed again, for presently, when I looked round,
I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence.
I whispered for the Curate several times, and at last
felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It
was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room,
(00:50):
lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians.
His shoulders were hunched so that his head was hidden
from me. I could hear a number of noise, almost
like those in an engine shed, and the place rocked
with that beating thud. Through the aperture in the wall,
I could see the top of a tree touched with gold,
(01:10):
and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For
a minute or so I remained watching the Curate, and
then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amid
the broken crockery that littered the floor. I touched the
curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass
of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a
(01:31):
loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out,
and for a long time we crouched motionless. Then I
turned to see how much our rampart remained. The detachment
of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in
the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam,
(01:51):
I was able to see out of this gap into
what had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway. Vast, indeed,
was the change that we beheld. The fifth cylinder must
have fallen right in the midst of the house we
had first visited. The building had vanished completely, smashed, pulverized,
and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now far
(02:15):
beneath the original foundations, deep in a hole already vastly
larger than the pit I had looked into at woking
the earth all round. It had splashed under that tremendous impact.
Splashed is the only word, and lay in heaped piles
that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had
behaved exactly like mud. Under the violent blow of a hammer.
(02:39):
Our house had collapsed backward. The front portion, even on
the ground floor, had been destroyed completely by a chance.
The kitchen and scullery had escaped and stood buried now
under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth.
On every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect
we hung now on the very edge of the great
(03:01):
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy
beating sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and
again a bright green vapor drove up like a veil
across our peep hole. The cylinder was already open in
the center of the pit, and on the farther edge
of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel heaped shrubbery,
(03:22):
one of the great fighting machines, deserted by its occupant,
stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first
I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it
had been convenient to describe them first. On account of
the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation,
and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling
(03:44):
slowly and painfully across the heaped mold near it. The
mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It
was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been
called handling machines, and the study of which has already
given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it
(04:04):
dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider,
with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number
of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about
its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with
three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates,
(04:25):
and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the
walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were
lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth
behind it. Its motion was so swift, complex and perfect
that at first I did not see it as a machine.
In spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting machines were
(04:49):
coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch. But nothing to
compare with this. People who have never seen these structures
and have only the ill imagined efforts of arms artists,
or the imperfect descriptions of such eyewitnesses of myself to
go upon scarcely realize that living quality. I recall particularly
(05:10):
the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give
a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently
made a hasty study of one of the fighting machines,
and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted,
stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an
altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings
(05:35):
had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply
to warn the reader against the impression they may have created.
They were no more like the martians I saw in
action than a Dutch doll is like a human being.
To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better
without them. At first, I say, the handling machine did
(05:55):
not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike
creature with a glittering integument, the controlling martian, whose delicate
tentacles actuated its movements, seeming to be simply the equivalent
of the crab's cerebral portion. But then I perceived the
resemblance of its gray, brown, shiny, leathery integment to that
(06:15):
of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true nature
of this dexterous workmen dawned upon me. With that realization,
my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
Already I had had a transient impression of these, and
the first nausea no longer obscured my observation. Moreover, I
(06:38):
was concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.
They were. I now saw the most unearthly creatures it
is possible to conceive. They were huge, round bodies, or
rather heads, about four feet in diameter, each body having
in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils, indeed,
(07:00):
the Martians do not seem to have any sense of smell,
but it had a pair of very large, dark colored eyes,
and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In
the back of this head or body I scarcely know
how to speak of it was the single tight tympanic
surface since known to be anatomically an ear, though it
(07:23):
must have been almost useless in our dense air. In
a group round the mouth was sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles,
arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have
since been named rather aptly by that distinguished anatomist Professor Howes,
the hands. Even as I saw these Martians for the
(07:45):
first time, they seemed to be endeavoring to raise themselves
on these hands. But of course, with the increased weight
of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to
suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them
with some facility. The internal anatomy, I may remark here,
as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The
(08:10):
greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous
nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this
were the bulky lungs into which the mouth opened, and
the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by
the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction, was only too
(08:30):
evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin. And
this was the sum of the Martian organs, strange as
it may seem to a human being, all the complex
apparatus of digestion which makes up. The bulk of our
bodies did not exist. In the Martians, they were heads,
merely heads entrails. They had none. They did not eat,
(08:56):
much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh life, living
blood of other creatures and injected it into their own veins.
I have seen this being done, as I shall mention
in its place, but squeamish as I may seem, I
cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure
even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say blood
(09:19):
obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from
a human being, was run directly by means of a
little pipet into the recipient canal. The bare idea of
this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at
the same time, I think that we should remember how
repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
(09:42):
The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable.
If one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time
and energy occasion by eating and the digestive process. Our
bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and
organs occupied in turning heterogenea food into blood. The digestive
(10:03):
processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our
strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable,
as they have healthy or unhealthy livers or sound gastric glands.
But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations
of mood and emotion. Their undeniable preference for men as
(10:24):
their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature
of the remains of the victims they had brought with
them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from
the shriveled remains that have fallen into human hands, were
bipeds with flimsy silicus skeletons almost like those of the
Silicus sponges, and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high
(10:47):
and having round, erect heads and large eyes in flinty sockets.
Two or three of these seemed to have been brought
in each cylinder, and all were killed before Earth was reached.
It was just as well for them them, for the
mere attempt to stand upright on our body would have
broken every bone in their bodies. And while I am
(11:07):
engaged in this description, I may add in this place
certain further details, which, although they were not all evident
to us at the time, will enable the reader who
is unacquainted with them, to form a clearer picture of
these offensive creatures. In three other points, their physiology differed
strangely from ours. Their organisms did not sleep any more
(11:29):
than the heart of a man sleeps. Since they had
no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was
unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue.
It would seem on Earth they could never have moved
without effort. Yet even to the last they kept in action.
In twenty four hours, they did twenty four hours of work,
(11:51):
as even on Earth. Is perhaps the case with the
ants in the next place. Wonderful as it seems in
a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and
therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from
that difference among men. A young Martian, there can now
be no dispute, was really borne upon Earth during the war,
(12:14):
and it was found attached to its parent, partially budded off,
just as young lillibolbs bud off, or like the young
animals in the fresh water polyp in man. In all
the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has disappeared,
but even on this Earth it was certainly the primitive
method among the lower animals up even to those first
(12:37):
cousins of the vertebrateed animals, the tunicates. The two processes
occur side by side, but finally the sexual methods superseded
its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has
apparently been the case. It is worthy to remark that
a certain speculative writer of quasi scientific repute, writing long
(12:59):
before or the Martian invasion, did forecast for Man a
final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy,
I remember, appeared in November or December eighteen ninety three
in a long defunct publication the pal Mal Budget, and
I recall a caricature of it in a pre Martian
(13:21):
periodical called Punch. He pointed out, writing in a foolish,
facetious tone, that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately
supersede limbs, the perfection of chemical devices digestion, that such
organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were
no longer essential parts of the human body, and that
(13:43):
the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction
of their steadied diminution through the coming ages. The brain
alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of
the body had a strong case for survival, and that
was the hand, teacher and agent of the brain. While
(14:04):
the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.
There is many a true word written in jest, and
here in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual
accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of
the organism by the intelligence. To me, it is quite
credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not
(14:25):
unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands,
the latter giving rise to two bunches of delicate tentacles
at last, at the expense of the rest of the body.
Without the body, the brain would of course become a
mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of
the human being. The last salient point in which the
(14:47):
systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what
one might have thought of very trivial. Particular. Microorganisms, which
cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either
never appeared on or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages
ago a hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of
(15:09):
human life, consumption, cancers, tumors, and such morbidities never enter
the scheme of their life. And speaking of the difference
between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may
allude here to the curious suggestion of the red weed.
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green
(15:29):
as a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood red tint.
At any rate, the seeds that the Martians intentionally or
accidentally brought with them gave rise in all cases to
red coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the red weed, however,
gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms. The red
(15:52):
creeper was quite a transitory growth, and a few people
have seen it growing. For a time. However, the red
weed grew with astonishing vigor and luxuriance. It spread up
the sides of the pit by the third or fourth
day of our imprisonment, and its cactus like branches formed
a carmine fridge to the edges of our triangular window.
(16:12):
And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and
especially wherever there was a stream of water. The Martians
had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a
single round drum at the back of the head body,
and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours,
except that, according to Phillips, blue and violet were as
(16:34):
black to them. It is commonly supposed that they communicated
by sounds and tentacular gesticulations. This is asserted, for instance,
in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet written evidently by
someone not an eyewitness of Martian actions, to which I
have already alluded, and which so far has been the
(16:54):
chief source of information concerning them. Now, no surviving human
being saw so much of the Martians in action as
I did. I take no credit to myself for an accident,
but the fact is so, and I assert that I
watch them closely, time after time, and that I have
seen four, five, and at once six of them sluggishly
(17:16):
performing the most elaborately complicated operations together without either sound
or gesture. Their peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding. It has
no modulation, and was I believe, in no sense a signal,
but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation.
(17:38):
I have a certain claim to at least an elementary
knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am convinced
as firmly as I am convinced of anything, that the
Martians interchange thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I have
been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions. Before
the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here and there
(18:01):
may remember, I had ridden with some little vehemence against
the telepathic theory. The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions
of ornament and decorum were necessarily different from ours. And
not only were they evidently much less sensible of changes
of temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do
not seem to have affected their health at all seriously. Yet,
(18:24):
though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
artificial additions to their body resources that their great superiority
over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road skates,
our lilienthal soaring machines, our guns and sticks, and so forth,
are just in the beginning of the evolution that the
Martians have worked out. They have become practically mere brains,
(18:49):
wearing different bodies according to their needs, just as men
wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry,
or an umbrella in the wet, and of all their appliances,
perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the
cureous fact that what is the dominant feature of almost
all human devices in mechanism is absent. The wheel is absent.
(19:11):
Among all the things they brought to earth, there is
no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One
would have least expected it in locomotion, and in this
connection it is curious to remark that even on this earth,
nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred
other expedients to its development. And not only did the
(19:34):
Martians either not know of which is incredible, or abstain
from the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly, little use
is made of the fixed pivot, or relatively fixed pivot,
with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane, almost all
of the joints of the machinery present a complicated system
(19:54):
of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.
And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable
that the long leverages of their machines are in most
cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the
disks in an elastic sheath. These disks become polarized and
(20:15):
drawn closely and powerfully together when transversed by a current
of electricity. In this way, the curious parallelism to animal motions,
which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder,
was attained. Such quasi muscles abounded in the crablike handling machine, which,
on my first peeping out of the slit I watched
(20:38):
unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the
actual martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting,
stirring in effectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast
journey across space. While I was still watching their sluggish
motions in the sunlight and noting each strange detail of
their form, the Curate reminded me of his presence by
(21:00):
pulling violently at my arm. I turned to a scowling
face and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit, which
permitted only one of us to peep through, and so
I had to forego watching them for a time while
he enjoyed that privilege. When I looked again, the busy
handling machine had already put together several of the pieces
(21:23):
of apparatus. It had taken out of the cylinder into
a shape having an unmistakable likeness to its own. And
down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had
come into view, emitting jets of green vapor and working
its way round the pit, excavating and in banking in
a methodical and discriminating manner. This it was which had
(21:47):
caused the regular beating noise and the rhythmic shocks that
had kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled
as it worked. So far as I could see, the
thing was without a direct martian at all. End of
Chapter two
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.