 The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells

 I

The Time Traveller (for so it will be
convenient to speak of him) was
expounding a recondite matter to us. His
grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his
usually pale face was flushed and
animated. The fire burned 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 roams 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-Dimension 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
recognized? 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 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 civilized
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 conjurer he had seen at
Burslem; but before he had finished his
preface the Time Traveller came back,
and Filby's anecdote collapsed.

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,' I said, '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 to-night,'
said the Medical Man; 'but wait until
to-morrow. 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.

 II

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 frame 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 egg-shell 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
Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar
thing at Tubingen, 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 any one 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 To-morrow 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
apologize,' 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 to-night. 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.

 III

'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 to-day 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
to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and
hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.
To-morrow 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 color 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 hill-side 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 civilization, 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
hill-side, 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 nerve. 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 hail-stones. The rebounding,
dancing hail hung in a 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 hill-side
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.

 IV

'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 nine-pins. 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
Phoenician 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-colored 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 recognized
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 by, 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
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.

'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 realized 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 off-spring are secure, there
is less necessity--indeed there is no
necessity--for an efficient family, and
the specialization 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 recognize, 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
realize 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 civilizing 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 to-day 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 organized, 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 leaped. 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
civilized 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!

 V

'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 realized. 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 any one 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 moon-lit ruins and
touching strange creatures in the black
shadows; at last, of lying on the ground
near the sphinx and weeping with
absolute wretchedness. 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, 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.

'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 learned
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 organization, 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
civilization 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 realized 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 learned
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. There 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 organization? How was
it related to the indolent serenity of
the beautiful Upper-worlders? 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 Upper-world 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 utilize
underground space for the less
ornamental purposes of civilization;
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
Upper-world 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
to-day. 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 civilization 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
Upper-worlders 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
Under-grounders I did not yet suspect;
but from what I had seen of the
Morlocks--that, by the by, 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
Under-world, 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 the human
inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very
soon she was smiling and clapping her
hands, while I solemnly burned a match.


 VI

'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
underground mysteries. 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
further and further 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 facade 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 agonized 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 disk, 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
disk 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 Under-world
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
roused by a soft hand touching my face.
Starting up in the darkness I snatched
at my matches and, hastily striking one,
I saw three stooping white creatures
similar to the one I had seen above
ground in the ruin, hastily retreating
before the light. Living, as they did,
in what appeared to me impenetrable
darkness, their eyes were abnormally
large and sensitive, just as are the
pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they
reflected the light in the same way. I
have no doubt they could see me in that
rayless obscurity, and they did not seem
to have any fear of me apart from the
light. But, so soon as I struck a match
in order to see them, they fled
incontinently, vanishing into dark
gutters and tunnels, from which their
eyes glared at me in the strangest
fashion.

'I tried to call to them, but the
language they had was apparently
different from that of the Over-world
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 by, 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 burned 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 economize them, and I had wasted
almost half the box in astonishing the
Upper-worlders, 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 realization 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 burned
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.

 VII

'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 Upper-world 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
Upper-world 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 Carolingian 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 Under-world.
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 realizing 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 vase for
floral decoration. At least she utilized
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 hill-side 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 organizations, 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.

 VIII

'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 learned 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
recognized 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 Palaeontological
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
Palaeontology; 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
oldtime 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 saltpeter; 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 patent 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
recognized 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 moralized 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 fossilized millions
of years ago. I was about to throw it
away, but I remembered that it was
inflammable and burned 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, Phoenician, 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.

 IX

'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 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 hill-side, 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
struck 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 about 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 Under-world. 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
realization. In manoeuvring 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 economize 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 recognized, 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 hill-side 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
realize 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.

 X

'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
Under-world. I understood now what all
the beauty of the Over-world 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 Upper-world man
had drifted towards his feeble
prettiness, and the Under-world 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 the Under-world, 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
Under-world 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 theorizing 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 fitted 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.

 XI

'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 antennae, 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 further 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 realized 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.

 XII

'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 recognize
our own petty 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 to-day, 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.

'I know,' he said, after a pause, 'that
all this will be absolutely incredible
to you. To me the one incredible thing
is that I am here to-night 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
gynaeceum'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, specimen 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 lakes 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
civilization 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. 