I.
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 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.


['Ò', 'ỗ', 'Ä', 'ú', 'ễ', 'Ỵ', 'ạ', 'Ễ', '–', 'Ồ']