that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty `
` surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians `
` can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is `
` impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this `
` earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread `
` of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our `
` sister planet within its toils. `
` `
` Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of `
` life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system `
` throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a `
` remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of `
` the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is `
` the future ordained. `
` `
` I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an `
` abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study `
` writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley `
` below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me `
` empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass `
` me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a `
` bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and `
` unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, `
` brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the `
` silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they `
` rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, `
` paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold `
` and wretched, in the darkness of the night. `
` `
` I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the `
` Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of `
` the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, `
` going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a `
` galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, `
` as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great `
` province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and `
` mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people `
` walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the `
` sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear `
` the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it `
` all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last `
` great day. . . . `
` `
` And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think `
` that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead. `
`