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Herbert George Wells

The War of the Worlds
[1898]

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)



BOOK ONE


THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS



CHAPTER ONE


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 scru-
tinise 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 mis-
sionary 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, re-