"H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
1898
English fiction; prose

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Book 1: The Coming of the Martians

Chapter 1.1

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
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its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and
water and all that necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up