автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу  The Time Machine (Project Gutenberg)

Herbert 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 ab­sent­minded, 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 arm­chair 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 to­night,” said the Med­ical Man; “but wait un­til to­mor­row. Wait for the com­mon sense of the morn­ing.”

“Would you like to see the Time Machine it­self?” asked the Time Trav­el­ler. And there­with, tak­ing the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long, draughty cor­ridor to his labor­at­ory. I re­mem­ber vividly the flick­er­ing light, his queer, broad head in sil­hou­ette, the dance of the shad­ows, how we all fol­lowed him, puzzled but in­cred­u­lous, and how there in the labor­at­ory we be­held a lar­ger edi­tion of the little mech­an­ism which we had seen van­ish from be­fore our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had cer­tainly been filed or sawn out of rock crys­tal. The thing was gen­er­ally com­plete, but the twis­ted crys­tal­line bars lay un­fin­ished upon the bench be­side some sheets of draw­ings, and I took one up for a bet­ter look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.

“Look here,” said the Med­ical Man, “are you per­fectly ser­i­ous? Or is this a trick—like that ghost you showed us last Christ­mas?”

“Upon that ma­chine,” said the Time Trav­el­ler, hold­ing the lamp aloft, “I in­tend to ex­plore time. Is that plain? I was never more ser­i­ous in my life.”

None of us quite knew how to take it.

I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Med­ical Man, and he winked at me sol­emnly.

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 egg­shell china. So I don’t think any of us said very much about time trav­el­ling in the in­ter­val between that Thursday and the next, though its odd po­ten­ti­al­it­ies ran, no doubt, in most of our minds: its plaus­ib­il­ity, that is, its prac­tical in­cred­ible­ness, the curi­ous pos­sib­il­it­ies of ana­chron­ism and of ut­ter con­fu­sion it sug­ges­ted. For my own part, I was par­tic­u­larly pre­oc­cu­pied with the trick of the model. That I re­mem­ber dis­cuss­ing with the Med­ical Man, whom I met on Fri­day at the 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, blood­stained 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 wool­gath­er­ing. Then, “Re­mark­able Be­ha­viour of an Emin­ent Scient­ist,” I heard the Ed­itor say, think­ing (after his wont) in head­lines. And this brought my at­ten­tion back to the bright din­ner-table.

“What’s the game?” said the Journ­al­ist. “Has he been do­ing the Amateur Cadger? I don’t fol­low.” I met the eye of the Psy­cho­lo­gist, and read my own in­ter­pret­a­tion in his face. I thought of the Time Trav­el­ler limp­ing pain­fully up­stairs. I don’t think any­one else had no­ticed his lame­ness.

The first to re­cover com­pletely from this sur­prise was the Med­ical Man, who rang the bell—the Time Trav­el­ler hated to have ser­vants wait­ing at din­ner—for a hot plate. At that the Ed­itor turned to his knife and fork with a grunt, and the Si­lent Man fol­lowed suit. The din­ner was re­sumed. Con­ver­sa­tion was ex­clam­at­ory for a little while, with gaps of won­der­ment; and then the Ed­itor got fer­vent in his curi­os­ity. “Does our friend eke out his mod­est in­come with a cross­ing? or has he his Nebuchad­nez­zar phases?” he in­quired. “I feel as­sured it’s this busi­ness of the Time Machine,” I said, and took up the Psy­cho­lo­gist’s ac­count of our pre­vi­ous meet­ing. The new guests were frankly in­cred­u­lous. The Ed­itor raised ob­jec­tions. “What was this time trav­el­ling? A man couldn’t cover him­self with dust by rolling in a para­dox, could he?” And then, as the idea came home to him, he re­sor­ted to ca­ri­ca­ture. Hadn’t they any clothes-brushes in the Fu­ture? The Journ­al­ist too, would not be­lieve at any price, and joined the Ed­itor in the easy work of heap­ing ri­dicule on the whole thing. They were both the new kind of journ­al­ist—very joy­ous, ir­rev­er­ent young men. “Our Spe­cial Cor­res­pond­ent in the Day after To­mor­row re­ports,” the Journ­al­ist was say­ing—or rather shout­ing—when the Time Trav­el­ler came back. He was dressed in or­din­ary even­ing clothes, and noth­ing save his hag­gard look re­mained of the change that had startled me.

“I say,” said the Ed­itor hil­ari­ously, “these chaps here say you have been trav­el­ling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rose­bery, will you? What will you take for the lot?”

The Time Trav­el­ler came to the place re­served for him without a word. He smiled quietly, in his old way. “Where’s my mut­ton?” he said. “What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!”

“St­ory!” cried the Ed­itor.

“St­ory be damned!” said the Time Trav­el­ler. “I want some­thing to eat. I won’t say a word un­til I get some pep­tone into my ar­ter­ies. Thanks. And the salt.”

“One word,” said I. “Have you been time trav­el­ling?”

“Yes,” said the Time Trav­el­ler, with his mouth full, nod­ding his head.

“I’d give a shil­ling a line for a ver­batim note,” said the Ed­itor. The Time Trav­el­ler pushed his glass to­wards the Si­lent Man and rang it with his fin­ger­nail; at which the Si­lent Man, who had been star­ing at his face, star­ted con­vuls­ively, and poured him wine. The rest of the din­ner was un­com­fort­able. For my own part, sud­den ques­tions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the oth­ers. The Journ­al­ist tried to re­lieve the ten­sion by telling an­ec­dotes of Het­tie Pot­ter. The Time Trav­el­ler de­voted his at­ten­tion to his din­ner, and dis­played the ap­pet­ite of a tramp. The Med­ical Man smoked a ci­gar­ette, and watched the Time Trav­el­ler through his eye­lashes. The Si­lent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank cham­pagne with reg­u­lar­ity and de­term­in­a­tion out of sheer nervous­ness. At last the Time Trav­el­ler pushed his plate away, and looked round us. “I sup­pose I must 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 to­night. I don’t mind telling you the story, but I can’t ar­gue. I will,” he went on, “tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you must re­frain from in­ter­rup­tions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will sound like ly­ing. So be it! It’s true—every word of it, all the same. I was in my labor­at­ory at four o’clock, and since then … I’ve lived eight days … such days as no hu­man be­ing ever lived be­fore! I’m nearly worn out, but I shan’t sleep till I’ve told this thing over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no in­ter­rup­tions! Is it agreed?”

“Agreed,” said the Ed­itor, and the rest of us echoed “Agreed.” And with that the Time Trav­el­ler began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. After­wards he got more an­im­ated. In writ­ing it down I feel with only too much keen­ness the in­ad­equacy of pen and ink—and, above all, my own in­ad­equacy—to ex­press its qual­ity. You read, I will sup­pose, at­tent­ively enough; but you can­not see the speaker’s white, sin­cere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the in­ton­a­tion of his voice. You can­not know how his ex­pres­sion fol­lowed the turns of his story! Most of us hear­ers were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journ­al­ist and the legs of the Si­lent Man from the knees down­ward were il­lu­min­ated. At first we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time Trav­el­ler’s face.

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 today that the first of all Time Machines began its ca­reer. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat my­self in the saddle. I sup­pose a sui­cide who holds a pis­tol to his skull feels much the same won­der at what will come next as I felt then. I took the start­ing lever in one hand and the stop­ping one in the other, pressed the first, and al­most im­me­di­ately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a night­mare sen­sa­tion of fall­ing; and, look­ing round, I saw the labor­at­ory ex­actly as be­fore. Had any­thing happened? For a mo­ment I sus­pec­ted that my in­tel­lect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A mo­ment be­fore, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the start­ing lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The labor­at­ory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watch­ett came in and walked, ap­par­ently without see­ing me, to­wards the garden door. I sup­pose it took her a minute or so to tra­verse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its ex­treme po­s­i­tion. The night came like the turn­ing out of a lamp, and in an­other mo­ment came to­mor­row. The labor­at­ory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To­mor­row night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An ed­dy­ing mur­mur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb con­fused­ness des­cen­ded on my mind.

“I am afraid I can­not con­vey the pe­cu­liar sen­sa­tions of time trav­el­ling. They are ex­cess­ively un­pleas­ant. There is a feel­ing ex­actly like that one has upon a switch­back—of a help­less head­long mo­tion! I felt the same hor­rible an­ti­cip­a­tion, too, of an im­min­ent smash. As I put on pace, night fol­lowed day like the flap­ping of a black wing. The dim sug­ges­tion of the labor­at­ory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hop­ping swiftly across the sky, leap­ing it every minute, and every minute mark­ing a day. I sup­posed the labor­at­ory had been des­troyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim im­pres­sion of scaf­fold­ing, but I was already go­ing too fast to be con­scious of any mov­ing things. The slow­est snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twink­ling suc­ces­sion of dark­ness and light was ex­cess­ively pain­ful to the eye. Then, in the in­ter­mit­tent dark­nesses, I saw the moon spin­ning swiftly through her quar­ters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circ­ling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gain­ing ve­lo­city, the pal­pit­a­tion of night and day merged into one con­tinu­ous grey­ness; the sky took on a won­der­ful deep­ness of blue, a splen­did lu­min­ous 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 hill­side upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees grow­ing and chan­ging like puffs of va­pour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge build­ings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole sur­face of the earth seemed changed—melt­ing and flow­ing un­der my eyes. The little hands upon the di­als that re­gistered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from sol­stice to sol­stice, in a minute or less, and that con­sequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and van­ished, and was fol­lowed by the bright, brief green of spring.

“The un­pleas­ant sen­sa­tions of the start were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hys­ter­ical ex­hil­ar­a­tion. I re­marked in­deed a clumsy sway­ing of the ma­chine, for which I was un­able to ac­count. But my mind was too con­fused to at­tend to it, so with a kind of mad­ness grow­ing upon me, I flung my­self into fu­tur­ity. At first I scarce thought of stop­ping, scarce thought of any­thing but these new sen­sa­tions. But presently a fresh series of im­pres­sions grew up in my mind—a cer­tain curi­os­ity and there­with a cer­tain dread—un­til at last they took com­plete pos­ses­sion of me. What strange de­vel­op­ments of hu­man­ity, what won­der­ful ad­vances upon our rudi­ment­ary 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 hill­side, and re­main there, without any wintry in­ter­mis­sion. Even through the veil of my con­fu­sion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the busi­ness of stop­ping.

“The pe­cu­liar risk lay in the pos­sib­il­ity of my find­ing some sub­stance in the space which I, or the ma­chine, oc­cu­pied. So long as I trav­elled at a high ve­lo­city through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, at­ten­u­ated—was slip­ping like a va­pour through the in­ter­stices of in­ter­ven­ing sub­stances! But to come to a stop in­volved the jam­ming of my­self, mo­lecule by mo­lecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bring­ing my atoms into such in­tim­ate con­tact with those of the obstacle that a pro­found chem­ical re­ac­tion—pos­sibly a far-reach­ing ex­plo­sion—would res­ult, and blow my­self and my ap­par­atus out of all pos­sible di­men­sions—into the Unknown. This pos­sib­il­ity had oc­curred to me again and again while I was mak­ing the ma­chine; but then I had cheer­fully ac­cep­ted it as an un­avoid­able risk—one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was in­ev­it­able, I no longer saw it in the same cheer­ful light. The fact is that, in­sens­ibly, the ab­so­lute strange­ness of everything, the sickly jar­ring and sway­ing of the ma­chine, above all, the feel­ing of pro­longed fall­ing, had ab­so­lutely up­set my 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 hail­stones. 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 weather­worn, and that im­par­ted an un­pleas­ant sug­ges­tion of dis­ease. I stood look­ing at it for a little space—half a minute, per­haps, or half an hour. It seemed to ad­vance and to re­cede as the hail drove be­fore it denser or thin­ner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a mo­ment and saw that the hail cur­tain had worn thread­bare, and that the sky was light­en­ing with the prom­ise of the sun.

“I looked up again at the crouch­ing white shape, and the full temer­ity of my voy­age came sud­denly upon me. What might ap­pear when that hazy cur­tain was al­to­gether with­drawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a com­mon pas­sion? What if in this in­ter­val the race had lost its man­li­ness and had de­veloped into some­thing in­hu­man, un­sym­path­etic, and over­whelm­ingly power­ful? I might seem some old-world sav­age an­imal, only the more dread­ful and dis­gust­ing for our com­mon like­ness—a foul creature to be in­con­tin­ently slain.

“Already I saw other vast shapes—huge build­ings with in­tric­ate para­pets and tall columns, with a wooded hill­side dimly creep­ing in upon me through the lessen­ing storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantic­ally to the Time Machine, and strove hard to re­ad­just it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thun­der­storm. The grey down­pour was swept aside and van­ished like the trail­ing gar­ments of a ghost. Above me, in the in­tense blue of the sum­mer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into noth­ing­ness. The great build­ings about me stood out clear and dis­tinct, shin­ing with the wet of the thun­der­storm, and picked out in white by the un­melted hail­stones piled along their courses. I felt na­ked in a strange world. I felt as per­haps a bird may feel in the clear air, know­ing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I took a breath­ing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the ma­chine. It gave un­der my des­per­ate on­set and turned over. It struck my chin vi­ol­ently. One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood pant­ing heav­ily in at­ti­tude to mount again.

“But with this re­cov­ery of a prompt re­treat my cour­age re­covered. I looked more curi­ously and less fear­fully at this world of the re­mote fu­ture. In a cir­cu­lar open­ing, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of fig­ures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were dir­ec­ted to­wards me.

“Then I heard voices ap­proach­ing me. Com­ing through the bushes by the White Sph­inx were the heads and shoulders of men run­ning. One of these emerged in a path­way lead­ing straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with my ma­chine. He was a slight creature—per­haps four feet high—clad in a purple tu­nic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. San­dals or buskins—I could not clearly dis­tin­guish which—were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. No­ti­cing that, I no­ticed for the first time how warm the air was.

“He struck me as be­ing a very beau­ti­ful and grace­ful creature, but in­des­crib­ably frail. His flushed face re­minded me of the more beau­ti­ful kind of con­sumptive—that hec­tic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the sight of him I sud­denly re­gained con­fid­ence. I took my hands from the ma­chine.

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 nine­pins. But I made a sud­den mo­tion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feel­ing at the Time Machine. Hap­pily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto for­got­ten, and reach­ing over the bars of the ma­chine I un­screwed the little levers that would set it in mo­tion, and put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of com­mu­nic­a­tion.

“And then, look­ing more nearly into their fea­tures, I saw some fur­ther pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies in their Dres­den-china type of pret­ti­ness. Their hair, which was uni­formly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest sug­ges­tion of it on the face, and their ears were sin­gu­larly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild; and—this may seem egot­ism on my part—I fan­cied even that there was a cer­tain lack of the in­terest I might have ex­pec­ted in them.

“As they made no ef­fort to com­mu­nic­ate with me, but simply stood round me smil­ing and speak­ing in soft coo­ing notes to each other, I began the con­ver­sa­tion. I poin­ted to the Time Machine and to my­self. Then hes­it­at­ing for a mo­ment how to ex­press time, I poin­ted to the sun. At once a quaintly pretty little fig­ure in chequered purple and white fol­lowed my ges­ture, and then as­ton­ished me by im­it­at­ing the sound of thun­der.

“For a mo­ment I was staggered, though the im­port of his ges­ture was plain enough. The ques­tion had come into my mind ab­ruptly: were these creatures fools? You may hardly un­der­stand how it took me. You see I had al­ways an­ti­cip­ated that the people of the year Eight Hun­dred and Two Thou­sand odd would be in­cred­ibly in front of us in know­ledge, art, everything. Then one of them sud­denly asked me a ques­tion that showed him to be on the in­tel­lec­tual level of one of our five-year-old chil­dren—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thun­der­storm! It let loose the judg­ment I had sus­pen­ded upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fra­gile fea­tures. A flow of dis­ap­point­ment rushed across my mind. For a mo­ment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.

“I nod­ded, poin­ted to the sun, and gave them such a vivid ren­der­ing of a thun­der­clap as startled them. They all with­drew a pace or so and bowed. Then came one laugh­ing to­wards me, car­ry­ing a chain of beau­ti­ful flowers al­to­gether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was re­ceived with me­lodi­ous ap­plause; and presently they were all run­ning to and fro for flowers, and laugh­ingly fling­ing them upon me un­til I was al­most smothered with blos­som. You who have never seen the like can scarcely ima­gine what del­ic­ate and won­der­ful flowers count­less years of cul­ture had cre­ated. Then someone sug­ges­ted that their plaything should be ex­hib­ited in the nearest build­ing, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my as­ton­ish­ment, to­wards a vast grey edi­fice of fret­ted stone. As I went with them the memory of my con­fid­ent an­ti­cip­a­tions of a pro­foundly grave and in­tel­lec­tual pos­ter­ity came, with ir­res­ist­ible mer­ri­ment, to my mind.

“The build­ing had a huge entry, and was al­to­gether of co­lossal di­men­sions. I was nat­ur­ally most oc­cu­pied with the grow­ing crowd of little people, and with the big open portals that yawned be­fore me shad­owy and mys­ter­i­ous. My gen­eral im­pres­sion of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beau­ti­ful bushes and flowers, a long neg­lected and yet weed­less garden. I saw a num­ber of tall spikes of strange white flowers, meas­ur­ing a foot per­haps across the spread of the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among the varie­gated shrubs, but, as I say, I did not ex­am­ine them closely at this time. The Time Machine was left deser­ted on the turf among the rhodo­den­drons.

“The arch of the door­way was richly carved, but nat­ur­ally I did not ob­serve the carving very nar­rowly, though I fan­cied I saw sug­ges­tions of old Phoen­i­cian dec­or­a­tions as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather­worn. 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 AD. 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 off­spring 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 arm­rests 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 today are still in the rudi­ment­ary stage. The sci­ence of our time has at­tacked but a little de­part­ment of the field of hu­man dis­ease, but even so, it spreads its op­er­a­tions very stead­ily and per­sist­ently. Our ag­ri­cul­ture and hor­ti­cul­ture des­troy a weed just here and there and cul­tiv­ate per­haps a score or so of whole­some plants, leav­ing the greater num­ber to fight out a bal­ance as they can. We im­prove our fa­vour­ite plants and an­im­als—and how few they are—gradu­ally by se­lect­ive breed­ing; now a new and bet­ter peach, now a seed­less grape, now a sweeter and lar­ger flower, now a more con­veni­ent breed of cattle. We im­prove them gradu­ally, be­cause our ideals are vague and tent­at­ive, and our know­ledge is very lim­ited; be­cause Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be bet­ter or­gan­ized, and still bet­ter. That is the drift of the cur­rent in spite of the ed­dies. The whole world will be in­tel­li­gent, edu­cated, and co­oper­at­ing; 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 north­east. 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 any­one from tam­per­ing with it in that way when they were re­moved. It had moved, and was hid, only in space. But then, where could it be?

“I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I re­mem­ber run­ning vi­ol­ently in and out among the moon­lit bushes all round the sphinx, and start­ling some white an­imal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I re­mem­ber, too, late that night, beat­ing the bushes with my clenched fist un­til my knuckles were gashed and bleed­ing from the broken twigs. Then, sob­bing and rav­ing in my an­guish of mind, I went down to the great build­ing of stone. The big hall was dark, si­lent, and deser­ted. I slipped on the un­even floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables, al­most break­ing my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty cur­tains, of which I have told you.

“There I found a second great hall covered with cush­ions, upon which, per­haps, a score or so of the little people were sleep­ing. I have no doubt they found my second ap­pear­ance strange enough, com­ing sud­denly out of the quiet dark­ness with in­ar­tic­u­late noises and the splut­ter and flare of a match. For they had for­got­ten about matches. ‘Where is my Time Machine?’ I began, bawl­ing like an angry child, lay­ing hands upon them and shak­ing them up to­gether. It must have been very queer to them. Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them stand­ing round me, it came into my head that I was do­ing as fool­ish a thing as it was pos­sible for me to do un­der the cir­cum­stances, in try­ing to re­vive the sen­sa­tion of fear. For, reas­on­ing from their day­light be­ha­viour, I thought that fear must be for­got­ten.

“Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and, knock­ing one of the people over in my course, went blun­der­ing across the big din­ing-hall again, out un­der the moon­light. I heard cries of ter­ror and their little feet run­ning and stum­bling this way and that. I do not re­mem­ber all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I sup­pose it was the un­ex­pec­ted nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hope­lessly cut off from my own kind—a strange an­imal in an un­known world. I must have raved to and fro, scream­ing and cry­ing upon God and Fate. I have a memory of hor­rible fa­tigue, as the long night of des­pair wore away; of look­ing in this im­possible place and that; of grop­ing among moon­lit ru­ins and touch­ing strange creatures in the black shad­ows; at last, of ly­ing on the ground near the sphinx and weep­ing with ab­so­lute wretched­ness. 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, ape­like 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 ape­like 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 Under-world 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 co­oper­a­tion as I had ima­gined. In­stead, I saw a real ar­is­to­cracy, armed with a per­fec­ted sci­ence and work­ing to a lo­gical con­clu­sion the in­dus­trial sys­tem of today. Its tri­umph had not been simply a tri­umph over Nature, but a tri­umph over Nature and the fel­low­man. 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 new­found 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 south­west­ward to­wards the rising coun­try that is now called Combe Wood, I ob­served far off, in the dir­ec­tion of nine­teenth-cen­tury Ban­stead, a vast green struc­ture, dif­fer­ent in char­ac­ter from any I had hitherto seen. It was lar­ger than the largest of the palaces or ru­ins I knew, and the façade had an Ori­ental look: the face of it hav­ing the lustre, as well as the pale-green tint, a kind of blu­ish-green, of a cer­tain type of Chinese por­cel­ain. This dif­fer­ence in as­pect sug­ges­ted a dif­fer­ence in use, and I was minded to push on and ex­plore. But the day was grow­ing late, and I had come upon the sight of the place after a long and tir­ing cir­cuit; so I re­solved to hold over the ad­ven­ture for the fol­low­ing day, and I re­turned to the wel­come and the caresses of little Weena. But next morn­ing I per­ceived clearly enough that my curi­os­ity re­gard­ing the Palace of Green Por­cel­ain was a piece of self-de­cep­tion, to en­able me to shirk, by an­other day, an ex­per­i­ence I dreaded. I re­solved I would make the des­cent without fur­ther waste of time, and star­ted out in the early morn­ing to­wards a well near the ru­ins of gran­ite and alu­minium.

“Little Weena ran with me. She danced be­side me to the well, but when she saw me lean over the mouth and look down­ward, she seemed strangely dis­con­cer­ted. ‘Good­bye, 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 Under-world 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 south­w­est. 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 ant­hill go­ing hither and thither and wait­ing for the dark. In my ex­cite­ment I fan­cied that they would re­ceive my in­va­sion of their bur­rows as a de­clar­a­tion of war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?

“So we went on in the quiet, and the twi­light deepened into night. The clear blue of the dis­tance faded, and one star after an­other came out. The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her fa­tigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her. Then, as the dark­ness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and, clos­ing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope into a val­ley, and there in the dim­ness I al­most walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the op­pos­ite side of the val­ley, past a num­ber of sleep­ing houses, and by a statue—a Faun, or some such fig­ure, minus the head. Here too were aca­cias. So far I had seen noth­ing of the Mor­locks, but it was yet early in the night, and the darker hours be­fore the old moon rose were still to come.

“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spread­ing wide and black be­fore me. I hes­it­ated at this. I could see no end to it, either to the right or the left. Feel­ing tired—my feet, in par­tic­u­lar, were very sore—I care­fully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I hal­ted, and sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green Por­cel­ain, and I was in doubt of my dir­ec­tion. I looked into the thick­ness of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were there no other lurk­ing danger—a danger I did not care to let my ima­gin­a­tion loose upon—there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the tree-boles to strike against.

“I was very tired, too, after the ex­cite­ments of the day; so I de­cided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.

“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I care­fully wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down be­side her to wait for the moon­rise. The hill­side was quiet and deser­ted, but from the black of the wood there came now and then a stir of liv­ing things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I felt a cer­tain sense of friendly com­fort in their twink­ling. All the old con­stel­la­tions had gone from the sky, how­ever: that slow move­ment which is im­per­cept­ible in a hun­dred hu­man life­times, had long since re­arranged them in un­fa­mil­iar group­ings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star­dust 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 such­like 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 fel­low­man, 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 north­east­ward 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 rain­wa­ter 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 air­tight 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 air­tight 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 tail­coat 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 air­tight 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 nonex­ist­ence.

“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 hill­side, there, as it seemed to me, was an al­to­gether safer rest­ing-place; I thought that with my matches and my cam­phor I could con­trive to keep my path il­lu­min­ated through the woods. Yet it was evid­ent that if I was to flour­ish matches with my hands I should have to aban­don my fire­wood; so, rather re­luct­antly, I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends be­hind by light­ing it. I was to dis­cover the at­ro­cious folly of this pro­ceed­ing, but it came to my mind as an in­geni­ous move for cov­er­ing our re­treat.

“I don’t know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the ab­sence of man and in a tem­per­ate cli­mate. The sun’s heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is fo­cused by dew­drops, as is some­times the case in more trop­ical dis­tricts. Light­ning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to wide­spread fire. De­cay­ing ve­get­a­tion may oc­ca­sion­ally smoulder with the heat of its fer­ment­a­tion, but this rarely res­ults in flame. In this dec­ad­ence, too, the art of fire-mak­ing had been for­got­ten on the earth. The red tongues that went lick­ing up my heap of wood were an al­to­gether new and strange thing to Weena.

“She wanted to run to it and play with it. I be­lieve she would have cast her­self into it had I not re­strained her. But I caught her up, and in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly be­fore me into the wood. For a little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Look­ing back presently, I could see, through the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes ad­ja­cent, and a curved line of fire was creep­ing up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that, and turned again to the dark trees be­fore me. It was very black, and Weena clung to me con­vuls­ively, but there was still, as my eyes grew ac­cus­tomed to the dark­ness, suf­fi­cient light for me to avoid the stems. Over­head it was simply black, ex­cept where a gap of re­mote blue sky shone down upon us here and there. I 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 match­box, 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 hill­side were some thirty or forty Mor­locks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blun­der­ing hither and thither against each other in their be­wil­der­ment. At first I did not 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.