The Angry Planet by John Keir Cross Page B

small, varying in height from 4 to 5 feet—their leader, to whom I have
already referred as the tallest, was about 5 feet 6 inches. Their bodies were
slender, smooth and round; in general dimensions comparable to the trunk of a
medium-sized silver birch on earth. In color they were, in general, yellowish—a
dark, patchy yellow ochre; but this deepened to green towards the foot in most
cases, and sometimes merged to a fleshy pink and even red at the top. At the
top, this trunk of theirs, as I have called it, bulbed out slightly into a head
(I am, in this description, forced to use analogous human terms—“head,” “trunk,”
“hands,” and so on; but, as you will see later, the Martians are quite
different from us—the words are used only as equivalents, for the purpose of
building up some sort of image, however imperfect, in your minds). This “head”
was covered, on the rounded top, with a sudden fringe—a sort of crown—of small
soft tufts of a vivid bright yellow color. Just below this, on the front—the “face”
(although strictly speaking the Martians, as we decided later, had no faces—or
rather, their faces were these tufts or crowns on the top that I have
described)—there were three, sometimes four, sometimes even five, small
jellyish bulbs — glaucous protuberances which glowed transparently. These were
the eyes. There were no organs of hearing or smell—at least, in that first
glimpse we could see nothing that might be an ear or a nose; we found out
later, as we shall describe, that the Martians had a very highly-developed
sense of smell, although they could only “hear” sounds of considerable
loudness.
    I now come to describe the “feet”
and “hands” of the Martians. At the lower extremity of the trunk—the greenish
part I have mentioned—the body suddenly bifurcated. Each of the forks split
again almost immediately, and so on and so on, so that on the ground, at the
foot of each figure, there was a perfect writhing mass of small, hard, fibrous
tentacles. About a third of the way up the trunk, in the front, there was
another sudden branching of similar “tendrils,” as I might call them—only these
ones were longer and lighter in color and seemingly more sensitive. These were
obviously the “hands,” since they held, in their twining grasp, the Martian
weapons—long spears, or swords, of some bright transparent crystalline
substance—a sort of flinty glass, as it seemed. Finally, to complete this
sketch of the appearance of the Martians, there were, just under the bulb of
the head, and on each side of the trunk, two smaller clusters of tentacles (or “tendrils,”
as I really prefer to call them). These were very short and slender, and light
green, almost white in color—like small pale sea anemones.
    These, then, were the creatures
that confronted us that first morning on Mars. The task of describing them
properly has been almost impossible—as I say, I have had to use human terms—we
think, us men, almost always in terms of ourselves (“anthropomorphically,” as
Mac would say—a monstrous big word meaning, quite simply, just that—thinking of
everything, the whole universe, in terms of ourselves, as being like ourselves). The Martians were quite, quite different from ourselves—it was not
till we grasped that that we began to understand them. As our story goes on,
and you begin to learn more about these strange creatures of another planet,
perhaps you will be able to form a clearer picture of them than I have been able
to give in the brief sketch above.
    The thing that astonished and
unnerved us most, however, at that first meeting with the Martians, was not so
much their appearance, strange as that was. It was the fact that the leader was
addressing us, and that the language he was using was our own English, as I
have said already at the end of the previous chapter.
    “Who are you?” he said
distinctly. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    I looked wildly