Journalist: Next day, the dawn was a brilliant, fiery red and I wandered through the weird and lurid landscape of another planet, for the vegetation which gives Mars its red appearance had taken root on Earth. As man had succumbed to the Martians, so our land now succumbed to the red weed.

Wherever there was a stream the red weed clung and grew with frightening voraciousness, its claw-like fronds choking the movement of the water. And then it began to creep like a slimy red animal across the land covering field and ditch and tree and hedgerow with living scarlet feelers, crawling, crawling.