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23 - The War of The Worlds - H G Wells · Classic Adventure Books Library

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  Chapter six, The Work of fifteen Days. For some time I stood tottering
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  on the mound, regardless of my safety. Within that noisome den from which
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  I had emerged. I had thought, with a narrow intensity, only of
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  our immediate security. I had not realized what had been happening to the world.
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  Had not anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to
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  see sheen in ruins. I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid
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  of another planet. For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range
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  of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well.
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  I felt as a rabbit might feel, returning to his burrow, and
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  suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a
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  house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear
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  in my mind that oppressed me for many days. A sense of dethronement,
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  a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the
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  animals under the Martian heel. With us, it would be as with them
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  to lurk and watch, to run and hide, the fear and Empire of
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  Man had passed away. But so soon as this strangeness had been realized,
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  it passed, and my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal
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  fast. In the direction away from the pit, I saw beyond a red
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  covered wall a patch of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint,
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  and I went knee deep and sometimes neck deep in the red weed. The
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  density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was
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  some six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it, I found
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  I could not live to my feet to the crest. So I went along
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  by the side of it and came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled
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  me to get to the top and tumble into the garden I coveted. Here
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  I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity
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  of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a
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  ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards que.
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  It was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops. Possessed with two
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  ideas to get more food and to limp as soon and as far as my
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  strength permitted, out of this accursed, unearthly region of the pit. Some
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  way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms, which
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  also I devoured. And then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
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  water where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment so served only to
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  wet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a hot,
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  dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the tropical
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  exuberance of the red weed. Directly, this extraordinary growth encountered water. Its
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  straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled for cunderity. Its seeds were simply poured down
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  into the water of the Way and Thames, and its swiftly growing and titanic
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  water fronds speedily choked both those rivers. At Putney, as I afterwards saw,
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  the bridge was almost lost in a tangle of this weed, and at
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  Richmond too, the Thames water poured in a broad and shallow stream across the
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  meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the water spread, the weed followed them
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  until the ruined villas of the Thames Valley were for a time lost in this
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  red swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the martians
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  had caused was concealed. In the end, the red weed succumbed almost as
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  quickly as it had spread, a cankering disease, due, it is believed
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  to the action of certain bacteria presently seized upon it. Now, by the
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  action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial
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  diseases. They never succumb without a severe struggle. But the red weed rotted
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  like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached and then shriveled and brittle.
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  They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated
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  their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea. My first act on
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  coming to this water was, of course, to slake my thirst. I
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  drank a great deal of it, and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
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  some fronds of red weed, but they were watery and had a sickly metallic
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  taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to wadhe securely,
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  although the red weed impeded my feet a little, but the flood evidently got
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  deeper towards the river, and I turned back to Mortlake. I managed to
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  make out the road by means of occasional ruins of its villas and fences and
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  lamps, and so presently I got out of this spade and made my way
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  to the hill, going up towards Roehampton, and came out on Putney Common.
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  Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of the
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  familiar. Patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in a
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  few score yards I would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds
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  trimly drawn and doors closed, as if they had been left for a day
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  by the owners, or as if their inhabitants slept within. The red weed
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  was less abundant. The tall trees along the lane were free from the red
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  creeper. I hunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I
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  also raided a couple of silent houses, but they had already been broken into
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  and ransacked. I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery,
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  being in my enfeebled condition too fatigued to push on. All this time I
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  saw no human beings and no signs of the Martians. I encountered a couple
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  of hungry looking dogs, but both hurried circatuitously away from the advances I made
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  them. Near Roehampton, I had seen two human skeletons, not bodies,
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  but skeletons picked clean. And in the woods by me I found the crushed
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  and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits, and the skull of a sheep.
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  But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing
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  to be got from them. After sunset I struggled on along the road towards
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  Putney, where I think the heat ray must have been used for some reason,
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  And in the garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes sufficient
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  to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon Putney and the
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  river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was singularly desolate, blackened
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  trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and down the hill the sheets of the
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  flooded river red tinged with the weed and over all silence. It filled me
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  with indescribable terror to think how swiftly, that desolating change had come. For
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  a time, I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and
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  that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the
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  top of Putney Hill, I came upon another skeleton with the arms dislocated and
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  removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I proceeded, I
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  became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was save for such stragglers
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  as myself already accomplished in this part of the world. The martians, I
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  thought, had gone on and left the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere.
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  Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they
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  had gone northward. End of Section twenty three.