"H. G. Wells - the war of the worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS --H. G. Wells (1898)




BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

But who shall dwell in these worlds
if they be inhabited?...
Are we or they Lords of the World?...
And how are all things made for man?

Kepler
quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy



CHAPTER 1
THE EVE OF THE WAR

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth
century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as
men busied themselves about their various concerns they were
scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and
fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to
the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those
departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other
men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a
missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to
our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects
vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious
eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early
in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves