 5 As I stood there musing over this two 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 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 may 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 a 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 quite suddenly out of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the sputter 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 behavior, 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 in the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that matted 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 behooves 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. But 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 suppose, opened from within. One thing was clear enough in 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 vertigris 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, I said 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 you're 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 humor 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 to 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 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 a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sunscorched 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 convenience 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 traveler amid such realities as I found here. Conceive the tale of London, which in 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 untraveled friend either apprehend or believe? Then think how narrow the gap between a Negro 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 sepulchre, 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 and bathing in the river, and 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 their width, others made up of words of letters even, absolutely unknown to you. Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of eight hundred and two thousand seven hundred and one presented itself to me. That day, too, I made a friend of a sort. It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with a 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, waiting 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 center 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 arbor, engaged in conversation chiefly of smiles. The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a child might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended, as I will tell you. She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about, it went to my heart to tire her down and leave her, at last, exhausted, and calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation, yet her distress when I left her was very great. Her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think altogether I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless, she was, somehow, a very great comfort. I thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me. Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her. Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For by merely seeming fond of me and showing in her weak futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighborhood 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 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 grayish 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 gray hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colorless 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 could 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 somber gray, the sky colorless and cheerless, and up the hill I thought I could see ghosts. There, several times as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body. They moved hastily. I did not see what became of them. It seemed that they vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known. I doubted my eyes. As the eastern sky grew brighter and the light of the day came on, and its vivid coloring 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 800,000 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. Clamoring 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 color swim before me. Suddenly I halted, spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness. The old, instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn. Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be living came to my mind, and then I remembered that strange terror of the dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent I advanced a step and spoke. I will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me. It blundered against a block of granite staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry. My impression of it is, of course, imperfect, but I know it was a dull white, and had strange large grayish 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 clamoring 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 felt 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 air 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 with all, 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 to see what I could get from her. But my mind was already in revolution, my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts, to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the time machine. And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me. Here was the new view. Plainly this second species of man was subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long continued underground habit. In the first place there was the bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the dark, the white fish of the Kentucky Caves, for instance. Then those large eyes with that capacity for reflecting light are common features of nocturnal things, witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the light, all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the retina. Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunneled enormously, and these tunnelings were the habitat of the new race. The presence of ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes everywhere, in fact, except along the river valley, showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this artificial underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was done. The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human species. I daresay 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 laborer 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 do 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 labor. 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 attoliated 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 a general cooperation as I had imagined. Instead I saw a real aristocracy armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cistern 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 undergrounders I did not yet suspect. But from what I had seen of the Morlocks, that by the way was the name by which these creatures were called, I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the Eloi, the beautiful race that I already knew. Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my time machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this underworld. But here again I was disappointed. At first, she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered, as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own I ever saw in that golden age. When I saw them, I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of the human inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a match. KIVAKO The Time Machine by H. G. Wells Chapter 6 It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the newfound clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached color 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 with a little people were sleeping in the moonlight. That night Wiener 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. 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 a companion it would have been different, but I was so horribly alone, and even to clamor down into the darkness of the well appalled me. I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back. It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the southwestward towards the rising country that is now called Coma Wood, I observed far off in the direction of nineteenth-century Bandstead a vast green structure different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the façade had an oriental look, the face of it having the luster 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 aluminum. Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well. But when she saw me lean over the mouth and looked downward, she seemed strangely disconcerted. Goodbye, Little Weena, I said, kissing her, and then putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather hastily I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away. At first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave the 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 clamor 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 clamoring down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible. Glancing upward I saw the aperture, a small, blue disc in which a star was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round black projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive. Everything saved that little disc above was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again, Weena had disappeared. I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft again and leave the underworld alone, but even while I turned this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last with intense relief I saw dimly coming up a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall, swinging myself in. I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not too soon my arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft. I do not know how long I lay. I was 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 in penetrable 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 strangest fashion. I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different from that of the overworld people, so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind. But I said to myself, you are in for it now. And feeling my way along the tunnel I found the noise of machinery grow louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to a large open space, and striking another match saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match. Necessarily my memory is vague, great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows in which dim spectral morelocks sheltered from the glare. The place by the by was very stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitess 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 morelocks 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 odor. 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 even 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 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-gray 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 clamoring up the shaft while they stared peering and blinking up at me. All but one little wretch who followed me for some way and well nice 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 alloy. Then, for a time, I was insensible. CHAPTER VII Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hither, too, 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. Hither, too, 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 Knights. It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark Knights 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 favored 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 toward or had already arrived at an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance. Since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylight 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 paused with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals for 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 a pace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, a man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine, and now that brother was coming back changed. Already, the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with fear, and suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the underworld. It seemed odd how it floated into my mind, not stirred up, as it were by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from the 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 paralyze and mystery has lost its terrors. I, at least, would defend myself. Without further delay, I determined to make myself arms in a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of the 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 toward the southwest. The distance I had reckoned was seven or eight miles, but it must have been near 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 inside of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky. Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a while she desired me to let her down and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that purpose, and that reminds me, in changing my jacket I found. The time traveler 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 toward Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the house of Greystone, 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 was always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty, saved for a few horizontal bars far down on the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the color 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 moorlocks on their ant hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken my time machine? So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened in tonight. The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out. The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weenus fear 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 around 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 waited and went up the opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping-houses, and by a statue, a fawn or some such figure, minus the head. Here, too, were acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the moorlocks, 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 Weenus 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 looking 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-bowls to strike against. I was very tired, too, after the excitements of the day, so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill. Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my jacket and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky. However, that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings, but the murky way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of stardust as of yore. Southward, as I judged it, was a very bright red star that was new to me. It was even more splendid than our own green Sirius, and amid all these scintillating points of light, one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend. Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great processional 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 whom 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 Wiena sleeping beside me, her face white and star-like 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 wild away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations in their 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 the faintness in the eastward sky like the reflection of some colorless 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, 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 pitted this last feeble reel from the great flood of humanity. Clearly at some time in the longer go 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 Morlock preserved and prayed 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, and had taken necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlisle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy and decay, but this attitude of mine 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 time. And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way toward the building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling. End of Chapter 7. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking northeastward before I entered it I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I thought then, though I never followed up on the thought, of what might have happened or might be happening, to the living things in the sea. The material of the palace proved an 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 gray covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the center of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the megatherium. The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place where rainwater had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time. But they must have been airtight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents. Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington. Here, apparently, was the paleontological section, and a very splendid array of fossils that 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. Wiena, 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 paleontology, 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 sulfur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find no salt-peter, indeed no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had daily quest ages ago. Yet the sulfur 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 shriveled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies and jars that 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 could find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks. Suddenly Wina came very close to my side. So suddenly that she startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. Footnote. It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill. 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 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 demunation of light, until Wina's increasing apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less abundant, and its surface less even. Further away, towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small, narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I still had 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 Wina'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 the signal box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon its sideways. Suddenly Wina, 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 Wina, 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 in killing the brutes I heard. Well, mace in one hand, and Wina in the other, I went out of that gallery, and into another, and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel, hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man, I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all the ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this somber wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions, and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics. Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at one end, where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case, and at last, in one of the really airtight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even Dan. I turned to Weena. Dance! I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon in deed 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 can-can, 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 that 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 odor of the camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chance 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 velomite 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 hopeful thing that 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 nearest accident, I discovered in an airtight case two dynamite cartridges. I shouted, Eureka! and smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course, the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown sphinx, brawn doors, and, as it proved, my chances of finding the time machine altogether 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 still had 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 befrained 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. 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 ear 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 fall of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides we now 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, we now 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 moorlocks with it. While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and them against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the bare hillside, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting place. I thought that with my matches and my camphor, I could contrive to keep my path eliminated through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands, I should have to abandon my firewood. So, rather reluctantly, I put it down, and then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our retreat. I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of men and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dew drops, as it sometimes decays in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Digging vegetation may occasionally smolder 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 tongs 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 struggle, 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 the 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 conned 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, thin 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 underworld. There were evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm. And weanish 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 canfur 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 canfur, 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 maneuvering 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 ball, and very hastily, as my first lump of canfur waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and there, out of the darkness round me, the Morlock's eyes shone like carbon coals. The canfur flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed were 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 canfur, and went on gathering my bone fire. Presently, I noticed how dry were 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 canfur. Then, I turned to 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 canfur 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 his lumberous murmur that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all was dark, and the moorlocks had their hands upon me. Slinging off their clinging fingers, I hastily felt in my pocket for the matchbox, and it had gone. Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and poured 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 exaltation 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 moorlocks 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 moorlocks 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 moorlocks about me. Three battled 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 moorlocks' 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 moorlocks' path. It was a closed 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 into a small open space, and as I did so, a moorlock came blundering towards me and passed me and went on straight into the fire. And now I was to see the most weird and horrible saying, 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 center was a hillock, or tumulus, surmounted by a scorched hearthorn. Behind this was another arm of the burning forest, with yellow tongs already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty moorlocks, 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 quicky 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 Wiener. But Wiener 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 a brush of smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rear tatters of that rent canopy, remote as though they were remote canopy, remote as though they belonged to another universe, shown the little stars. Two or three moorlocks 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 hand, 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 moorlocks 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 stringing masses of black smoke, and the whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of these dim creatures, came the white light of 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 to descend. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations about me. But I contained myself. The Heluk, 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 intense wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrows 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, moaning sky, I made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The box must have leaked before it was lost. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Chapter 10. About eight or nine in the morning, I came to the same seat of yellow metal, from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Wiena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose a cupola's above the ways to the underworld. I understood now what all the beauty of the overworld people covered. A 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 it 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 was 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 a 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 underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection, absolute permanency. Apparently, as time went on, the feeding of the underworld, however it was affected, had become disjointed. Mother necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The underworld being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw it, in my last view of the world, of 800 and 2000, 700 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 woke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being caught napping by the moorlocks, 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 almost 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. None raised place in the corner of this was a 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 moorlocks. Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the time machine. A surprise to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I've suspected since that the moorlocks had even partially taken it to pieces, while trying on 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 panel suddenly slid up and struck the frame with the clang. I was in the dark, trapped. So the moorlocks thought. At that, I chuckled gleefully. I could already hear their murmuring laughter as it came towards me. Very calmly, I tried to strike the match. I'd 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, the light only on the box. You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The low 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 the 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 button the dark with my head. I could hear the moorlock's skull ring to recover it. It was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble. But at last the lever was fitted and pulled over. The clinging hand slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself in the same gray light and tumult I've already described. End of chapter 10.