CHAPTER SIX
THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS
For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of mysafety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I hadthought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I hadnot realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipatedthis startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to seeSheen in ruins--I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, ofanother planet.
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range ofmen, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. Ifelt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenlyconfronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundationsof a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grewquite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense ofdethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but ananimal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would beas with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empireof man had passed away.
But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and mydominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In thedirection away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patchof garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of theweed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feethigh, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift myfeet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to acorner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumbleinto the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a coupleof gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which Isecured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way throughscarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking through anavenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get morefood, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out ofthis accursed unearthly region of the pit.
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms whichalso I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallowwater, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment servedonly to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in ahot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by thetropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinarygrowth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and ofunparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into thewater of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic waterfronds speedily choked both those rivers.
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in atangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured ina broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton andTwickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until theruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this redswamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation theMartians had caused was concealed.
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it hadspread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action ofcertain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action ofnatural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resistingpower against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severestruggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. Thefronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They brokeoff at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their earlygrowth carried their last vestiges out to sea.
My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake mythirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawedsome fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me towade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but theflood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back toMortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruinsof its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of thisspate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and cameout on Putney Common.
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to thewreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastationof a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectlyundisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doorsclosed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as iftheir inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; thetall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I huntedfor food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a coupleof silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, inmy enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians.I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurriedcircuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton Ihad seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, pickedclean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bonesof several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though Ignawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got fromthem.
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where Ithink the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in thegarden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down uponPutney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk wassingularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, anddown the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with theweed. And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terrorto think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence,and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by thetop of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the armsdislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body. As Iproceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination ofmankind was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplishedin this part of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on andleft the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even nowthey were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gonenorthward.