my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable

intermittence. I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the

lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the

Highgate hills.

At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The

northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington

glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed

up and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London

was black. Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale,

violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze. For

a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be

the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that

realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of

things, awoke again. I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear,

glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the

darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.

I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the

grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the

midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent

revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a

certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring

exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was

filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined

dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into

235

The War of the Worlds