Out
of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds
pecked and tore.
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood
upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A
mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it,
huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered
about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid
handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a
row, were the Martians--_dead_!--slain by the putrefactive and disease
bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red
weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by
the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have
foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These
germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of
things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here.
But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed
resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to
many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our
living frames are altogether immune.
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