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Title: The Time Machine

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: October 2, 2004 [EBook #35]

Last Updated: January 14, 2018

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME MACHINE ***

The Time Machine

An Invention

by H. G. Wells
 CONTENTS
I Introduction
II The Machine
III The Time Traveller Returns
IV Time Travelling
V In the Golden Age
VI The Sunset of Mankind
VII A Sudden Shock
VIII Explanation
IX The Morlocks
X When Night Came
XI The Palace of Green Porcelain
XII In the Darkness
XIII The Trap of the White Sphinx
XIV The Further Vision
XV The Time Traveller’s Return
XVI After the Story
Epilogue

Introduction
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
expounding a recondite matter to us. His pale grey eyes shone and twinkled,
and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly,
and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught
the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his
patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and
there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere, when thought runs
gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—
marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his
earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas
that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught
you at school is founded on a misconception.”
“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an
argumentative person with red hair.
“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for
it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that
a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught
you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere
abstractions.”
“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real
existence.”
“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real
things—”
“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube
exist?”
“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real
body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth,
Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which
I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are
really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a
fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction
between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that
our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from
the beginning to the end of our lives.”
“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his
cigar over the lamp; “that … very clear indeed.”
“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,”
continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. “Really
this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk
about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way
of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three
dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some
foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard
what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?”
“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as
having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness,
and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to
the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three
dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the
other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry.
Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York
Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat
surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-
dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three
dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the
perspective of the thing. See?”
“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he
lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic
words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said after some time, brightening in a
quite transitory manner.
“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of
Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance,
here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at
seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections,
as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned
being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required
for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is only a kind of
Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace
with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so
high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently
upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the
dimensions of Space generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line,
and that line, therefore, we must conclude, was along the Time-Dimension.”
“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, “if Time is
really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always
been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as
we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”
 The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you so sure we can move freely in Space?
Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men
always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how
about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities
of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”
“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.
“Easier, far easier down than up.”
“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
present moment.”
“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole
world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment.
Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are
passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to
the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles
above the earth’s surface.”
“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. ’You can
move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.”
“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we
cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very
vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as
you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying
back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of
staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the
savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why
should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his
drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”
“Oh, this,” began Filby, “is all—”
“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will never
convince me.”
“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the
object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I
had a vague inkling of a machine—”
“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.
“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the
driver determines.”
Filby contented himself with laughter.
“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller.
“It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist
suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the
Battle of Hastings, for instance!”
“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man. “Our
ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the
Very Young Man thought.
“In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The
German scholars have improved Greek so much.”
“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One
might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on
ahead!”
“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic basis.”
“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the Psychologist.
“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—”
“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going to verify that?”
“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the Psychologist, “though it’s all
humbug, you know.”
The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and with
his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and
we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.
The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s got?”
“Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,” said the Medical Man, and Filby
tried to tell us about a conjuror he had seen at Burslem, but before he had
finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s anecdote
collapsed.
 II

The Machine
The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic
framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made.
There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I
must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is to be
accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small
octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the
fire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he placed the mechanism.
Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table was
a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell upon the model. There
were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the
mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I
sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be
almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him,
looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor
watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The
Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It
appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and
however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these
conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. “Well?” said
the Psychologist.
“This little affair,” said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the
table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, “is only a model. It
is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks
singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar,
as though it was in some way unreal.” He pointed to the part with his finger.
“Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.”
The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. “It’s
beautifully made,” he said.
“It took two years to make,” retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we
had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: “Now I want you
clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine
gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle
represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever,
and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and
disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy
yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be
told I’m a quack.”
There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to
speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his
finger towards the lever. “No,” he said suddenly. “Lend me your hand.” And
turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual’s hand in his own and told
him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent
forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the
lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of
wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was
blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct,
was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass
and ivory; and it was gone—vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.
Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under the
table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. “Well?” he said, with a
reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar
on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.
We stared at each other. “Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you in
earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled
into time?”
“Certainly,” said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire.
Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist’s face. (The
Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and
tried to light it uncut.) “What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in
there”—he indicated the laboratory—“and when that is put together I mean to
have a journey on my own account.”
“You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?” said
Filby.
“Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain, know which.”
After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. “It must have gone
into the past if it has gone anywhere,” he said.
“Why?” said the Time Traveller.
 “Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into
the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have travelled
through this time.”
“But,” said I, “If it travelled into the past it would have been visible when
we came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here; and the
Thursday before that; and so forth!”
“Serious objections,” remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of
impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
“Not a bit,” said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist: “You think.
You can explain that. It’s presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted
presentation.”
“Of course,” said the Psychologist, and reassured us. “That’s a simple point
of psychology. I should have thought of it. It’s plain enough, and helps the
paradox delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine,
any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying
through the air. If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times
faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second,
the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth
of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That’s plain enough.”
He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. “You
see?” he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time
Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.
“It sounds plausible enough tonight,” said the Medical Man; “but wait until
tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
“Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?” asked the Time Traveller.
And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long,
draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the flickering light, his
queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all
followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we
beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from
before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been
filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the
twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of
drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly serious? Or is this a
trick—like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?”
“Upon that machine,” said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, “I
intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life.”
None of us quite knew how to take it.
I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he winked
at me solemnly.

III
The Time Traveller Returns
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The
fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be
believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected
some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.
Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller’s
words, we should have shown him far less scepticism. For we should have
perceived his motives: a pork-butcher could understand Filby. But the Time
Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we
distrusted him. Things that would have made the fame of a less clever man
seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily. The serious
people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they
were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him
was like furnishing a nursery with eggshell china. So I don’t think any of us
said very much about time travelling in the interval between that Thursday
and the next, though its odd potentialities ran, no doubt, in most of our minds:
its plausibility, that is, its practical incredibleness, the curious possibilities of
anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was
particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model. That I remember
discussing with the Medical Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnæan. He
said he had seen a similar thing at Tübingen, and laid considerable stress on
the blowing-out of the candle. But how the trick was done he could not
explain.
The next Thursday I went again to Richmond—I suppose I was one of the
Time Traveller’s most constant guests—and, arriving late, found four or five
men already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical Man was standing
before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in the other. I
looked round for the Time Traveller, and—“It’s half-past seven now,” said the
Medical Man. “I suppose we’d better have dinner?”
“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.
“You’ve just come? It’s rather odd. He’s unavoidably detained. He asks me
in this note to lead off with dinner at seven if he’s not back. Says he’ll explain
when he comes.”
“It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil,” said the Editor of a well-known
daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.
The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who
had attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor
aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man with a
beard—whom I didn’t know, and who, as far as my observation went, never
opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner-
table about the Time Traveller’s absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a
half-jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that explained to him, and the
Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the “ingenious paradox and
trick” we had witnessed that day week. He was in the midst of his exposition
when the door from the corridor opened slowly and without noise. I was
facing the door, and saw it first. “Hallo!” I said. “At last!” And the door
opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood before us. I gave a cry of surprise.
“Good heavens! man, what’s the matter?” cried the Medical Man, who saw
him next. And the whole tableful turned towards the door.
He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared
with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me
greyer—either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His
face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a cut half-healed; his
expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he
hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came
into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore
tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion
towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it
towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked
round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. “What
on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor. The Time Traveller did
not seem to hear. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he said, with a certain faltering
articulation. “I’m all right.” He stopped, held out his glass for more, and took
it off at a draught. “That’s good,” he said. His eyes grew brighter, and a faint
colour came into his cheeks. His glance flickered over our faces with a certain
dull approval, and then went round the warm and comfortable room. Then he
spoke again, still as it were feeling his way among his words. “I’m going to
wash and dress, and then I’ll come down and explain things…. Save me some
of that mutton. I’m starving for a bit of meat.”
He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was all
right. The Editor began a question. “Tell you presently,” said the Time
Traveller. “I’m—funny! Be all right in a minute.”
He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I
remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and
standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on
them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained socks. Then the door closed upon
him. I had half a mind to follow, till I remembered how he detested any fuss
about himself. For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering. Then,
“Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist,” I heard the Editor say,
thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this brought my attention back to
the bright dinner-table.
“What’s the game?” said the Journalist. “Has he been doing the Amateur
Cadger? I don’t follow.” I met the eye of the Psychologist, and read my own
interpretation in his face. I thought of the Time Traveller limping painfully
upstairs. I don’t think anyone else had noticed his lameness.
The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man,
who rang the bell—the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting at
dinner—for a hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and fork with a
grunt, and the Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was resumed.
Conversation was exclamatory for a little while with gaps of wonderment;
and then the Editor got fervent in his curiosity. “Does our friend eke out his
modest income with a crossing? or has he his Nebuchadnezzar phases?” he
inquired. “I feel assured it’s this business of the Time Machine,” I said, and
took up the Psychologist’s account of our previous meeting. The new guests
were frankly incredulous. The Editor raised objections. “What was this time
travelling? A man couldn’t cover himself with dust by rolling in a paradox,
could he?” And then, as the idea came home to him, he resorted to caricature.
Hadn’t they any clothes-brushes in the Future? The Journalist too, would not
believe at any price, and joined the Editor in the easy work of heaping ridicule
on the whole thing. They were both the new kind of journalist—very joyous,
irreverent young men. “Our Special Correspondent in the Day after
Tomorrow reports,” the Journalist was saying—or rather shouting—when the
Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in ordinary evening clothes, and
nothing save his haggard look remained of the change that had startled me.
“I say,” said the Editor hilariously, “these chaps here say you have been
travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rosebery, will
you? What will you take for the lot?”
The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He
smiled quietly, in his old way. “Where’s my mutton?” he said. “What a treat it
is to stick a fork into meat again!”
“Story!” cried the Editor.
“Story be damned!” said the Time Traveller. “I want something to eat. I
won’t say a word until I get some peptone into my arteries. Thanks. And the
salt.”
“One word,” said I. “Have you been time travelling?”
“Yes,” said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.
“I’d give a shilling a line for a verbatim note,” said the Editor. The Time
Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his
fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started
convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable.
For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it
was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by
telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to
his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a
cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent
Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with
regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time
Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us. “I suppose I must
apologise,” he said. “I was simply starving. I’ve had a most amazing time.”
He reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut the end. “But come into the
smoking-room. It’s too long a story to tell over greasy plates.” And ringing
the bell in passing, he led the way into the adjoining room.
“You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?” he said to
me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming the three new guests.
“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” said the Editor.
“I can’t argue tonight. I don’t mind telling you the story, but I can’t argue. I
will,” he went on, “tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you like,
but you must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will
sound like lying. So be it! It’s true—every word of it, all the same. I was in
my laboratory at four o’clock, and since then … I’ve lived eight days … such
days as no human being ever lived before! I’m nearly worn out, but I shan’t
sleep till I’ve told this thing over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no
interruptions! Is it agreed?”
 “Agreed,” said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed “Agreed.” And with
that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his
chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated.
In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen
and ink—and, above all, my own inadequacy—to express its quality. You
read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker’s
white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the
intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the
turns of his story! Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the
smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and
the legs of the Silent Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first
we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that,
and looked only at the Time Traveller’s face.

IV

Time Travelling
“I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine,
and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is
now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a
brass rail bent; but the rest of it’s sound enough. I expected to finish it on
Friday; but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that
one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get
remade; so that the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten
o’clock today that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a
last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod,
and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull
feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the
starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first,
and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare
sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as
before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect
had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had
stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!
“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs.
Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the
garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to
me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over
to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in
another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then
fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night
again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has
upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day
like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory
seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly
across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I
supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air.
I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be
conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed
by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was
excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the
moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint
glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the
palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky
took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of
early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in
space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the
stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which
this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw
trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they
grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint
and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed
changed—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials
that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that
the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less,
and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by
minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was
followed by the bright, brief green of spring.
“The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They
merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a
clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my
mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing
upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently a fresh
series of impressions grew up in my mind—a certain curiosity and therewith a
certain dread—until at last they took complete possession of me. What
strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our
rudimentary civilisation, I thought, might not appear when I came to look
nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I
saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any
buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I
saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there, without any wintry
intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very
fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping.
“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high
velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated—
was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!
But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule,
into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate
contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—
possibly a far-reaching explosion—would result, and blow myself and my
apparatus out of all possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility
had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then
I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man
has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same
cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of
everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the
feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerves. I told myself
that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop
forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently
the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.
“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting
on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but
presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round
me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by
rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms
were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones. The
rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the machine, and drove
along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. ‘Fine
hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.’
“Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked
round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed
indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all
else of the world was invisible.
“My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew
thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver
birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something
like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the
sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me,
was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was
towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint
shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted
an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—
half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as
the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a
moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky
was lightening with the promise of the sun.
“I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my
voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain
was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if
cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race
had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman,
unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world
savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common
likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain.
“Already I saw other vast shapes—huge buildings with intricate parapets
and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through
the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the
Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun
smote through the thunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and
vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue
of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into
nothingness. The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct,
shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the
unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I
felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above
and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my
teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave
under my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One
hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude
to mount again.
“But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked
more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future. In a
circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of
figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were
directed towards me.
“Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the
White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these
emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood
with my machine. He was a slight creature—perhaps four feet high—clad in a
purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins—I
could not clearly distinguish which—were on his feet; his legs were bare to
the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time
how warm the air was.
“He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but
indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind
of consumptive—that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the
sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the
machine.

In the Golden Age

“In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing
out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The
absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he
turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to them in a
strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.
“There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or
ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed me. It
came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and deep for
them. So I shook my head, and, pointing to my ears, shook it again. He came
a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft
little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was
real. There was nothing in this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in
these pretty little people that inspired confidence—a graceful gentleness, a
certain childlike ease. And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy
myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like ninepins. But I made a
sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the
Time Machine. Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I
had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine I unscrewed
the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket. Then I
turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication.
“And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further
peculiarities in their Dresden china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was
uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the
faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute.
The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins
ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild; and—this may seem egotism on
my part—I fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest I might
have expected in them.
“As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round
me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the
conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then, hesitating
for a moment how to express Time, I pointed to the sun. At once a quaintly
pretty little figure in chequered purple and white followed my gesture, and
then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.
“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain
enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures
fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had always
anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd
would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of
them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual
level of one of our five-year-old children—asked me, in fact, if I had come
from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended
upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of
disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built
the Time Machine in vain.
“I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a
thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and bowed. Then
came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers
altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received with
melodious applause; and presently they were all running to and fro for
flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered
with blossom. You who have never seen the like can scarcely imagine what
delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then
someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest
building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed
to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast
grey edifice of fretted stone. As I went with them the memory of my
confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came,
with irresistible merriment, to my mind.
“The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal dimensions.
I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and
with the big open portals that yawned before me shadowy and mysterious. My
general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of
beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw
a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps
across the spread of the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among
the variegated shrubs, but, as I say, I did not examine them closely at this
time. The Time Machine was left deserted on the turf among the
rhododendrons.
“The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not observe
the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old
Phœnician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were
very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad people met
me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century
garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded
by an eddying mass of bright, soft-coloured robes and shining white limbs, in
a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.
“The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with
brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with
coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor
was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor
slabs—blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the going to and fro
of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along the more frequented
ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of
polished stone, raised, perhaps, a foot from the floor, and upon these were
heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a kind of hypertrophied raspberry and
orange, but for the most part they were strange.
“Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these
my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a pretty
absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel
and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the sides of the tables. I
was not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry. As I did so
I surveyed the hall at my leisure.
“And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The
stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were
broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end were
thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near
me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich and
picturesque. There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred people dining in the
hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they could come, were
watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over the fruit they were
eating. All were clad in the same soft, and yet strong, silky material.
“Fruit, by the bye, was all their diet. These people of the remote future were
strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings,
I had to be frugivorous also. Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle,
sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction. But the fruits
were very delightful; one, in particular, that seemed to be in season all the
time I was there—a floury thing in a three-sided husk—was especially good,
and I made it my staple. At first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and
by the strange flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.
“However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now. So
soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute
attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that was the
next thing to do. The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and
holding one of these up I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures. I
had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning. At first my
efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but presently
a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name.
They had to chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and
my first attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language caused
an immense amount of genuine, if uncivil, amusement. However, I felt like a
schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score of
noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got to demonstrative
pronouns, and even the verb ‘to eat.’ But it was slow work, and the little
people soon tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations, so I
determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons in little doses
when they felt inclined. And very little doses I found they were before long,
for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.
 VI

The Sunset of Mankind

“A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their
lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like
children, but, like children they would soon stop examining me, and wander
away after some other toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings
ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me
at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little
people. I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my
hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the
future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me,
and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my
own devices.
“The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall,
and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At first things were
very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had
known—even the flowers. The big building I had left was situated on the
slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted, perhaps, a mile from
its present position. I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest, perhaps a
mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this our planet
in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One, A.D.
For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine
recorded.
“As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly help
to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world—for
ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of
granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of
precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very
beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles possibly—but wonderfully tinted with
brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging. It was evidently the
derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end built I could not
determine. It was here that I was destined, at a later date, to have a very
strange experience—the first intimation of a still stranger discovery—but of
that I will speak in its proper place.
“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested
for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently
the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and
there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the
cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English
landscape, had disappeared.
“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.
“And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-dozen
little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had
the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish
rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this
before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In
costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off
the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the
children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged
then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at
least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.
“Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that
this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for
the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the
family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of
an age of physical force. Where population is balanced and abundant, much
childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where
violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity—
indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialisation of
the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some
beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was
complete. This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I
was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.
“While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a
pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way
of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my
speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as
my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for
the first time. With a strange sense of freedom and adventure I pushed on up
to the crest.
“There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognise,
corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss,
the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins’ heads. I sat down
on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that
long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had
already gone below the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with
some horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the
Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I have already
spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some
in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure
in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of
some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights,
no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.
“So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen,
and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in
this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a half truth—or only a glimpse of
one facet of the truth.)
“It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The
ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I
began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at
present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough.
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The
work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilising process that
makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One
triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that
are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and
carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!
“After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the
rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department
of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its operations very
steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just
here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants,
leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our
favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective
breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter
and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them
gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is
very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some
day all this will be better organised, and still better. That is the drift of the
current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated,
and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation
of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of
animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.
“This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done indeed
for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had leapt. The air
was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits
and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.
The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped
out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I
shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay
had been profoundly affected by these changes.
“Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid
shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil.
There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The
shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body
of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should
jump at the idea of a social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population
had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased to increase.
“But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the
change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of
human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under
which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall;
conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon
self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the
emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring,
parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the
imminent dangers of the young. Now, where are these imminent dangers?
There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy,
against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now,
and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined
and pleasant life.
“I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence,
and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect
conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been
strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter
the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered
conditions.
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless
energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own
time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant
source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no
great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man. And in a state of
physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would
be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war
or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require
strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call
the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better
equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for
which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I
saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of
mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions
under which it lived—the flourish of that triumph which began the last great
peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to
eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
“Even this artistic impetus would at last die away—had almost died in the
Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the
sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would
fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone
of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me that here was that hateful
grindstone broken at last!
“As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple
explanation I had mastered the problem of the world—mastered the whole
secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised for the
increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather
diminished than kept stationary. That would account for the abandoned ruins.
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong
theories are!
 VII

A Sudden Shock
“As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the full
moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the
north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless
owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to
descend and find where I could sleep.
“I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the figure
of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as the light
of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver birch against it. There
was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there was
the little lawn. I looked at the lawn again. A queer doubt chilled my
complacency. ‘No,’ said I stoutly to myself, ‘that was not the lawn.’
“But it was the lawn. For the white leprous face of the sphinx was towards
it. Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to me? But you
cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
“At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own
age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it
was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop
my breathing. In another moment I was in a passion of fear and running with
great leaping strides down the slope. Once I fell headlong and cut my face; I
lost no time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm
trickle down my cheek and chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself:
‘They have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way.’
Nevertheless, I ran with all my might. All the time, with the certainty that
sometimes comes with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly,
knew instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath
came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hill crest to
the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am not a young man.
I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting
good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and none answered. Not a creature seemed
to be stirring in that moonlit world.
“When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realised. Not a trace of the
thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among
the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be
hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my
hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining,
leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my
dismay.
“I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the
mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and
intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the sense of some hitherto
unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished.
Yet, for one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had produced its exact
duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the
levers—I will show you the method later—prevented anyone from tampering
with it in that way when they were removed. It had moved, and was hid, only
in space. But then, where could it be?
“I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently in
and out among the moonlit bushes all round the sphinx, and startling some
white animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I remember, too,
late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist until my knuckles
were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs. Then, sobbing and raving in
my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of stone. The big hall
was dark, silent, and deserted. I slipped on the uneven floor, and fell over one
of the malachite tables, almost breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on
past the dusty curtains, of which I have told you.
“There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which,
perhaps, a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no doubt they
found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the
quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the splutter and flare of a match.
For they had forgotten about matches. ‘Where is my Time Machine?’ I began,
bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up
together. It must have been very queer to them. Some laughed, most of them
looked sorely frightened. When I saw them standing round me, it came into
my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as it was possible for me to do
under the circumstances, in trying to revive the sensation of fear. For,
reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought that fear must be forgotten.
“Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and knocking one of the people over
in my course, went blundering across the big dining-hall again, out under the
moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling
this way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I
suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt
hopelessly cut off from my own kind—a strange animal in an unknown
world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and Fate.
I have a memory of horrible fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away;
of looking in this impossible place and that; of groping among moonlit ruins
and touching strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the
ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness, even anger
at the folly of leaving the machine having leaked away with my strength. I
had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full
day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach
of my arm.
“I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got
there, and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair. Then
things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could
look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my frenzy
overnight, and I could reason with myself. ‘Suppose the worst?’ I said.
‘Suppose the machine altogether lost—perhaps destroyed? It behoves me to
be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the
method of my loss, and the means of getting materials and tools; so that in the
end, perhaps, I may make another.’ That would be my only hope, a poor hope,
perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious
world.
“But probably the machine had only been taken away. Still, I must be calm
and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or cunning. And with
that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering where I could
bathe. I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled. The freshness of the morning made
me desire an equal freshness. I had exhausted my emotion. Indeed, as I went
about my business, I found myself wondering at my intense excitement
overnight. I made a careful examination of the ground about the little lawn. I
wasted some time in futile questionings, conveyed, as well as I was able, to
such of the little people as came by. They all failed to understand my gestures;
some were simply stolid, some thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I had
the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces.
It was a foolish impulse, but the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill
curbed and still eager to take advantage of my perplexity. The turf gave better
counsel. I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of
the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled with
the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with queer
narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed
my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It
was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either
side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was hollow. Examining the
panels with care I found them discontinuous with the frames. There were no
handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as I
supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind. It
took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside
that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.
“I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and
under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling to
them, and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to the bronze
pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first gesture towards
this they behaved very oddly. I don’t know how to convey their expression to
you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded
woman—it is how she would look. They went off as if they had received the
last possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with
exactly the same result. Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of
myself. But, as you know, I wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once
more. As he turned off, like the others, my temper got the better of me. In
three strides I was after him, had him by the loose part of his robe round the
neck, and began dragging him towards the sphinx. Then I saw the horror and
repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.
“But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I
thought I heard something stir inside—to be explicit, I thought I heard a
sound like a chuckle—but I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big pebble
from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the
decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes. The delicate little
people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on
either hand, but nothing came of it. I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes,
looking furtively at me. At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place.
But I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I
could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours
—that is another matter.
“I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes
towards the hill again. ‘Patience,’ said I to myself. ‘If you want your machine
again you must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take your machine
away, it’s little good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don’t, you
will get it back as soon as you can ask for it. To sit among all those unknown
things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face
this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its
meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.’ Then suddenly the humour of
the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study
and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of
it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that
ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help
myself. I laughed aloud.
 “Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people
avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do
with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the
avoidance. I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain from
any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two things got back to the
old footing. I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I
pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point or
their language was excessively simple—almost exclusively composed of
concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract
terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple
and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest
propositions. I determined to put the thought of my Time Machine and the
mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx, as much as possible in a corner
of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me back to them in a
natural way. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, tethered me in a circle
of a few miles round the point of my arrival.

VIII
Explanation
“So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant richness
as the Thames valley. From every hill I climbed I saw the same abundance of
splendid buildings, endlessly varied in material and style, the same clustering
thickets of evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees and tree ferns. Here and
there water shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose into blue undulating
hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky. A peculiar feature, which
presently attracted my attention, was the presence of certain circular wells,
several, as it seemed to me, of a very great depth. One lay by the path up the
hill which I had followed during my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed
with bronze, curiously wrought, and protected by a little cupola from the rain.
Sitting by the side of these wells, and peering down into the shafted darkness,
I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted
match. But in all of them I heard a certain sound: a thud—thud—thud, like
the beating of some big engine; and I discovered, from the flaring of my
matches, that a steady current of air set down the shafts. Further, I threw a
scrap of paper into the throat of one, and, instead of fluttering slowly down, it
was at once sucked swiftly out of sight.
 “After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing
here and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often just such a
flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun-scorched beach. Putting
things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of
subterranean ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine. I was
at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people. It
was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.
“And here I must admit that I learnt very little of drains and bells and
modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in this real
future. In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times which I have
read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and social arrangements,
and so forth. But while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole
world is contained in one’s imagination, they are altogether inaccessible to a
real traveller amid such realities as I found here. Conceive the tale of London
which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What
would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and
telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the
like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him!
And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend
either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro
and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself
and these of the Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and
which contributed to my comfort; but save for a general impression of
automatic organisation, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your
mind.
“In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria
nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that, possibly, there
might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my
explorings. This, again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my
curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point. The thing puzzled me,
and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me still more: that
aged and infirm among this people there were none.
“I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic
civilisation and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of
no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored
were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could
find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed
in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though
undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such
things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative
tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among
them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in
making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not
see how things were kept going.
“Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had
taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. Why? For the life of me
I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars. I felt I
lacked a clue. I felt—how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription,
with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated
therewith, others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to
you? Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of Eight
Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One presented itself to me!
“That day, too, I made a friend—of a sort. It happened that, as I was
watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was
seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran
rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give
you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell
you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little
thing which was drowning before their eyes. When I realised this, I hurriedly
slipped off my clothes, and, wading in at a point lower down, I caught the
poor mite and drew her safe to land. A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought
her round, and I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left
her. I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any
gratitude from her. In that, however, I was wrong.
“This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little woman, as I
believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an exploration, and
she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of
flowers—evidently made for me and me alone. The thing took my
imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At any rate I did my
best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were soon seated together in a
little stone arbour, engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles. The creature’s
friendliness affected me exactly as a child’s might have done. We passed each
other flowers, and she kissed my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried
talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don’t know what it
meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a
queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended—as I will tell you!
“She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried
to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my
heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me
rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had
not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her expostulations at the
parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble
as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great
comfort. I thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me.
Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her
when I left her. Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was
to me. For, by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile
way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my
return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming
home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I
came over the hill.
“It was from her, too, that I learnt that fear had not yet left the world. She
was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me;
for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she
simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded
black things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful. It was a singularly
passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing. I discovered then,
among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after
dark, and slept in droves. To enter upon them without a light was to put them
into a tumult of apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping
alone within doors, after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed
the lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena’s distress, I insisted upon
sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.
“It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me triumphed,
and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all,
she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story slips away from me
as I speak of her. It must have been the night before her rescue that I was
awakened about dawn. I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I
was drowned, and that sea anemones were feeling over my face with their soft
palps. I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal
had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt
restless and uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour when things are just
creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet
unreal. I got up, and went down into the great hall, and so out upon the
flagstones in front of the palace. I thought I would make a virtue of necessity,
and see the sunrise.
“The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of
dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky black, the
ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up the hill I
thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw
white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, ape-like creature running
rather quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them
carrying some dark body. They moved hastily. I did not see what became of
them. It seemed that they vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still
indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain, early-
morning feeling you may have known. I doubted my eyes.
“As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and its
vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view
keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere creatures of
the half-light. ‘They must have been ghosts,’ I said; ‘I wonder whence they
dated.’ For a queer notion of Grant Allen’s came into my head, and amused
me. If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will
get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown
innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no great
wonder to see four at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking
of these figures all the morning, until Weena’s rescue drove them out of my
head. I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had
startled in my first passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was a
pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far
deadlier possession of my mind.
“I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this
Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the
earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling
steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those
of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one
by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze
with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this
fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter
than we know it.
“Well, one very hot morning—my fourth, I think—as I was seeking shelter
from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house where I slept
and fed, there happened this strange thing. Clambering among these heaps of
masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked
by fallen masses of stone. By contrast with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at
first impenetrably dark to me. I entered it groping, for the change from light
to blackness made spots of colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted
spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight
without, was watching me out of the darkness.
“The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my
hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn.
Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be
living came to my mind. And then I remembered that strange terror of the
dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I will
admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and
touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something
white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little
ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the
sunlit space behind me. It blundered against a block of granite, staggered
aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of
ruined masonry.
“My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull
white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair
on its head and down its back. But, as I say, it went too fast for me to see
distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours, or only with its
forearms held very low. After an instant’s pause I followed it into the second
heap of ruins. I could not find it at first; but, after a time in the profound
obscurity, I came upon one of those round well-like openings of which I have
told you, half closed by a fallen pillar. A sudden thought came to me. Could
this Thing have vanished down the shaft? I lit a match, and, looking down, I
saw a small, white, moving creature, with large bright eyes which regarded
me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human
spider! It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first time a
number of metal foot and hand rests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft.
Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it
dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster had disappeared.
“I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for some
time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was
human. But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained
one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful
children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation,
but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before
me, was also heir to all the ages.
“I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground
ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered, was
this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organisation? How
was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful Overworlders? And
what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft? I sat upon the edge of
the well telling myself that, at any rate, there was nothing to fear, and that
there I must descend for the solution of my difficulties. And withal I was
absolutely afraid to go! As I hesitated, two of the beautiful upperworld people
came running in their amorous sport across the daylight in the shadow. The
male pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.
“They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned pillar,
peering down the well. Apparently it was considered bad form to remark
these apertures; for when I pointed to this one, and tried to frame a question
about it in their tongue, they were still more visibly distressed and turned
away. But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse
them. I tried them again about the well, and again I failed. So presently I left
them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what I could get from her. But
my mind was already in revolution; my guesses and impressions were
slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of
these wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts; to say
nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the Time
Machine! And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of
the economic problem that had puzzled me.
“Here was the new view. Plainly, this second species of Man was
subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me
think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long-
continued underground habit. In the first place, there was the bleached look
common in most animals that live largely in the dark—the white fish of the
Kentucky caves, for instance. Then, those large eyes, with that capacity for
reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things—witness the owl
and the cat. And last of all, that evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty
yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage
of the head while in the light—all reinforced the theory of an extreme
sensitiveness of the retina.
“Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and these
tunnellings were the habitat of the New Race. The presence of ventilating
shafts and wells along the hill slopes—everywhere, in fact, except along the
river valley—showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural,
then, as to assume that it was in this artificial Underworld that such work as
was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was done? The notion was
so plausible that I at once accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this
splitting of the human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my
theory; though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.
“At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as
daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and
social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer was the key to the
whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and wildly
incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that
way. There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental
purposes of civilisation; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for
instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are
underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.
Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually
lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into
larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing
amount of its time therein, till, in the end—! Even now, does not an East-end
worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the
natural surface of the earth?
“Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no doubt, to the
increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them
and the rude violence of the poor—is already leading to the closing, in their
interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for
instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this
same widening gulf—which is due to the length and expense of the higher
educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards
refined habits on the part of the rich—will make that exchange between class
and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the
splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less
frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing
pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the
Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once
they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it,
for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or
be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be
miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being
permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of
underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Overworld people were to
theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed
naturally enough.
“The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in
my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-
operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a
perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of
today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph
over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the
time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My
explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one.
But even on this supposition the balanced civilisation that was at last attained
must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The
too-perfect security of the Overworlders had led them to a slow movement of
degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I
could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Undergrounders I
did not yet suspect; but, from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the
bye, was the name by which these creatures were called—I could imagine that
the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among
the ‘Eloi,’ the beautiful race that I already knew.
“Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time
Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the Eloi
were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were they
so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena
about this Underworld, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would
not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She
shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her,
perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except
my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly
to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these
signs of her human inheritance from Weena’s eyes. And very soon she was
smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burnt a match.

IX

The Morlocks
“It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the
new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar
shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached colour of
the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum.
And they were filthily cold to the touch. Probably my shrinking was largely
due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I
now began to appreciate.
“The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little
disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I had a
feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason. I
remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the little people were
sleeping in the moonlight—that night Weena was among them—and feeling
reassured by their presence. It occurred to me even then, that in the course of
a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter, and the nights grow
dark, when the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these
whitened Lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more
abundant. And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks
an inevitable duty. I felt assured that the Time Machine was only to be
recovered by boldly penetrating these mysteries of underground. Yet I could
not face the mystery. If only I had had a companion it would have been
different. But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the
darkness of the well appalled me. I don’t know if you will understand my
feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
“It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me farther and
farther afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the south-westward
towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I observed far-off,
in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure,
different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the
largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the façade had an Oriental look: the
face of it having the lustre, as well as the pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-
green, of a certain type of Chinese porcelain. This difference in aspect
suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore. But
the day was growing late, and I had come upon the sight of the place after a
long and tiring circuit; so I resolved to hold over the adventure for the
following day, and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena.
But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the
Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to
shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the
descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early morning
towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
“Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when she
saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely
disconcerted. ‘Good-bye, little Weena,’ I said, kissing her; and then putting
her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather
hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away! At
first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave a most piteous cry, and
running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands. I think her
opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I shook her off, perhaps a little
roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well. I saw her
agonised face over the parapet, and smiled to reassure her. Then I had to look
down at the unstable hooks to which I clung.
“I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The descent
was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well,
and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter
than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent. And not
simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost
swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I hung by one hand,
and after that experience I did not dare to rest again. Though my arms and
back were presently acutely painful, I went on clambering down the sheer
descent with as quick a motion as possible. Glancing upward, I saw the
aperture, a small blue disc, in which a star was visible, while little Weena’s
head showed as a round black projection. The thudding sound of a machine
below grew louder and more oppressive. Everything save that little disc above
was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again Weena had disappeared.
“I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up the
shaft again, and leave the Underworld alone. But even while I turned this over
in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly
coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall. Swinging
myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I
could lie down and rest. It was not too soon. My arms ached, my back was
cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this,
the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was
full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.
“I do not know how long I lay. I was arroused by a soft hand touching my
face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches and, hastily striking
one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I had seen above
ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the light. Living, as they did, in
what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large
and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected
the light in the same way. I have no doubt they could see me in that rayless
obscurity, and they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light.
But, so soon as I struck a match in order to see them, they fled incontinently,
vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in
the strangest fashion.
“I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different
from that of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to my own unaided
efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my
mind. But I said to myself, ‘You are in for it now,’ and, feeling my way along
the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder. Presently the walls
fell away from me, and I came to a large open space, and striking another
match, saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter
darkness beyond the range of my light. The view I had of it was as much as
one could see in the burning of a match.
“Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines rose out
of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral
Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the bye, was very stuffy and
oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly-shed blood was in the air. Some
way down the central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with what
seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous! Even at the time,
I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to furnish the
red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the heavy smell, the big unmeaning
shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the
darkness to come at me again! Then the match burnt down, and stung my
fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.
“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an
experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the
absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely
ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without arms, without
medicine, without anything to smoke—at times I missed tobacco frightfully!
—even without enough matches. If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could
have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and examined it at
leisure. But, as it was, I stood there with only the weapons and the powers
that Nature had endowed me with—hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four
safety-matches that still remained to me.
“I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and
it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of
matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there
was any need to economise them, and I had wasted almost half the box in
astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as I say, I
had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank fingers
came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour.
I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about
me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other
hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures
examining me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden realisation of my
ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly
in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away, and
then I could feel them approaching me again. They clutched at me more
boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I shivered violently, and shouted
again—rather discordantly. This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and
they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me. I will confess I
was horribly frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape
under the protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a
scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.
But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the
blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and
pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.
“In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking
that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and waved it in
their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they
looked—those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as
they stared in their blindness and bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I
promise you: I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I
struck my third. It had almost burnt through when I reached the opening into
the shaft. I lay down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made
me giddy. Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my
feet were grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my
last match … and it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the
climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the
clutches of the Morlocks, and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while
they stayed peering and blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who
followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.
“That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty feet
of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping
my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness.
Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling. At last,
however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin
into the blinding sunlight. I fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and
clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of
others among the Eloi. Then, for a time, I was insensible.

When Night Came

“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except
during my night’s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a
sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these new
discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish
simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only
to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the
sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman and malign.
Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had
fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I
felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.
“The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new
moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem
to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on the
wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now
understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little
Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it
might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now
that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld people might once
have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical
servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had
resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already
arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the Carlovignan
kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth
on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations,
had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made
their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,
perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as a
standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport:
because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism.
But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the
delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago,
man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now
that brother was coming back—changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn
one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And
suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the
Underworld. It seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it
were by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question
from outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something
familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.
“Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious
Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of ours, this ripe
prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its
terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further delay I determined to
make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a
base, I could face this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in
realising to what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never
sleep again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to
think how they must already have examined me.
“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found
nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the buildings
and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as the
Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall pinnacles of the
Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to
my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my shoulder,
I went up the hills towards the south-west. The distance, I had reckoned, was
seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the
place on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished. In
addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working
through the sole—they were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors—so
that I was lame. And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of
the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.
“Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a
while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me,
occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets.
My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that
they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration. At least she utilised
them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In changing my jacket I
found…”
The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed
two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little
table. Then he resumed his narrative.
“As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the
hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the
house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace of
Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand that we were
seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great pause that comes
upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is
always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear,
remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well,
that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm
my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the
hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through
it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the
dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their
burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?
“So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The clear
blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out. The ground
grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her fatigue grew upon her. I
took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her. Then, as the darkness
grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and, closing her eyes, tightly
pressed her face against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope into a
valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked into a little river. This I
waded, and went up the opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping
houses, and by a statue—a Faun, or some such figure, minus the head. Here
too were acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet
early in the night, and the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to
come.
“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to the right
or the left. Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were very sore—I carefully
lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon the turf. I
could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my
direction. I looked into the thickness of the wood and thought of what it might
hide. Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the
stars. Even were there no other lurking danger—a danger I did not care to let
my imagination loose upon—there would still be all the roots to stumble over
and the tree-boles to strike against. I was very tired, too, after the excitements
of the day; so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon
the open hill.
“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my
jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The hillside was
quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now and then a
stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I
felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old
constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which is
imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them
in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the
same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it) was
a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even more splendid than our
own green Sirius. And amid all these scintillating points of light one bright
planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.
“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the
gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the
slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the
unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the
earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all
the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the
activity, all the traditions, the complex organisations, the nations, languages,
literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had
been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had
forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror.
Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the
first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I
had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping
beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed
the thought.
“Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I
could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the
old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear, except for a
hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil wore on, came
a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless fire, and
the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And close behind, and
overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then
growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed, I had seen
none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it almost
seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I stood up and found my
foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel; so I
sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung them away.
“I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and
pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to
break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing
in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night. And
then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured now of
what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill from
the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human
decay the Morlocks’ food had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and
such-like vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in
his food than he was—far less than any monkey. His prejudice against human
flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men——! I
tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human
and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years
ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment
had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle,
which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to the
breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
 “Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me,
by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been
content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had
taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time
Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this
wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible.
However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of
the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer
in their degradation and their Fear.
“I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue. My
first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms
of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was immediate. In the
next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so that I should have the
weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient
against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break
open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx. I had in mind a battering
ram. I had a persuasion that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of
light before me I should discover the Time Machine and escape. I could not
imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away. Weena I had
resolved to bring with me to our own time. And turning such schemes over in
my mind I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen
as our dwelling.

XI

The Palace of Green Porcelain

“I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon,
deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its
windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the
corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking
north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or
even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I
thought then—though I never followed up the thought—of what might have
happened, or might be happening, to the living things in the sea.
“The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain,
and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I
thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only
learnt that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always
seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her
affection was so human.
“Within the big valves of the door—which were open and broken—we
found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows.
At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick
with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in
the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the
centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I
recognised by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the
fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the
thick dust, and in one place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in
the roof, the thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the
huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was
confirmed. Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping
shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases
of our own time. But they must have been air-tight to judge from the fair
preservation of some of their contents.
“Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!
Here, apparently, was the Palæontological Section, and a very splendid array
of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had
been staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and
fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme
sureness if with extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here
and there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken
to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds. And the cases had in some
instances been bodily removed—by the Morlocks, as I judged. The place was
very silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been
rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I
stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
“And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an
intellectual age that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented. Even
my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
“To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a
great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palæontology; possibly historical
galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least in my present
circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of
old-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another short gallery running
transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight
of a block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find no
saltpetre; indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages
ago. Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for
the rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they were the best
preserved of all I saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy,
and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had
entered. Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but
everything had long since passed out of recognition. A few shrivelled and
blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated
mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown dust of departed plants:
that was all! I was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the
patient readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been
attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but
singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the
end at which I entered. At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling—
many of them cracked and smashed—which suggested that originally the
place had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on
either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded
and many broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a
certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these;
the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could
make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could
solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be
of use against the Morlocks.
“Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she startled
me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that the floor
of the gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may be, of course, that the floor did
not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill.—ED.] The end
I had come in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like
windows. As you went down the length, the ground came up against these
windows, until at last there was a pit like the ‘area‘ of a London house before
each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along,
puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the
gradual diminution of the light, until Weena’s increasing apprehensions drew
my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick
darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was
less abundant and its surface less even. Further away towards the dimness, it
appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints. My sense of
the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt that I was
wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery. I called to mind
that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no
weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then down in the
remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd
noises I had heard down the well.
“I took Weena’s hand. Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned
to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal-box.
Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my
weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in the central aisle, began
to whimper. I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it
snapped after a minute’s strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand
more than sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I
longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to
want to go killing one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to
feel any humanity in the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a
persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine
might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing
the brutes I heard.
“Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery
and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of
a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that
hung from the sides of it, I presently recognised as the decaying vestiges of
books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print
had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic
clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might,
perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the
thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to
which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will
confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own
seventeen papers upon physical optics.
“Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a
gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful
discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was
well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at last, in one of
the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them.
They were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned to Weena.
‘Dance,’ I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon indeed
against the horrible creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum,
upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weena’s huge delight, I solemnly
performed a kind of composite dance, whistling The Land of the Leal as
cheerfully as I could. In part it was a modest cancan, in part a step dance, in
part a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I
am naturally inventive, as you know.
“Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of
time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most
fortunate, thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and
that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had
been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax, and
smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable.
In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps
through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had
once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and
become fossilised millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I
remembered that it was inflammable and burnt with a good bright flame—
was, in fact, an excellent candle—and I put it in my pocket. I found no
explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As
yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced upon.
Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
“I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would require a
great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order. I
remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated
between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry both,
however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates. There
were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses of rust, but
many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound. But any cartridges or
powder there may once have been had rotted into dust. One corner I saw was
charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the
specimens. In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican,
Grecian, Phœnician, every country on earth, I should think. And here,
yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite
monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
“As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery after
gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust
and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself near the
model of a tin mine, and then by the merest accident I discovered, in an air-
tight case, two dynamite cartridges! I shouted ‘Eureka!’ and smashed the case
with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I
made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five,
ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the things
were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe
that had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown
Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time
Machine, all together into non-existence.
“It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the
palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and refreshed
ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position. Night was
creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to be found. But
that troubled me very little now. I had in my possession a thing that was,
perhaps, the best of all defences against the Morlocks—I had matches! I had
the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to me that
the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected
by a fire. In the morning there was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards
that, as yet, I had only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I
felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained
from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had
never impressed me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron
not altogether inadequate for the work.
 XII

In the Darkness
“We emerged from the Palace while the sun was still in part above the
horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning,
and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me
on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible that night, and
then, building a fire, to sleep in the protection of its glare. Accordingly, as we
went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my
arms full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had
anticipated, and besides Weena was tired. And I, also, began to suffer from
sleepiness too; so that it was full night before we reached the wood. Upon the
shrubby hill of its edge Weena would have stopped, fearing the darkness
before us; but a singular sense of impending calamity, that should indeed have
served me as a warning, drove me onward. I had been without sleep for a
night and two days, and I was feverish and irritable. I felt sleep coming upon
me, and the Morlocks with it.
“While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against
their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long grass
all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The forest, I
calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the
bare hillside, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting-place; I
thought that with my matches and my camphor I could contrive to keep my
path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish
matches with my hands I should have to abandon my firewood; so, rather
reluctantly, I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would amaze
our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this
proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our
retreat.
“I don’t know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in
the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun’s heat is rarely strong
enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the
case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely
gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder
with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this
decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red
tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and
strange thing to Weena.
 “She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast
herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up, and in spite of her
struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a little way the glare
of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I could see, through the
crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some
bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of the hill.
I laughed at that, and turned again to the dark trees before me. It was very
black, and Weena clung to me convulsively, but there was still, as my eyes
grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems.
Overhead it was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone
down upon us here and there. I lit none of my matches because I had no hand
free. Upon my left arm I carried my little one, in my right hand I had my iron
bar.
“For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the
faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the
blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering behind me. I
pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the
same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Underworld. There were
evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me. Indeed,
in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm. And
Weena shivered violently, and became quite still.
“It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I did so, and,
as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness about my
knees, perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar cooing sounds
from the Morlocks. Soft little hands, too, were creeping over my coat and
back, touching even my neck. Then the match scratched and fizzed. I held it
flaring, and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in flight amid the trees. I
hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket, and prepared to light it as
soon as the match should wane. Then I looked at Weena. She was lying
clutching my feet and quite motionless, with her face to the ground. With a
sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed scarcely to breathe. I lit the block
of camphor and flung it to the ground, and as it split and flared up and drove
back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her. The wood
behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of a great company!
“She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder and rose
to push on, and then there came a horrible realisation. In manœuvring with
my matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several times, and now I
had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my path. For all I knew, I might
be facing back towards the Palace of Green Porcelain. I found myself in a
cold sweat. I had to think rapidly what to do. I determined to build a fire and
encamp where we were. I put Weena, still motionless, down upon a turfy
bole, and very hastily, as my first lump of camphor waned, I began collecting
sticks and leaves. Here and there out of the darkness round me the Morlocks’
eyes shone like carbuncles.
“The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two
white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away. One was
so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his bones grind
under the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a little way,
and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor, and went on gathering my
bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage above me, for
since my arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a week, no rain had fallen.
So, instead of casting about among the trees for fallen twigs, I began leaping
up and dragging down branches. Very soon I had a choking smoky fire of
green wood and dry sticks, and could economise my camphor. Then I turned
to where Weena lay beside my iron mace. I tried what I could to revive her,
but she lay like one dead. I could not even satisfy myself whether or not she
breathed.
“Now, the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made
me heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air. My
fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary after my
exertion, and sat down. The wood, too, was full of a slumbrous murmur that I
did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all was dark,
and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their clinging fingers
I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box, and—it had gone! Then they
gripped and closed with me again. In a moment I knew what had happened. I
had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my
soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the
neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible
in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I
was in a monstrous spider’s web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt
little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came
against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human
rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces
might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows,
and for a moment I was free.
“The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting
came upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined to
make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree,
swinging the iron bar before me. The whole wood was full of the stir and
cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch
of excitement, and their movements grew faster. Yet none came within reach.
I stood glaring at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope. What if the
Morlocks were afraid? And close on the heels of that came a strange thing.
The darkness seemed to grow luminous. Very dimly I began to see the
Morlocks about me—three battered at my feet—and then I recognised, with
incredulous surprise, that the others were running, in an incessant stream, as it
seemed, from behind me, and away through the wood in front. And their
backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I stood agape, I saw a little red
spark go drifting across a gap of starlight between the branches, and vanish.
And at that I understood the smell of burning wood, the slumbrous murmur
that was growing now into a gusty roar, the red glow, and the Morlocks’
flight.
“Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw, through the
black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It was my
first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she was gone.
The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree
burst into flame, left little time for reflection. My iron bar still gripped, I
followed in the Morlocks’ path. It was a close race. Once the flames crept
forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was outflanked and had to strike
off to the left. But at last I emerged upon a small open space, and as I did so, a
Morlock came blundering towards me, and past me, and went on straight into
the fire!
“And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all that
I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with the
reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a
scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with
yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with
a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled
by the light and heat, and blundering hither and thither against each other in
their bewilderment. At first I did not realise their blindness, and struck
furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me,
killing one and crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures
of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard
their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the
glare, and I struck no more of them.
“Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting loose
a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time the flames
died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would presently be able
to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing some of them
before this should happen; but the fire burst out again brightly, and I stayed
my hand. I walked about the hill among them and avoided them, looking for
some trace of Weena. But Weena was gone.
“At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this strange
incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and making uncanny
noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on them. The coiling uprush
of smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rare tatters of that red
canopy, remote as though they belonged to another universe, shone the little
stars. Two or three Morlocks came blundering into me, and I drove them off
with blows of my fists, trembling as I did so.
“For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I bit
myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the ground with
my hands, and got up and sat down again, and wandered here and there, and
again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to
let me awake. Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads down in a kind of agony
and rush into the flames. But, at last, above the subsiding red of the fire,
above the streaming masses of black smoke and the whitening and blackening
tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of these dim creatures, came the
white light of the day.
“I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain that
they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it
relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed
destined. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the
helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself. The hillock, as I
have said, was a kind of island in the forest. From its summit I could now
make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of Green Porcelain, and from
that I could get my bearings for the White Sphinx. And so, leaving the
remnant of these damned souls still going hither and thither and moaning, as
the day grew clearer, I tied some grass about my feet and limped on across
smoking ashes and among black stems that still pulsated internally with fire,
towards the hiding-place of the Time Machine. I walked slowly, for I was
almost exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the intensest wretchedness for the
horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in
this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual
loss. But that morning it left me absolutely lonely again—terribly alone. I
began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you, and with
such thoughts came a longing that was pain.
“But, as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I
made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The
box must have leaked before it was lost.
 XIII

The Trap of the White Sphinx

“About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow
metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I
thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from
laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the
same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the
same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the
beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were
bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that suddenly gave
me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas
above the ways to the Underworld. I understood now what all the beauty of
the Overworld people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the
day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and
provided against no needs. And their end was the same.
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It
had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease,
a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had
attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have
reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and
comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world
there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And
a great quiet had followed.
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the
compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in
harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals
to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence
where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake
of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
“So, as I see it, the Upperworld man had drifted towards his feeble
prettiness, and the Underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect
state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute
permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of an Underworld,
however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had
been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began
below. The Underworld being in contact with machinery, which, however
perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained
perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the
Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had
hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw it in my last view of the world of Eight
Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One. It may be as wrong an
explanation as mortal wit could invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me,
and as that I give it to you.
“After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days, and in spite of
my grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm sunlight were very
pleasant. I was very tired and sleepy, and soon my theorising passed into
dozing. Catching myself at that, I took my own hint, and spreading myself out
upon the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep.
“I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being caught
napping by the Morlocks, and, stretching myself, I came on down the hill
towards the White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the other hand
played with the matches in my pocket.
“And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal of
the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into
grooves.
“At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
“Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner of this
was the Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here, after all
my elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx, was a meek
surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use it.
“A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal. For
once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks. Suppressing a
strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the
Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned.
I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces
while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.
“Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of
the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels
suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the dark—
trapped. So the Morlocks thought. At that I chuckled gleefully.
“I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me.
Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers and
depart then like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little thing. The matches
were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.
“You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were close
upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with
the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then came
one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight against their
persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for the studs over
which these fitted. One, indeed, they almost got away from me. As it slipped
from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my head—I could hear the
Morlock’s skull ring—to recover it. It was a nearer thing than the fight in the
forest, I think, this last scramble.
“But at last the lever was fixed and pulled over. The clinging hands slipped
from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself in the
same grey light and tumult I have already described.

XIV
The Further Vision
“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time
travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways
and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it
swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself
to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial
records days, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and
another thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had
pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at
these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as
the seconds hand of a watch—into futurity.
“As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The
palpitating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still travelling with
prodigious velocity—the blinking succession of day and night, which was
usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more
marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day
grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until
they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded
over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared
across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long
since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set—it simply rose and fell in the
west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had
vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given
place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun,
red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing
with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one
time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily
reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its rising
and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to
rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the
earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to
reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands until the
thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere
mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach
grew visible.
“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The
sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the
blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a
deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing
scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and
motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the
trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that
covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same
rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which
like these grow in a perpetual twilight.
“The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to
the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There
were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a
slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the
eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water
sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky.
There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was
breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of
mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is
now.
“Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing
like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky and,
circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was
so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine.
Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a
reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing
was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as
yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws
swaying, its long antennæ, like carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its
stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was
corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation
blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated
mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
“As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling
on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with
my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another
by my ear. I struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It was drawn
swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had
grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil
eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and
its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon
me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month
between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach, and I
saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be
crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the foliated sheets of
intense green.
“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the
stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform
poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s
lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and
there was the same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea,
the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out
among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a
curved pale line like a vast new moon.
“So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years
or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange
fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of
the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge
red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the
darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts
and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold
assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the
north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and
I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes
of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses farther out; but the main
expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still
unfrozen.
“I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain
indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw
nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone
testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea
and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object
flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and
I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely
a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle
very little.
“Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had
changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow
larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping
over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was beginning. Either the
moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the sun’s disk. Naturally, at
first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that
what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near to the
earth.
“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts
from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number.
From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless
sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of
it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of
insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As
the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing
before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one,
swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into
blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow
of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone
were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my
marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a
deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the
edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and
incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw
again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was
a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the
size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down
from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was
hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying
helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered
upon the saddle.

XV

The Time Traveller’s Return

“So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the
machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the
sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The
fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun backward
upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences
of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others came.
Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to
recognise our own pretty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran
back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower. Then
the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently, now, I slowed the
mechanism down.
“I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you that
when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had
walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I
returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory.
But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous
ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the
laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had
previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but
he passed like a flash.
“Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar
laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off the thing
very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I trembled
violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old workshop again,
exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the whole thing have been
a dream.
 “And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east corner of
the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west, against the wall
where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the
pedestal of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried my
machine.
“For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through
the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling
sorely begrimed. I saw the Pall Mall Gazette on the table by the door. I found
the date was indeed today, and looking at the timepiece, saw the hour was
almost eight o’clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated
—I felt so sick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened
the door on you. You know the rest. I washed, and dined, and now I am telling
you the story.

XVI
After the Story
“I know,” he said, after a pause, “that all this will be absolutely incredible
to you, but to me the one incredible thing is that I am here tonight in this old
familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange
adventures.” He looked at the Medical Man. “No. I cannot expect you to
believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop.
Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race, until I have
hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to
enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?”
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap with it
nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then
chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off
the Time Traveller’s face, and looked round at his audience. They were in the
dark, and little spots of colour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed
absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the
end of his cigar—the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others,
as far as I remember, were motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity it is you’re not a writer of
stories!” he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.
 “You don’t believe it?”
“Well——”
“I thought not.”
The Time Traveller turned to us. “Where are the matches?” he said. He lit
one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. “To tell you the truth… I hardly believe
it myself….. And yet…”
His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon the
little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw he was
looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers. “The
gynæceum’s odd,” he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see, holding out
his hand for a specimen.
“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said the Journalist. “How shall we
get home?”
“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.
“It’s a curious thing,” said the Medical Man; “but I certainly don’t know the
natural order of these flowers. May I have them?”
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: “Certainly not.”
“Where did you really get them?” said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was
trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. “They were put into my pocket
by Weena, when I travelled into Time.” He stared round the room. “I’m
damned if it isn’t all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every
day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model
of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a
precious poor dream at times—but I can’t stand another that won’t fit. It’s
madness. And where did the dream come from? … I must look at that
machine. If there is one!”
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door
into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp
was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew, a thing of brass, ebony,
ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch—for I put out my
hand and felt the rail of it—and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory,
and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along
the damaged rail. “It’s all right now,” he said. “The story I told you was true.
I’m sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.” He took up the lamp, and,
in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The
Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he
was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him
standing in the open doorway, bawling good-night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a “gaudy lie.” For my
own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and
incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night
thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller
again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the
house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a
minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At
that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by the
wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of
the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through
the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was
coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack
under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake.
“I’m frightfully busy,” said he, “with that thing in there.”
“But is it not some hoax?” I said. “Do you really travel through time?”
“Really and truly I do.” And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated.
His eye wandered about the room. “I only want half an hour,” he said. “I
know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines
here. If you’ll stop to lunch I’ll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt,
specimens and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?”
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and
he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory
slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he going
to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement
that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my
watch, and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went
down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly
truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as
I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on
the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly,
indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—a
figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was
absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time
Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the
laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown
in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had
happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing
might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-
servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. “Has Mr. —— gone
out that way?” said I.
“No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.”
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on,
waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger
story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am
beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller
vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never
returned.

Epilogue
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept
back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the
Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among
the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may
even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-
haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age.
Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men,
but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems
solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that
these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord
are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for
the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was
made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in
the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall
back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to
live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is
a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I
have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and
brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had
gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

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