BOOK TWO: THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 6: THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS
For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless
of my safety. Within that noisome den from which I had
emerged I had thought with a narrow intensity only of our
immediate security. I had not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated this startling vision
of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in ruins--I
found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another
planet.
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common
range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate
know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning
to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a
dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I
felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite
clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense
of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master,
but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.
With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run
and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
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.
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