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+ .xhtml_center table {
+ display: table;
+ text-align: left;
+ margin-left: auto;
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+ }</style><title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells</title>
+<link href="time_files/cover.jpg" rel="icon" type="image/x-cover" id="id-8432451369110091092">
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+<meta name="dc.rights" content="Public domain in the USA.">
+<link rel="dcterms.isFormatOf" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35">
+<meta name="dc.creator" content="Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Science fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Time travel -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dc.subject" content="Dystopias -- Fiction">
+<meta name="dcterms.created" content="2004-10-02">
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+<body><section class="pg-boilerplate pgheader" id="pg-header" lang="en"><h2 id="pg-header-heading" title="">The Project Gutenberg eBook of <span lang="en" id="pg-title-no-subtitle">The Time Machine</span></h2>
+
+<div>This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
+at <a class="reference external" href="https://www.gutenberg.org/">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you are not located in the United States,
+you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
+before using this eBook.</div>
+
+<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header"><p><strong>Title</strong>: The Time Machine</p>
+<div id="pg-header-authlist">
+<p><strong>Author</strong>: H. G. Wells</p>
+</div>
+<p><strong>Release date</strong>: October 2, 2004 [eBook #35]<br>
+ Most recently updated: April 19, 2025</p>
+
+<p><strong>Language</strong>: English</p>
+
+
+</div><div id="pg-start-separator">
+<span>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME MACHINE ***</span>
+</div></section><div></div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img alt="[Illustration]" src="time_files/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" id="img_images_cover.jpg">
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+The Time Machine
+</h1>
+
+<h3>
+An Invention
+</h3>
+
+<h2>
+by H. G. Wells
+</h2>
+
+<hr>
+
+<h2>
+CONTENTS
+</h2>
+
+<table style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;">
+
+<tbody><tr>
+<td> I&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap01" class="pginternal">Introduction</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> II&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap02" class="pginternal">The Machine</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> III&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap03" class="pginternal">The Time Traveller Returns</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> IV&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap04" class="pginternal">Time Travelling</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> V&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap05" class="pginternal">In the Golden Age</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> VI&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap06" class="pginternal">The Sunset of Mankind</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> VII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap07" class="pginternal">A Sudden Shock</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> VIII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap08" class="pginternal">Explanation</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> IX&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap09" class="pginternal">The Morlocks</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> X&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap10" class="pginternal">When Night Came</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XI&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap11" class="pginternal">The Palace of Green Porcelain</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap12" class="pginternal">In the Darkness</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XIII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap13" class="pginternal">The Trap of the White Sphinx</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XIV&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap14" class="pginternal">The Further Vision</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XV&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap15" class="pginternal">The Time Traveller’s Return</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> XVI&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap16" class="pginternal">After the Story</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td>
+<a href="#chap17" class="pginternal">Epilogue</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</tbody></table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap01"></a>I.<br>
+Introduction</h2>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
+expounding a recondite matter to us. His pale grey eyes shone and twinkled, and
+his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly,
+and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver
+caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs,
+being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat
+upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere, when thought
+runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in
+this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat
+and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it)
+and his fecundity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or
+two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance,
+they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin
+upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable
+ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of
+course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness <i>nil</i>, has no
+real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane.
+These things are mere abstractions.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have
+a real existence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body
+may exist. All real things—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an
+<i>instantaneous</i> cube exist?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real
+existence?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller
+proceeded, “any real body must have extension in <i>four</i>
+directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.
+But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you
+in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four
+dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth,
+Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between
+the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our
+consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from
+the beginning to the end of our lives.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to
+relight his cigar over the lamp; “that . . . very clear
+indeed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively
+overlooked,” continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of
+cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension,
+though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they
+mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. <i>There is no
+difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except
+that our consciousness moves along it</i>. But some foolish people have got
+hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to
+say about this Fourth Dimension?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>I</i> have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is
+spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth,
+and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each
+at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been
+asking why <i>three</i> dimensions particularly—why not another
+direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to
+construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding
+this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know
+how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a
+figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by
+models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they
+could master the perspective of the thing. See?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting
+his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one
+who repeats mystic words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said
+after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this
+geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious.
+For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at
+fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All
+these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations
+of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the
+pause required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well
+that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a
+weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the
+barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this
+morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did
+not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognised?
+But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must
+conclude, was along the Time-Dimension.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the
+fire, “if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it,
+and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot
+we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of
+Space?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you so sure we can move freely in
+Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and
+men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how
+about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are
+balloons.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
+inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical
+movement.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the
+Medical Man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Easier, far easier down than up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
+present moment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where
+the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present
+moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions,
+are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the
+cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel <i>down</i> if we began our
+existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the
+Psychologist. ’You <i>can</i> move about in all directions of Space,
+but you cannot move about in Time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say
+that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an
+incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become
+absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no
+means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an
+animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is
+better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against
+gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may
+be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even
+turn about and travel the other way?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, <i>this</i>,” began Filby, “is
+all—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby,
+“but you will never convince me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you
+begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four
+Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and
+Time, as the driver determines.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Filby contented himself with laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time
+Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the
+Psychologist suggested. “One might travel back and verify the
+accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said
+the Medical Man. “Our ancestors had no great tolerance for
+anachronisms.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and
+Plato,” the Very Young Man thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In which case they would certainly plough you for the
+Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man.
+“Just think! One might invest all one’s money, leave it to
+accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a
+strictly communistic basis.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the
+Psychologist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it
+until—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going
+to verify <i>that</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting
+brain-weary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the
+Psychologist, “though it’s all humbug, you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and
+with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the
+room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his
+laboratory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s
+got?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,” said the Medical Man,
+and Filby tried to tell us about a conjuror he had seen at Burslem, but before
+he had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s
+anecdote collapsed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap02"></a>II.<br>
+The Machine</h2>
+
+<p>
+The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic
+framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made.
+There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now
+I must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is
+to be accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of
+the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it
+in front of the fire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he
+placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other
+object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell
+upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass
+candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was
+brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I
+drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the
+fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man
+and the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the
+Psychologist from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the
+Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that
+any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done,
+could have been played upon us under these conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism.
+“Well?” said the Psychologist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This little affair,” said the Time Traveller, resting his
+elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus,
+“is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time.
+You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd
+twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way
+unreal.” He pointed to the part with his finger. “Also, here is
+one little white lever, and here is another.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing.
+“It’s beautifully made,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It took two years to make,” retorted the Time Traveller.
+Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said:
+“Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed
+over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses
+the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently
+I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish,
+pass into future Time, and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look
+at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I
+don’t want to waste this model, and then be told I’m a
+quack.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about
+to speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his
+finger towards the lever. “No,” he said suddenly. “Lend
+me your hand.” And turning to the Psychologist, he took that
+individual’s hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger.
+So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time
+Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am
+absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and
+the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and
+the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a
+ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and
+ivory; and it was gone—vanished! Save for the lamp the table was
+bare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under
+the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully.
+“Well?” he said, with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then,
+getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to
+us began to fill his pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We stared at each other. “Look here,” said the Medical Man,
+“are you in earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that
+machine has travelled into time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly,” said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a
+spill at the fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the
+Psychologist’s face. (The Psychologist, to show that he was not
+unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut.)
+“What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in
+there”—he indicated the laboratory—“and when that
+is put together I mean to have a journey on my own account.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the
+future?” said Filby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain,
+know which.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. “It must
+have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?” said the Time Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it
+travelled into the future it would still be here all this time, since it
+must have travelled through this time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But,” said I, “If it travelled into the past it would
+have been visible when we came first into this room; and last Thursday when
+we were here; and the Thursday before that; and so forth!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Serious objections,” remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an
+air of impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not a bit,” said the Time Traveller, and, to the
+Psychologist: “You think. <i>You</i> can explain that. It’s
+presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted
+presentation.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course,” said the Psychologist, and reassured us.
+“That’s a simple point of psychology. I should have thought of
+it. It’s plain enough, and helps the paradox delightfully. We cannot
+see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the spoke
+of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air. If it is
+travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are,
+if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression
+it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it
+would make if it were not travelling in time. That’s plain
+enough.” He passed his hand through the space in which the machine
+had been. “You see?” he said, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time
+Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It sounds plausible enough tonight,” said the Medical Man;
+“but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the
+morning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?” asked the
+Time Traveller. And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way
+down the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the
+flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the
+shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in
+the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we
+had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory,
+parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was
+generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon
+the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better
+look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly
+serious? Or is this a trick—like that ghost you showed us last
+Christmas?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Upon that machine,” said the Time Traveller, holding the
+lamp aloft, “I intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never
+more serious in my life.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+None of us quite knew how to take it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he
+winked at me solemnly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap03"></a>III.<br>
+The Time Traveller Returns</h2>
+
+<p>
+I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine.
+The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to
+be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always
+suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid
+frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time
+Traveller’s words, we should have shown <i>him</i> far less
+scepticism. For we should have perceived his motives: a pork-butcher could
+understand Filby. But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim
+among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would have made the
+fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to
+do things too easily. The serious people who took him seriously never felt
+quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their
+reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with
+eggshell china. So I don’t think any of us said very much about time
+travelling in the interval between that Thursday and the next, though its
+odd potentialities ran, no doubt, in most of our minds: its plausibility,
+that is, its practical incredibleness, the curious possibilities of
+anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was
+particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model. That I remember
+discussing with the Medical Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnæan. He
+said he had seen a similar thing at Tübingen, and laid considerable stress
+on the blowing-out of the candle. But how the trick was done he could not
+explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next Thursday I went again to Richmond—I suppose I was one of
+the Time Traveller’s most constant guests—and, arriving late,
+found four or five men already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical
+Man was standing before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his
+watch in the other. I looked round for the Time Traveller,
+and—“It’s half-past seven now,” said the Medical
+Man. “I suppose we’d better have dinner?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve just come? It’s rather odd. He’s
+unavoidably detained. He asks me in this note to lead off with dinner at
+seven if he’s not back. Says he’ll explain when he
+comes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil,” said the Editor
+of a well-known daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who
+had attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor
+aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man
+with a beard—whom I didn’t know, and who, as far as my
+observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some
+speculation at the dinner-table about the Time Traveller’s absence,
+and I suggested time travelling, in a half-jocular spirit. The Editor
+wanted that explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden
+account of the “ingenious paradox and trick” we had witnessed
+that day week. He was in the midst of his exposition when the door from the
+corridor opened slowly and without noise. I was facing the door, and saw it
+first. “Hallo!” I said. “At last!” And the door
+opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood before us. I gave a cry of
+surprise. “Good heavens! man, what’s the matter?” cried
+the Medical Man, who saw him next. And the whole tableful turned towards
+the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared
+with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me
+greyer—either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually
+faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a
+cut half-healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense
+suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been
+dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such
+a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence,
+expecting him to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion
+towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it
+towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked
+round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face.
+“What on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor. The
+Time Traveller did not seem to hear. “Don’t let me disturb
+you,” he said, with a certain faltering articulation.
+“I’m all right.” He stopped, held out his glass for more,
+and took it off at a draught. “That’s good,” he said. His
+eyes grew brighter, and a faint colour came into his cheeks. His glance
+flickered over our faces with a certain dull approval, and then went round
+the warm and comfortable room. Then he spoke again, still as it were
+feeling his way among his words. “I’m going to wash and dress,
+and then I’ll come down and explain things.... Save me some of that
+mutton. I’m starving for a bit of meat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was
+all right. The Editor began a question. “Tell you presently,”
+said the Time Traveller. “I’m—funny! Be all right in a
+minute.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I
+remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and
+standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on
+them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained socks. Then the door closed upon
+him. I had half a mind to follow, till I remembered how he detested any
+fuss about himself. For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering.
+Then, “Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist,” I heard
+the Editor say, thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this brought my
+attention back to the bright dinner-table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the game?” said the Journalist. “Has he
+been doing the Amateur Cadger? I don’t follow.” I met the eye
+of the Psychologist, and read my own interpretation in his face. I thought
+of the Time Traveller limping painfully upstairs. I don’t think
+anyone else had noticed his lameness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man,
+who rang the bell—the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting
+at dinner—for a hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and
+fork with a grunt, and the Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was
+resumed. Conversation was exclamatory for a little while with gaps of
+wonderment; and then the Editor got fervent in his curiosity. “Does
+our friend eke out his modest income with a crossing? or has he his
+Nebuchadnezzar phases?” he inquired. “I feel assured it’s
+this business of the Time Machine,” I said, and took up the
+Psychologist’s account of our previous meeting. The new guests were
+frankly incredulous. The Editor raised objections. “What <i>was</i>
+this time travelling? A man couldn’t cover himself with dust by
+rolling in a paradox, could he?” And then, as the idea came home to
+him, he resorted to caricature. Hadn’t they any clothes-brushes in
+the Future? The Journalist too, would not believe at any price, and joined
+the Editor in the easy work of heaping ridicule on the whole thing. They
+were both the new kind of journalist—very joyous, irreverent young
+men. “Our Special Correspondent in the Day after Tomorrow
+reports,” the Journalist was saying—or rather
+shouting—when the Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in
+ordinary evening clothes, and nothing save his haggard look remained of the
+change that had startled me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I say,” said the Editor hilariously, “these chaps
+here say you have been travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all
+about little Rosebery, will you? What will you take for the lot?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He
+smiled quietly, in his old way. “Where’s my mutton?” he
+said. “What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Story!” cried the Editor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Story be damned!” said the Time Traveller. “I want
+something to eat. I won’t say a word until I get some peptone into my
+arteries. Thanks. And the salt.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One word,” said I. “Have you been time
+travelling?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding
+his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d give a shilling a line for a verbatim note,” said
+the Editor. The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and
+rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring
+at his face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the
+dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising
+to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist
+tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The
+Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the
+appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the
+Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more
+clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination
+out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away,
+and looked round us. “I suppose I must apologise,” he said.
+“I was simply starving. I’ve had a most amazing time.” He
+reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut the end. “But come into the
+smoking-room. It’s too long a story to tell over greasy
+plates.” And ringing the bell in passing, he led the way into the
+adjoining room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the
+machine?” he said to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming
+the three new guests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” said the Editor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t argue tonight. I don’t mind telling you the
+story, but I can’t argue. I will,” he went on, “tell you
+the story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you must refrain
+from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will sound like
+lying. So be it! It’s true—every word of it, all the same. I
+was in my laboratory at four o’clock, and since then … I’ve
+lived eight days … such days as no human being ever lived before! I’m
+nearly worn out, but I shan’t sleep till I’ve told this thing
+over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions! Is it
+agreed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Agreed,” said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed
+“Agreed.” And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I
+have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a
+weary man. Afterwards he got more animated. In writing it down I feel with
+only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink—and, above all,
+my own inadequacy—to express its quality. You read, I will suppose,
+attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker’s white, sincere
+face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of
+his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the turns of his
+story! Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the
+smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and
+the legs of the Silent Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At
+first we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do
+that, and looked only at the Time Traveller’s face.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap04"></a>IV.<br>
+Time Travelling</h2>&gt;
+
+<p>
+“I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time
+Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the
+workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the
+ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it’s
+sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday; but on Friday, when the
+putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was
+exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so that the thing
+was not complete until this morning. It was at ten o’clock today
+that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap,
+tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and
+sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his
+skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I
+took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other,
+pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I
+felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the
+laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I
+suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A
+moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now
+it was nearly half-past three!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with
+both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went
+dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me,
+towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse
+the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I
+pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the
+turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory
+grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came
+black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An
+eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended
+on my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time
+travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly
+like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I
+felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on
+pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim
+suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I
+saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and
+every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed
+and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding,
+but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The
+slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling
+succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then,
+in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her
+quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars.
+Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night
+and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful
+deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight;
+the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the
+moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save
+now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside
+upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and
+dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now
+green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings
+rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the
+earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little
+hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and
+faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from
+solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace
+was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed
+across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green
+of spring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now.
+They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked,
+indeed, a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account.
+But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness
+growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of
+stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But
+presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind—a certain
+curiosity and therewith a certain dread—until at last they took
+complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what
+wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilisation, I thought, might not
+appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and
+fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising
+about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it
+seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the
+hillside, and remain there, without any wintry intermission. Even through
+the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came
+round to the business of stopping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some
+substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I
+travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was,
+so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the
+interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the
+jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant
+bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle
+that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching
+explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
+possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred
+to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had
+cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man
+has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the
+same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness
+of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all,
+the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerves. I told
+myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to
+stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and
+incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through
+the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
+stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was
+sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
+seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was
+gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a
+garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve
+and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the
+hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the
+machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to
+the skin. ‘Fine hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has
+travelled innumerable years to see you.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and
+looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone,
+loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But
+all else of the world was invisible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail
+grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large,
+for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in
+shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being
+carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover.
+The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with
+verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless eyes
+seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It
+was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of
+disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a minute,
+perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail
+drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a
+moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky
+was lightening with the promise of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full
+temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that
+hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
+What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval
+the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman,
+unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world
+savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common
+likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Already I saw other vast shapes—huge buildings with
+intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping
+in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I
+turned frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As
+I did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The grey
+downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a
+ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown
+shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about me
+stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and
+picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I
+felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the
+clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to
+frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled
+fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave under my desperate
+onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle,
+the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude to mount
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered.
+I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote
+future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I
+saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their
+faces were directed towards me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by
+the White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these
+emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood
+with my machine. He was a slight creature—perhaps four feet
+high—clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather
+belt. Sandals or buskins—I could not clearly distinguish
+which—were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head
+was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air
+was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but
+indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful
+kind of consumptive—that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so
+much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands
+from the machine.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap05"></a>V.<br>
+In the Golden Age</h2>
+
+<p>
+“In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this
+fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into
+my eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at
+once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to
+them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps
+eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them
+addressed me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too
+harsh and deep for them. So I shook my head, and, pointing to my ears,
+shook it again. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my
+hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders.
+They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all
+alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that
+inspired confidence—a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease.
+And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the
+whole dozen of them about like ninepins. But I made a sudden motion to
+warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the Time Machine.
+Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had
+hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine I unscrewed
+the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket.
+Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some
+further peculiarities in their Dresden china type of prettiness. Their
+hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek;
+there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears
+were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin
+lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild;
+and—this may seem egotism on my part—I fancied even that there
+was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood
+round me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began
+the conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then,
+hesitating for a moment how to express Time, I pointed to the sun. At once
+a quaintly pretty little figure in chequered purple and white followed my
+gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture
+was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these
+creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had
+always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two
+Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art,
+everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him
+to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old
+children—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a
+thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes,
+their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment
+rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time
+Machine in vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid
+rendering of a thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so
+and bowed. Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful
+flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was
+received with melodious applause; and presently they were all running to
+and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was
+almost smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the like can
+scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of
+culture had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should be
+exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of
+white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my
+astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone. As I went with
+them the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and
+intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal
+dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little
+people, and with the big open portals that yawned before me shadowy and
+mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a
+tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet
+weedless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers,
+measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the waxen petals. They grew
+scattered, as if wild, among the variegated shrubs, but, as I say, I did
+not examine them closely at this time. The Time Machine was left deserted
+on the turf among the rhododendrons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did
+not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions
+of old Phœnician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that
+they were very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad
+people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy
+nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with
+flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-coloured robes
+and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing
+speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung
+with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with
+coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor
+was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor
+slabs—blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the going to
+and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along the more
+frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of
+slabs of polished stone, raised, perhaps, a foot from the floor, and upon
+these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a kind of hypertrophied
+raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon
+these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With
+a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands,
+flinging peel and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the
+sides of the tables. I was not loath to follow their example, for I felt
+thirsty and hungry. As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated
+look. The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical
+pattern, were broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the
+lower end were thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the
+marble table near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was
+extremely rich and picturesque. There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred
+people dining in the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they
+could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over
+the fruit they were eating. All were clad in the same soft, and yet strong,
+silky material.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fruit, by the bye, was all their diet. These people of the remote
+future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some
+carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also. Indeed, I found afterwards
+that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into
+extinction. But the fruits were very delightful; one, in particular, that
+seemed to be in season all the time I was there—a floury thing in a
+three-sided husk—was especially good, and I made it my staple. At
+first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers
+I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future
+now. So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a
+resolute attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that
+was the next thing to do. The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin
+upon, and holding one of these up I began a series of interrogative sounds
+and gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning.
+At first my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable
+laughter, but presently a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my
+intention and repeated a name. They had to chatter and explain the business
+at great length to each other, and my first attempts to make the exquisite
+little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of genuine, if
+uncivil, amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children,
+and persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at
+my command; and then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb
+‘to eat.’ But it was slow work, and the little people soon
+tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations, so I determined,
+rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons in little doses when
+they felt inclined. And very little doses I found they were before long,
+for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap06"></a>VI.<br>
+The Sunset of Mankind</h2>
+
+<p>
+“A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that
+was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of
+astonishment, like children, but, like children they would soon stop
+examining me, and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my
+conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all
+those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how
+speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the
+portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I
+was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow
+me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and
+gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the
+great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At
+first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from
+the world I had known—even the flowers. The big building I had left
+was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had
+shifted, perhaps, a mile from its present position. I resolved to mount to
+the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could
+get a wider view of this our planet in the year Eight Hundred and Two
+Thousand Seven Hundred and One, A.D. For that, I should explain, was the
+date the little dials of my machine recorded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I walked I was watching for every impression that could
+possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I
+found the world—for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for
+instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of
+aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst
+which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles
+possibly—but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and
+incapable of stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast
+structure, to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was
+destined, at a later date, to have a very strange experience—the
+first intimation of a still stranger discovery—but of that I will
+speak in its proper place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I
+rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen.
+Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished.
+Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house
+and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English
+landscape, had disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the
+half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I
+perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless
+visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange,
+perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so strange.
+Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences
+of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these
+people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be
+but the miniatures of their parents. I judged then that the children of
+that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found
+afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I
+felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would
+expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the
+institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere
+militant necessities of an age of physical force. Where population is
+balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a
+blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring are
+secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no
+necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialisation of the
+sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see
+some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was
+complete. This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I
+was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted
+by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a
+transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the
+thread of my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of
+the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was
+presently left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of freedom
+and adventure I pushed on up to the crest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not
+recognise, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half
+smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance
+of griffins’ heads. I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view
+of our old world under the sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and
+fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon
+and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple
+and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay
+like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the great palaces
+dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still
+occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden
+of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or
+obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences
+of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I
+had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was
+something in this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a
+half truth—or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane.
+The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first
+time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we
+are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence
+enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on
+feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true
+civilising process that makes life more and more secure—had gone
+steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had
+followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects
+deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I
+saw!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still
+in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little
+department of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its
+operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture
+destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of
+wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they
+can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they
+are—gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now
+a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient
+breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague
+and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is
+shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better
+organised, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of
+the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and
+co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of
+Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of
+animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done
+indeed for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had
+leapt. The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi;
+everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant
+butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was
+attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any
+contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later
+that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly
+affected by these changes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in
+splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged
+in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical
+struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which
+constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden
+evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise. The difficulty
+of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased
+to increase.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to
+the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the
+cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions
+under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the
+wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men,
+upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the
+family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the
+tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their
+justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young. <i>Now</i>,
+where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising, and it will
+grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion
+of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us
+uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant
+life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of
+intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief
+in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity
+had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant
+vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the
+reaction of the altered conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that
+restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in
+our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival,
+are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle,
+for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a
+civilised man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power,
+intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless
+years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no
+danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of
+constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the
+weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better
+equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for
+which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I
+saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of
+mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions
+under which it lived—the flourish of that triumph which began the
+last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it
+takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Even this artistic impetus would at last die away—had
+almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance,
+to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no
+more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are
+kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me
+that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this
+simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world—mastered
+the whole secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had
+devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their
+numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary. That would account for
+the abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible
+enough—as most wrong theories are!
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap07"></a>VII.<br>
+A Sudden Shock</h2>
+
+<p>
+“As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the
+full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light
+in the north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a
+noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I
+determined to descend and find where I could sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to
+the figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing
+distinct as the light of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the
+silver birch against it. There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black
+in the pale light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the lawn
+again. A queer doubt chilled my complacency. ‘No,’ said I stoutly to
+myself, ‘that was not the lawn.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it <i>was</i> the lawn. For the white leprous face of the
+sphinx was towards it. Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came
+home to me? But you cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of
+losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The
+bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip
+me at the throat and stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a
+passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope. Once
+I fell headlong and cut my face; I lost no time in stanching the blood, but
+jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin. All the
+time I ran I was saying to myself: ‘They have moved it a little, pushed it
+under the bushes out of the way.’ Nevertheless, I ran with all my might.
+All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread,
+I knew that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine
+was removed out of my reach. My breath came with pain. I suppose I covered
+the whole distance from the hill crest to the little lawn, two miles
+perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I
+ran, at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath
+thereby. I cried aloud, and none answered. Not a creature seemed to be
+stirring in that moonlit world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realised. Not a trace
+of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty
+space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the
+thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands
+clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal,
+white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to
+smile in mockery of my dismay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had
+put the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their
+physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the sense
+of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention
+had vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had
+produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time. The
+attachment of the levers—I will show you the method
+later—prevented anyone from tampering with it in that way when they
+were removed. It had moved, and was hid, only in space. But then, where
+could it be?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running
+violently in and out among the moonlit bushes all round the sphinx, and
+startling some white animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small
+deer. I remember, too, late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched
+fist until my knuckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs.
+Then, sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great
+building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted. I slipped
+on the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables, almost
+breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains, of
+which I have told you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon
+which, perhaps, a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no
+doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out
+of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the splutter and flare
+of a match. For they had forgotten about matches. ‘Where is my Time
+Machine?’ I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and
+shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them. Some
+laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them standing
+round me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as it
+was possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying to revive the
+sensation of fear. For, reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought
+that fear must be forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and knocking one of the people
+over in my course, went blundering across the big dining-hall again, out
+under the moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running
+and stumbling this way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon
+crept up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that
+maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind—a strange
+animal in an unknown world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and
+crying upon God and Fate. I have a memory of horrible fatigue, as the long
+night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible place and that;
+of groping among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black
+shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with
+absolute wretchedness, even anger at the folly of leaving the machine
+having leaked away with my strength. I had nothing left but misery. Then I
+slept, and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were
+hopping round me on the turf within reach of my arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I
+had got there, and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and
+despair. Then things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable
+daylight, I could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild
+folly of my frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself.
+‘Suppose the worst?’ I said. ‘Suppose the machine
+altogether lost—perhaps destroyed? It behoves me to be calm and
+patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method
+of my loss, and the means of getting materials and tools; so that in the
+end, perhaps, I may make another.’ That would be my only hope, a poor
+hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful
+and curious world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But probably the machine had only been taken away. Still, I must
+be calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or
+cunning. And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me,
+wondering where I could bathe. I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled. The
+freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness. I had exhausted
+my emotion. Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself wondering
+at my intense excitement overnight. I made a careful examination of the
+ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in futile questionings,
+conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as came by.
+They all failed to understand my gestures; some were simply stolid, some
+thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I had the hardest task in the
+world to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces. It was a foolish
+impulse, but the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed and
+still eager to take advantage of my perplexity. The turf gave better
+counsel. I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal
+of the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled
+with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with
+queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This
+directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have
+said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep
+framed panels on either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was
+hollow. Examining the panels with care I found them discontinuous with the
+frames. There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they
+were doors, as I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough
+to my mind. It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time
+Machine was inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different
+problem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the
+bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned
+smiling to them, and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to
+the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my
+first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don’t know how
+to convey their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly
+improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman—it is how she would look.
+They went off as if they had received the last possible insult. I tried a
+sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result.
+Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself. But, as you know, I
+wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more. As he turned off, like
+the others, my temper got the better of me. In three strides I was after
+him, had him by the loose part of his robe round the neck, and began
+dragging him towards the sphinx. Then I saw the horror and repugnance of
+his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze
+panels. I thought I heard something stir inside—to be explicit, I
+thought I heard a sound like a chuckle—but I must have been mistaken.
+Then I got a big pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had
+flattened a coil in the decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery
+flakes. The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty
+outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it. I saw a crowd
+of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me. At last, hot and tired, I
+sat down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long; I am too
+Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to
+wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the
+bushes towards the hill again. ‘Patience,’ said I to myself.
+‘If you want your machine again you must leave that sphinx alone. If
+they mean to take your machine away, it’s little good your wrecking
+their bronze panels, and if they don’t, you will get it back as soon
+as you can ask for it. To sit among all those unknown things before a
+puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world.
+Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning.
+In the end you will find clues to it all.’ Then suddenly the humour
+of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in
+study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to
+get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless
+trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could
+not help myself. I laughed aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little
+people avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something
+to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure
+of the avoidance. I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain
+from any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two things got back
+to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the language, and in
+addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some
+subtle point or their language was excessively simple—almost
+exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be
+few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their
+sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or
+understand any but the simplest propositions. I determined to put the
+thought of my Time Machine and the mystery of the bronze doors under the
+sphinx, as much as possible in a corner of memory, until my growing
+knowledge would lead me back to them in a natural way. Yet a certain
+feeling, you may understand, tethered me in a circle of a few miles round
+the point of my arrival.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap08"></a>VIII.<br>
+Explanation</h2>
+
+<p>
+“So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant
+richness as the Thames valley. From every hill I climbed I saw the same
+abundance of splendid buildings, endlessly varied in material and style,
+the same clustering thickets of evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees
+and tree ferns. Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond, the
+land rose into blue undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of the
+sky. A peculiar feature, which presently attracted my attention, was the
+presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to me, of a very
+great depth. One lay by the path up the hill which I had followed during
+my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously
+wrought, and protected by a little cupola from the rain. Sitting by the
+side of these wells, and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could
+see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted
+match. But in all of them I heard a certain sound: a
+thud—thud—thud, like the beating of some big engine; and I
+discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady current of air
+set down the shafts. Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of
+one, and, instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked swiftly
+out of sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers
+standing here and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often
+just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a
+sun-scorched beach. Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion
+of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation, whose true import it
+was difficult to imagine. I was at first inclined to associate it with the
+sanitary apparatus of these people. It was an obvious conclusion, but it
+was absolutely wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And here I must admit that I learnt very little of drains and
+bells and modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in
+this real future. In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times
+which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and
+social arrangements, and so forth. But while such details are easy enough
+to obtain when the whole world is contained in one’s imagination,
+they are altogether inaccessible to a real traveller amid such realities as
+I found here. Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central
+Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway
+companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the
+Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least,
+should be willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what
+he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or
+believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of
+our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the
+Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed
+to my comfort; but save for a general impression of automatic organisation,
+I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of
+crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that,
+possibly, there might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the
+range of my explorings. This, again, was a question I deliberately put to
+myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point. The
+thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me
+still more: that aged and infirm among this people there were none.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an
+automatic civilisation and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I
+could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big
+palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and
+sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind.
+Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need
+renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex
+specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little
+people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops, no
+workshops, no sign of importations among them. They spent all their time in
+playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful
+fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept
+going.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what,
+had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. <i>Why?</i> For
+the life of me I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those
+flickering pillars. I felt I lacked a clue. I felt—how shall I put
+it? Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and there in
+excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of
+words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you? Well, on the third day
+of my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven
+Hundred and One presented itself to me!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That day, too, I made a friend—of a sort. It happened that,
+as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of
+them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current
+ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It
+will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these
+creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue
+the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes. When I
+realised this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and, wading in at a
+point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to land. A
+little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and I had the
+satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her. I had got to
+such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any gratitude from
+her. In that, however, I was wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little
+woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an
+exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me
+with a big garland of flowers—evidently made for me and me alone. The
+thing took my imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At
+any rate I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were soon
+seated together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation, chiefly
+of smiles. The creature’s friendliness affected me exactly as a
+child’s might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed
+my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her
+name was Weena, which, though I don’t know what it meant, somehow
+seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship
+which lasted a week, and ended—as I will tell you!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always.
+She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it
+went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and
+calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to
+be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on
+a miniature flirtation. Yet her distress when I left her was very great,
+her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think,
+altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion.
+Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort. I thought it was mere
+childish affection that made her cling to me. Until it was too late, I did
+not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her. Nor until
+it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For, by merely
+seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for
+me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the
+neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home; and I
+would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I came over
+the hill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was from her, too, that I learnt that fear had not yet left
+the world. She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest
+confidence in me; for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening
+grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark,
+dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing
+dreadful. It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking
+and observing. I discovered then, among other things, that these little
+people gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept in droves. To
+enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult of
+apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping alone within
+doors, after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the
+lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena’s distress, I insisted upon
+sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me
+triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the
+last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story
+slips away from me as I speak of her. It must have been the night before
+her rescue that I was awakened about dawn. I had been restless, dreaming
+most disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea anemones were feeling
+over my face with their soft palps. I woke with a start, and with an odd
+fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried
+to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was that
+dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when
+everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal. I got up, and went
+down into the great hall, and so out upon the flagstones in front of the
+palace. I thought I would make a virtue of necessity, and see the
+sunrise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first
+pallor of dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky
+black, the ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up
+the hill I thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned
+the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white,
+ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the
+ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body. They moved hastily. I
+did not see what became of them. It seemed that they vanished among the
+bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling
+that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known. I doubted
+my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on
+and its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the
+view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere
+creatures of the half-light. ‘They must have been ghosts,’ I
+said; ‘I wonder whence they dated.’ For a queer notion of Grant
+Allen’s came into my head, and amused me. If each generation die and
+leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them.
+On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred
+Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But
+the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the
+morning, until Weena’s rescue drove them out of my head. I associated
+them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my
+first passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was a pleasant
+substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far deadlier
+possession of my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather
+of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was
+hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun
+will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such
+speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must
+ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes
+occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some
+inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains
+that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, one very hot morning—my fourth, I think—as I
+was seeking shelter from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the
+great house where I slept and fed, there happened this strange thing.
+Clambering among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose
+end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone. By contrast
+with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me. I
+entered it groping, for the change from light to blackness made spots of
+colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes,
+luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of
+the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched
+my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to
+turn. Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared
+to be living came to my mind. And then I remembered that strange terror of
+the dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I
+will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand
+and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something
+white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer
+little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running
+across the sunlit space behind me. It blundered against a block of granite,
+staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath
+another pile of ruined masonry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a
+dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was
+flaxen hair on its head and down its back. But, as I say, it went too fast
+for me to see distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours, or
+only with its forearms held very low. After an instant’s pause I
+followed it into the second heap of ruins. I could not find it at first;
+but, after a time in the profound obscurity, I came upon one of those round
+well-like openings of which I have told you, half closed by a fallen
+pillar. A sudden thought came to me. Could this Thing have vanished down
+the shaft? I lit a match, and, looking down, I saw a small, white, moving
+creature, with large bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it
+retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human spider! It was
+clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first time a number of
+metal foot and hand rests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft. Then the
+light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped,
+and when I had lit another the little monster had disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not
+for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I
+had seen was human. But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had
+not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals:
+that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants
+of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which
+had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an
+underground ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I
+wondered, was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced
+organisation? How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful
+Overworlders? And what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft?
+I sat upon the edge of the well telling myself that, at any rate, there was
+nothing to fear, and that there I must descend for the solution of my
+difficulties. And withal I was absolutely afraid to go! As I hesitated, two
+of the beautiful upperworld people came running in their amorous sport
+across the daylight in the shadow. The male pursued the female, flinging
+flowers at her as he ran.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned
+pillar, peering down the well. Apparently it was considered bad form to
+remark these apertures; for when I pointed to this one, and tried to frame
+a question about it in their tongue, they were still more visibly
+distressed and turned away. But they were interested by my matches, and I
+struck some to amuse them. I tried them again about the well, and again I
+failed. So presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what
+I could get from her. But my mind was already in revolution; my guesses and
+impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now a clue
+to the import of these wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of
+the ghosts; to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and
+the fate of the Time Machine! And very vaguely there came a suggestion
+towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here was the new view. Plainly, this second species of Man was
+subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me
+think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a
+long-continued underground habit. In the first place, there was the
+bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the
+dark—the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then, those
+large eyes, with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of
+nocturnal things—witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that
+evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight
+towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the
+light—all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the
+retina.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously,
+and these tunnellings were the habitat of the New Race. The presence of
+ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes—everywhere, in
+fact, except along the river valley—showed how universal were its
+ramifications. What so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this
+artificial Underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the
+daylight race was done? The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted
+it, and went on to assume the <i>how</i> of this splitting of the human
+species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory; though, for
+myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed
+clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
+temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer
+was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough
+to you—and wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are
+existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilise
+underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation; there
+is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric
+railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and
+restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this
+tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in
+the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever
+larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its
+time therein, till, in the end—! Even now, does not an East-end
+worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from
+the natural surface of the earth?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no
+doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening
+gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor—is already
+leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the
+surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier
+country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening
+gulf—which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational
+process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined
+habits on the part of the rich—will make that exchange between class
+and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the
+splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and
+less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves,
+pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots,
+the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.
+Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a
+little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused,
+they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so
+constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end,
+the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to
+the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the
+Overworld people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty
+and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different
+shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and
+general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy,
+armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the
+industrial system of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over
+Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn
+you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern
+of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think
+it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced
+civilisation that was at last attained must have long since passed its
+zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the
+Overworlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a
+general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see
+clearly enough already. What had happened to the Undergrounders I did not
+yet suspect; but, from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the
+bye, was the name by which these creatures were called—I could imagine
+that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than
+among the ‘Eloi,’ the beautiful race that I already knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time
+Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the
+Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were
+they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to
+question Weena about this Underworld, but here again I was disappointed.
+At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused
+to answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when
+I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were
+the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw
+them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only
+concerned in banishing these signs of her human inheritance from
+Weena’s eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands,
+while I solemnly burnt a match.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap09"></a>IX.<br>
+The Morlocks</h2>
+
+<p>
+“It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow
+up the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a
+peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the
+half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit
+in a zoological museum. And they were filthily cold to the touch. Probably
+my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi,
+whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a
+little disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice
+I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite
+reason. I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the
+little people were sleeping in the moonlight—that night Weena was
+among them—and feeling reassured by their presence. It occurred to me
+even then, that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its
+last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these
+unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin
+that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both these days I
+had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I felt
+assured that the Time Machine was only to be recovered by boldly
+penetrating these mysteries of underground. Yet I could not face the mystery.
+If only I had had a companion it would have been different. But I was so
+horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness of the well
+appalled me. I don’t know if you will understand my feeling, but I
+never felt quite safe at my back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me
+farther and farther afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the
+south-westward towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I
+observed far-off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast
+green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It
+was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the façade
+had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well as the
+pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese
+porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I
+was minded to push on and explore. But the day was growing late, and I had
+come upon the sight of the place after a long and tiring circuit; so I
+resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day, and I returned
+to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena. But next morning I
+perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the Palace of Green
+Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by another
+day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the descent without
+further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well
+near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when
+she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely
+disconcerted. ‘Good-bye, little Weena,’ I said, kissing her;
+and then putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the
+climbing hooks. Rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my
+courage might leak away! At first she watched me in amazement. Then she
+gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with
+her little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I
+shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the
+throat of the well. I saw her agonised face over the parapet, and smiled to
+reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I
+clung.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The
+descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of
+the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller
+and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the
+descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my
+weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I
+hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again.
+Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on
+clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.
+Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disc, in which a star was
+visible, while little Weena’s head showed as a round black
+projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more
+oppressive. Everything save that little disc above was profoundly dark, and
+when I looked up again Weena had disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to
+go up the shaft again, and leave the Underworld alone. But even while I
+turned this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense
+relief, I saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender
+loophole in the wall. Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a
+narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not too
+soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the
+prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a
+distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of
+machinery pumping air down the shaft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand
+touching my face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches and,
+hastily striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the
+one I had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the
+light. Living, as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness,
+their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of
+the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way. I have no
+doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to
+have any fear of me apart from the light. But, so soon as I struck a match
+in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters
+and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest
+fashion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently
+different from that of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to
+my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was
+even then in my mind. But I said to myself, ‘You are in for it
+now,’ and, feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of
+machinery grow louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to
+a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a
+vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of
+my light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning
+of a match.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines
+rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim
+spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the bye, was very
+stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly-shed blood was in
+the air. Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal,
+laid with what seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
+Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have
+survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the
+heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the
+shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again! Then the
+match burnt down, and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in
+the blackness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such
+an experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with
+the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be
+infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without
+arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke—at times I missed
+tobacco frightfully!—even without enough matches. If only I had
+thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in
+a second, and examined it at leisure. But, as it was, I stood there with
+only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me
+with—hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that
+still remained to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the
+dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my
+store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment
+that there was any need to economise them, and I had wasted almost half the
+box in astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as
+I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine,
+lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar
+unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those
+dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being
+gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The
+sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.
+The sudden realisation of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing
+came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly
+as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me
+again. They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each
+other. I shivered violently, and shouted again—rather discordantly.
+This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer
+laughing noise as they came back at me. I will confess I was horribly
+frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the
+protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap
+of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I
+had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I
+could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like
+the rain, as they hurried after me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no
+mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light,
+and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how
+nauseatingly inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and
+great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness
+and bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated
+again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost
+burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the
+edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt
+sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped
+from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my last match … and
+it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and,
+kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks,
+and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and
+blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way,
+and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or
+thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest
+difficulty in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle
+against this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the
+sensations of falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow,
+and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I fell upon my
+face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my
+hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then, for a time,
+I was insensible.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap10"></a>X.<br>
+When Night Came</h2>
+
+<p>
+“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto,
+except during my night’s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I
+had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered
+by these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by
+the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces
+which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new
+element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman
+and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might
+feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get
+out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon
+him soon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the
+new moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
+remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem
+to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on the wane:
+each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now understood to
+some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little
+Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it
+might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now
+that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld people might once
+have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical
+servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had
+resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had
+already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the
+Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still
+possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for
+innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface
+intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and
+maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an
+old habit of service. They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot,
+or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed
+necessities had impressed it on the organism. But, clearly, the old order
+was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping
+on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his
+brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was
+coming back—changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson
+anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came
+into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld. It
+seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the
+current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from
+outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something
+familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of
+their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this
+age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse
+and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without
+further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might
+sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with
+some of that confidence I had lost in realising to what creatures night by
+night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was
+secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must already
+have examined me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames,
+but found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
+buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as
+the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall pinnacles of
+the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back
+to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my
+shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The distance, I had
+reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen.
+I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are
+deceptively diminished. In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose,
+and a nail was working through the sole—they were comfortable old
+shoes I wore about indoors—so that I was lame. And it was already
+long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black
+against the pale yellow of the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but
+after a while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of
+me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my
+pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
+concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration.
+At least she utilised them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In
+changing my jacket I found…”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently
+placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the
+little table. Then he resumed his narrative.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over
+the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to
+the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the
+Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand that
+we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great pause
+that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees.
+To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.
+The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far
+down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my
+fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I
+fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet:
+could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going
+hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied
+that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of
+war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night.
+The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.
+The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her
+fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed
+her. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck,
+and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we
+went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost
+walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the opposite side of
+the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue—a Faun,
+or some such figure, <i>minus</i> the head. Here too were acacias. So far I
+had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and
+the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
+black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to
+the right or the left. Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were
+very sore—I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and
+sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green
+Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction. I looked into the thickness
+of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of
+branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were there no other
+lurking danger—a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose
+upon—there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the
+tree-boles to strike against. I was very tired, too, after the excitements
+of the day; so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night
+upon the open hill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped
+her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The
+hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came
+now and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the
+night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their
+twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that
+slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long
+since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed
+to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore.
+Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me;
+it was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these
+scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily
+like the face of an old friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all
+the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable
+distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the
+unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional
+cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that
+silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And
+during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the
+complex organisations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations,
+even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.
+Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry,
+and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great
+Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a
+sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might
+be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me,
+her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the
+thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well
+as I could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs
+of the old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear,
+except for a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil
+wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some
+colourless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And
+close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at
+first, and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us.
+Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of
+renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I
+stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and
+painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung
+them away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and
+pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to
+break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing
+in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night.
+And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured
+now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last
+feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some time in the
+Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks’ food had run short. Possibly
+they had lived on rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less
+discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than
+any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct.
+And so these inhuman sons of men——! I tried to look at the
+thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more
+remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And
+the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had
+gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle,
+which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to
+the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming
+upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man
+had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his
+fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the
+fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a
+Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude
+of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the
+Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to
+make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should
+pursue. My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make
+myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was
+immediate. In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so
+that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew,
+would be more efficient against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to arrange
+some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx.
+I had in mind a battering ram. I had a persuasion that if I could enter
+those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the Time
+Machine and escape. I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to
+move it far away. Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time.
+And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the
+building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap11"></a>XI.<br>
+The Palace of Green Porcelain</h2>
+
+<p>
+“I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it
+about noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass
+remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen
+away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy
+down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to
+see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea
+must once have been. I thought then—though I never followed up the
+thought—of what might have happened, or might be happening, to the
+living things in the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed
+porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown
+character. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to
+interpret this, but I only learnt that the bare idea of writing had never
+entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she
+was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Within the big valves of the door—which were open and
+broken—we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by
+many side windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The
+tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous
+objects was shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing
+strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower
+part of a huge skeleton. I recognised by the oblique feet that it was some
+extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the
+upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where
+rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had
+been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a
+Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side I
+found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick
+dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time. But they must
+have been air-tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their
+contents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South
+Kensington! Here, apparently, was the Palæontological Section, and a very
+splendid array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process
+of decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the
+extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force,
+was nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work
+again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the little
+people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings
+upon reeds. And the cases had in some instances been bodily
+removed—by the Morlocks, as I judged. The place was very silent. The
+thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin
+down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about me, and
+very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of
+an intellectual age that I gave no thought to the possibilities it
+presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little
+from my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green
+Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palæontology;
+possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least
+in my present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than
+this spectacle of old-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another
+short gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be
+devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind
+running on gunpowder. But I could find no saltpetre; indeed, no nitrates of
+any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in
+my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of
+that gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I
+saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on
+down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
+Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but everything
+had long since passed out of recognition. A few shrivelled and blackened
+vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars
+that had once held spirit, a brown dust of departed plants: that was all! I
+was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the patient
+readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been attained.
+Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly
+ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the end at
+which I entered. At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling—many
+of them cracked and smashed—which suggested that originally the place
+had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on
+either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded
+and many broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a
+certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these;
+the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I
+could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that
+if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers
+that might be of use against the Morlocks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she
+startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed
+that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may be, of
+course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into
+the side of a hill.—ED.] The end I had come in at was quite above
+ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As you went down the length,
+the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit
+like the ‘area‘ of a London house before each, and only a
+narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about the
+machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the gradual
+diminution of the light, until Weena’s increasing apprehensions drew
+my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick
+darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust
+was less abundant and its surface less even. Further away towards the
+dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints.
+My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt
+that I was wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery. I
+called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that
+I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then
+down in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering,
+and the same odd noises I had heard down the well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I took Weena’s hand. Then, struck with a sudden idea, I
+left her and turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike
+those in a signal-box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever
+in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted
+in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength of the
+lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute’s strain, and I
+rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient, I judged, for any
+Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a Morlock
+or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own
+descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the
+things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I
+began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer,
+restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the brutes I
+heard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that
+gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance
+reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and
+charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognised as the
+decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and
+every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped
+boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I
+been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of
+all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force
+was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting
+paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the
+<i>Philosophical Transactions</i> and my own seventeen papers upon physical
+optics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been
+a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of
+useful discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this
+gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at
+last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches. Very
+eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I
+turned to Weena. ‘Dance,’ I cried to her in her own tongue. For
+now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And so,
+in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to
+Weena’s huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance,
+whistling <i>The Land of the Leal</i> as cheerfully as I could. In part it
+was a modest <i>cancan</i>, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance (so
+far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally
+inventive, as you know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped
+the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was
+a most fortunate, thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier
+substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by
+chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at first
+that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour
+of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance
+had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It
+reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a
+fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilised millions of
+years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was
+inflammable and burnt with a good bright flame—was, in fact, an
+excellent candle—and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives,
+however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As yet my iron
+crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left
+that gallery greatly elated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would
+require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the
+proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how
+I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry
+both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates.
+There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses of
+rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound. But any
+cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into dust. One
+corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an explosion
+among the specimens. In another place was a vast array of
+idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phœnician, every country on
+earth, I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I
+wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that
+particularly took my fancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery
+after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere
+heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found
+myself near the model of a tin mine, and then by the merest accident I
+discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite cartridges! I shouted
+‘Eureka!’ and smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt. I
+hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never
+felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes
+for an explosion that never came. Of course the things were dummies, as I
+might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that had they not
+been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze
+doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all
+together into non-existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court
+within the palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested
+and refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position.
+Night was creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to
+be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my possession a
+thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defences against the
+Morlocks—I had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a
+blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be
+to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning there
+was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my
+iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently
+towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them,
+largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had never impressed
+me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether
+inadequate for the work.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap12"></a>XII.<br>
+In the Darkness</h2>
+
+<p>
+“We emerged from the Palace while the sun was still in part above the
+horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning,
+and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me
+on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible that night,
+and then, building a fire, to sleep in the protection of its glare.
+Accordingly, as we went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw,
+and presently had my arms full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress
+was slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena was tired. And I,
+also, began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was full night before
+we reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge Weena would have
+stopped, fearing the darkness before us; but a singular sense of impending
+calamity, that should indeed have served me as a warning, drove me onward.
+I had been without sleep for a night and two days, and I was feverish and
+irritable. I felt sleep coming upon me, and the Morlocks with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim
+against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and
+long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious
+approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If
+we could get through it to the bare hillside, there, as it seemed to me,
+was an altogether safer resting-place; I thought that with my matches and
+my camphor I could contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods.
+Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should
+have to abandon my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put it down. And
+then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting
+it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came
+to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know if you have ever thought what a rare thing
+flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The
+sun’s heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused
+by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning
+may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire.
+Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its
+fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the
+art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that
+went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to
+Weena.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would
+have cast herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up,
+and in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood. For
+a little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I
+could see, through the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze
+had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping
+up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that, and turned again to the dark
+trees before me. It was very black, and Weena clung to me convulsively, but
+there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient
+light for me to avoid the stems. Overhead it was simply black, except where
+a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us here and there. I lit none
+of my matches because I had no hand free. Upon my left arm I carried my
+little one, in my right hand I had my iron bar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my
+feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the
+throb of the blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering
+behind me. I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I
+caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Underworld.
+There were evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon
+me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my
+arm. And Weena shivered violently, and became quite still.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I
+did so, and, as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness
+about my knees, perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar
+cooing sounds from the Morlocks. Soft little hands, too, were creeping over
+my coat and back, touching even my neck. Then the match scratched and
+fizzed. I held it flaring, and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in
+flight amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket, and
+prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane. Then I looked at
+Weena. She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless, with her face
+to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed scarcely
+to breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the ground, and as
+it split and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt
+down and lifted her. The wood behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of
+a great company!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder
+and rose to push on, and then there came a horrible realisation. In
+manœuvring with my matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several
+times, and now I had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my path.
+For all I knew, I might be facing back towards the Palace of Green
+Porcelain. I found myself in a cold sweat. I had to think rapidly what to
+do. I determined to build a fire and encamp where we were. I put Weena,
+still motionless, down upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as my first
+lump of camphor waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and there
+out of the darkness round me the Morlocks’ eyes shone like
+carbuncles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did
+so, two white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away.
+One was so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt
+his bones grind under the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay,
+staggered a little way, and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor, and
+went on gathering my bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some of the
+foliage above me, for since my arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a
+week, no rain had fallen. So, instead of casting about among the trees for
+fallen twigs, I began leaping up and dragging down branches. Very soon I
+had a choking smoky fire of green wood and dry sticks, and could economise
+my camphor. Then I turned to where Weena lay beside my iron mace. I tried
+what I could to revive her, but she lay like one dead. I could not even
+satisfy myself whether or not she breathed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have
+made me heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air.
+My fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary
+after my exertion, and sat down. The wood, too, was full of a slumbrous
+murmur that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes.
+But all was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off
+their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box,
+and—it had gone! Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a
+moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and
+the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the
+smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms,
+and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all
+these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous
+spider’s web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth
+nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my
+iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats
+from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces
+might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my
+blows, and for a moment I was free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard
+fighting came upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I
+determined to make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to
+a tree, swinging the iron bar before me. The whole wood was full of the
+stir and cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a
+higher pitch of excitement, and their movements grew faster. Yet none came
+within reach. I stood glaring at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope.
+What if the Morlocks were afraid? And close on the heels of that came a
+strange thing. The darkness seemed to grow luminous. Very dimly I began to
+see the Morlocks about me—three battered at my feet—and then I
+recognised, with incredulous surprise, that the others were running, in an
+incessant stream, as it seemed, from behind me, and away through the wood
+in front. And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I stood
+agape, I saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of starlight
+between the branches, and vanish. And at that I understood the smell of
+burning wood, the slumbrous murmur that was growing now into a gusty roar,
+the red glow, and the Morlocks’ flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw, through
+the black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It
+was my first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she
+was gone. The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each
+fresh tree burst into flame, left little time for reflection. My iron bar
+still gripped, I followed in the Morlocks’ path. It was a close race.
+Once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was
+outflanked and had to strike off to the left. But at last I emerged upon a
+small open space, and as I did so, a Morlock came blundering towards me,
+and past me, and went on straight into the fire!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think,
+of all that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as
+day with the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or
+tumulus, surmounted by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of
+the burning forest, with yellow tongues already writhing from it,
+completely encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside
+were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and
+blundering hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment. At
+first I did not realise their blindness, and struck furiously at them with
+my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and
+crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures of one of them
+groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I
+was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I
+struck no more of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me,
+setting loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one
+time the flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would
+presently be able to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by
+killing some of them before this should happen; but the fire burst out
+again brightly, and I stayed my hand. I walked about the hill among them
+and avoided them, looking for some trace of Weena. But Weena was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this
+strange incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and making
+uncanny noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on them. The
+coiling uprush of smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rare
+tatters of that red canopy, remote as though they belonged to another
+universe, shone the little stars. Two or three Morlocks came blundering
+into me, and I drove them off with blows of my fists, trembling as I did
+so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a
+nightmare. I bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I
+beat the ground with my hands, and got up and sat down again, and wandered
+here and there, and again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes
+and calling upon God to let me awake. Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads
+down in a kind of agony and rush into the flames. But, at last, above the
+subsiding red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and
+the whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of
+these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was
+plain that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot
+describe how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to
+which it seemed destined. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin
+a massacre of the helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself.
+The hillock, as I have said, was a kind of island in the forest. From its
+summit I could now make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of Green
+Porcelain, and from that I could get my bearings for the White Sphinx. And
+so, leaving the remnant of these damned souls still going hither and
+thither and moaning, as the day grew clearer, I tied some grass about my
+feet and limped on across smoking ashes and among black stems that still
+pulsated internally with fire, towards the hiding-place of the Time
+Machine. I walked slowly, for I was almost exhausted, as well as lame, and
+I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena.
+It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is
+more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss. But that morning it
+left me absolutely lonely again—terribly alone. I began to think of
+this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you, and with such
+thoughts came a longing that was pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning
+sky, I made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose
+matches. The box must have leaked before it was lost.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap13"></a>XIII.<br>
+The Trap of the White Sphinx</h2>
+
+<p>
+“About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of
+yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my
+arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not
+refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same
+beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and
+magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks.
+The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the
+trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and
+that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the
+landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Underworld. I understood
+now what all the beauty of the Overworld people covered. Very pleasant was
+their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the
+cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their
+end was the same.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had
+been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards
+comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its
+watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once,
+life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had
+been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and
+work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem,
+no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility
+is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in
+harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals
+to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no
+intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those
+animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs
+and dangers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So, as I see it, the Upperworld man had drifted towards his
+feeble prettiness, and the Underworld to mere mechanical industry. But
+that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical
+perfection—absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the
+feeding of an Underworld, however it was effected, had become disjointed.
+Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came
+back again, and she began below. The Underworld being in contact with
+machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside
+habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of
+every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed
+them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw
+it in my last view of the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven
+Hundred and One. It may be as wrong an explanation as mortal wit could
+invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to
+you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days,
+and in spite of my grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm
+sunlight were very pleasant. I was very tired and sleepy, and soon my
+theorising passed into dozing. Catching myself at that, I took my own hint,
+and spreading myself out upon the turf I had a long and refreshing
+sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being
+caught napping by the Morlocks, and, stretching myself, I came on down the
+hill towards the White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the other
+hand played with the matches in my pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the
+pedestal of the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid
+down into grooves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner
+of this was the Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here,
+after all my elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx, was
+a meek surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the
+portal. For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the
+Morlocks. Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the
+bronze frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had
+been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks
+had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to
+grasp its purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere
+touch of the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze
+panels suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the
+dark—trapped. So the Morlocks thought. At that I chuckled
+gleefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came
+towards me. Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on
+the levers and depart then like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little
+thing. The matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the
+box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were
+close upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them
+with the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then
+came one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight against
+their persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for the
+studs over which these fitted. One, indeed, they almost got away from me.
+As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my head—I
+could hear the Morlock’s skull ring—to recover it. It was a
+nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But at last the lever was fixed and pulled over. The clinging
+hands slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found
+myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap14"></a>XIV.<br>
+The Further Vision</h2>
+
+<p>
+“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes
+with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the
+saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I
+clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went,
+and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find
+where I had arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days,
+another millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead
+of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with
+them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the
+thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a
+watch—into futurity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of
+things. The palpitating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still
+travelling with prodigious velocity—the blinking succession of day
+and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and
+grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The
+alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the
+passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through
+centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight
+only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. The
+band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for
+the sun had ceased to set—it simply rose and fell in the west, and
+grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The
+circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to
+creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red
+and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing
+with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one
+time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it
+speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down
+of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The
+earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time
+the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former
+headlong fall, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the
+circling hands until the thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one
+was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim
+outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking
+round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and
+out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars.
+Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew
+brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull
+of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish
+colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the
+intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their
+south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss
+or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual
+twilight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched
+away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan
+sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was
+stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing,
+and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the
+margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of
+salt—pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my
+head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded
+me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air
+to be more rarefied than it is now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a
+thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the
+sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of
+its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon
+the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had
+taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw
+the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab
+as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly,
+its big claws swaying, its long antennæ, like carters’ whips, waving
+and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its
+metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly
+bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see
+the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it
+moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I
+felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to
+brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost
+immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught something
+threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I
+turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab
+that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks,
+its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared
+with an algal slime, were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on
+the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters. But
+I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I
+stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre
+light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over
+the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea,
+the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the
+uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that
+hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on
+a hundred years, and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a
+little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same
+crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the
+red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast
+new moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a
+thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate,
+watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the
+westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than
+thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to
+obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once
+more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red
+beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless.
+And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white
+flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare
+of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an
+undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along
+the sea margin, with drifting masses farther out; but the main expanse of
+that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still
+unfrozen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A
+certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the
+machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime
+on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank
+had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied
+I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became
+motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived,
+and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were
+intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun
+had changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this
+grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that
+was creeping over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was
+beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the
+sun’s disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there
+is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of
+an inner planet passing very near to the earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening
+gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in
+number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these
+lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey
+the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the
+cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of
+our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying
+flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air
+more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white
+peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a
+moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping
+towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else
+was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote
+to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered,
+and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared
+the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy
+and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I
+saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now
+that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a
+round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and
+tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering
+blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was
+fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful
+twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap15"></a>XV.<br>
+The Time Traveller’s Return</h2>
+
+<p>
+“So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon
+the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed,
+the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom.
+The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun
+backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the
+evidences of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others
+came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I
+began to recognise our own pretty and familiar architecture, the thousands
+hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and
+slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently,
+now, I slowed the mechanism down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told
+you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett
+had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket.
+As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the
+laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of
+her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly
+up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which
+she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a
+moment; but he passed like a flash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old
+familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got
+off the thing very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes
+I trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old workshop
+again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the whole
+thing have been a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east
+corner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west,
+against the wall where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from
+my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks
+had carried my machine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came
+through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and
+feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> on the table by
+the door. I found the date was indeed today, and looking at the timepiece,
+saw the hour was almost eight o’clock. I heard your voices and the
+clatter of plates. I hesitated—I felt so sick and weak. Then I
+sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you. You know the rest.
+I washed, and dined, and now I am telling you the story.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap16"></a>XVI.<br>
+After the Story</h2>
+
+<p>
+“I know,” he said, after a pause, “that all this will be
+absolutely incredible to you, but to me the one incredible thing is that I
+am here tonight in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces
+and telling you these strange adventures.” He looked at the Medical
+Man. “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a
+lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have
+been speculating upon the destinies of our race, until I have hatched this
+fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance
+its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap
+with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary
+stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet.
+I took my eyes off the Time Traveller’s face, and looked round at his
+audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam before
+them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The
+Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar—the sixth. The
+Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were
+motionless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity it is you’re
+not a writer of stories!” he said, putting his hand on the Time
+Traveller’s shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t believe it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well——”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller turned to us. “Where are the matches?” he
+said. He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. “To tell you the
+truth... I hardly believe it myself..... And yet...”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon
+the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw
+he was looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers.
+“The gynæceum’s odd,” he said. The Psychologist leant
+forward to see, holding out his hand for a specimen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said
+the Journalist. “How shall we get home?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a curious thing,” said the Medical Man;
+“but I certainly don’t know the natural order of these flowers.
+May I have them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: “Certainly
+not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where did you really get them?” said the Medical Man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was
+trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. “They were put into
+my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.” He stared round the
+room. “I’m damned if it isn’t all going. This room and
+you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever
+make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a
+dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I
+can’t stand another that won’t fit. It’s madness. And
+where did the dream come from? … I must look at that machine. If there is
+one!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the
+door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of
+the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew, a thing of
+brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the
+touch—for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it—and with
+brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the
+lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand
+along the damaged rail. “It’s all right now,” he said.
+“The story I told you was true. I’m sorry to have brought you
+out here in the cold.” He took up the lamp, and, in an absolute
+silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat.
+The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told
+him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember
+him standing in the open doorway, bawling good-night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a “gaudy
+lie.” For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story
+was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay
+awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and
+see the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and
+being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory,
+however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out
+my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass
+swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me
+extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used
+to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time
+Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had
+a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed
+when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. “I’m frightfully
+busy,” said he, “with that thing in there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But is it not some hoax?” I said. “Do you really
+travel through time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really and truly I do.” And he looked frankly into my eyes.
+He hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. “I only want half an
+hour,” he said. “I know why you came, and it’s awfully
+good of you. There’s some magazines here. If you’ll stop to
+lunch I’ll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimens
+and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and
+he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory
+slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he
+going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an
+advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at
+two. I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely save that
+engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the Time
+Traveller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly
+truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round
+me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass
+falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a
+ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass
+for a moment—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its
+sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I
+rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of
+dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight
+had, apparently, just been blown in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had
+happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing
+might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the
+man-servant appeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. “Has Mr.
+—— gone out that way?” said I.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find
+him here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed
+on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still
+stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him.
+But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time
+Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has
+never returned.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a id="chap17"></a>Epilogue</h2>
+
+<p>
+One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he
+swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages
+of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or
+among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic
+times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on
+some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline
+seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer
+ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time
+answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race:
+for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak
+experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s
+culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question
+had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was
+made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw
+in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must
+inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so,
+it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is
+still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places
+by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange
+white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to
+witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual
+tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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