But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited are we or are they Lords of the world and how are all things made for man?
No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly, and closely by intelligence is greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own, that is men busy themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope by scrutinized 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 and their assurance of their empire over matter it is possible that the infer also 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.
The planet Mars a 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
The Martian seemed to have calculated they just sent with amazing subtlety. Their mathematical learning is evidently for an excess of ours, and to have carried out their preparations with a well perfect unanimity.
I did but a day before writing this last chapter to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist vanishing at the last into the vague lower sky to see the people walking to and fro among the flowerbeds on the hill to see the site, sears about the Martian machine that stands there still to hear the tumult of the plain children in which call the time that I saw it all bright and clear cut hard and silent under the dawn of the last great day and strangest of all is to hold my wife’s hand again and think that I have counted her and that she has counted me among the dead