achieved by the invaders had produced everywhere a
mingled feeling of consternation and hopelessness. The devastation was
widespread. The death-dealing engines which the Martians had brought with
them had proved irresistible and the inhabitants of the earth possessed
nothing capable of contending against them. There had been no protection
for the great cities; no protection even for the open country. Everything
had gone down before the savage onslaught of those merciless invaders from
space. Savage ruins covered the sites of many formerly flourishing towns
and villages, and the broken walls of great cities stared at the heavens
like the exhumed skeletons of Pompeii. The awful agencies had extirpated
pastures and meadows and dried up the very springs of fertility in the
earth where they had touched it. In some parts of the devastated lands
pestilence broke out; elsewhere there was famine. Despondency black as
night brooded over some of the fairest portions of the globe.

All Not Yet Destroyed.

Yet all had not been destroyed, because all had not been reached by
the withering hand of the destroyer. The Martians had not had time to
complete their work before they themselves fell a prey to the diseases
that carried them off at the very culmination of their triumph.

From those lands which had, fortunately, escaped invasion, relief was
sent to the sufferers. The outburst of pity and of charity exceeded
anything that the world had known. Differences of race and religion
were swallowed up in the universal sympathy which was felt for those
who had suffered so terribly from an evil that was as unexpected as it
was unimaginable in its enormity.

But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the
scenes of death and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was
the profound mental and moral depression that followed. This was shared
even by those who had not seen the Martians and had not witnessed the
destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had imported
for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal
despair, and it became tenfold blacker when the astronomers announced
from their observatories that strange lights were visible, moving and
flashing upon the red surface of the Planet of War. These mysterious
appearances could only be interpreted in the light of past experience to
mean that the Martians were preparing for another invasion of the earth,