textfiles/etext/FICTION/wells-time-188.txt

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                            H. G. Wells

                                   Chapter I

          The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of
      him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.  His grey eyes shone
      and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.
      The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the
      incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles
      that flashed and passed in our glasses.  Our chairs, being his
      patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat
      upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when
      thought 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-Dimension geometry.  Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding
      this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago.
      You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we
      can represent a figure of a three dimensional solid, and similarly
      they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent
      one of four--if they could master the perspective of the thing.
      See?'

          `I think so,' murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his
      brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as
      one who repeats mystic words.  `Yes, I think I see it now,' he
      said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.

          `Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this
      geometry of Four Dimensions for some time.  Some of my results are
      curious.  For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years
      old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at
      twenty-three, and so on.  All these are evidently sections, as it
      were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned
      being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.'

          `Scientific people,' proceeded the Time Traveller, after the
      pause required for the proper assimilation of this, `know very
      well that Time is only a kind of Space.  Here is a popular
      scientific diagram, a weather record.  This line I trace with my
      finger shows the movement of the barometer.  Yesterday it was so
      high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again,
      and so gently upward to here.  Surely the mercury did not trace
      this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized?
      But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we
      must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.'

          `But,' said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the
      fire, `if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is
      it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different?
      And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other
      dimensions of Space?'

          The Time Traveller smiled.  `Are you sure we can move freely
      in Space?  Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely
      enough, and men always have done so.  I admit we move freely in
      two dimensions.  But how about up and down?  Gravitation limits us
      there.'

          `Not exactly,' said the Medical Man.  `There are balloons.'

          `But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
      inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical
      movement.'

          `Still they could move a little up and down,' said the Medical
      Man.

          `Easier, far easier down than up.'

          `And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from
      the present moment.'

          `My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong.  That is just
      where the whole world has gone wrong.  We are always getting away
      from the present movement.  Our mental existences, which are
      immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the
      Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the
      grave.  Just as we should travel down if we began our existence
      fifty miles above the earth's surface.'

          `But the great difficulty is this,' interrupted the
      Psychologist.  `You can move about in all directions of Space, but
      you cannot move about in Time.'

          `That is the germ of my great discovery.  But you are wrong to
      say that we cannot move about in Time.  For instance, if I am
      recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its
      occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say.  I jump back for a
      moment.  Of course we have no means of staying back for any length
      of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six
      feet above the ground.  But a civilized man is better off than the
      savage in this respect.  He can go up against gravitation in a
      balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able
      to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even
      turn about and travel the other way?'

          `Oh, this,' began Filby, `is all--'

          `Why not?' said the Time Traveller.

          `It's against reason,' said Filby.

          `What reason?' said the Time Traveller.

          `You can show black is white by argument,' said Filby, `but
      you will never convince me.'

          `Possibly not,' said the Time Traveller.  `But now you begin
      to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four
      Dimensions.  Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine--'

          `To travel through Time!' exclaimed the Very Young Man.

          `That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and
      Time, as the driver determines.'

          Filby contented himself with laughter.

          `But I have experimental verification,' said the Time
      Traveller.

          `It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,' the
      Psychologist suggested.  `One might travel back and verify the
      accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!'

          `Don't you think you would attract attention?' said the
      Medical Man.  `Our ancestors had no great tolerance for
      anachronisms.'

          `One might get one's Greek from the very lips of Homer and
      Plato,' the Very Young Man thought.

          `In which case they would certainly plough you for the
      Little-go.  The German scholars have improved Greek so much.'

          `Then there is the future,' said the Very Young Man.  `Just
      think!  One might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate
      at interest, and hurry on ahead!'

          `To discover a society,' said I, `erected on a strictly
      communistic basis.'

          `Of all the wild extravagant theories!' began the
      Psychologist.

          `Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until--'

          `Experimental verification!' cried I.  `You are going to
      verify that?'

          `The experiment!' cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.

          `Let's see your experiment anyhow,' said the Psychologist,
      `though it's all humbug, you know.'

          The Time Traveller smiled round at us.  Then, still smiling
      faintly, and with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he
      walked slowly out of the room, and we heard his slippers shuffling
      down the long passage to his laboratory.

          The Psychologist looked at us.  `I wonder what he's got?'

          `Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,' said the Medical Man,
      and Filby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at
      Burslem; but before he had finished his preface the Time Traveller
      came back, and Filby's anecdote collapsed.

          The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering
      metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very
      delicately made.  There was ivory in it, and some transparent
      crystalline substance.  And now I must be explicit, for this that
      follows--unless his explanation is to be accepted--is an
      absolutely unaccountable thing.  He took one of the small
      octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in
      front of the fire, with two legs on the hearthrug.  On this table
      he placed the mechanism.  Then he drew up a chair, and sat down.
      The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the
      bright light of which fell upon the model.  There were also
      perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the
      mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly
      illuminated.  I sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I
      drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller
      and the fire-place.  Filby sat behind him, looking over his
      shoulder.  The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in
      profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left.  The Very
      Young Man stood behind the Psychologist.  We were all on the
      alert.  It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick,
      however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have
      been played upon us under these conditions.

          The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism.
      `Well?' said the Psychologist.

          `This little affair,' said the Time Traveller, resting his
      elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the
      apparatus, `is only a model.  It is my plan for a machine to
      travel through time.  You will notice that it looks singularly
      askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this
      bar, as though it was in some way unreal.'  He pointed to the part
      with his finger.  `Also, here is one little white lever, and here
      is another.'

          The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the
      thing.  `It's beautifully made,' he said.

          `It took two years to make,' retorted the Time Traveller.
      Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he
      said: `Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being
      pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this
      other reverses the motion.  This saddle represents the seat of a
      time traveller.  Presently I am going to press the lever, and off
      the machine will go.  It will vanish, pass into future Time, and
      disappear.  Have a good look at the thing.  Look at the table too,
      and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery.  I don't want to
      waste this model, and then be told I'm a quack.'

          There was a minute's pause perhaps.  The Psychologist seemed
      about to speak to me, but changed his mind.  Then the Time
      Traveller put forth his finger towards the lever.  `No,' he said
      suddenly.  `Lend me your hand.'  And turning to the Psychologist,
      he took that individual's hand in his own and told him to put out
      his forefinger.  So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent
      forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage.  We all
      saw the lever turn.  I am absolutely certain there was no
      trickery.  There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped.
      One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little
      machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a
      ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass
      and ivory; and it was gone--vanished!  Save for the lamp the table
      was bare.

          Everyone was silent for a minute.  Then Filby said he was
      damned.

          The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly
      looked under the table.  At that the Time Traveller laughed
      cheerfully.  `Well?' he said, with a reminiscence of the
      Psychologist.  Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the
      mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.

          We stared at each other.  `Look here,' said the Medical Man,
      `are you in earnest about this?  Do you seriously believe that
      that machine has travelled into time?'

          `Certainly,' said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a
      spill at the fire.  Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at
      the Psychologist's face.  (The Psychologist, to show that he was
      not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it
      uncut.)  `What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in
      there'--he indicated the laboratory--`and when that is put
      together I mean to have a journey on my own account.'

          `You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the
      future?' said Filby.

          `Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know
      which.'

          After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration.  `It
      must have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,' he said.

          `Why?' said the Time Traveller.

          `Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it
      travelled into the future it would still be here all this time,
      since it must have travelled through this time.'

          `But,' I said, `if it travelled into the past it would have
      been visible when we came first into this room; and last Thursday
      when we were here; and the Thursday before that; and so forth!'

          `Serious objections,' remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an
      air of impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.

          `Not a bit,' said the Time Traveller, and, to the
      Psychologist: `You think.  You can explain that.  It's
      presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted presentation.'

          `Of course,' said the Psychologist, and reassured us.  `That's
      a simple point of psychology.  I should have thought of it.  It's
      plain enough, and helps the paradox delightfully.  We cannot see
      it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the
      spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air.  If
      it is traveling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster
      than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a
      second, the impression it creates will of course be only
      one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not
      travelling in time.  That's plain enough.'  He passed his hand
      through the space in which the machine had been.  `You see?' he
      said, laughing.

          We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so.
      Then the Time Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.

          `It sounds plausible enough to-night,' said the Medical Man;
      `but wait until to-morrow.  Wait for the common sense of the
      morning.'

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

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

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

          None of us quite knew how to take it.

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

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter II

          I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the
      Time Machine.  The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those
      men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw
      all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some
      ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.  Had Filby shown
      the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words,
      we should have shown him far less scepticism.  For we should have
      perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby.  But
      the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his
      elements, and we distrusted him.  Things that would have made the
      frame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands.  It is a
      mistake to do things too easily.  The serious people who took him
      seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were
      somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with
      him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.  So I
      don't think any of us said very much about time travelling in the
      interval between that Thursday and the next, though its odd
      potentialities ran, no doubt, in most of our minds: its
      plausibility, that is, its practical incredibleness, the curious
      possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested.
      For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied with the trick of
      the model.  That I remember discussing with the Medical Man, whom
      I met on Friday at the Linnaean.  He said he had seen a similar
      thing at Tubingen, and laid considerable stress on the blowing out
      of the candle.  But how the trick was done he could not explain.

          The next Thursday I went again to Richmond--I suppose I was
      one of the Time Traveller's most constant guests--and, arriving
      late, found four or five men already assembled in his drawing
      room.  The Medical Man was standing before the fire with a sheet
      of paper in one hand and his watch in the other.  I looked round
      for the Time Traveller, and--`It's half-past seven now,' said the
      Medical Man.  `I suppose we'd better have dinner?'

          `Where's--?' said I, naming our host.

          `You've just come?  It's rather odd.  He's unavoidably
      detained.  He asks me in this note to lead off with dinner at
      seven if he's not back.  Says he'll explain when he comes.'

          `It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil,' said the Editor of
      a well-known daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.

          The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and
      myself who had attended the previous dinner.  The other men were
      Blank, the Editor aforementioned, a certain journalist, and
      another--a quiet, shy man with a beard--whom I didn't know, and
      who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the
      evening.  There was some speculation at the dinner-table about the
      Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a
      half-jocular spirit.  The Editor wanted that explained to him, and
      the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the `ingenious
      paradox and trick' we had witnessed that day week.  He was in the
      midst of his exposition when the door from the corridor opened
      slowly and without noise.  I was facing the door, and saw it
      first.  `Hallo!' I said.  `At last!'  And the door opened wider,
      and the Time Traveller stood before us.  I gave a cry of surprise.
      `Good heavens! man, what's the matter?' cried the Medical Man, who
      saw him next.  And the whole tableful turned towards the door.

          He was in an amazing plight.  His coat was dusty and dirty,
      and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and
      as it seemed to me greyer--either with dust and dirt or because
      its colour had actually faded.  His face was ghastly pale; his
      chin had a brown cut on it--a cut half healed; his expression was
      haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering.  For a moment he
      hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light.
      Then he came into the room.  He walked with just such a limp as I
      have seen in footsore tramps.  We stared at him in silence,
      expecting him to speak.

          He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made
      a motion towards the wine.  The Editor filled a glass of
      champagne, and pushed it towards him.  He drained it, and it
      seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the
      ghost of his old smile flickered across his face.  `What on earth
      have you been up to, man?' said the Doctor.  The Time Traveller
      did not seem to hear.  `Don't let me disturb you,' he said, with a
      certain faltering articulation.  `I'm all right.'  He stopped,
      held out his glass for more, and took it off at a draught.
      `That's good,' he said.  His eyes grew brighter, and a faint
      colour came into his cheeks.  His glance flickered over our faces
      with a certain dull approval, and then went round the warm and
      comfortable room.  Then he spoke again, still as it were feeling
      his way among his words.  `I'm going to wash and dress, and then
      I'll come down and explain things. ...  Save me some of that
      mutton.  I'm starving for a bit of meat.'

          He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and
      hoped he was all right.  The Editor began a question.  `Tell you
      presently,' said the Time Traveller.  `I'm--funny.  Be all right
      in a minute.'

          He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door.
      Again I remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his
      footfall, and standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went
      out.  He had nothing on them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained
      socks.  Then the door closed upon him.  I had half a mind to
      follow, till I remembered how he detested any fuss about himself.
      For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering.  Then,
      `Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist,' I heard the Editor
      say, thinking (after his wont) in headlines.  And this brought my
      attention back to the bright dinner-table.

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

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

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

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

          `Story!' cried the Editor.

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

          `One word,' said I.  `Have you been time travelling?'

          `Yes,' said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding
      his head.

          `I'd give a shilling a line for a verbatim note,' said the
      Editor.  The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent
      Man and rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who
      had been staring at his face, started convulsively, and poured him
      wine.  The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable.  For my own part,
      sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was
      the same with the others.  The Journalist tried to relieve the
      tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter.  The Time Traveller
      devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of
      a tramp.  The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time
      Traveller through his eyelashes.  The Silent Man seemed even more
      clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and
      determination out of sheer nervousness.  At last the Time
      Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us.  `I suppose
      I must apologize,' he said.  `I was simply starving.  I've had a
      most amazing time.'  He reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut
      the end.  `But come into the smoking-room.  It's too long a story
      to tell over greasy plates.'  And ringing the bell in passing, he
      led the way into the adjoining room.

          `You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?'
      he said to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming the three
      new guests.

          `But the thing's a mere paradox,' said the Editor.

          `I can't argue 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.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter III

          `I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the
      Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete
      in the workshop.  There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly;
      and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but
      the rest of it's sound enough.  I expected to finish it on Friday,
      but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found
      that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and
      this I had to get remade; so that the thing was not complete until
      this morning.  It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all
      Time Machines began its career.  I gave it a last tap, tried all
      the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and
      sat myself in the saddle.  I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol
      to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as
      I felt then.  I took the starting lever in one hand and the
      stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost
      immediately the second.  I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare
      sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory
      exactly as before.  Had anything happened?  For a moment I
      suspected that my intellect had tricked me.  Then I noted the
      clock.  A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or
      so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

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

          `I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time
      travelling.  They are excessively unpleasant.  There is a feeling
      exactly like that one has upon a switchback--of a helpless
      headlong motion!  I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of
      an imminent smash.  As I put on pace, night followed day like the
      flapping of a black wing.  The dim suggestion of the laboratory
      seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping
      swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute
      marking a day.  I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I
      had come into the open air.  I had a dim impression of
      scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of
      any moving things.  The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by
      too fast for me.  The twinkling succession of darkness and light
      was excessively painful to the eye.  Then, in the intermittent
      darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters
      from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars.
      Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation
      of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took
      on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like
      that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a
      brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and
      I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter
      circle flickering in the blue.

          `The landscape was misty and vague.  I was still on the
      hill-side upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose
      above me grey and dim.  I saw trees growing and changing like
      puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread,
      shivered, and passed away.  I saw huge buildings rise up faint and
      fair, and pass like dreams.  The whole surface of the earth seemed
      changed--melting and flowing under my eyes.  The little bands upon
      the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.
      Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from
      solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently
      my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white
      snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by
      the bright, brief green of spring.

          `The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant
      now.  They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration.
      I remarked indeed a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was
      unable to account.  But my mind was too confused to attend to it,
      so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into
      futurity.  At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought
      of anything but these new sensations.  But presently a fresh
      series of impressions grew up in my mind--a certain curiosity and
      therewith a certain dread--until at last they took complete
      possession of me.  What strange developments of humanity, what
      wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought,
      might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive
      world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes!  I saw great and
      splendid, architecture rising about me, more massive than any
      buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer
      and mist.  I saw a richer green flow up the hill-side, and remain
      there without any wintry intermission.  Even through the veil of
      my confusion the earth seemed very fair.  And so my mind came
      round to the business of stopping.

          The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some
      substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied.  So long
      as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely
      mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping like a
      vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!  But to
      come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by
      molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms
      into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a
      profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion--
      would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible
      dimensions--into the Unknown.  This possibility had occurred to me
      again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had
      cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk--one of the risks a
      man has got to take!  Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw
      it in the same cheerful light.  The fact is that, insensibly, the
      absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying
      of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
      absolutely upset my nerve.  I told myself that I could never stop,
      and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith.  Like
      an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the
      thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.

          `There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears.  I may
      have been stunned for a moment.  A pitiless hail was hissing round
      me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset
      machine.  Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked
      that the confusion in my ears was gone.  I looked round me.  I was
      on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by
      rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple
      blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the
      hailstones.  The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the
      machine, and drove along the ground like smoke.  In a moment I was
      wet to the skin.  "Fine hospitality," said I, "to a man who has
      travelled innumerable years to see you."

          `Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet.  I stood up
      and looked round me.  A colossal figure, carved apparently in some
      white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through
      the hazy downpour.  But all else of the world was invisible.

          `My sensations would be hard to describe.  As the columns of
      hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly.  It was
      very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder.  It was
      of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the
      wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were
      spread so that it seemed to hover.  The pedestal, it appeared to
      me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris.  It chanced that
      the face was towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me;
      there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.  It was greatly
      weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of
      disease.  I stood looking at it for a little space--half a minute,
      perhaps, or half an hour.  It seemed to advance and to recede as
      the hail drove before it denser or thinner.  At last I tore my
      eyes from it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn
      threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of
      the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter IV

          `In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this
      fragile thing out of futurity.  He came straight up to me and
      laughed into my eyes.  The absence from his bearing of any sign of
      fear struck me at once.  Then he turned to the two others who were
      following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet and
      liquid tongue.

          `There were others coming, and presently a little group of
      perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me.
      One of them addressed me.  It came into my head, oddly enough,
      that my voice was too harsh and deep for them.  So I shook my
      head, and, pointing to my ears, shook it again.  He came a step
      forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand.  Then I felt other
      soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders.  They wanted to
      make sure I was real.  There was nothing in this at all alarming.
      Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that
      inspired confidence--a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike
      ease.  And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself
      flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine-pins.  But I made
      a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands
      feeling at the Time Machine.  Happily then, when it was not too
      late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching
      over the bars of the machine I unscrewed the little levers that
      would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket.  Then I turned
      again to see what I could do in the way of communication.

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

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

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

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

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

          `The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I
      did not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw
      suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and
      it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather-worn.
      Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we
      entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century garments, looking
      grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an
      eddying mass of bright, soft-colored robes and shining white
      limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.

          `The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung
      with brown.  The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially
      glazed with colored glass and partially unglazed, admitted a
      tempered light.  The floor was made up of huge blocks of some very
      hard white metal, not plates nor slabs--blocks, and it was so much
      worn, as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as
      to be deeply channelled along the more frequented ways.
      Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of
      polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from the floor, and upon
      these were heaps of fruits.  Some I recognized as a kind of
      hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they
      were strange.

          `Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions.
      Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do
      likewise.  With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the
      fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so forth,
      into the round openings in the sides of the tables.  I was not
      loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry.  As
      I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.

          `And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated
      look.  The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a
      geometrical pattern, were broken in many places, and the curtains
      that hung across the lower end were thick with dust.  And it
      caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was
      fractured.  Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich
      and picturesque.  There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred people
      dining in the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they
      could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes
      shining over the fruit they were eating.  All were clad in the
      same soft, and yet strong, silky material.

          `Fruit, by the by, was all their diet.  These people of the
      remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them,
      in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also.
      Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had
      followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.  But the fruits were
      very delightful; one, in particular, that seemed to be in season
      all the time I was there--a floury thing in a three-sided
      husk--was especially good, and I made it my staple.  At first I
      was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange
      flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.

          `However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant
      future now.  So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I
      determined to make a resolute attempt to learn the speech of these
      new men of mine.  Clearly that was the next thing to do.  The
      fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of
      these up I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures.  I
      had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning.  At
      first my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable
      laughter, but presently a fair-haired little creature seemed to
      grasp my intention and repeated a name.  They had to chatter and
      explain the business at great length to each other, and my first
      attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language
      caused an immense amount of amusement.  However, I felt like a
      schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a
      score of noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got
      to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb "to eat."  But it was
      slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away
      from my interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to
      let them give their lessons in little doses when they felt
      inclined.  And very little doses I found they were before long,
      for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.

          `A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and
      that was their lack of interest.  They would come to me with eager
      cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would
      soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.  The
      dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the
      first time that almost all these 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 so 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 watchful 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
      crumbled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful
      pagoda-like plants--nettles possibly--but wonderfully tinted with
      brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging.  It was
      evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end
      built I could not determine.  It was here that I was destined, at
      a later date, to have a very strange experience--the first
      intimation of a still stranger discovery--but of that I will speak
      in its proper place.

          `Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which
      I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses
      to be seen.  Apparently the single house, and possibly even the
      household, had vanished.  Here and there among the greenery were
      palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form
      such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had
      disappeared.

          `"Communism," said I to myself.

          `And on the heels of that came another thought.  I looked at
      the half-dozen little figures that were following me.  Then, in a
      flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same
      soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.  It
      may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before.
      But everything was so strange.  Now, I saw the fact plainly
      enough.  In costume, and in all the differences of texture and
      bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people
      of the future were alike.  And the children seemed to my eyes to
      be but the miniatures of their parents.  I judged, then, that the
      children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at
      least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

          `Seeing the ease and security in which these people were
      living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after
      all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the
      softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the
      differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an
      age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant,
      much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the
      State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure,
      there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for an
      efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with
      reference to their children's needs disappears.  We see some
      beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it
      was complete.  This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the
      time.  Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the
      reality.

          `While I was musing upon these things, my attention was
      attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a
      cupola.  I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of wells
      still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations.
      There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as
      my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left
      alone for the first time.  With a strange sense of freedom and
      adventure I pushed on up to the crest.

          `There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not
      recognize, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half
      smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the
      resemblance of griffins' heads.  I sat down on it, and I surveyed
      the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.
      It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen.  The sun had
      already gone below the horizon and the west was flaming gold,
      touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson.  Below
      was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band
      of burnished steel.  I have already spoken of the great palaces
      dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some
      still occupied.  Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in
      the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp
      vertical line of some cupola or obelisk.  There were no hedges, no
      signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the
      whole earth had become a garden.

          `So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things
      I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my
      interpretation was something in this way.  (Afterwards I found I
      had got only a half-truth--or only a glimpse of one facet of the
      truth.)

          `It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the
      wane.  The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind.
      For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the
      social effort in which we are at present engaged.  And yet, come
      to think, it is a logical consequence enough.  Strength is the
      outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.  The work
      of ameliorating the conditions of life--the true civilizing
      process that makes life more and more secure--had gone steadily on
      to a climax.  One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had
      followed another.  Things that are now mere dreams had become
      projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward.  And the
      harvest was what I saw!

          `After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are
      still in the rudimentary stage.  The science of our time has
      attacked but a little department of the field of human disease,
      but, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and
      persistently.  Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed
      just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of
      wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a
      balance as they can.  We improve our favorite plants and animals--
      and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new
      and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger
      flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle.  We improve them
      gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our
      knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in
      our clumsy hands.  Some day all this will be better organized, and
      still better.  That is the drift of the current in spite of the
      eddies.  The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and
      co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the
      subjugation of Nature.  In the end, wisely and carefully we shall
      readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our
      human needs.

          `This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well;
      done indeed for all Time, in the space of Time across which my
      machine had leaped.  The air was free from gnats, the earth from
      weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful
      flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.  The ideal
      of preventive medicine was attained.  Diseases had been stamped
      out.  I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my
      stay.  And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes
      of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these
      changes.

          `Social triumphs, too, had been effected.  I saw mankind
      housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had
      found them engaged in no toil.  There were no signs of struggle,
      neither social nor economical struggle.  The shop, the
      advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the
      body of our world, was gone.  It was natural on that golden
      evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.  The
      difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and
      population had ceased to increase.

          `But with this change in condition comes inevitably
      adaptations to the change.  What, unless biological science is a
      mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour?
      Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong,
      and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that
      put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon
      self-restraint, patience, and decision.  And the institution of
      the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce
      jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion,
      all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers
      of the young.  Now, where are these imminent dangers?  There is a
      sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy,
      against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts;
      unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable,
      savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.

          `I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their
      lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it
      strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature.  For after
      the battle comes Quiet.  Humanity had been strong, energetic, and
      intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the
      conditions under which it lived.  And now came the reaction of the
      altered conditions.

          `Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that
      restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.
      Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once
      necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure.  Physical
      courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great
      help--may even be hindrances--to a civilized man.  And in a state
      of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as
      physical, would be out of place.  For countless years I judged
      there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger
      from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of
      constitution, no need of toil.  For such a life, what we should
      call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no
      longer weak.  Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong
      would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.  No
      doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome
      of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind
      before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions
      under which it lived--the flourish of that triumph which began the
      last great peace.  This has ever been the fate of energy in
      security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor
      and decay.

          `Even this artistic impetus would at last die away--had almost
      died in the Time I saw.  To adorn themselves with flowers, to
      dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic
      spirit, and no more.  Even that would fade in the end into a
      contented inactivity.  We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain
      and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful
      grindstone broken at last!

          `As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this
      simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the
      world--mastered the whole secret of these delicious people.
      Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of
      population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather
      diminished than kept stationary.  That would account for the
      abandoned ruins.  Very simple was my explanation, and plausible
      enough--as most wrong theories are!

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                   Chapter V

          `As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man,
      the full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of
      silver light in the northeast.  The bright little figures ceased
      to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered
      with the chill of the night.  I determined to descend and find
      where I could sleep.

          `I looked for the building I knew.  Then my eye travelled
      along to the figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of
      bronze, growing distinct as the light of the rising moon grew
      brighter.  I could see the silver birch against it.  There was the
      tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there
      was the little lawn.  I looked at the lawn again.  A queer doubt
      chilled my complacency.  "No," said I stoutly to myself, "that was
      not the lawn."

          `But it was the lawn.  For the white leprous face of the
      sphinx was towards it.  Can you imagine what I felt as this
      conviction came home to me?  But you cannot.  The Time Machine was
      gone!

          `At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of
      losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new
      world.  The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation.
      I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing.  In
      another moment I was in a passion of fear and running with great
      leaping strides down the slope.  Once I fell headlong and cut my
      face; I lost no time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran
      on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin.  All the time I
      ran I was saying to myself: "They have moved it a little, pushed
      it under the bushes out of the way."  Nevertheless, I ran with all
      my might.  All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes
      with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew
      instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach.  My
      breath came with pain.  I suppose I covered the whole distance
      from the hill crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten
      minutes.  And I am not a young man.  I cursed aloud, as I ran, at
      my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath
      thereby.  I cried aloud, and none answered.  Not a creature seemed
      to be stirring in that moonlit world.

          `When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized.  Not a
      trace of the thing was to be seen.  I felt faint and cold when I
      faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes.  I ran
      round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner,
      and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair.  Above
      me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining,
      leprous, in the light of the rising moon.  It seemed to smile in
      mockery of my dismay.

          `I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people
      had put the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt
      assured of their physical and intellectual inadequacy.  That is
      what dismayed me: the sense of some hitherto unsuspected power,
      through whose intervention my invention had vanished.  Yet, for
      one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had produced its
      exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time.  The
      attachment of the levers--I will show you the method later--
      prevented any one from tampering with it in that way when they
      were removed.  It had moved, and was hid, only in space.  But
      then, where could it be?

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

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

          `Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and, knocking one of the
      people over in my course, went blundering across the big
      dining-hall again, out under the moonlight.  I heard cries of
      terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way and
      that.  I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky.
      I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened
      me.  I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind--a strange animal
      in an unknown world.  I must have raved to and fro, screaming and
      crying upon God and Fate.  I have a memory of horrible fatigue, as
      the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible
      place and that; of groping among moonlit ruins and touching
      strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the
      ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness.  I
      had nothing left but misery.  Then I slept, and when I woke again
      it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on
      the turf within reach of my arm.

          `I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember
      how I had got there, and why I had such a profound sense of
      desertion and despair.  Then things came clear in my mind.  With
      the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my circumstances
      fairly in the face.  I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight,
      and I could reason with myself.  "Suppose the worst?" I said.
      "Suppose the machine altogether lost--perhaps destroyed?  It
      behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people,
      to get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means of
      getting materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may
      make another."  That would be my only hope, perhaps, but better
      than despair.  And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious
      world.

          `But probably, the machine had only been taken away.  Still, I
      must be calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by
      force or cunning.  And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked
      about me, wondering where I could bathe.  I felt weary, stiff, and
      travel-soiled.  The freshness of the morning made me desire an
      equal freshness.  I had exhausted my emotion.  Indeed, as I went
      about my business, I found myself wondering at my intense
      excitement overnight.  I made a careful examination of the ground
      about the little lawn.  I wasted some time in futile questionings,
      conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as
      came by.  They all failed to understand my gestures; some were
      simply stolid, some thought it was a jest and laughed at me.  I
      had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their
      pretty laughing faces.  It was a foolish impulse, but the devil
      begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed and still eager to
      take advantage of my perplexity.  The turf gave better counsel.  I
      found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of
      the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had
      struggled with the overturned machine.  There were other signs of
      removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could
      imagine made by a sloth.  This directed my closer attention to the
      pedestal.  It was, as I think I have said, of bronze.  It was not
      a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on
      either side.  I went and rapped at these.  The pedestal was
      hollow.  Examining the panels with care I found them discontinuous
      with the frames.  There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly
      the panels, if they were doors, as I supposed, opened from within.
      One thing was clear enough to my mind.  It took no very great
      mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside that
      pedestal.  But how it got there was a different problem.

          `I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the
      bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me.  I
      turned smiling to them and beckoned them to me.  They came, and
      then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish
      to open it.  But at my first gesture towards this they behaved
      very oddly.  I don't know how to convey their expression to you.
      Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a
      delicate-minded woman--it is how she would look.  They went off as
      if they had received the last possible insult.  I tried a
      sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same
      result.  Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself.  But,
      as you know, I wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more.
      As he turned off, like the others, my temper got the better of me.
      In three strides I was after him, had him by the loose part of his
      robe round the neck, and began dragging him towards the sphinx.
      Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a
      sudden I let him go.

          `But I was not beaten yet.  I banged with my fist at the
      bronze panels, I thought I heard something stir inside--to be
      explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle--but I must
      have been mistaken.  Then I got a big pebble from the river, and
      came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations,
      and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes.  The delicate little
      people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away
      on either hand, but nothing came of it.  I saw a crowd of them
      upon the slopes, looking furtively at me.  At last, hot and tired,
      I sat down to watch the place.  But I was too restless to watch
      long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil.  I could work at a
      problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours--
      that is another matter.

          `I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through
      the bushes towards the hill again.  "Patience," said I to myself.
      "If you want your machine again you must leave that sphinx alone.
      If they mean to take your machine away, it's little good your
      wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don't, you will get it
      back as soon as you can ask for it.  To sit among all those
      unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless.  That way
      lies monomania.  Face this world.  Learn its ways, watch it, be
      careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning.  In the end you will
      find clues to it all."  Then suddenly the humour of the situation
      came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study
      and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety
      to get out of it.  I had made myself the most complicated and the
      most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.  Although it was at my
      own expense, I could not help myself.  I laughed aloud.

          `Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little
      people avoided me.  It may have been my fancy, or it may have had
      something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze.  Yet I
      felt tolerably sure of the avoidance.  I was careful, however, to
      show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them, and in
      the course of a day or two things got back to the old footing.  I
      made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I
      pushed my explorations here and there.  Either I missed some
      subtle point, or their language was excessively simple--almost
      exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs.  There
      seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of
      figurative language.  Their sentences were usually simple and of
      two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the
      simplest propositions.  I determined to put the thought of my Time
      Machine and the mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx as
      much as possible in a corner of memory, until my growing knowledge
      would lead me back to them in a natural way.  Yet a certain
      feeling, you may understand, tethered me in a circle of a few
      miles round the point of my arrival.

          `So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same
      exuberant richness as the Thames valley.  From every hill I
      climbed I saw the same abundance of splendid buildings, endlessly
      varied in material and style, the same clustering thickets of
      evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees and tree-ferns.  Here and
      there water shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose into blue
      undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky.  A
      peculiar feature, which presently attracted my attention, was the
      presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to me,
      of a very great depth.  One lay by the path up the hill, which I
      had followed during my first walk.  Like the others, it was rimmed
      with bronze, curiously wrought, and protected by a little cupola
      from the rain.  Sitting by the side of these wells, and peering
      down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor
      could I start any reflection with a lighted match.  But in all of
      them I heard a certain sound: a thud--thud--thud, like the beating
      of some big engine; and I discovered, from the flaring of my
      matches, that a steady current of air set down the shafts.
      Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of one, and,
      instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked swiftly
      out of sight.

          `After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall
      towers standing here and there upon the slopes; for above them
      there was often just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a
      hot day above a sun-scorched beach.  Putting things together, I
      reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean
      ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine.  I was
      at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of
      these people.  It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely
      wrong.

          `And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains
      and bells and modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences,
      during my time in this real future.  In some of these visions of
      Utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a vast amount
      of detail about building, and social arrangements, and so forth.
      But while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole
      world is contained in one's imagination, they are altogether
      inaccessible to a real traveller amid such realities as I found
      here.  Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from
      Central Africa, would take back to his tribe!  What would he know
      of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and
      telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal
      orders and the like?  Yet we, at least, should be willing enough
      to explain these things to him!  And even of what he knew, how
      much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or
      believe?  Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a
      white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between
      myself and these of the Golden Age!  I was sensible of much which
      was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but save for a
      general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey
      very little of the difference to your mind.

          `In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no
      signs of crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs.  But it
      occurred to me that, possibly, there might be cemeteries (or
      crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my explorings.  This,
      again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my
      curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point.  The
      thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which
      puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this people
      there were none.

          `I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of
      an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long
      endure.  Yet I could think of no other.  Let me put my
      difficulties.  The several big palaces I had explored were mere
      living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments.  I
      could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind.  Yet these
      people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need
      renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly
      complex specimens of metalwork.  Somehow such things must be made.
      And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency.
      There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among
      them.  They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in
      the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating
      fruit and sleeping.  I could not see how things were kept going.

          `Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not
      what, had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx.
      Why?  For the life of me I could not imagine.  Those waterless
      wells, too, those flickering pillars.  I felt I lacked a clue.  I
      felt--how shall I put it?  Suppose you found an inscription, with
      sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and
      interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even,
      absolutely unknown to you?  Well, on the third day of my visit,
      that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven
      Hundred and One presented itself to me!

          `That day, too, I made a friends--of a sort.  It happened
      that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a
      shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting
      downstream.  The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too
      strongly for even a moderate swimmer.  It will give you an idea,
      therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I
      tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly
      crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.  When I
      realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and, wading in
      at a point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to
      land.  A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and I
      had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left
      her.  I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not
      expect any gratitude from her.  In that, however, I was wrong.

          `This happened in the morning.  In the afternoon I met my
      little woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my
      centre from an exploration, and she received me with cries of
      delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers--evidently
      made for me and me alone.  The thing took my imagination.  Very
      possibly I had been feeling desolate.  At any rate I did my best
      to display my appreciation of the gift.  We were soon seated
      together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation,
      chiefly of smiles.  The creature's friendliness affected me
      exactly as a child's might have done.  We passed each other
      flowers, and she kissed my hands.  I did the same to hers.  Then I
      tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I
      don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough.  That
      was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and
      ended--as I will tell you!

          `She was exactly like a child.  She wanted to be with me
      always.  She tried to follow me every where, and on my next
      journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and
      leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather
      plaintively.  But the problems of the world had to be mastered.  I
      had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a
      miniature flirtation.  Yet her distress when I left her was very
      great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic,
      and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her
      devotion.  Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort.  I
      thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me.
      Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted
      upon her when I left her.  Nor until it was too late did I clearly
      understand what she was to me.  For, by merely seeming fond of me,
      and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the
      little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the
      neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming
      home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so
      soon as I came over the hill.

          `It was from her, too, that I learned that fear had not yet
      left the world.  She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she
      had the oddest confidence in me; for once, in a foolish moment, I
      made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them.
      But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things.
      Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful.  It was a singularly
      passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing.  I
      discovered then, among other things, that these little people
      gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept in droves.
      To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult
      of apprehension.  I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping
      alone within doors, after dark.  Yet I was still such a blockhead
      that I missed the lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena's
      distress I insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering
      multitudes.

          `It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for
      me triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance,
      including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed
      on my arm.  But my story slips away from me as I speak of her.  It
      must have been the night before her rescue that I was awakened
      about dawn.  I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that
      I was drowned, and that sea-anemones were feeling over my face
      with their soft palps.  I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy
      that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber.  I
      tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and
      uncomfortable.  It was that dim grey hour when things are just
      creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear
      cut, and yet unreal.  I got up, and went down into the great hall,
      and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace.  I thought
      I would make a virtue of necessity, and see the sunrise.

          `The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first
      pallor of dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light.  The bushes
      were inky black, the ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and
      cheerless.  And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts.  There
      several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures.  Twice
      I fancied I saw a solitary white, apelike creature running rather
      quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them
      carrying some dark body.  They moved hastily.  I did not see what
      became of them.  It seemed that they vanished among the bushes.
      The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand.  I was feeling
      that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known.
      I doubted my eyes.

          `As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day
      came on and its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more,
      I scanned the view keenly.  But I saw no vestige of my white
      figures.  They were mere creatures of the half-light.  "They must
      have been ghosts," I said; "I wonder whence they dated."  For a
      queer notion of Grant Allen's came into my head, and amused me.
      If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at
      last will get overcrowded with them.  On that theory they would
      have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence,
      and it was no great wonder to see four at once.  But the jest was
      unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning,
      until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head.  I associated them
      in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my
      first passionate search for the Time Machine.  But Weena was a
      pleasant substitute.  Yet all the same, they were soon destined to
      take far deadlier possession of my mind.

          `I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the
      weather of this Golden Age.  I cannot account for it.  It may be
      that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.  It is usual
      to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future.
      But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the
      younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back
      one by one into the parent body.  As these catastrophes occur, the
      sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner
      planet had suffered this fate.  Whatever the reason, the fact
      remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.

          `Well, one very hot morning--my fourth, I think--as I was
      seeking shelter from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near
      the great house where I slept and fed, there happened this strange
      thing: Clambering among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow
      gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses
      of stone.  By contrast with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at
      first impenetrably dark to me.  I entered it groping, for the
      change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before
      me.  Suddenly I halted spellbound.  A pair of eyes, luminous by
      reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of
      the darkness.

          `The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me.  I
      clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring
      eyeballs.  I was afraid to turn.  Then the thought of the absolute
      security in which humanity appeared to be living came to my mind.
      And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark.  Overcoming
      my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke.  I will admit
      that my voice was harsh and ill controlled.  I put out my hand and
      touched something soft.  At once the eyes darted sideways, and
      something white ran past me.  I turned with my heart in my mouth,
      and saw a queer little apelike figure, its head held down in a
      peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me.  It
      blundered against a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a
      moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined
      masonry.

          `My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I knew it
      was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also
      that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.  But, as
      I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly.  I cannot even
      say whether it ran on all-fours, or only with its forearms held
      very low.  After an instant's pause I followed it into the second
      heap of ruins.  I could not find it at first; but, after a time in
      the profound obscurity, I came upon one of those round well-like
      openings of which I have told you, half closed by a fallen pillar.
      A sudden thought came to me.  Could this Thing have vanished down
      the shaft?  I lit a match, and, looking down, I saw a small,
      white, moving creature, with large bright eyes which regarded me
      steadfastly as it retreated.  It made me shudder.  It was so like
      a human spider!  It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw
      for the first time a number of metal foot and hand rests forming a
      kind of ladder down the shaft.  Then the light burned my fingers
      and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped, and when I had
      lit another the little monster had disappeared.

          `I do not know how long I sat peering down that well.  It was
      not for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that
      the thing I had seen was human.  But, gradually, the truth dawned
      on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had
      differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful
      children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our
      generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing,
      which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.

          `I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an
      underground ventilation.  I began to suspect their true import.
      And what, I wondered, was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a
      perfectly balanced organization?  How was it related to the
      indolent serenity of the beautiful Upper-worlders?  And what was
      hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft?  I sat upon the edge
      of the well telling myself that, at any rate, there was nothing to
      fear, and that there I must descend for the solution of my
      difficulties.  And withal I was absolutely afraid to go!  As I
      hesitated, two of the beautiful Upper-world people came running in
      their amorous sport across the daylight in the shadow.  The male
      pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.

          `They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the
      overturned pillar, peering down the well.  Apparently it was
      considered bad form to remark these apertures; for when I pointed
      to this one, and tried to frame a question about it in their
      tongue, they were still more visibly distressed and turned away.
      But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse
      them.  I tried them again about the well, and again I failed.  So
      presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what I
      could get from her.  But my mind was already in revolution; my
      guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new
      adjustment.  I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the
      ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts; to say nothing
      of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the
      Time Machine!  And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards
      the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.

          `Here was the new view.  Plainly, this second species of Man
      was subterranean.  There were three circumstances in particular
      which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the
      outcome of a long-continued underground look common in most
      animals that live largely in the dark--the white fish of the
      Kentucky caves, for instance.  Then, those large eyes, with that
      capacity for reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal
      things--witness the owl and the cat.  And last of all, that
      evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward
      flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head
      while in the light--all reinforced the theory of an extreme
      sensitiveness of the retina.

          `Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled
      enormously, and these tunnellings were the habitat of the new
      race.  The presence of ventilating shafts and wells along the hill
      slopes--everywhere, in fact, except along the river valley--showed
      how universal were its ramifications.  What so natural, then, as
      to assume that it was in this artificial Under-world that such
      work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was
      done?  The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it, and
      went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human species.
      I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory; though, for
      myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.

          `At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it
      seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the
      present merely temporary and social difference between the
      Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.
      No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you--and wildly
      incredible!--and yet even now there are existing circumstances to
      point that way.  There is a tendency to utilize underground space
      for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the
      Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new
      electric railways, there are subways, there are underground
      workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.
      Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry
      had gradually lost its birthright in the sky.  I mean that it had
      gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground
      factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein,
      till, in the end--!  Even now, does not an East-end worker live in
      such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the
      natural surface of the earth?

          `Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no
      doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the
      widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor--is
      already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable
      portions of the surface of the land.  About London, for instance,
      perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.
      And this same widening gulf--which is due to the length and
      expense of the higher educational process and the increased
      facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part
      of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that
      promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting
      of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less
      frequent.  So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves,
      pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the
      Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the
      conditions of their labour.  Once they were there, they would no
      doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the
      ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would
      starve or be suffocated for arrears.  Such of them as were so
      constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in
      the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become
      as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as
      happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.  As
      it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor
      followed naturally enough.

          `The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a
      different shape in my mind.  It had been no such triumph of moral
      education and general 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 civilization that was at last attained
      must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen
      into decay.  The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had
      led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general
      dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.  That I could see
      clearly enough already.  What had happened to the Under-grounders
      I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the
      Morlocks--that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures
      were called--I could imagine that the modification of the human
      type was even far more profound than among the "Eloi," the
      beautiful race that I already knew.

          `Then came troublesome doubts.  Why had the Morlocks taken my
      Time Machine?  For I felt sure it was they who had taken it.  Why,
      too, if the Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine
      to me?  And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark?  I
      proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this
      Under-world, but here again I was disappointed.  At first she
      would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to
      answer them.  She shivered as though the topic was unendurable.
      And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into
      tears.  They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in
      that Golden Age.  When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble
      about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these
      signs of the human inheritance from Weena's eyes.  And very soon
      she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a
      match.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter VI

          `It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could
      follow up the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper
      way.  I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.  They
      were just the half-bleached colour of the worms and things one
      sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum.  And they were
      filthily cold to the touch.  Probably my shrinking was largely due
      to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the
      Morlocks I now began to appreciate.

          `The next night I did not sleep well.  Probably my health was
      a little disordered.  I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt.
      Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could
      perceive no definite reason.  I remember creeping noiselessly into
      the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the
      moonlight--that night Weena was among them--and feeling reassured
      by their presence.  It occurred to me even then, that in the
      course of a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter,
      and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these unpleasant
      creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin that
      had replaced the old, might be more abundant.  And on both these
      days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable
      duty.  I felt assured that the Time Machine was only to be
      recovered by boldly penetrating these underground mysteries.  Yet
      I could not face the mystery.  If only I had had a companion it
      would have been different.  But I was so horribly alone, and even
      to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me.  I
      don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt
      quite safe at my back.

          `It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that
      drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions.
      Going to the south-westward towards the rising country that is now
      called Combe Wood, I observed far off, in the direction of
      nineteenth-Century Banstead, a vast green structure, different in
      character from any I had hitherto seen.  It was larger than the
      largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the facade had an
      Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well as the
      pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of
      Chinese porcelain.  This difference in aspect suggested a
      difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore.  But
      the day was growing late, and I had come upon the sight of the
      place after a long and tiring circuit; so I resolved to hold over
      the adventure for the following day, and I returned to the welcome
      and the caresses of little Weena.  But next morning I perceived
      clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the Palace of Green
      Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by
      another day, an experience I dreaded.  I resolved I would make the
      descent without further waste of time, and started out in the
      early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and
      aluminium.

          `Little Weena ran with me.  She danced beside me to the well,
      but when she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she
      seemed strangely disconcerted.  "Good-bye, little Weena," I said,
      kissing her; and then, putting her down, I began to feel over the
      parapet for the climbing hooks.  Rather hastily, I may as well
      confess, for I feared my courage might leak away!  At first she
      watched me in amazement.  Then she gave a most piteous cry, and,
      running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands.  I
      think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed.  I shook her
      off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the
      throat of the well.  I saw her agonized face over the parapet, and
      smiled to reassure her.  Then I had to look down at the unstable
      hooks to which I clung.

          `I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards.
      The descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from
      the sides of the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a
      creature much smaller and lighter than myself, I was speedily
      cramped and fatigued by the descent.  And not simply fatigued!
      One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me
      off into the blackness beneath.  For a moment I hung by one hand,
      and after that experience I did not dare to rest again.  Though my
      arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on clambering
      down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.
      Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disk, in which a
      star was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round
      black projection.  The thudding sound of a machine below grew
      louder and more oppressive.  Everything save that little disk
      above was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again Weena had
      disappeared.

          `I was in an agony of discomfort.  I had some thought of
      trying to go up the shaft again, and leave the Under-world alone.
      But even while I turned this over in my mind I continued to
      descend.  At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly coming up, a
      foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall.  Swinging
      myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal
      tunnel in which I could lie down and rest.  It was not too soon.
      My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the
      prolonged terror of a fall.  Besides this, the unbroken darkness
      had had a distressing effect upon my eyes.  The air was full of
      the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.

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

          `I tried to call to them, but the language they had was
      apparently different from that of the Over-world people; so that I
      was needs left to my own unaided efforts, and the thought of
      flight before exploration was even then in my mind.  But I said to
      myself.  "You are in for it now," and, feeling my way along the
      tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder.  Presently the
      walls fell away from me, and I came to a large open space, and
      striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast arched
      cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my
      light.  The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the
      burning of a match.

          `Necessarily my memory is vague.  Great shapes like big
      machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black
      shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare.
      The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive, and the
      faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the air.  Some way down
      the central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with
      what seemed a meal.  The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
      Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could
      have survived to furnish the red joint I saw.  It was all very
      indistinct: the heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene
      figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness
      to come at me again!  Then the match burned down, and stung my
      fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.

          `I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for
      such an experience.  When I had started with the Time Machine, I
      had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future
      would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their
      appliances.  I had come without arms, without medicine, without
      anything to smoke--at times I missed tobacco frightfully--even
      without enough matches.  If only I had thought of a Kodak!  I
      could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and
      examined it at leisure.  But, as it was, I stood there with only
      the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me with--hands,
      feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still
      remained to me.

          `I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in
      the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I
      discovered that my store of matches had run low.  It had never
      occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to
      economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in
      astonishing the Upper-worlders, to whom fire was a novelty.  Now,
      as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand
      touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was
      sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour.  I fancied I heard the
      breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me.  I
      felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and
      other hands behind me plucking at my clothing.  The sense of these
      unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.  The
      sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and
      doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness.  I shouted at
      them as loudly as I could.  They started away, and then I could
      feel them approaching me again.  They clutched at me more boldly,
      whispering odd sounds to each other.  I shivered violently, and
      shouted again--rather discordantly.  This time they were not so
      seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they
      came back at me.  I will confess I was horribly frightened.  I
      determined to strike another match and escape under the protection
      of its glare.  I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of
      paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.
      But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out, and in
      the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among
      leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.

          `In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no
      mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.  I struck another
      light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.  You can scarce
      imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked--those pale, chinless
      faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!--as they stared in
      their blindness and bewilderment.  But I did not stay to look, I
      promise you: I retreated again, and when my second match had
      ended, I struck my third.  It had almost burned through when I
      reached the opening into the shaft.  I lay down on the edge, for
      the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.  Then I felt
      sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were
      grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward.  I lit
      my last match ... and it incontinently went out.  But I had my
      hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I
      disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was
      speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and
      blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for
      some way, and wellnigh 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.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter VII

          `Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before.  Hitherto,
      except during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine,
      I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was
      staggered by these new discoveries.  Hitherto I had merely thought
      myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people,
      and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to
      overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening
      quality of the Morlocks--a something inhuman and malign.
      Instinctively I loathed them.  Before, I had felt as a man might
      feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and
      how to get out of it.  Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose
      enemy would come upon him soon.

          `The enemy I dreaded may surprise you.  It was the darkness of
      the new moon.  Weena had put this into my head by some at first
      incomprehensible remarks about the Dark Nights.  It was not now
      such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights
      might mean.  The moon was on the wane: each night there was a
      longer interval of darkness.  And I now understood to some slight
      degree at least the reason of the fear of the little Upper-world
      people for the dark.  I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it
      might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon.  I felt pretty
      sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong.  The Upper-world
      people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the
      Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed
      away.  The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man
      were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an
      altogether new relationship.  The Eloi, like the Carlovingian
      kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.  They still
      possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks,
      subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find
      the daylit surface intolerable.  And the Morlocks made their
      garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,
      perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.  They did
      it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys
      killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities
      had impressed it on the organism.  But, clearly, the old order was
      already in part reversed.  The Nemesis of the delicate ones was
      creeping on apace.  Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man
      had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine.  And
      now that brother was coming back--changed!  Already the Eloi had
      begun to learn one old lesson anew.  They were becoming
      reacquainted with Fear.  And suddenly there came into my head the
      memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-world.  It seemed odd
      how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the
      current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question
      from outside.  I tried to recall the form of it.  I had a vague
      sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at
      the time.

          `Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of
      their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted.  I came out
      of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear
      does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors.  I at least
      would defend myself.  Without further delay I determined to make
      myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep.  With that refuge
      as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that
      confidence I had lost in realizing to what creatures night by
      night I lay exposed.  I felt I could never sleep again until my
      bed was secure from them.  I shuddered with horror to think how
      they must already have examined me.

          `I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the
      Thames, but found nothing that commended itself to my mind as
      inaccessible.  All the buildings and trees seemed easily
      practicable to such dexterous climbers as the Morlocks, to judge
      by their wells, must be.  Then the tall pinnacles of the Palace of
      Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to
      my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my
      shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west.  The
      distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must
      have been nearer eighteen.  I had first seen the place on a moist
      afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished.  In addition,
      the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working
      through the sole--they were comfortable old shoes I wore about
      indoors--so that I was lame.  And it was already long past sunset
      when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the
      pale yellow of the sky.

          `Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her,
      but after a time she desired me to let her down, and ran along by
      the side of me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick
      flowers to stick in my pockets.  My pockets had always puzzled
      Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an
      eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.  At least she
      utilized them for that purpose.  And that reminds me!  In changing
      my jacket I found ...'

          The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and
      silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white
      mallows, upon the little table.  Then he resumed his narrative.

          `As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded
      over the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted
      to return to the house of grey stone.  But I pointed out the
      distant pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and
      contrived to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge
      there from her Fear.  You know that great pause that comes upon
      things before the dusk?  Even the breeze stops in the trees.  To
      me there is always an air of expectation about that evening
      stillness.  The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few
      horizontal bars far down in the sunset.  Well, that night the
      expectation took the colour of my fears.  In that darkling calm my
      senses seemed preternaturally sharpened.  I fancied I could even
      feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed,
      almost see through it the Morlocks on their anthill going hither
      and thither and waiting for the dark.  In my excitement I fancied
      that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a
      declaration of war.  And why had they taken my Time Machine?

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

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

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

         `Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep.  I carefully
      wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the
      moonrise.  The hill-side was quiet and deserted, but from the
      black of the wood there came now and then a stir of living things.
      Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear.  I felt a
      certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling.  All the old
      constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement
      which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long
      since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings.  But the Milky Way,
      it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust
      as of yore.  Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star
      that was new to me; it was even more splendid than our own green
      Sirius.  And amid all these scintillating points of light one
      bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old
      friend.

          `Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and
      all the gravities of terrestrial life.  I thought of their
      unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their
      movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.  I
      thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth
      describes.  Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred
      during all the years that I had traversed.  And during these few
      revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex
      organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations,
      even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of
      existence.  Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten
      their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in
      terror.  Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two
      species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the
      clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be.  Yet it was
      too horrible!  I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her
      face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed
      the thought.

          `Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as
      well as I could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I
      could find signs of the old constellations in the new confusion.
      The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy cloud or so.  No doubt
      I dozed at times.  Then, as my vigil wore on, came a faintness in
      the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless fire, and
      the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white.  And close behind,
      and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at
      first, and then growing pink and warm.  No Morlocks had approached
      us.  Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night.  And in the
      confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had
      been unreasonable.  I stood up and found my foot with the loose
      heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel, so I sat
      down again, took off my shoes, and flung them away.

          `I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green
      and pleasant instead of black and forbidding.  We found some fruit
      wherewith to break our fast.  We soon met others of the dainty
      ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight as though there was no
      such thing in nature as the night.  And then I thought once more
      of the meat that I had seen.  I felt assured now of what it was,
      and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill
      from the great flood of humanity.  Clearly, at some time in the
      Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run short.
      Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like vermin.  Even now
      man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he
      was--far less than any monkey.  His prejudice against human flesh
      is no deep-seated instinct.  And so these inhuman sons of men--!
      I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.  After all,
      they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors
      of three or four thousand years ago.  And the intelligence that
      would have made this state of things a torment had gone.  Why
      should I trouble myself?  These Eloi were mere fatted cattle,
      which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon--probably
      saw to the breeding of.  And there was Weena dancing at my side!

          `Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was
      coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human
      selfishness.  Man had been content to live in ease and delight
      upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his
      watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had
      come home to him.  I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this
      wretched aristocracy in decay.  But this attitude of mind was
      impossible.  However great their intellectual degradation, the
      Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy,
      and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their
      Fear.

          `I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should
      pursue.  My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to
      make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive.  That
      necessity was immediate.  In the next place, I hoped to procure
      some means of fire, so that I should have the weapon of a torch at
      hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient against these
      Morlocks.  Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open
      the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx.  I had in mind a
      battering-ram.  I had a persuasion that if I could enter those
      doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the
      Time Machine and escape.  I could not imagine the Morlocks were
      strong enough to move it far away.  Weena I had resolved to bring
      with me to our own time.  And turning such schemes over in my mind
      I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen
      as our dwelling.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                 Chapter VIII

          `I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it
      about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.  Only ragged vestiges
      of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green
      facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework.  It
      lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking north-eastward before
      I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even
      creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have
      been.  I thought then--though I never followed up the thought--of
      what might have happened, or might be happening, to the living
      things in the sea.

          `The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed
      porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some
      unknown character.  I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might
      help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea
      of writing had never entered her head.  She always seemed to me, I
      fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was
      so human.

          `Within the big valves of the door--which were open and
      broken--we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery
      lit by many side windows.  At the first glance I was reminded of a
      museum.  The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable
      array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey
      covering.  Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the
      centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge
      skeleton.  I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some
      extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium.  The skull
      and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one
      place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof,
      the thing itself had been worn away.  Further in the gallery was
      the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus.  My museum hypothesis
      was confirmed.  Going towards the side I found what appeared to be
      sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old
      familiar glass cases of our own time.  But they must have been
      air-tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their
      contents.

          `Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South
      Kensington!  Here, apparently, was the Palaeontological Section,
      and a very splendid array of fossils it must have been, though the
      inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time,
      and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost
      ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was nevertheless, with
      extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work again upon all
      its treasures.  Here and there I found traces of the little people
      in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in
      strings upon reeds.  And the cases had in some instances been
      bodily removed--by the Morlocks as I judged.  The place was very
      silent.  The thick dust deadened our footsteps.  Weena, who had
      been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case,
      presently came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my
      hand and stood beside me.

          `And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument
      of an intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the
      possibilities it presented.  Even my preoccupation about the Time
      Machine receded a little from my mind.

          `To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green
      Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of
      Palaeontology; possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a
      library!  To me, at least in my present circumstances, these would
      be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of 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 saltpeter; indeed, no nitrates
      of any kind.  Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago.  Yet the
      sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking.  As for
      the rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they
      were the best preserved of all I saw, I had little interest.  I am
      no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous
      aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
      Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but
      everything had long since passed out of recognition.  A few
      shrivelled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed
      animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a
      brown dust of departed plants: that was all!  I was sorry for
      that, because I should have been glad to trace the patent
      readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been
      attained.  Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal
      proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running
      downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered.  At
      intervals white globes hung from the ceiling--many of them cracked
      and smashed--which suggested that originally the place had been
      artificially lit.  Here I was more in my element, for rising on
      either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly
      corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete.
      You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was
      inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part
      they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the
      vaguest guesses at what they were for.  I fancied that if I could
      solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers
      that might be of use against the Morlocks.

          `Suddenly Weena came very close to my side.  So suddenly that
      she startled me.  Had it not been for her I do not think I should
      have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all.(1)
      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 this 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 charted rags that hung from the sides of it,
      I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books.  They
      had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had
      left them.  But here and there were warped boards and cracked
      metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.  Had I been a
      literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of
      all ambition.  But as it was, the thing that struck me with
      keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this
      sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.  At the time I will
      confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions
      and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.

          `Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once
      have been a gallery of technical chemistry.  And here I had not a
      little hope of useful discoveries.  Except at one end where the
      roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved.  I went
      eagerly to every unbroken case.  And at last, in one of the really
      air-tight cases, I found a box of matches.  Very eagerly I tried
      them.  They were perfectly good.  They were not even damp.  I
      turned to Weena.  "Dance," I cried to her in her own tongue.  For
      now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we
      feared.  And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft
      carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a
      kind of composite dance, whistling The Land of the Leal as
      cheerfully as I could.  In part it was a modest cancan, in part a
      step-dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far as my tailcoat
      permitted), and in part original.  For I am naturally inventive,
      as you know.

          `Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have
      escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange,
      as for me it was a most fortunate thing.  Yet, oddly enough, I
      found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor.  I found
      it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had been really
      hermetically sealed.  I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax,
      and smashed the glass accordingly.  But the odour of camphor was
      unmistakable.  In the universal decay this volatile substance had
      chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries.
      It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the
      ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become
      fossilized millions of years ago.  I was about to throw it away,
      but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good
      bright flame--was, in fact, an excellent candle--and I put it in
      my pocket.  I found no explosives, however, nor any means of
      breaking down the bronze doors.  As yet my iron crowbar was the
      most helpful thing I had chanced upon.  Nevertheless I left that
      gallery greatly elated.

          `I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon.  It
      would require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations
      in at all the proper order.  I remember a long gallery of rusting
      stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a
      hatchet or a sword.  I could not carry both, however, and my bar
      of iron promised best against the bronze gates.  There were
      numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles.  The most were masses of
      rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.
      But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted
      into dust.  One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I
      thought, by an explosion among the specimens.  In another place
      was a vast array of idols--Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian,
      Phoenician, every country on earth I should think.  And here,
      yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose
      of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my
      fancy.

          `As the evening drew on, my interest waned.  I went through
      gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits
      sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.  In
      one place I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin-mine,
      and then by the merest accident I discovered, in an 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.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter IX

          `We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part
      above the horizon.  I was determined to reach the White Sphinx
      early the next morning, and ere the dusk I purposed pushing
      through the woods that had stopped me on the previous journey.  My
      plan was to go as far as possible that night, and then, building a
      fire, to sleep in the protection of its glare.  Accordingly, as we
      went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and
      presently had my arms full of such litter.  Thus loaded, our
      progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena was
      tired.  And I began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was
      full night before we reached the wood.  Upon the shrubby hill of
      its edge Weena would have stopped, fearing the darkness before us;
      but a singular sense of impending calamity, that should indeed
      have served me as a warning, drove me onward.  I had been without
      sleep for a night and two days, and I was feverish and irritable.
      I felt sleep coming upon me, and the Morlocks with it.

          `While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim
      against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures.  There was
      scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from
      their insidious approach.  The forest, I calculated, was rather
      less than a mile across.  If we could get through it to the bare
      hill-side, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer
      resting-place; I thought that with my matches and my camphor I
      could contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods.  Yet
      it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I
      should have to abandon my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put
      it down.  And then it came into my head that I would amaze our
      friends behind by lighting it.  I was to discover the atrocious
      folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious
      move for covering our retreat.

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

          `She wanted to run to it and play with it.  I believe she
      would have cast herself into it had I not restrained her.  But I
      caught her up, and, in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly
      before me into the wood.  For a little way the glare of my fire
      lit the path.  Looking back presently, I could see, through the
      crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to
      some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up
      the grass of the hill.  I laughed at that, and turned again to the
      dark trees before me.  It was very black, and Weena clung to me
      convulsively, but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to
      the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems.
      Overhead it was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue
      sky shone down upon us here and there.  I struck none of my
      matches because I had no hand free.  Upon my left arm I carried my
      little one, in my right hand I had my iron bar.

          `For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my
      feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing
      and the throb of the blood-vessels in my ears.  Then I seemed to
      know of a pattering about me.  I pushed on grimly.  The pattering
      grew more distinct, and then I caught the same queer sound and
      voices I had heard in the Under-world.  There were evidently
      several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me.
      Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something
      at my arm.  And Weena shivered violently, and became quite still.

          `It was time for a match.  But to get one I must put her down.
      I did so, and, as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in
      the darkness about my knees, perfectly silent on her part and with
      the same peculiar cooing sounds from the Morlocks.  Soft little
      hands, too, were creeping over my coat and back, touching even my
      neck.  Then the match scratched and fizzed.  I held it flaring,
      and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in flight amid the trees.
      I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket, and prepared to
      light it as soon as the match should wane.  Then I looked at
      Weena.  She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless, with
      her face to the ground.  With a sudden fright I stooped to her.
      She seemed scarcely to breathe.  I lit the block of camphor and
      flung it to the ground, and as it split and flared up and drove
      back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her.
      The wood behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of a great
      company!

          `She seemed to have fainted.  I put her carefully upon my
      shoulder and rose to push on, and then there came a horrible
      realization.  In manoeuvring with my matches and Weena, I had
      turned myself about several times, and now I had not the faintest
      idea in what direction lay my path.  For all I knew, I might be
      facing back towards the Palace of Green Porcelain.  I found myself
      in a cold sweat.  I had to think rapidly what to do.  I determined
      to build a fire and encamp where we were.  I put Weena, still
      motionless, down upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as my first
      lump of camphor waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves.  Here
      and there out of the darkness round me the Morlocks' eyes shone
      like carbuncles.

          `The camphor flickered and went out.  I lit a match, and as I
      did so, two white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed
      hastily away.  One was so blinded by the light that he came
      straight for me, and I felt his bones grind under the blow of my
      fist.  He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a little way, and fell
      down.  I lit another piece of camphor, and went on gathering my
      bonfire.  Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage
      above me, for since my arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a
      week, no rain had fallen.  So, instead of casting about among the
      trees for fallen twigs, I began leaping up and dragging down
      branches.  Very soon I had a choking smoky fire of green wood and
      dry sticks, and could economize my camphor.  Then I turned to
      where Weena lay beside my iron mace.  I tried what I could to
      revive her, but she lay like one dead.  I could not even satisfy
      myself whether or not she breathed.

          `Now, the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must
      have made me heavy of a sudden.  Moreover, the vapour of camphor
      was in the air.  My fire would not need replenishing for an hour
      or so.  I felt very weary after my exertion, and sat down.  The
      wood, too, was full of a slumbrous murmur that I did not
      understand.  I seemed just to nod and open my eyes.  But all was
      dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me.  Flinging off
      their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the
      match-box, and--it had gone!  Then they gripped and closed with me
      again.  In a moment I knew what had happened.  I had slept, and my
      fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul.
      The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood.  I was caught
      by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down.  It was
      indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft
      creatures heaped upon me.  I felt as if I was in a monstrous
      spider's web.  I was overpowered, and went down.  I felt little
      teeth nipping at my neck.  I rolled over, and as I did so my hand
      came against my iron lever.  It gave me strength.  I struggled up,
      shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I
      thrust where I judged their faces might be.  I could feel the
      succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a
      moment I was free.

          `The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard
      fighting came upon me.  I knew that both I and Weena were lost,
      but I determined to make the Morlocks pay for their meat.  I stood
      with my back to a tree, swinging the iron bar before me.  The
      whole wood was full of the stir and cries of them.  A minute
      passed.  Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch of
      excitement, and their movements grew faster.  Yet none came within
      reach.  I stood glaring at the blackness.  Then suddenly came
      hope.  What if the Morlocks were afraid?  And close on the heels
      of that came a strange thing.  The darkness seemed to grow
      luminous.  Very dimly I began to see the Morlocks about me--three
      battered at my feet--and then I recognized, with incredulous
      surprise, that the others were running, in an incessant stream, as
      it seemed, from behind me, and away through the wood in front.
      And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish.  As I stood
      agape, I saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of
      starlight between the branches, and vanish.  And at that I
      understood the smell of burning wood, the slumbrous murmur that
      was growing now into a gusty roar, the red glow, and the Morlocks'
      flight.

          `Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw,
      through the black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the
      burning forest.  It was my first fire coming after me.  With that
      I looked for Weena, but she was gone.  The hissing and crackling
      behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree burst into flame,
      left little time for reflection.  My iron bar still gripped, I
      followed in the Morlocks' path.  It was a close race.  Once the
      flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was
      outflanked and had to strike off to the left.  But at last I
      emerged upon a small open space, and as I did so, a Morlock came
      blundering towards me, and past me, and went on straight into the
      fire!

          `And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I
      think, of all that I beheld in that future age.  This whole space
      was as bright as day with the reflection of the fire.  In the
      centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a scorched
      hawthorn.  Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with
      yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the
      space with a fence of fire.  Upon the hill-side were some thirty
      or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blundering
      hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment.  At
      first I did not realize their blindness, and struck furiously at
      them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me,
      killing one and crippling several more.  But when I had watched
      the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the
      red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute
      helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of
      them.

          `Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me,
      setting loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him.
      At one time the flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul
      creatures would presently be able to see me.  I was thinking of
      beginning the fight by killing some of them before this should
      happen; but the fire burst out again brightly, and I stayed my
      hand.  I walked about the hill among them and avoided them,
      looking for some trace of Weena.  But Weena was gone.

          `At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched
      this strange incredible company of blind things groping to and
      fro, and making uncanny noises to each other, as the glare of the
      fire beat on them.  The coiling uprush of smoke streamed across
      the sky, and through the rare tatters of that red canopy, remote
      as though they belonged to another universe, shone the little
      stars.  Two or three Morlocks came blundering into me, and I drove
      them off with blows of my fists, trembling as I did so.

          `For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a
      nightmare.  I bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to
      awake.  I beat the ground with my hands, and got up and sat down
      again, and wandered here and there, and again sat down.  Then I
      would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to let me
      awake.  Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads down in a kind of
      agony and rush into the flames.  But, at last, above the subsiding
      red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and the
      whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers
      of these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.

          `I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none.
      It was plain that they had left her poor little body in the
      forest.  I cannot describe how it relieved me to think that it had
      escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined.  As I thought
      of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless
      abominations about me, but I contained myself.  The hillock, as I
      have said, was a kind of island in the forest.  From its summit I
      could now make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of Green
      Porcelain, and from that I could get my bearings for the White
      Sphinx.  And so, leaving the remnant of these damned souls still
      going hither and thither and moaning, as the day grew clearer, I
      tied some grass about my feet and limped on across smoking ashes
      and among black stems, that still pulsated internally with fire,
      towards the hiding-place of the Time Machine.  I walked slowly,
      for I was almost exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the
      intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena.  It
      seemed an overwhelming calamity.  Now, in this old familiar room,
      it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.  But
      that morning it left me absolutely lonely again--terribly alone.
      I began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some
      of you, and with such thoughts came a longing that was pain.

          `But, as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright
      morning sky, I made a discovery.  In my trouser pocket were still
      some loose matches.  The box must have leaked before it was lost.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                   Chapter X

          `About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of
      yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of
      my arrival.  I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening
      and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence.
      Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the
      same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river
      running between ill fertile banks.  The gay robes of the beautiful
      people moved hither and thither among the trees.  Some were
      bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that
      suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain.  And like blots upon the
      landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world.  I
      understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people
      covered.  Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of
      the cattle in the field.  Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies
      and provided against no needs.  And their end was the same.

          `I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect
      had been.  It had committed suicide.  It had set itself
      steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with
      security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its
      hopes--to come to this at last.  Once, life and property must have
      reached almost absolute safety.  The rich had been assured of his
      wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work.  No
      doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem,
      no social question left unsolved.  And a great quiet had followed.

          `It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual
      versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
      An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect
      mechanism.  Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and
      instinct are useless.  There is no intelligence where there is no
      change and no need of change.  Only those animals partake of
      intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and
      dangers.

          `So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his
      feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical
      industry.  But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for
      mechanical perfection--absolute permanency.  Apparently as time
      went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected,
      had become disjointed.  Mother Necessity, who had been staved off
      for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below.
      The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however
      perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had
      probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of
      every other human character, than the Upper.  And when other meat
      failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.
      So I say I saw it in my last view of the world of Eight Hundred
      and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One.  It may be as wrong an
      explanation as mortal wit could invent.  It is how the thing
      shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to you.

          `After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past
      days, and in spite of my grief, this seat and the tranquil view
      and the warm sunlight were very pleasant.  I was very tired and
      sleepy, and soon my theorizing passed into dozing.  Catching
      myself at that, I took my own hint, and spreading myself out upon
      the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep.

          `I awoke a little before sunsetting.  I now felt safe against
      being caught napping by the Morlocks, and, stretching myself, I
      came on down the hill towards the White Sphinx.  I had my crowbar
      in one hand, and the other hand played with the matches in my
      pocket.

          `And now came a most unexpected thing.  As I approached the
      pedestal of the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open.  They
      had slid down into grooves.

          `At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.

          `Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the
      corner of this was the Time Machine.  I had the small levers in my
      pocket.  So here, after all my elaborate preparations for the
      siege of the White Sphinx, was a meek surrender.  I threw my iron
      bar away, almost sorry not to use it.

          `A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the
      portal.  For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of
      the Morlocks.  Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I
      stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time Machine.  I
      was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned.  I
      have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it
      to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.

          `Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the
      mere touch of the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened.
      The bronze panels suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a
      clang.  I was in the dark--trapped.  So the Morlocks thought.  At
      that I chuckled gleefully.

          `I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came
      towards me.  Very calmly I tried to strike the match.  I had only
      to fix on the levers and depart then like a ghost.  But I had
      overlooked one little thing.  The matches were of that abominable
      kind that light only on the box.

          `You may imagine how all my calm vanished.  The little brutes
      were close upon me.  One touched me.  I made a sweeping blow in
      the dark at them with the levers, and began to scramble into the
      saddle of the machine.  Then came one hand upon me and then
      another.  Then I had simply to fight against their persistent
      fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for the studs
      over which these fitted.  One, indeed, they almost got away from
      me.  As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my
      head--I could hear the Morlock's skull ring--to recover it.  It
      was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this
      last scramble.

          `But at last the lever was 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.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter XI

          `I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that
      comes with time travelling.  And this time I was not seated
      properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion.
      For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and
      vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to
      look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived.
      One dial records days, and another thousands of days, another
      millions of days, and another thousands of millions.  Now, instead
      of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as, to go
      forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I
      found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the
      seconds hand of a watch--into futurity.

          `As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of
      things.  The palpitating greyness grew darker; then--though I was
      still traveling with prodigious velocity--the blinking succession
      of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,
      returned, and grew more and more marked.  This puzzled me very
      much at first.  The alternations of night and day grew slower and
      slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until
      they seemed to stretch through centuries.  At last a steady
      twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and
      then when a comet glared across the darkling sky.  The band of
      light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for
      the sun had ceased to set--it simply rose and fell in the west,
      and grew ever broader and more red.  All trace of the moon had
      vanished.  The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower,
      had given place to creeping points of light.  At last, some time
      before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless
      upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now
      and then suffering a momentary extinction.  At one time it had for
      a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily
      reverted to its sullen red heat.  I perceived by this slowing down
      of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was
      done.  The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even
      as in our own time the moon faces the earth.  Very cautiously, for
      I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse my
      motion.  Slower and slower went the circling hands until the
      thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a
      mere mist upon its scale.  Still slower, until the dim outlines of
      a desolate beach grew visible.

          `I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking
      round.  The sky was no longer blue.  North-eastward it was inky
      black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the
      pale white stars.  Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless,
      and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where,
      cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and
      motionless.  The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour,
      and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the
      intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on
      their south-eastern face.  It was the same rich green that one
      sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like
      these grow in a perpetual twilight.

          `The machine was standing on a sloping beach.  The sea
      stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright
      horizon against the wan sky.  There were no breakers and no waves,
      for not a breath of wind was stirring.  Only a slight oily swell
      rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal
      sea was still moving and living.  And along the margin where the
      water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt--pink
      under the lurid sky.  There was a sense of oppression in my head,
      and I noticed that I was breathing very fast.  The sensation
      reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that
      I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.

          `Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and
      saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering
      up into the sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks
      beyond.  The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and
      seated myself more firmly upon the machine.  Looking round me
      again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish
      mass of rock was moving slowly towards me.  Then I saw the thing
      was really a monstrous crab-like creature.  Can you imagine a crab
      as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and
      uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like
      carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming
      at you on either side of its metallic front?  Its back was
      corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish
      incrustation blotched it here and there.  I could see the many
      palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.

          `As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me,
      I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there.
      I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it
      returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear.  I struck
      at this, and caught something threadlike.  It was drawn swiftly
      out of my hand.  With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that
      I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just
      behind me.  Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its
      mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws,
      smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon me.  In a moment
      my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself
      and these monsters.  But I was still on the same beach, and I saw
      them distinctly now as soon as I stopped.  Dozens of them seemed
      to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the
      foliated sheets of intense green.

          `I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung
      over the world.  The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the
      salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow
      stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the
      lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all
      contributed to an appalling effect.  I moved on a hundred years,
      and there was the same red sun--a little larger, a little
      duller--the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd
      of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and
      the red rocks.  And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line
      like a vast new moon.

          `So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of
      a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's
      fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and
      duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb
      away.  At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge
      red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of
      the darkling heavens.  Then I stopped once more, for the crawling
      multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for
      its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless.  And now
      it was flecked with white.  A bitter cold assailed me.  Rare white
      flakes ever and again came eddying down.  To the north-eastward,
      the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I
      could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white.  There
      were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses
      further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody
      under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

          `I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life
      remained.  A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the
      saddle of the machine.  But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky
      or sea.  The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life
      was not extinct.  A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and
      the water had receded from the beach.  I fancied I saw some black
      object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as
      I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and
      that the black object was merely a rock.  The stars in the sky
      were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.

          `Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the
      sun had changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the
      curve.  I saw this grow larger.  For a minute perhaps I stared
      aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then
      I realized that an eclipse was beginning.  Either the moon or the
      planet Mercury was passing across the sun's disk.  Naturally, at
      first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to
      believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet
      passing very near to the earth.

          `The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in
      freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in
      the air increased in number.  From the edge of the sea came a
      ripple and whisper.  Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was
      silent.  Silent?  It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.
      All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds,
      the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our
      lives--all that was over.  As the darkness thickened, the eddying
      flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of
      the air more intense.  At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the
      other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into
      blackness.  The breeze rose to a moaning wind.  I saw the black
      central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me.  In another
      moment the pale stars alone were visible.  All else was rayless
      obscurity.  The sky was absolutely black.

          `A horror of this great darkness came on me.  The cold, that
      smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me.
      I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.  Then like a red-hot
      bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun.  I got off the
      machine to recover myself.  I felt giddy and incapable of facing
      the return journey.  As I stood sick and confused I saw again the
      moving thing upon the shoal--there was no mistake now that it was
      a moving thing--against the red water of the sea.  It was a round
      thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and
      tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the
      weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.
      Then I felt I was fainting.  But a terrible dread of lying
      helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I
      clambered upon the saddle.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                  Chapter XII

          `So I came back.  For a long time I must have been insensible
      upon the machine.  The blinking succession of the days and nights
      was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue.  I breathed
      with greater freedom.  The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed
      and flowed.  The hands spun backward upon the dials.  At last I
      saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent
      humanity.  These, too, changed and passed, and others came.
      Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed.
      I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the
      thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day
      flapped slower and slower.  Then the old walls of the laboratory
      came round me.  Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.

          `I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me.  I think I have
      told you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high,
      Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed
      to me, like a rocket.  As I returned, I passed again across that
      minute when she traversed the laboratory.  But now her every
      motion appeared to he 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.

          `I know,' he said, after a pause, `that all this will be
      absolutely incredible to you.  To me the one incredible thing is
      that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into
      your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures.'

          He looked at the Medical Man.  `No.  I cannot expect you to
      believe it.  Take it as a lie--or a prophecy.  Say I dreamed it in
      the workshop.  Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies
      of our race until I have hatched this fiction.  Treat my assertion
      of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest.  And
      taking it as a story, what do you think of it?'

          He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner,
      to tap with it nervously upon the bars of the grate.  There was a
      momentary stillness.  Then chairs began to creak and shoes to
      scrape upon the carpet.  I took my eyes off the Time Traveller's
      face, and looked round at his audience.  They were in the dark,
      and little spots of colour swam before them.  The Medical Man
      seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host.  The Editor was
      looking hard at the end of his cigar--the sixth.  The Journalist
      fumbled for his watch.  The others, as far as I remember, were
      motionless.

          The Editor stood up with a sigh.  `What a pity it is you're
      not a writer of stories!' he said, putting his hand on the Time
      Traveller's shoulder.

          `You don't believe it?'

          `Well--'

          `I thought not.'

          The Time Traveller turned to us.  `Where are the matches?' he
      said.  He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing.  `To tell you
      the truth ... I hardly believe it myself. ...  And yet ...'

          His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white
      flowers upon the little table.  Then he turned over the hand
      holding his pipe, and I saw he was looking at some half-healed
      scars on his knuckles.

          The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the
      flowers.  `The gynaeceum's odd,' he said.  The Psychologist leant
      forward to see, holding out his hand for a specimen.

          `I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one,' said the
      Journalist.  `How shall we get home?'

          `Plenty of cabs at the station,' said the Psychologist.

          `It's a curious thing,' said the Medical Man; `but I certainly
      don't know the natural order of these flowers.  May I have them?'

          The Time Traveller hesitated.  Then suddenly: `Certainly not.'

          `Where did you really get them?' said the Medical Man.

          The Time Traveller put his hand to his head.  He spoke like
      one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him.  `They
      were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.'  He
      stared round the room.  `I'm damned if it isn't all going.  This
      room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my
      memory.  Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time
      Machine?  Or is it all only a dream?  They say life is a dream, a
      precious poor dream at times--but I can't stand another that won't
      fit.  It's madness.  And where did the dream come from? ...  I
      must look at that machine.  If there is one!'

          He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red,
      through the door into the corridor.  We followed him.  There in
      the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough,
      squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and
      translucent glimmering quartz.  Solid to the touch--for I put out
      my hand and felt the rail of it--and with brown spots and smears
      upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts,
      and one rail bent awry.

          The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his
      hand along the damaged rail.  `It's all right now,' he said.  `The
      story I told you was true.  I'm sorry to have brought you out here
      in the cold.'  He took up the lamp, and, in an absolute silence,
      we returned to the smoking-room.

          He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with
      his coat.  The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a
      certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at
      which he laughed hugely.  I remember him standing in the open
      doorway, bawling good night.

          I shared a cab with the Editor.  He thought the tale a `gaudy
      lie.'  For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion.  The
      story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and
      sober.  I lay awake most of the night thinking about it.  I
      determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller again.  I was
      told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the
      house, I went up to him.  The laboratory, however, was empty.  I
      stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and
      touched the lever.  At that the squat substantial-looking mass
      swayed like a bough shaken by the wind.  Its instability startled
      me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days
      when I used to be forbidden to meddle.  I came back through the
      corridor.  The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room.  He was
      coming from the house.  He had a small camera under one arm and a
      knapsack under the other.  He laughed when he saw me, and gave me
      an elbow to shake.  `I'm frightfully busy,' said he, `with that
      thing in there.'

          `But is it not some hoax?' I said.  `Do you really travel
      through time?'

          `Really and truly I do.'  And he looked frankly into my eyes.
      He hesitated.  His eye wandered about the room.  `I only want half
      an hour,' he said.  `I know why you came, and it's awfully good of
      you.  There's some magazines here.  If you'll stop to lunch I'll
      prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all.
      If you'll forgive my leaving you now?'

          I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his
      words, and he nodded and went on down the corridor.  I heard the
      door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up
      a daily paper.  What was he going to do before lunch-time?  Then
      suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to
      meet Richardson, the publisher, at two.  I looked at my watch, and
      saw that I could barely save that engagement.  I got up and went
      down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.

          As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an
      exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud.
      A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from
      within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor.  The
      Time Traveller was not there.  I seemed to see a ghostly,
      indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass
      for a moment--a figure so transparent that the bench behind with
      its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm
      vanished as I rubbed my eyes.  The Time Machine had gone.  Save
      for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory
      was empty.  A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blow
      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.

                               THE TIME MACHINE
                                   Epilogue

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

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