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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 23. THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS
For some time I stood on the mound, swaying, and I didn't care about my safety.
Inside that horrible den where I had been, I had thought only about our immediate safety.
I hadn't realized what had been happening to the world.
I hadn't expected this shocking sight of strange things.
I had expected to see Sheen in ruins.
Instead, I found around me the landscape of another planet, weird and bright.
For that moment I felt an emotion beyond normal human experience, yet one that the poor animals we control know only too well.
I felt like a rabbit returning to its hole and seeing work of a dozen workers digging the foundations of a house.
I felt the first hint of a thing that soon became very clear in my mind.
It oppressed me for many days, it was a feeling of being removed from power.
I believed that I was no longer a master, but an animal among animals, under the Martian's control.
With us it would be as with them, to hide and watch, to run and hide.
The fear and rule of man had ended.
But as soon as I realized this strangeness, it passed.
My main feeling became the hunger from my long and terrible fast.
Away from the pit, I saw beyond a red-covered wall a piece of garden ground that wasn't buried.
This gave me an idea, I walked knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed.
The thickness of the weed made me feel safe and hidden.
The wall was about six feet high.
When I tried to climb it, I found I couldn't lift my feet to the top.
So I walked along beside it, I came to a corner and some rockwork that let me get to the top.
Then I fell into the garden I wanted.
Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a lot of small carrots, I took all of these.
Then I climbed over a ruined wall and went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew.
It was like walking through an avenue of giant blood drops.
I had two ideas, get more food, and limp away as soon and as far as my strength allowed from this cursed pit.
A bit farther on, in a grassy place, I found a group of mushrooms.
I ate them too, then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow water, where meadows used to be.
These small bits of food only made my hunger worse.
At first I was surprised at this flood in a hot, dry summer.
But later I discovered that it was caused by the tropical growth of the red weed.
As soon as this strange plant met water, it became giant and produced seeds in huge numbers.
Its seeds simply poured into the water of the Wey and Thames.
Its fast-growing, giant water leaves quickly blocked both rivers.
At Putney, as I saw later, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle of this weed.
At Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad, shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham.
As the water spread, the weed followed it.
The ruined villas of the Thames valley were lost for a time in this red swamp.
I explored its edge, and much of the destruction the Martians had caused was hidden.
In the end, the red weed died almost as quickly as it had spread.
A rotting disease, caused, it's believed, by certain bacteria, soon attacked it.
Now, by natural selection, all land plants have gained a power to resist bacterial diseases.
They never die without a hard fight.
But the red weed rotted like something already dead.
Its leaves became white, then dry and brittle.
They broke off at the smallest touch.
The waters that had helped their early growth carried their last remains out to sea.
My first act when I came to this water was, of course, to drink.
I drank a lot of it, then, moved by an impulse, I bit some leaves of red weed.
But they were watery and had a sickly, metallic taste.
I found the water was shallow enough for me to wade safely, although the red weed slowed my feet a little.
But the flood clearly got deeper towards the river, so I turned back to Mortlake.
I managed to find the road by using the occasional ruins of its villas, fences, and lamps.
So soon I got out of this flood and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton.
I came out on Putney Common at dusk, exhausted and unsteady from hunger.
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of the familiar.
Patches of ground showed the destruction of a cyclone.
In a few dozen yards I'd come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces.
Houses had their blinds neatly drawn and doors closed, as if the owners had left for a day, or as if their people slept inside.
The red weed was less common, the tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper.
I looked for food among the trees, finding nothing.
I also searched a couple of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and robbed.
I rested for the rest of the daylight in a shrubbery.
In my weak condition, I was too tired to go on.
All this time I saw no human beings and no signs of the Martians.
I met a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both quickly went around me when I tried to approach them.
Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons, Not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean.
In the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep.
But though I bit parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to get from them.
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason.
In the garden beyond Roehampton I got a lot of small potatoes, enough to stop my hunger.
From this garden one looked down upon Putney and the river.
The look of the place in the dusk was strangely desolate.
Blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-colored with the weed.
And over all, silence, it filled me with terrible fear to think how quickly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been wiped out of existence.
I stood there alone, the last man left alive.
Near the top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton.
Its arms were separated and moved several yards from the rest of the body.
As I went on, I became sure that mankind's destruction was complete in this part of the world, except for stragglers like me.
The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country desolated, looking for food elsewhere.
Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, Or maybe they had gone northward.