garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
weed. And over all silence. It filled me with indescribable terror to
think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and
that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the top of
Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms dislocated and
removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I proceeded I
became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was,
save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part
of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country
desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were
destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone northward.
VII.
THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.
I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill,
sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into
that house afterwards I found the front door was on the latch nor how I
ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in
what seemed to me to be a servant s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust
and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and
emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches
that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too
rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my
pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that
part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an
interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering
out for some sign of these monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I
found myself thinking consecutively a thing I do not remember to have
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