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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 19. WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE
After eating, we crept back to the scullery.
There I must have dozed again, because when I looked around, I was alone.
The thudding vibration continued with a tired persistence.
I whispered for the curate several times.
At last I felt my way to the kitchen door.
It was still daylight, I saw him across the room, lying against the triangular hole that looked out on the Martians.
His shoulders were hunched, so I couldn't see his head.
I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine shed.
The place rocked with that beating thud.
Through the hole in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a calm evening sky.
For a minute or so I stayed watching the curate.
Then I moved forward, crouching and stepping with great care among the broken dishes that covered the floor.
I touched the curate's leg, he started so violently that a mass of plaster slid down outside and fell with a loud crash.
I gripped his arm, afraid he might cry out.
For a long time we crouched without moving.
Then I turned to see how much of our wall remained.
The falling plaster had left a vertical slit open in the rubble.
By raising myself carefully across a beam, I could see out of this gap into what had been a quiet suburban road the night before.
The change we saw was truly huge.
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the middle of the house we had first visited.
The building had vanished, it was completely smashed, crushed, and scattered by the blow.
The cylinder now lay far below the original foundations, deep in a hole already much larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking.
The earth all around it had splashed under that huge impact.
"Splashed" is the only word.
It lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the nearby houses.
It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer.
Our house had collapsed backward, the front part, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely.
By chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped.
They now stood buried under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side except toward the cylinder.
Over that side we now hung on the very edge of the great circular pit the Martians were making.
The heavy beating sound was clearly just behind us.
Every now and then a bright green vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.
The cylinder was already open in the centre of the pit.
On the far edge of the pit, among the smashed and gravel-covered bushes, one of the great fighting-machines stood stiff and tall against the evening sky.
Its occupant had left it and stood nearby, watching the scene from the pit's edge.
At first I hardly noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been easier to describe them first.
I was drawn to the strange glittering mechanism that was busy in the excavation.
I was also drawn to the strange creatures crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped earth near it.
The mechanism held my attention first, it was one of those complicated machines that have since been called handling-machines.
The study of them has already given a huge push to earthly invention.
As I first saw it, it looked like a metal spider with five jointed, quick legs.
It had an unusual number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and grabbing tentacles around its body.
Most of its arms were pulled back.
With three long tentacles it was pulling out several rods, plates, and bars that lined the covering and strengthened the cylinder's walls.
As it took them out, they were lifted and placed on a flat surface of earth behind it.
Its motion was so fast, complex, and perfect that at first I didn't see it as a machine, in spite of its metal shine.
The fighting-machines were coordinated and lively to an amazing degree, but nothing compared to this.
People who have never seen these machines and rely only on artists' poor imaginings or imperfect eye-witness descriptions cannot grasp that living quality.
Artistic sketches and second-hand reports give a very weak idea of the machines' true life-like nature.
I remember particularly the picture in one of the first pamphlets to give a connected account of the war.
The artist had clearly made a quick study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended.
He showed them as tilted, stiff tripods, without any flexibility or subtlety, and with a completely misleading sameness of effect.
The pamphlet containing these pictures had a large audience.
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.
In my opinion, the pamphlet would have been much better without them.
At first, I say, the handling-machine didn't impress me as a machine, but as a crab-like creature with a shiny outer layer.
The controlling Martian, whose delicate tentacles moved it, seemed to be simply the equivalent of the crab's brain part.
But then I noticed the similarity of its grey-brown, shiny, leathery outer layer to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond.
The true nature of this skilful worker became clear to me.
With that understanding, my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
I had already had a quick impression of them.
The first sickness no longer blocked my observation.
Also, I was hidden and still, and under no need to act.
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it's possible to imagine.
They were huge round bodies, or rather heads, about four feet across.
Each body had a face in front of it.
This face had no nostrils, Indeed, the Martians didn't seem to have any sense of smell.
But it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just below this a kind of fleshy beak.
In the back of this head or body, I hardly know how to speak of it, was the single tight drum-like surface.
This is now known to be an ear in its structure, though it must have been almost useless in our thick air.
In a group around the mouth were sixteen thin, almost whip-like tentacles.
They were arranged in two bunches of eight each.
These bunches have since been named rather well, by that famous scientist Professor Howes, the hands.
Even as I saw these Martians for the first time, they seemed to be trying to raise themselves on these hands.
But of course, with the increased weight of earthly conditions, this was impossible.
There's reason to think that on Mars they may have moved on them with some ease.
The inside structure, I may note here, as cutting up has since shown, was almost equally simple.
The greater part of the structure was the brain.
It sent huge nerves to the eyes, ear, and touch tentacles.
Besides this were the large lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its blood vessels.
The breathing trouble caused by the thicker air and greater pull of gravity was only too clear in the shaking movements of the outer skin.
And this was all of the Martian organs.
Strange as it may seem, the complex digestive equipment that makes up most of our bodies didn't exist in the Martians.
They were heads, merely heads, they had no guts, they didn't eat, much less digest.
Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures and injected it into their own blood vessels.
I have myself seen this done, as I'll mention in its place.
But, as sensitive as I may seem, I can't bring myself to describe what I couldn't bear even to keep watching.
Let it be enough to say that blood was taken from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being.
It was then run directly by a little tube into the receiving canal.
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly disgusting to us.
But at the same time I think we should remember how disgusting our meat-eating habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
The physical benefits of the practice of injection are hard to deny.
One must consider the huge waste of human time and energy caused by eating and digestion.
Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, busy turning different food into blood.
The digestive processes and their effect on the nervous system take away our strength and colour our minds.
Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound stomach glands.
But the Martians were lifted above all these organic changes of mood and emotion.
Their clear preference for men as their source of food is partly explained by the nature of the remains.
These remains were of the victims they had brought with them as supplies from Mars.
These creatures, judging from dried remains in human hands, were two-legged with thin glassy skeletons like glass sponges and weak muscles.
They stood about six feet high and had round, upright heads, and large eyes in hard sockets.
Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder.
All were killed before earth was reached.
It was just as well for them, because the mere attempt to stand upright on our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.
And while I'm busy with this description, I may add here certain further details.
Though not all were clear then, these details will help readers unfamiliar with them form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
In three other points their body structure differed strangely from ours.
Their bodies didn't sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps.
Since they had no large muscle system to recover, that regular stopping was unknown to them.
They had little or no sense of tiredness, it would seem.
On earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the end they kept in action.
In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with ants.
In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a world of sexes, the Martians were completely without sex.
Therefore they had none of the wild emotions that arise from that difference among men.
A young Martian, there can now be no argument, was really born on earth during the war.
It was found attached to its parent, partly budded off, just as young lily bulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the fresh-water polyp.
In man, in all the higher land animals, such a method of increase has disappeared.
But even on this earth it was certainly the original method.
Among the lower animals, up even to those first cousins of the backboned animals, the Tunicates, the two processes happen side by side.
But finally the sexual method replaced its competitor completely.
On Mars, however, the opposite has apparently been the case.
A certain almost-scientific writer, long before the Martian invasion, predicted that man would end with a structure like the Martians'.
His prediction, I remember, appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long-dead publication, the Pall Mall Budget.
I recall a cartoon of it in a pre-Martian magazine called Punch.
He pointed out, writing in a silly, joking tone, that the perfection of mechanical tools must finally replace limbs.
The perfection of chemical devices would replace digestion.
Such organs as hair, outer nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer necessary parts of the human being.
The tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady shrinking through the coming ages.
The brain alone remained a main need.
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 shrank, the hands would grow larger.
There's many a true word written in fun.
Here in the Martians we have beyond argument the actual achievement of such a removal of the animal side of the body by the intelligence.
To me it's quite believable that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves.
This happened by a gradual development of brain and hands.
The hands finally gave rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles, at the cost of the rest of the body.
Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional base of the human being.
The last important point in which the systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very small detail.
Tiny living things, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared on Mars or Martian cleaning science removed them ages ago.
A hundred diseases, all the fevers and infections of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such sicknesses, never enter the plan of their life.
And speaking of the differences between life on Mars and earthly life, I may mention here the curious suggestions of the red weed.
Apparently the plant kingdom on Mars, instead of having green as a main colour, is of a bright blood-red colour.
At any rate, the seeds which the Martians, on purpose or by accident, 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 earthly forms.
The red creeper was quite a short-lived growth, and few people have seen it growing.
For a time, however, the red weed grew with amazing strength and richness.
It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment.
Its cactus-like branches formed a red edge to the sides of our triangular window.
And afterwards I found it spread throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.
The Martians had what appears to have been a hearing organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body.
They had eyes with a visual range not very different from ours, except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them.
It's commonly thought that they communicated by sounds and tentacle movements.
This is stated in a hastily written pamphlet by someone clearly not an eyewitness of Martian actions, which I have referred to.
This pamphlet has so far been the main source of information about them.
Now no surviving human being saw as much of the Martians in action as I did.
I take no credit for an accident, but the fact is so.
And I say that I watched them closely time after time.
I have seen four, five, and once six of them slowly performing the most carefully complicated operations together without either sound or gesture.
Their strange hooting always came before feeding.
It had no change in tone, and was, I believe, in no sense a signal.
It was simply the release of air before the sucking action.
I have a certain claim to at least a basic knowledge of psychology.
In this matter I'm convinced, as firmly as I'm convinced of anything, that the Martians exchanged thoughts without any physical middle step.
And I have been convinced of this in spite of strong previous beliefs.
Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may remember, I had written with some force against the telepathic theory.
The Martians wore no clothing, Their ideas of decoration and proper behaviour were necessarily different from ours.
They were much less sensitive to temperature changes than we are, and pressure changes did not seriously affect their health.
Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other artificial additions to their body resources that their great advantage over man lay.
We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal flying-machines, our guns and sticks, are just at the beginning of development.
The Martians have worked out much more advanced development.
They have become almost pure brains, putting on different bodies as their needs require.
They change bodies as men put on a suit, grab a bicycle, or take an umbrella in the rain.
Perhaps nothing is more remarkable among their tools than the absence of the wheel, the main feature of most human mechanical devices.
The wheel is missing, Among all the things they brought to earth there's no sign or suggestion of their use of wheels.
One would have at least expected it in movement.
Curiously, even on earth nature never hit upon the wheel, preferring other methods for movement.
The Martians either didn't know of the wheel, which is hard to believe, or they avoided it.
Their machines also made very little use of the fixed pivot or a relatively fixed pivot.
Circular motions around such pivots were limited to one plane.
Almost all the joints of the machinery show a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.
And it is remarkable that the long levers of their machines are usually moved by a false muscle.
This muscle is made of disks in a stretchy cover.
These disks become polarised and pulled closely and powerfully together when a current of electricity passes through them.
In this way the strange likeness to animal movements, which was so striking and disturbing to the human watcher, was achieved.
Such almost-muscles were plentiful in the crab-like handling-machine which, on my first look out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder.
It seemed more alive than the Martians beyond it in the sunset, breathing hard, moving weak tentacles, feebly after their huge journey
I was still watching their slow movements in the sunlight, noting each strange detail of their form.
The curate reminded me of his presence by pulling hard at my arm.
I turned to a frowning face and silent, meaningful lips.
He wanted the slit, which allowed only one of us to look through.
So I had to stop watching them for a time while he enjoyed that chance.
When I looked again, the busy handling-machine had already put together several pieces of equipment it had taken out of the cylinder.
They were arranged into a shape with a clear likeness to its own body.
Down on the left a busy little digging machine had come into view.
It sent out jets of green vapour and worked its way around the pit.
It was digging and building up banks in a careful and selective manner.
This was what had caused the regular beating noise and the rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruined shelter shaking.
It piped and whistled as it worked.
As far as I could see, the thing had no directing Martian at all.