What We Saw From The Ruined House

: THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS

After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have

dozed again, for when presently 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, lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the

Martians. Hi shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden

from me.



I could hear a number of noises 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

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 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 of 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 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 into the midst of the

house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely

smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now

far 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. 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

circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating

sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green

vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.



The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on

the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped

shrubbery, 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 has 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 slowly and painfully across

the heaped mould 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 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, 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 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 artists or

the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon,

scarcely realise that living quality.



I recall particularly 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 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 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 grey-brown, shiny,

leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and

the true nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that

realisation 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 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, the Martians do not seem to have had any

sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured 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

must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the

mouth were 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 first time they seemed to be

endeavouring 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 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 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, much

less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other

creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself 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 obtained from

a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run

directly by means of a little pipette 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.



The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are

undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and

energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are

half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning

heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive 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 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 shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands,

were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the

silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet

high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets.

Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and

all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for

them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have

broken every bone in their bodies.



And while I am 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 than the heart of 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, 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 born upon earth

during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially

budded off, just as young lilybulbs 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

cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes

occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its

competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has

apparently been the case.



It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of

quasi-scientific repute, writing long before 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, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget,

and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian 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 being, and that the tendency of natural selection

would lie in the direction of their steady 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 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

unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the

latter giving rise to the 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 systems of these creatures

differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial

particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on

earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary

science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers

and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such

morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life. And speaking of

the differences between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may

allude here to the curious suggestions of the red weed.



Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green

for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the

seeds which 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 creeper was quite a transitory

growth, and few people have seen it growing. For a time, however, the

red weed grew with astonishing vigour 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 fringe to the edges of

our triangular window. 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 Philips,

blue and violet were as 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 eye-witness of Martian actions)

to which I have already alluded, and which, so far, has been the 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

watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four, five,

and (once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately

complicated operations together without either sound or gesture. Their

peculiar hooting invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation,

and was, I believe, in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of

air preparatory to the suctional operation. 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 interchanged 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 or there may

remember, I had written 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 though they wore no clothing, it was in the other

artificial additions to their bodily 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, 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 their

appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the

curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human

devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the

things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their

use of wheels. One would have at 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 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 the joints of the machinery present a

complicated system 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 polarised and drawn closely and powerfully

together when traversed 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 unpacking the cylinder. It seemed

infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the

sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual 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 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 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 vapour and working its way round the pit,

excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner.

This it was which had 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 directing Martian at all.