The War of The Worlds (Unabridged). H. G. Wells
Читать онлайн.| Название | The War of The Worlds (Unabridged) |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | H. G. Wells |
| Жанр | Языкознание |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Языкознание |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9788075830203 |
H. G. Wells
The War of The Worlds
(Unabridged)
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
�ISBN 978-80-7583-020-3
Table of Contents
Book One. The Coming of the Martians
Chapter One. The Eve Of The War
Chapter Three. On Horsell Common
Chapter Four. The Cylinder Opens
Chapter Six. The HeatRay In The Chobham Road
Chapter Seven. How I Reached Home
Chapter Nine. The Fighting Begins
Chapter Twelve. What I Saw Of The Destruction
Chapter Thirteen. How I Fell In With The Curate
Chapter Fifteen. What Had Happened In Surrey
Chapter Sixteen. The Exodus From London
Chapter Seventeen. The “Thunder Child”
Book Two. The Earth Under the Martians
Chapter Two. What We Saw From The Ruined House
Chapter Three. The Days Of Imprisonment
Chapter Four. The Death Of The Curate
Chapter Six. The Work Of Fifteen Days
Chapter Seven. The Man On Putney Hill
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 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