No one would have
believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched
keenly
and closely by
intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
scrutinise
the
transient creatures that
swarm and
multiply in a
drop of water. With infinite
complacency men went to and
fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave
a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human
danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as
impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall
some of the
mental habits of those departed days. At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon
Mars,
perhaps
inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a
missionary
enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that
are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,
intellects
vast and cool and
unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with
envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their
plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came
the great
disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles,
and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half
of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular
hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long
before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely
one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated
its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It
has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of
animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed
any idea that intelligent life might have developed
there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was
it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth,
with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more
distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet
has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical
condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that
even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely
approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more
attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover
but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge
snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion,
which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day
problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate
pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged
their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across
space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have
scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope,
our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with
water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with
glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches
of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must
be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys
and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would
seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars.
Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard
as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember
what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has
wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison
and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians,
in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants,
in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of
mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with
amazing subtlety -- their mathematical learning is evidently
far in excess of ours -- and to have carried out their preparations
with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments
permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble
far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli
watched the red planet -- it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless
centuries Mars has been the star of war -- but failed to
interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they
mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on
the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory,
then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English
readers heard of it first in the issue of NATURE dated August 2.
I am inclined to think that this blaze may have been the
casting of the huge gun, in the vast pit sunk into their planet,
from which their shots were fired at us. Peculiar markings, as
yet unexplained, were seen near the site of that outbreak
during the next two oppositions.
The storm burst upon us six years ago now. As Mars
approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the
astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence
of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet.
It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the
spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a
mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an
enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had
become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared
it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted
out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day
there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in
the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and the world went in ignorance of one
of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race.
I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met
Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was
immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings
invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a
scrutiny of the red planet.
In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember
that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory,
the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor
in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope,
the little slit in the roof -- an oblong profundity with
the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible
but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle
of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the
field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and
still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly
flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so
silvery warm -- a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered,
but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity
of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.
As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller
and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye
was tired. Forty millions of miles it was from us -- more than
forty millions of miles of void. Few people realise the immensity
of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe
swims.
Near it in the field, I remember, were three faint points of
light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around
it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know
how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope
it seems far profounder. And invisible to me because
it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards
me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer every minute
by so many thousands of miles, came the Thing they were
sending us, the Thing that was to bring so much struggle and
calamity and death to the earth. I never dreamed of it then
as I watched; no one on earth dreamed of that unerring
missile.
That night, too, there was another jetting out of gas from
the distant planet. I saw it. A reddish flash at the edge, the
slightest projection of the outline just as the chronometer
struck midnight; and at that I told Ogilvy and he took my
place. The night was warm and I was thirsty, and I went
stretching my legs clumsily and feeling my way in the darkness,
to the little table where the siphon stood, while Ogilvy
exclaimed at the streamer of gas that came out towards us.
That night another invisible missile started on its way to
the earth from Mars, just a second or so under twenty-four
hours after the first one. I remember how I sat on the table
there in the blackness, with patches of green and crimson
swimming before my eyes. I wished I had a light to smoke
by, little suspecting the meaning of the minute gleam I had
seen and all that it would presently bring me. Ogilvy watched
till one, and then gave it up; and we lit the lantern and
walked over to his house. Down below in the darkness were
Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people,
sleeping in peace.
He was full of speculation that night about the condition
of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants
who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites
might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that
a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed out
to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken
the same direction in the two adjacent planets.
"The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a
million to one," he said.
Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the
night after about midnight, and again the night after; and
so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased
after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain.
It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience.
Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through
a powerful telescope on earth as little grey, fluctuating
patches, spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere
and obscured its more familiar features.
Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at
last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere
concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The seriocomic periodical
PUNCH, I remember, made a happy use of it in the
political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the
Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of
space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It
seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with
that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their
petty concerns as they did. I remember how jubilant Markham
was at securing a new photograph of the planet for the
illustrated paper he edited in those days. People in these
latter times scarcely realise the abundance and enterprise
of our nineteenth-century papers. For my own part, I was
much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy
upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments
of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.
One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been
10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It
was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to
her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping
zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed.
It was a warm night. Coming home, a party of excursionists
from Chertsey or Isleworth passed us singing and playing
music. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses
as the people went to bed. From the railway station in the
distance came the sound of shunting trains, ringing and
rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. My
wife pointed out to me the brightness of the red, green, and
yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky.
It seemed so safe and tranquil.