The War of the Worlds

by H. G. Wells [1898]


But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?--
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)



BOOK ONE

THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS



CHAPTER ONE

THE EVE OF THE WAR


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