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+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.
+
+“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.”
+
+“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said
+Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
+
+“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 _nil_, has no real
+existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane.
+These things are mere abstractions.”
+
+“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
+
+“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a
+real existence.”
+
+“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All
+real things—”
+
+“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an _instantaneous_ cube
+exist?”
+
+“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
+
+“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real
+existence?”
+
+Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any
+real body must have extension in _four_ 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.”
+
+“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his
+cigar over the lamp; “that . . . very clear indeed.”
+
+“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. _There is no difference between
+Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our
+consciousness moves along it_. 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?”
+
+“_I_ have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
+
+“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 _three_ 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?”
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.”
+
+“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?”
+
+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.”
+
+“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
+
+“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
+inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”
+
+“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.
+
+“Easier, far easier down than up.”
+
+“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
+present moment.”
+
+“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 _down_
+if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”
+
+“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. ’You
+_can_ move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about
+in Time.”
+
+“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?”
+
+“Oh, _this_,” began Filby, “is all—”
+
+“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
+
+“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will
+never convince me.”
+
+“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—”
+
+“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.
+
+“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as
+the driver determines.”
+
+Filby contented himself with laughter.
+
+“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“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!”
+
+“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man.
+“Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”
+
+“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the
+Very Young Man thought.
+
+“In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The
+German scholars have improved Greek so much.”
+
+“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!”
+
+“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic
+basis.”
+
+“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the Psychologist.
+
+“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—”
+
+“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going to verify _that_?”
+
+“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
+
+“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the Psychologist, “though it’s
+all humbug, you know.”
+
+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.
+
+The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s got?”
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ II.
+ The Machine
+
+
+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.
+
+The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. “Well?”
+said the Psychologist.
+
+“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.”
+
+The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing.
+“It’s beautifully made,” he said.
+
+“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.”
+
+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.
+
+Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
+
+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.
+
+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?”
+
+“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.”
+
+“You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?” said
+Filby.
+
+“Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain, know which.”
+
+After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. “It must have
+gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,” he said.
+
+“Why?” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“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.”
+
+“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!”
+
+“Serious objections,” remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of
+impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
+
+“Not a bit,” said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist: “You
+think. _You_ can explain that. It’s presentation below the threshold,
+you know, diluted presentation.”
+
+“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.
+
+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.
+
+“It sounds plausible enough tonight,” said the Medical Man; “but wait
+until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
+
+“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.
+
+“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly serious? Or is
+this a trick—like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?”
+
+“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.”
+
+None of us quite knew how to take it.
+
+I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he
+winked at me solemnly.
+
+
+
+
+ III.
+ The Time Traveller Returns
+
+
+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 _him_ 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.
+
+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?”
+
+“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.
+
+“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.”
+
+“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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.”
+
+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.”
+
+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.
+
+“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.
+
+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 _was_ 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.
+
+“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?”
+
+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!”
+
+“Story!” cried the Editor.
+
+“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.”
+
+“One word,” said I. “Have you been time travelling?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” said the Editor.
+
+“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?”
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ IV.
+ Time Travelling
+
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.’
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ V.
+ In the Golden Age
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ VI.
+ The Sunset of Mankind
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.)
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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. _Now_, 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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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!
+
+“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!
+
+
+
+
+ VII.
+ A Sudden Shock
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.’
+
+“But it _was_ 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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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?
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ VIII.
+ Explanation
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had
+taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. _Why?_ 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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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 _how_ 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.
+
+“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?
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ IX.
+ The Morlocks
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“I do not know how long I lay. I was arroused 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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ X.
+ When Night Came
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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…”
+
+_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._
+
+“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?
+
+“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, _minus_ 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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ XI.
+ The Palace of Green Porcelain
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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 _Philosophical Transactions_
+and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.
+
+“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 _The Land of the Leal_ as cheerfully as I
+could. In part it was a modest _cancan_, 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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ XII.
+ In the Darkness
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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!
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ XIII.
+ The Trap of the White Sphinx
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ XIV.
+ The Further Vision
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+
+
+
+ XV.
+ The Time Traveller’s Return
+
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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.
+
+“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 _Pall Mall Gazette_ 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.
+
+
+
+
+ XVI.
+ After the Story
+
+
+“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?”
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+“You don’t believe it?”
+
+“Well——”
+
+“I thought not.”
+
+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...”
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said the Journalist. “How
+shall we get home?”
+
+“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.
+
+“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?”
+
+The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: “Certainly not.”
+
+“Where did you really get them?” said the Medical Man.
+
+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!”
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.”
+
+“But is it not some hoax?” I said. “Do you really travel through time?”
+
+“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?”
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. “Has Mr. —— gone out
+that way?” said I.
+
+“No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him
+here.”
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+ Epilogue
+
+
+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.
\ No newline at end of file