ceased. It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a
thunderclap.

The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees
towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed
clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable;
by virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life
about me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of
something--I knew not what--and then a stillness that could be felt.
Nothing but this gaunt quiet.

London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white
houses were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination
found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror
of my temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as though
it was tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I
could not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road,
and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I
hid from the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a
cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage
returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more
towards Regent's Park. I missed my way among the streets, and
presently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn,
the curve of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading
stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.

An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I
would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on
recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the
light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and
clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began
running along the road.

I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's Terrace (I
waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down from
the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass
before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the
crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and
largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these heaps there
rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog
ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew
real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling
exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out
of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds
pecked and tore.

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood
upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A
mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it,
huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered
about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid
handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a
row, were the Martians--_dead_!--slain by the putrefactive and disease
bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red
weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by
the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have
foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These
germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of
things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed
resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to
many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our
living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in
Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and
fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already
when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting
even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a
billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is
his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten
times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in
that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have
seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also
at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that
these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead.
For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been
repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain
them in the night.

I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously,
even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his
rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and
wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their
tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows
towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the
bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across
the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great
flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser
atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a
day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the
huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the
tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned
seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.

I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed


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