The War of the Worlds | Page 5

cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has
air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the
nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far,
or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars
is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from
the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning but
nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed
with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now
that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our
coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until
they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather
and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage
of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem
for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their
intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space
with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its
nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our
own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere
eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of
populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and
lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry
warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after
generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter

destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished
bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human
likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by
European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to
complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety--their
mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their
preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we
might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like
Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries
Mars has been the star of war--but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the
markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk,
first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers.
English readers heard of it first in the issue of NATURE dated August 2. I am inclined to
think that this blaze may have been the casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into
their planet, from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as yet
unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of
Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence
of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred towards midnight
of the twelfth; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of
flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth.
This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a
colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, "as flaming gases
rushed out of a gun."
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of