It's not important, EDDIE. There doesn't seem to be much interest, anyway. I suppose that if a rocket was blasting off, with plenty of smoke and flames, that might get more people watching, but Mars creeping up, nice and slow, isn't what I'd call dramatic!
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Well I think it's fascinating. Mars is so lovely to look at with the naked eye anyway. Cloudy here at the moment though so I doubt I'll see much for a day or two.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Hopkirk I was just about to post something from War of the Worlds myself.
My old school history teacher was a Mr Wells and he was a relation of H G Wells.