"After parting with the artilleryman, I came at last to the Holland tunnel. I entered that silent tube, anxious to know the fate of the great city on the other side of the Hudson. Cautiously, I came out of the tunnel and made my way up Canal Street. I reached 14th Street, and there again were black powder and several bodies, and an evil ominous smell from the gratings of the cellars of some of the houses. I wandered up through the 30s and 40s; I stood alone on Times Square. I caught sight of a lean dog running down 7th Avenue with a piece of dark brown meat in his jaws, and a pack of starving mongrels at his heels. He made a wide circle around me, as though he feared I might prove a fresh competitor. I walked up Broadway in the direction of that...that strange powder – past silent shop windows, displaying their mute wares to empty sidewalks – past the Capitol Theatre, silent, dark – past a shooting gallery, where a row of empty guns faced an arrested line of wooden ducks. Near Columbus Circle, I noticed models of 1939 motorcars in the showrooms facing empty streets. From over the top of the General Motors Building, I watched a flock of black birds circling in the sky. I hurried on. Suddenly I caught sight of the hood of a Martian machine, standing somewhere in Central Park, gleaming in the late afternoon sun. An insane idea! I...I rushed recklessly across Columbus Circle and into the park. I...I climbed a small hill above the pond at 60th Street. From there I could see, standing in a silent row along the mall, 19 of those great metal titans, their cowls empty, their steel arms hanging listlessly by their sides. I looked in vain for the monsters that inhabit those machines. Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds that hovered directly below me. They circled to the ground, and there before my eyes, stark and silent, lay the Martians, with the hungry birds pecking and tearing brown shreds of flesh from their dead bodies. Later, when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their immune systems were unprepared. Slain, after all man's defenses had failed, by the humblest things that God in His wisdom has put upon this Earth. Before the cylinder fell, there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space, no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seedbed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. Maybe...maybe that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, is the future ordained, perhaps. Strange, it now seems, to sit in my peaceful study at Princeton...writing down this last chapter of the record begun at a deserted farm in Grover's Mill. Strange to see from my window the University spires dim and blue through an April haze. Strange to watch children playing in the streets. Strange to see young people strolling on the green, where the new spring grass heals the last black scars of a bruised Earth. Strange to watch the sightseers enter the museum where the disassembled parts of a Martian machine are kept on public view. Strange when I recall the time when I first saw it, bright and clean cut, hard, and silent, under the dawn of that last great day."