But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the weed gave
me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet high, and
when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my feet to the
crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a
rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into the garden
I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs,
and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and,
scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and
crimson trees towards Kew it was like walking through an avenue of
gigantic blood drops possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to
limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed
unearthly region of the pit.
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served
only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a
hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth
encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled
fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey
and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily
choked both those rivers.
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle
of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad
and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the
water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the
Thames valley were for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin I
explored, and much of the desolation the Martians had caused was
concealed.
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A
cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain
bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural
128