material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in
their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines,
and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the
Martians _dead!_ slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against
which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being
slain; slain, after all man s devices had failed, by the humblest
things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen
had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease
have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things taken toll of
our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this
natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no
germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many those that cause
putrefaction in dead matter, for instance our living frames are
altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly
these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic
allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they
were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and
fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought
his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would
still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For
neither do men live nor die in vain.
Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that
great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to
them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time
this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that
had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I
believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that
God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.
I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even
as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The
pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful
in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms,
rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.
A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay
darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its
farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine
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