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At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of

my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside.

That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I

fell and lay still.



I must have remained there some time.



I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not

clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me

like a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from

its fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three real

things before me--the immensity of the night and space and nature, my

own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it

was as if something turned over, and the point of view altered

abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one state of mind to

the other. I was immediately the self of every day again--a decent,

ordinary citizen. The silent common, the impulse of my flight, the

starting flames, were as if they had been in a dream. I asked myself

had these latter things indeed happened? I could not credit it.



I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge. My

mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their

strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over the

arch, and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside

him ran a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was

minded to speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a

meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.



Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit

smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying

south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of

people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little

row of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real

and so familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic!

Such things, I told myself, could not be.



Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my

experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of

detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all

from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time,

out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling

was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my

dream.



But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the

swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of

business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all alight. I

stopped at the group of people.



"What news from the common?" said I.



There were two men and a woman at the gate.



"Eh?" said one of the men, turning.



"What news from the common?" I said.



"'Ain't yer just been there?" asked the men.



"People seem fair silly about the common," said the woman over the

gate. "What's it all abart?"



"Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" said I; "the creatures

from Mars?"



"Quite enough," said the woman over the gate. "Thenks"; and all

three of them laughed.



I felt foolish and angry. I tried and found I could not tell them

what I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.



"You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on to my home.



I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went into

the dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I could

collect myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The

dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and remained

neglected on the table while I told my story.



"There is one thing," I said, to allay the fears I had aroused;

"they are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep

the pit and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out

of it. . . . But the horror of them!"



"Don't, dear!" said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her

hand on mine.



"Poor Ogilvy!" I said. "To think he may be lying dead there!"



My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw

how deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.



"They may come here," she said again and again.



I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.



"They can scarcely move," I said.



I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had

told me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves

on the earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational

difficulty. On the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three

times what it is on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would

weigh three times more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength

would be the same. His own body would be a cope of lead to him. That,

indeed, was the general opinion. Both The Times and the Daily

Telegraph, for instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both

overlooked, just as I did, two obvious modifying influences.



The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen

or far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars.

The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians

indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their

bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that

such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able

to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.



But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my

reasoning was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and

food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring

my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.



"They have done a foolish thing," said I, fingering my wineglass.

"They are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror.

Perhaps they expected to find no living things--certainly no

intelligent living things."



"A shell in the pit" said I, "if the worst comes to the worst will

kill them all."



The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my

perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner

table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet

anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white

cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days

even philosophical writers had many little luxuries--the crimson-purple

wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of

it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's

rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.



So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in

his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless

sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow,

my dear."



I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to

eat for very many strange and terrible days.