The Time Machine | Complete Audiobook | H. G. Wells

0:00The Time Machine By H. G. Wells The complete audiobook in 17 chapters. Author introduction H. G. Wells was an English writer who scientific romances turned the discoveries and anxieties of the late 19th century into vivid thought experiments. Published in 1895, the Time Machine does more than send a traveler into the future. It asks what present-day inequality, comfort and power might become over immense spans of time. Wells frames the impossible through dinner table testimony, damaged machinery, and two fragile flowers, allowing wonder and doubt to remain in the room together. The Time Machine By H. G. Wells Chapter 1 Introduction Listening note

1:00Wells begins around a comfortable Victorian dinner table where abstract geometry slowly becomes a proposal for physical travel. Notice how the unnamed narrator records professional titles instead of full identities. The formal witnesses make the fantastic claim feel testable while their teasing skepticism keeps belief at a distance. The Time Traveler, for so it will be convenient to speak of him, was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiant of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trams of precision. And he put it to us in this way, marking the point with a lean forefinger as we sat and

2:03lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox as we thought it and his fecundity. You must follow me carefully. I shall have to contravert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception. Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon, said Philby, an argumentative person with red hair? I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions. That is all right, said the psychologist. Nor having only length, breadth and thickness can a cube have a real existence.

3:05There I object, said Philby. Of course a solid body may exist. All real things. So most people think. At a moment, can an instantaneous cube exist? Don't follow you, said Philby. Can a cube that does not last for any time at all have a real existence? Philby became pensive. Clearly, the time traveler proceeded any real body must have extension in four directions. It must have length, breadth, thickness and duration. And through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we inclined to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of space and a fourth time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one

4:08direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives. That said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp that very clear indeed. Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked, continued the time traveler, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. Really this is what is meant by the fourth dimension, though some people who talk about the fourth dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at time. There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this fourth dimension. I have not said the provincial mayor. It is simply this. That space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call length, breadth and thickness, and is always definable by reference to three

5:13planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly, why not another direction at right angles to the other three, and have even tried to construct a four-dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcombe was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four if they could master the perspective of the thing. See? I think so, murmured the provincial mayor, and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. Yes, I think I see it now, he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner. Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of four dimensions

6:16for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were three-dimensional representations of his four-dimension being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing. Scientific people proceeded the time traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, no very well at time is only a kind of space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the Mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of space generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude, was

7:20along the time dimension. But said the medical man, staring harder to coal in the fire, if time is really only a fourth dimension of space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move about in time as we move about in the other dimensions of space? The time traveller smiled. Are you so sure we can move freely in space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there. Not exactly, said the medical man, there are balloons. But before the balloons, safe as bismotic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement. Still they could move a little up and down, said the medical man.

8:20Easier, far easier down than up. And you cannot move at all in time, you cannot get away from the present moment. My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the time dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence 50 miles above the earth's surface. But the great difficulty is this, interrupted the psychologist. You can move about in all directions of space, but you cannot move about in time. That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence, I become absent-minded, as you say.

9:23I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the time dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way? Oh, this began Philby, is all. Why not said the time traveler? It's against reason, said Philby. What reason said the time traveler? You can show black is white by argument, said Philby, but you will never convince me. Possibly not, said the time traveler. But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of four dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine.

10:24To travel through time exclaimed the very young man. That shall travel indifferently in any direction of space and time as the driver determines. Philby contented himself with laughter. But I have experimental verification, said the time traveler. It would be remarkably convenient for the historian, the psychologist suggested. One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the battle of Hastings, for instance. Don't you think you would attract attention, said the medical man our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms? One might get one's Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato, the very young man thought. In which case they would certainly plow you for the little go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much. Then there is the future, said the very young man to just think. One might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest and hurry on ahead.

11:27To discover a society, said I, erected on a strictly communistic basis. Of all the wild extravagant theories began the psychologist. Yes, so it seemed to me and so I never talked of it until. Experimental verification cried are you are going to verify that. The experiment cried Philby who was getting brain weary. Let's see your experiment anyhow, said the psychologist, though it's all humbug, you know. The time traveler smiled round at us. Then still smiling faintly and with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory. The psychologist looked at us. I wonder what he's got. Some slight of hand trick or other said the medical man and Philby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslam, but before he had finished his preface the time traveler came back and Philby's anecdote collapsed.

12:33Chapter Reflection The time traveler has turned a lecture about four dimensions into a demonstration, a small machine vanishes before several witnesses. No one agrees on what the event proves, but the room can no longer dismiss the idea as words alone. Chapter 2 brings out the full-sized apparatus and asks whether anyone is prepared to believe where it can go. The Time Machine By H. G. Wells Chapter 2 The Machine Listening note The miniature device is both scientific instrument and stage object assembled from brass, ivory and crystal beneath the witness's eyes. Wells carefully records hands, levers, light and empty space so that the impossible happens inside a scene of material precision. The debate that follows matters as much as the disappearance itself.

13:33The thing the time traveler held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock and very delicately made. There was ivory in it and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit for this that follows unless his explanation is to be accepted is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room and set it in front of the fire with two legs on the half-rag. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair and sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell full upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantle and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low armchair near his the fire and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the time traveler and the fireplace.

14:37Phil be sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The medical man and the provincial mayor watched him in profile from the right, the psychologist from the left. The very young man stood behind the psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however a droidly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions. The time traveler looked at us and then at the mechanism. Well, said the psychologist. This little affair said the time traveler resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly asqueue and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar as though it was in some way unreal. He pointed to the part with his finger. Also, here is one little white lever and here is another.

15:40The medical man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. It's beautifully made, he said. It took two years to make, retorted the time traveler. Then, when we had all imitated the action of the medical man, he said, now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveler. Presently, I am going to press the lever and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future time and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don't want to waste this model and then be told I am a quack. There was a minute's pause perhaps. The psychologist seemed about to speak to me but changed his mind. Then the time traveler put forth his finger towards the lever.

16:43No, he said suddenly. Lend me your hand. And turning to the psychologist, he took that individual's hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the psychologist himself who sent forth the model time machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantle was blown out and the little machine suddenly swung round became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory and it was gone, vanished. Say for the lamp the table was bare. Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Phil be said he was damned. The psychologist recovered from his stupor and suddenly looked under the table. At that the time traveler laughed cheerfully. Well, he said with a reminiscence of the psychologist.

17:48Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the mantle and with his back to us began to fill his pipe. We stared at each other. Look here, said the medical man, are you in earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled into time? Certainly, said the time traveler, stooping to light a spill at the fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe to look at the psychologist's face. The psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut. What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in there, he indicated the laboratory and when that is put together I mean to have a journey on my own account. You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future, said Phil be? Into the future or the past, I don't, for certain, no which. After an interval the psychologist had an inspiration.

18:48It must have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere, he said. Why, said the time traveler? Because I presume that it has not moved in space and if it travelled into the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have traveled through this time. But said I, if it travelled into the past it would have been visible when we came first into this room and last Thursday when we were here and the Thursday before that and so forth. Serious objections remarked the provincial mayor with an air of impartiality turning towards the time traveler. Not a bit, said the time traveler and to the psychologist, you think. You can explain that. Its presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted presentation. Of course, said the psychologist and reassured us. That's a simple point in psychology. I should have thought of it. Its plain enough and helps the paradox delightfully.

19:53We cannot see it nor can we appreciate this machine any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning or a bullet flying through the air. If it is travelling through time 50 times or 100 times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftyth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That's plain enough. He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. You see, he said, laughing. We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the time traveler asked us what we thought of it all. It sounds plausible enough tonight, said the medical man, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning. Would you like to see the time machine itself the time traveler? And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long,

20:53drafted corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broadhead insoluble, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger addition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystal line bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be. Look here, said the medical man, are you perfectly serious? Or is this a trick like that ghost you showed us last Christmas? Upon that machine, said the time traveler, holding the lamp aloft, I intend to explore time. Is that plane? I was never more serious in my life. None of us quite knew how to take it.

21:57I caught Philby's eye over the shoulder of the medical man, and he winked at me solemnly. Chapter Reflection Some guests suspected trick while others begin imagining practical uses for time travel. The larger machine in the laboratory remains unfinished and belief remains provisional. Chapter 3 returns to the same house a week later when the inventor arrives late, injured, hungry, and carrying evidence that theory has become experience. The Time Machine By H. Gene Wells Chapter 3 the time traveler returns Listening note A second dinner party turns the earlier experiment into a mystery. The time traveler's torn clothing, bleeding feet, and urgent hunger are physical facts, yet his reputation for cleverness still makes the guests wary. Wells lets the ordinary rituals of washing and eating delay the explanation until curiosity

22:59becomes almost unbearable. I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the time machine. The fact is, the time traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed, you never felt that you saw all round him, you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Philby shown the model and explained the matter in the time traveler's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives, a pork butcher could understand Philby. But the time traveler had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would have made the fame of a less clever man seen tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily. The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment, they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with eggshell China. So I don't think any of us said very much about

24:03time travelling in the interval between that Thursday and the next, though its odd potentialities ran no doubt in most of our minds, its plausibility, that is, its practical incredableness, the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model, that I remember discussing with the medical man whom I met on Friday at the Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar thing at tube-engine and laid considerable stress on the blowing out of the candle. But how the trick was done he could not explain. The next Thursday I went again to Richmond, I suppose I was one of the time travellers most constant guests and arriving late found for or five men already assembled in his drawing room. The medical man was standing before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in the other. I looked round for the time traveller and its half past seven now said the medical man

25:06I suppose would better have dinner. Where's said I naming our host? You've just come? It's rather odd. He's unavoidably detained. He asks me in this note to lead off with dinner at seven if he's not back. Says he'll explain when he comes. It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil said the editor of a well-known daily paper and thereupon the doctor rang the bell. The psychologist was the only person besides the doctor and myself who had attended the previous dinner. The other men were blank, the editor aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another acquired, shy man with a beard, whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner table about the time traveller's absence and I suggested time travelling in a half-jocular spirit. The editor wanted that explained to him and the psychologist volunteered a wooden

26:09account of an ingenious paradox and trick we had witnessed that day week. He was in the midst of his exposition when the door from the corridor opened slowly and without noise. I was facing the door and saw it first. Hello! I said, at last, and the door opened wider and the time traveller stood before us. I gave a cry of surprise. Good heavens! Man, what's the matter? Cried the medical man who saw him next? And the whole table full turned towards the door. He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty and smeared with green down the sleeves, his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greya, either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale, his chin had a brown cut on it, a cut half-heeled, his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway,

27:15as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in foot-sour tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak. He said not a word but came painfully to the table and made a motion towards the wine. The editor filled a glass of champagne and pushed it towards him. He drained it and it seemed to do him good for he looked round the table and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. What on earth have you been up to? Man, said the doctor. The time traveler did not seem to hear. Don't let me disturb you, he said, with a certain faltering articulation. I'm alright. He stopped, held out his glass for more and took it off at a draft. That's good, he said. His eyes grew brighter and a faint color came into his cheeks.

28:16His glances flickered over our faces with a certain dull approval and then went round the warm and comfortable room. Then he spoke again, still as it were feeling his way among his words. I'm going to wash and dress and then I'll come down and explain things. Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat. He looked across at the editor who was a rare visitor and hoped he was alright. The editor began a question. Tell you presently, said the time traveler. I'm funny. Be alright in a minute. He put down his glass and walked towards the staircase door. Again, I remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall and standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained socks. Then the door closed upon him. I had half a mind to follow till I remembered how he detested any fuss about himself.

29:21For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering. Then, remarkable behavior of an eminent scientist, I heard the editors say, thinking after his wound, in headlines. And this brought my attention back to the bright dinner table. What's the game, said the journalist? Has he been doing the amateur cagure? I don't follow. I met the eye of the psychologist and read my own interpretation in his face. I thought of the time traveler limping painfully upstairs. I don't think anyone else had noticed his lameness. The first to recover completely from this surprise was the medical man who rang the bell, the time traveler hated to have servants waiting at dinner for a hot plate. At that the editor turned to his knife and fork with a grunt and the silent man followed suit. The dinner was resumed. Conversation was exclamatory for a little while with gaps of wonderment and then the

30:23editor got fervent in his curiosity. Does our friendy-cout his modest income with a crossing? Or has he his nebucket nezza phases? He inquired. I feel assured it's this business of the time machine I said and took up the psychologist's account of our previous meeting. The new guests were frankly incredulous. The editor raised objections. One was this time travelling. A man couldn't cover himself with dust by rolling in a paradox could he? And then, as the idea came home to him, he resorted to caricature. Hadn't they any clothes brushes in the future? The journalist too would not believe at any price and joined the editor in the easy work of heaping ridicule on the whole thing. They were both the new kind of journalist, very joyous, irreverent young men. Our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow reports, the journalist was saying, or rather shouting, when the time traveller came back.

31:28He was dressed in ordinary evening clothes and nothing save his haggard look remained of the change that had startled me. I say, said the editor hilariously, these chats here say you have been travelling into the middle of next week. Tell us all about little Rosebury, will you? What will you take for the lot? The time traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He smiled quietly in his old way. Where's my mutton, he said? What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again. Story cried the editor. Story be damned said the time traveller. I want something to eat. I won't say a word until I get some pep tone into my arteries. Thanks. And the salt. One word said, I have you been time travelling. Yes, said the time traveller with his mouthful nodding his head. I'd give a shilling a line

32:31for a verbatim note, said the editor. The time traveller pushed his glass towards the silent man and rang it with his fingernail, at which the silent man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hetty Potter. The time traveller devoted his attention to his dinner and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The medical man smoked a cigarette and watched the time traveller through his eyelashes. The silent man seemed even more clumsy than usual and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the time traveller pushed his plate away and looked round us. I suppose I must apologise, he said. I was simply starving. I had a most amazing time.

33:36He reached out his hand for a cigar and cut the end. But come into the smoking room. It's too long a story to tell over greasy plates. And ringing the bell in passing, he led the way into the adjoining room. You have told blank and dash and chose about the machine. He said to me, leaning back in his easy chair and naming the three new guests. But the things are mere paradox, said the editor. I can't argue tonight. I don't mind telling you the story, but I can't argue. I will. He went on. Tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will sound like lying. So be it. It's true every word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at four o'clock and since then, I've lived eight days, such days as

34:39no human being ever lived before. I'm nearly worn out, but I shan't sleep till I've told this thing over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions. Is it agreed? Agreed said the editor and the rest of us echoed the greed. And with that the time traveler began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards, he got more animated. In writing it down, I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink and, above all, my own inadequacy to express its quality. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough, but you cannot see the speaker's white since he or she in the bright circle of the little lamp nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the turns of his story. Most of us here as were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking room had

35:42not been lighted and only the face of the journalist and the legs of the silent man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first we glance now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that and looked only at the time traveler's face. Chapter Reflection The inventor refuses a quick headline and asks for patience before telling his story. His condition suggests danger but it does not establish where he has been. Chapter for shifts into his first person account, where days and nights begin to flicker past the machine and the familiar laboratory dissolves into deep time. The Time Machine Chapter for Time Traveling The journey is described through changing light, weather, architecture and bodily sensation rather than through a clean mechanical diagram. Wells make speed exhilarating and dangerous at once,

36:46stopping could be fatal if the machine occupies the same space as future matter. Watch how confidence gives way to fear at the moment of arrival. I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine and showed you the actual thing itself incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel warn, truly and one of the ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent but the rest of it sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday but on Friday when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short and this I had to get remade so that the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at 10 o'clock today that the first of all Time Machine's began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what

37:49will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel, I felt a nightmare sensation of falling and looking round I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past 10, now it was nearly half past three. I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchet came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme

38:51position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then feinter and ever feinter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind. I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like the one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion. I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping at every minute and every minute marking a day. I suppose the

39:54laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grain-us, the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight, the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon afain to fluctuating band, and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The landscape was misty and vague.

40:55I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands and the shoulder rows above me gray and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green, they grew, spread, shivered and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute and minute by minute the whites no flashed across the world and vanished and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring. The unpleasant sensations of the star were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of the machine for which I was

41:59unable to account. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind, a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread, until at last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes. I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside and remained there without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came round to

43:03the business of stopping. The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered, I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances. But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way, meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction, possibly a far-reaching explosion, would result and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions, into the unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine, but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk, one of the risks a man has got to take. Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.

44:04The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling had absolutely upset my nerves. I told myself that I could never stop and with a gust of pettulence I resolved to stop forth with. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever and incontinently the thing went reeling over and I was flung headlong through the air. There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned for a moment. A pettuless hail was hissing around me and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked around me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by roader dendron bushes and I noticed that their move and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a

45:08little cloud over the machine and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. Fine hospitality said I to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you. Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked around me. A colossal figure carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the roader dendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible. My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large for a silver birch tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble in shape something like a winged sphinx but the wings instead of being carried vertically at the sides were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me was a bronze and was thick with vertigris. It chanced that the face was towards me at the

46:12cyclist's eye seemed to watch me. There was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather-warn and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space half a minute perhaps or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the hail curtain had worn thread bare and that the sky was lightning with the promise of the sun. I looked up again at the crouching white shape and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something in human, unsympathetic and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old world savage animal,

47:14only the more dreadful and disgusting for a common likeness, a foul creature to be incontanently slain. Already I saw other vast shapes, huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the time machine and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smoked through the thunder storm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud world into nothingness. The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with a wet of the thunderstorm and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air

48:14knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee with the machine. It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily and attitude to mount again. But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me and their faces were directed towards me. Then I heard voices approaching me, coming through the bushes by the whites, finks were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I

49:15stood with my machine. He was a slight creature, perhaps for feet high, clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins, I could not clearly distinguish which were on his feet, his legs were bare to the knees and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was. He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine. Chapter Reflection. The machine stops in a storm beneath the whites, finks, and the traveller meets a small human figure from the year 802,701. His first impressions are shaped by beauty, fragility, and relief at having survived. Chapter 5 introduces the Eloy and the

50:21Sunlit world that seems, at first, to have escaped labour and conflict. The Time Machine. By H. Jean Wells. Chapter 5 in the Golden Age. Listening note. The Eloy welcome the traveller with flowers, fruit, laughter, and a language he cannot understand. Their ruin palaces an effortless communal life tempt him to read the future as a peaceful golden age. Wells plants unease inside that beauty, doors gabe into shadow, curiosity fades quickly and the unattended machine remains exposed. In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.

51:24There were others coming and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and deep for them. So I shook my head and pointing to my ears, shook it again. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence, a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease. And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine pins. But I made a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the time machine. Happily then,

52:24when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten and reaching over the bars of the machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion and put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication. And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their dressed and china type of prittiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek, there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and there is were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild, and this may seem egotism on my part, I fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them. As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me smiling and speaking in soft-cuing notes to each other, I began the conversation. I pointed to the time machine and to myself.

53:30Then, hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun. At once a quaintly pretty little figure in checkered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder. For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly, were these creatures fools. You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had always anticipated that the people of the year 802,000 would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm. It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the

54:33time machine in vain. I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a thunder-clap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace also and bowed. Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received with melodious applause, and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the light can scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone. As I went with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible

55:34merriment, to my mind. The building had a huge entry and was altogether of colossal dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and with the big open portals that yearned before me shadowy and mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet wheatless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the wax and petals. They grew scattered as if wild among the variegated shrubs, but as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The time machine was left deserted on the turf among the roaded enderans. The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather-worn.

56:38Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy 19th century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an edging mass of bright, soft coloured robes and shining white limbs in a melodious whirl of laugh to un-lapping speech. The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall-hung with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows partially glazed with coloured glass and partially inglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates, nor slabs, blocks, and it was so much worn as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations as to be deeply channeled along the more frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised, perhaps, a foot from the floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a kind of high

57:39pertrophid raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange. Between the tables scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so forth into the round openings in the sides of the tables. I was not loath to follow their example for I felt thirsty and hungry. As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure, and perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The stained glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were broken in many places and the curtains that hung across the lower end were thick with dust, and it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich and picturesque. There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred people dining in the hall, and most of them

58:44seated as near to me as they could come, were watching me with interest their little eyes shining over the fruit they were eating. All were clad in the same soft, and yet strong, silky material. Fruit, by the buy, was all their diet. These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugeiverous also. Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs had followed the ectheosaurus into extinction. But the fruits were very delightful, or one, in particular, that seemed to be in season all the time I was there, a flowery thing in a three-sided husk was especially good, and I made it my staple. At first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import. However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now. So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute

59:50attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that was the next thing to do. The fruit seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of these up, I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning. At first my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but presently a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name. They had to chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and my first attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of genuine, if uncivil, amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command, and then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb to eat. But it was slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations,

1:00:52so I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons in little doses when they felt inclined. And very little doses I found they were before long, for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued. Chapter Reflection The traveller sees abundance without visible work and begins building a theory of perfected humanity. Yet the Eloise delicacy and short attention trouble that optimistic reading. Chapter 6 turns sunset into an intellectual warning, as he asks whether security has produced freedom or removed the pressures that once developed strength. The Time Machine By H. Jean Wells Chapter 6 The Sunset of Mankind Listening Note Wells pauses the adventure for a speculative argument about comfort, labour and social division. The traveller interprets the Eloise through the assumptions of his own

1:01:53century, treating their weakness as the possible cost of complete security. His theory is persuasive, provisional, and as he later admits only half the truth. A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the Sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices. The calm of evening was upon the world as I

1:02:57emerged from the great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known even the flowers. The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted, perhaps, a mile from its present position. I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this hour planet in the year 802701 AD. For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded. As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in which I found the world for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful

1:04:01pagoda-like plants, nettles possibly, but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves and incapable of stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined at a later date to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of a still stranger discovery, but of that I will speak in its proper place. Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage which formed such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. Communism said I to myself. And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash,

1:05:03I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft, hairless visage, and the same girlish retundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before, but everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion. Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force.

1:06:04Where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state, where violence comes but rarely an offspring are secure. There is less necessity, indeed there is no necessity for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality. While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the hardness of well still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of

1:07:08freedom and adventure I pushed on up to the crest. There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognise, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half-smothered in soft moss, the armrests cast and filed into the resemblance of Griffin's heads. I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day. It was a sweet and fairer view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon, and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnish steel. I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture,

1:08:12the whole earth had become a garden. So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way. Afterwards I found I had got only a half truth, or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth. It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need, security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life, the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure, had gone steadily onto a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in

1:09:17hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw. After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroyer we just hear and there uncultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out of balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals and how few they are gradually by selective breeding, now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually because our ideals are vague and tentative and our knowledge is very limited because nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands.

1:10:17Someday all this will be better organised and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated and cooperating, things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of nature. In the end wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs. This adjustment, I say, must have been done and done well, done indeed for all time, in the space of time across which my machine had leapt. The air was free from nats, the earth from weeds or fungi, everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers, brilliant butterflies flew hither and hither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay and I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes. Social triumphs, too,

1:11:23had been affected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased to increase. But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigor. Hard chip and freedom, conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall, conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience and decision. And the institution of the family and the emotions

1:12:29that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young. Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising and it will grow against cannibial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts, unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discord in a refined and pleasant life. I thought of the physical sliteness of the people, their lack of intelligence and those big abundant ruins, and its strength and my belief in a perfect conquest of nature. For after the battle comes quiet, humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us

1:13:32is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own times certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help, may even be hindrances, to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surging of the now-purposeless energy of mankind before it

1:14:32settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived, the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy and security, it takes to art and to eroticism and then come langa and decay. Even this artistic impetus would at last die away, had almost died in the time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight, so much was left of the artistic spirit and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity and it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last. As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world, mastered the whole secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary. That would

1:15:35account for the abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation and plausible enough as most wrong theories are. Chapter Reflection The sunset that colours the landscape becomes a metaphor for humanity's apparent decline. The traveler believes the old struggle between classes may have ended in effortless peace, but he has not yet accounted for the wells or the pale creature glimpsed in darkness. Chapter 7 breaks the theory apart when the time machine disappears. The Time Machine By H. G. Wells Chapter 7 A Sudden Shock Listening Note Moonlight reveals an empty lawn where the machine had stood. The traveler moves from calculation to panic, attacking the Sphinx's pedestal and exhausting himself against an object that will not answer. Daylight restores his discipline, showing how strongly Wells links reason to visibility and terror to the unseen.

1:16:40As I stood there musing over this two perfect triumph of man, the full moon, yellow and gibbers, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the northeast. The bright little figures cease to move about below, a noiseless elf 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 traveled along to the figure of the white Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as the light of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver birch against it. There was the tangle of roaded endrun 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

1:17:46gone. 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 starching the blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself, they have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way. Nevertheless, I ran with all my might. All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, new instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole

1:18:47distance from the hillcrest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am not a young man. I cursed aloud as I ran at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud and none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit world. When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realised. Not a trace of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously as if the thing might be hidden in a corner and then stopped abruptly with my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay. I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanism in some

1:19:48shelter for me had I not felt a should 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 a should unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the levers I will show you the method later prevented anyone from tampering with it in that way when they were removed. It had moved and was hid only in space. But then where could it be? I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently in an 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

1:20:52of stone. The big hall was dark, silent and deserted. I slipped on the uneven floor and fell over one of the malachite tables almost breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains of which I have told you. There I found a second great hall covered with cushions upon which perhaps a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness within articulate noises and the splutter and flare of a match. For they had forgotten about matches. Where is my time machine? I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them. Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them standing round me it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as

1:21:52it was possible for me to do under the circumstances in trying to revive the sensation of fear. For, reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought that fear must be forgotten. A abruptly I dashed down the match and knocking one of the people over in my course went blundering across the big dining hall again out under the moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind, a strange animal in an unknown world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and fate. I have a memory of horrible fatigue as the long night of despair wore away, of looking in this impossible place and that, of groping among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows, at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with

1:22:55absolute wretchedness, even anger at the folly of leaving the machine having leaked away with my strength. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach of my arm. I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got there and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair. Then things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight and I could reason with myself. I said, suppose the machine all together lost, perhaps destroyed? It behows me to become 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

1:23:57make another. That would be my only hope, a poor hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious world. But probably the machine had only been taken away. Still, I must become and patient, find its hiding place and recover it by force or cunning. And with that ice cramble 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 solid,

1:25:01some 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 wear. 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 slope. This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep-frained panels on either side. I went and wrapped 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

1:26:06panels, if they were doors, as I supposed, open from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind. It took no very great mental effort to infer that my time machine was inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem. I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple trees towards me. I turned smiling to them and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate minded woman, it is how she would look. They went off as if they had received the last possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result. Somehow his manner made me feel ashamed

1:27:09of 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 repugnant 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 Verdagris 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.

1:28:11At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long, I am too accidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait in active for 24 hours, that is another matter. I got up after at time and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the hill again. Patience said I to myself. If you want your machine again, you must leave that's thinks 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 two hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all. Then suddenly the humour of the situation

1:29:12came into my mind, the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud. Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance. I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two things got back to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively simple, almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any,

1:30:17abstract 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. Chapter Reflection Tracks and circumstance convince the traveller that the machine has been hidden inside the white sphinx. He cannot open it by force, so escape now depends on understanding the future society around him. Chapter 8 brings Wiener closer and turns the strange wells and underground sounds into clues about another branch of humanity. The Time Machine

1:31:17By H. Jean Wells Chapter 8 Explanation Listening Note The traveller rescues Wiener from drowning and gains a companion, but affection does not solve the larger puzzle. Great ventilating wells, nocturnal shapes, and the Eloise fear of darkness suggest that the serene surface world depends on machinery below. Wells revises the class argument from separation into a disturbing form of mutual dependence. 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 their watershine 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

1:32:21my attention was the presence of certain circular wells, several as it seemed to me of a very great depth. One lay by the path up the hill which I had followed during my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously wrought and protected by a little cupola from the rain. Sitting by the side of these wells and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted match. But in all of them I heard a certain sound, a thud, thud, thud like the beating of some big engine, and I discovered from the flaring of my matches that a steady current of air set down the shafts. Further I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of one, and instead of fluttering slowly down it was at once sucked swiftly out of sight. After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing here and there upon the slopes, for above them there was often just

1:33:23such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sunscorch beach. Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine. I was at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people. It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong. And here I must admit that I learnt very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance and the light 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 are negro,

1:34:23fresh from Central Africa would take back to his tribe. What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the parcels delivery company and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him. And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either at prehand or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times and how wide the interval between myself and these of the golden age. I was sensible of much which was unseen and which contributed to my comfort but say for a general impression of automatic organisation, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind. In the matter of sepulcher, 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

1:35:26somewhere 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 inferm among this people there were none. I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilisation and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops,

1:36:33no workshops, no sign of importations among them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going. Then, again, about the time machine, something I knew not what had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the white's finks. Why? For the life of me I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars. I felt I lacked a clue. I felt, how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription with sentences here and there in excellent plain English and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even absolutely unknown to you. Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of 802,701 presented itself to me.

1:37:34That day, too, I made a friend of a sort. It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weekly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes. When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and, wading in at a point lower down, I caught the poor might and drew her safe to land. A little rubbing of the limb 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.

1:38:34In the afternoon, I met my little woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big gallant 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's might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended, as I will tell you. She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always.

1:39:40She 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

1:40:42sphinx almost the feeling of coming home, and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill. It was from her, too, that I learnt that fear had not yet left the world. She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful. It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing. I discovered then, among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark and slept in droves. To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult of apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping alone within doors, after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the lesson of that fear, and in spite of

1:41:45weeners' distress, I insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes. It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me triumphant, 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 in eminies were feeling over my face with their soft palpai. I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness when everything is colourless and clear-cut and yet unreal. I got up and went down into the great hall and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace. I thought I would make a virtue of necessity and see

1:42:50the 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 grey, the sky-colourless and cheerless. And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, a polite 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 in distinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain, early morning feeling you may have known. I datted my eyes. As the eastern sky grew brighter and the light of the day came on and its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white

1:43:56figures. They were mere creatures of the half-light. They must have been ghosts, I said, I wonder when they dated. For a queer notion of grand-alans 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 for at once. But the jest was unsatisfying and I was thinking of these figures all the morning until Wiener 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 Wiener was a pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far deadly a possession of my mind. I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this golden age.

1:44:56I 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. Clambring 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

1:45:56impenetrabley dark to me. I entered it groping for the change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without was watching me out of the darkness. The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn. Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be living came to my mind. And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth and saw a queer little ape-like figure,

1:46:59its 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 flax and 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

1:48:05which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human spider. It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first time a number of metalfoot and hand-rests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft. Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster had disappeared. I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was human. But gradually, the truth dawned on me, that man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals, that my graceful children of the upper world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing which had flashed before me was also air to all the ages. I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground ventilation.

1:49:08I began to suspect their true import. And what I wondered was this lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organisation. How was it related to the indolence or entity of the beautiful over-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 amourous 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

1:50:10and 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 Weenah and see what I could get from her. But my mind was already in revolution, my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now acclue 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

1:51:14the 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 headwild in the light, all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitivity 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 workers 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

1:52:15splitting of the human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory, though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth. At first, preceding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the capitalist and the labourer was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you, unwildly incredible, and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental purposes of 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

1:53:18underground factories, spending a still increasing amount of its time therein, till in the end. Even now, does not an East End worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth? Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people, due no doubt to the increasing refinement of their education and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor, is already leading to the closing in their interest of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf, which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for 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.

1:54:21So, in the end, above ground you must have the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the have-nots, the workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns, and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die, and in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life and as happy in their way as the overworld people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pala followed naturally enough. The great triumph of humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy armed with a perfected science and working to a logical

1:55:26conclusion 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 chituronian 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 two perfect security of the overworlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the underground as I did not yet suspect, but from what I had seen of the Morlocks that, by the buy, 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

1:56:31race 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 Weiner 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 unindurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that golden age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of her human inheritance from Weiner's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands while I solemnly

1:57:35burned a match. Chapter Reflection The traveller names the underground people Morlocks and the surface dwellers Eloi. He now suspects that the old division between worker and owner survived by becoming biological, though his theory remains incomplete. Chapter 9 requires a physical descent into the wells, where observation will carry a cost that speculation did not. The Time Machine By H. Gene Wells Chapter 9 The Morlocks Listening note The descent into the well reverses the bright openness of the Elois world. Sound, touch, and smell replace distant views while the traveller's matches become brief islands of safety. The Morlocks enlarged eyes reveal adaptation to darkness, but their machinery and meet force him to reconsider who serves whom. It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before

1:58:37I could follow up the newfound clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum. And they were filthy cold to the touch. Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate. The next night I did not sleep well, probably my health was a little disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason. I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the moonlight that night weiner 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,

1:59:42these white and lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I felt assured that the time machine was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating these mysteries of underground. Yet I could not face the mystery. If only I had had a companion it would have been different. But I was so horribly alone and even to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me. I don't know if you will understand my feeling but I never felt quite safe at my back. It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me farther and farther afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the southwestward towards the rising country that is now called CUME wood, I observed far off in the direction of 19th century bansted, a vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the largest

2:00:44of the palaces or ruins I knew and the facade 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 weiner. But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the palace of green porcelain was a piece of self-deception to enable me to shirk by another day an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the descent without further waste of time and started out in the early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium. Little weiner ran with me. She danced beside me to the well but when she saw me lean over the mouth

2:01:45and looked downward she seemed strangely disconcerted. Goodbye, little weiner, I said, kissing her and then putting her down I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather hastily I may as well confess for I feared my courage might leak away. At first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave a most pittiest cry and running to me she began to pull at me with her little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I shook her off perhaps a little roughly and in another moment I was in the throat of the well. I saw her agonised face over the parapet and smiled to reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung. I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps 200 yards. The descent was affected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well and these being adapted to the needs of a

2:02:45creature much smaller and lighter than myself I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent. And not simply fatigued. One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I hung by one hand and after that experience I did not dare to rest again. Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful I went on clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible. Clancing upward I saw the aperture, a small blue disc in which a star was visible while little weeners head showed as a round black projection. The thirding 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 weener 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.

2:03:50At 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 other pupils of the abysmal fishes and they

2:04:55reflected the light in the same way. I have no doubt they could see me in that raily obscurity and they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light. But so soon as I struck a match in order to see them they fled incontinently vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion. I tried to call to them but the language they had was apparently different from that of the overworld people so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts and the thought of flight 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 so 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.

2:06:00Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness and cast grotesque black shadows in which dim spectral morloc sheltered from the glare. The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive and the faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the air. Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal laid with what seemed a meal. The morlocs at any rate were carnivorous. Even at the time I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct, the heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again. Then the match burnt down and stung my fingers and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness. I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience. When I had started with the time machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the

2:07:01men 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 co-dack, I could have flashed the glimpse of the underworld in a second and examined it at leisure. But as it was I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that nature had endowed me with hands, feet and teeth, these and four safety matches that still remained to me. I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to economise them and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishingly overworld as to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as I say, I had for left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, length fingers came feeling over my face,

2:08:06and I was sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden realisation of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away and then I could feel them approaching me again. They clutched at me more boldly with spring 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

2:09:12my 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 moorlocks rustling like wind among leaves and pattering like the rain as they hurried after me. In a moment I was clutched by several hands and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked, those pale, ginless faces and great, lidless, pinkish grey eyes as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment. But I did not state a look, I promise you, I retreated again and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the edge for the throb of the grape-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

2:10:16backward. 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 moorlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft while they stayed peering and blinking up at me all but one little wretch who followed me for some way and well-nice secured my boot as a trophy. That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last 20 or 30 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 smelled sweet and clean. Then I remember Weena

2:11:18kissing my hands and ears and the voices of others among the Eloy. Then, for a time, I was insensible. Chapter Reflection The traveler escapes the tunnels with a darker theory, the moorlocks maintain the surface world and may also feed upon it. Light is now both knowledge and weapon yet his supply of matches is limited. Chapter 10 begins a nighttime journey with Weena when distance, fatigue and approaching darkness make preparation urgent. The Time Machine By H. G. Wells Chapter 10 When Night Came Listening Note Knowledge of the moorlocks changes every shadow on the surface. The traveler carries Weena toward the distant palace of Green Porcelain, hoping to find tools and fire, but the journey is slower than his plan allows. Wells measures danger through fading

2:12:19daylight and the vulnerable trust between two unequal companions. Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. H. G. Wells Chapter 10 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. Here the two 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 more lox, a something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loved 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

2:13:19into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the dark nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming dark nights might mean. The moon was on the wane, each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little upper world people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the more lox did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The upper world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy and the more lox their mechanical servants, but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards or had already arrived at an altogether new relationship. The Eloy, like the color Vignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance

2:14:20since the more lox subterranean for innumerable generations had come at last to find the Dalit surface intolerable. And the more lox made their garments eye 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-pawed with his foot or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism. But clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. The nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on a pace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back, changed. Already the Eloy had begun to learn one old lesson and knew. They were becoming re-acquainted with fear. And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the underworld.

2:15:21It seemed odd how it floated into my mind, not stirred up as it were by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time. Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of hours, 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 and a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realising to what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have

2:16:22examined 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 Moulox 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 Weiner like a child upon my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The distance I had reckoned was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer 18. 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, siloeted black against the pale yellow of the sky. Weiner had been hugely delighted when I began

2:17:27to 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 Weiner, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that purpose. And that reminds me, in changing my jacket I found. The time travel appore, put his hand into his pocket and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows upon the little table. Then he resumed his narrative. As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weiner 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?

2:18:32Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote and empty safe for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet, could, indeed, almost see through at the mall locks on their ant hill going hither and either unweighting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken my time machine? So we went on in the quiet and the twilight deepened into night. The clear blue of the distance faded and one star after another came out. The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weeness fears and her fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed

2:19:37her. Then as the darkness grew deeper she put her arms round my neck and closing her eyes tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope into a valley and there in the dimness I almost walked into a little river. This I waited and went up the opposite side of the valley passed a number of sleeping houses and by a statue or a fawn or some such figure minus the head. Here two were acasias. So far I had seen nothing of the mall locks 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 Weeness from my shoulder as I halted and sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the palace

2:20:41of 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 with there no other lurking danger a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose upon there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the trebles to strike against. I was very tired too after the excitement of the day so I decided that I would not face it but would pass the night upon the open hill. Weeness I was glad to find was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my jacket and sat down beside her to wait for the moon rise. 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

2:21:44however that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way it seemed to me was still the same tattered streamer of star dust as a viewer. 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 the 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 40 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,

2:22:46the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of man as I knew him had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry and the white things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the great fear that was between the two species and for the first time with a sudden shiver came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible. I looked at little wiener sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars and forth with dismissed the thought. Through that long night I held my mind off them all ox as well as I could and wild away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear except for a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then as my visual war on came a faintness in the eastward sky like the reflection of some

2:23:50colourless fire and the old moon rose thin and peaked and white. And close behind and overtaking it and overflowing it the dawn came, pale at first and then growing pink and warm. No more lox 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 a 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 wiener 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

2:24:54last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly at some time in the long ago of human decay the moorlox 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 in human 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 Eloy were mere fatted cattle which the ant like moorlox preserved and preyed upon probably saw to the breeding of. And there was weenard dancing at my side. Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me by regarding it as a rigorous

2:25:58punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labors of his fellow man had taken necessity as his watchword and excuse and in the fullness of time necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlisle like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloy had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy and to make me before Sahara 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 moorlox. Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to

2:27:01break open the doors of bronze under the white's finks. 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 moorlox were strong enough to move it far away. Weiner I had resolved to bring with me to our own time and turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling. Chapter Reflection Night overtakes the pair before they reach safety and the travellers' confidence rests on a few matches and the hope that moonrise will come soon enough. Weiner's fear is no longer childish it is informed by the world she knows. Chapter 11 opens the ruin palace where the remains of human knowledge may offer both explanation and defence. The Time Machine by H. Jean Wells Chapter 11 the Palace of Green Porcelain

2:28:08Listening Note The palace proves to be a decayed museum, its labels gone and its collections collapsing into dust. The traveller searches civilizations archive for practical survival tools rather than historical answers. Wells makes the museum poignant and ironic, the enormous knowledge remains but only matches, camphor and an iron lever can help now. I found the palace of green porcelain when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary or even creek where I judged once worth and battersy must once have been. I thought then though I never followed up the thought of what might have happened or might be happening to the living things in the sea. The material of the palace

2:29:12proved on examination to be indeed porcelain and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I thought rather foolishly that Wiener might help me to interpret this but I only learnt that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human. Within the big vows of the door which were open and broken, we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognised by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the upper bones lay

2:30:13beside 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 it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost 99 hundreds of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme shorness if with extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the

2:31:16little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings upon reads. And the cases had in some instances been bodily removed by the moorlocks as I judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weiner, 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 all-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another

2:32:22short 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 saltpita, indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had de la 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 blacken vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown dust of departed plants, that was all. I was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the patient re-adjustments by which the conquest of

2:33:27animated 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 fancered that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the moorlocks. Suddenly weiner came very close to my side. So suddenly that she startled me.

2:34:27Had 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 here of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill dot E.D. The end I had come in it was quite above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit like the diaria of a London house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the gradual diminution of the light, until weiner'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

2:35:33of the Molox revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in this academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well. I took weiner's hand. Then struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon its sideways. Suddenly weiner, 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 Molox skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a

2:36:36Molox 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 weiner, and a persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my time machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the broods I heard. Well, mace in one hand and weiner in the other, I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognised as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warp boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was

2:37:42the 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 17 papers upon physical optics. Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at last, in one of the really airtight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned to Weenah. Dance, I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weenah's huge delight,

2:38:47I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling the land of the leal as cheerfully as I could. In part it was a modest cancan, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance, so far as my tailcoat permitted, and in part original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know. Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most fortunate thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikely a substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar that by chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odor of 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

2:39:49seepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil bellum night that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflamible and burnt with a good bright flame, was, in fact, an excellent candle, and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As yet my eye in crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanceed 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 eye and promise best against the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses

2:40:53of 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 steetype 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 exhibit 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 mayorest accident I discovered in an airtight case, two dynamite

2:41:53cartridges. I shouted at 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 believed that had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown syncs, bronze doors, and as it proved, my chances of finding the time machine all together into nonexistence. It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace. It was turfed and had three fruit trees. So we rested and refreshed ourselves. Toward sunset I began to consider our position. Night was creeping upon us

2:42:53and my inaccessible hiding place had still to be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defenses against the Moorlocks I had matches. I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning there was the getting of the time machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the work. Chapter Reflection Armed with fire-making materials and a metal bar, the traveller leaves the museum before darkness

2:43:57closes in. His impatience with ruined machines shows how completely the adventure has shifted from inquiry to survival. Chapter 12 enters the forest, where his plan for a protective fire turns against both pursuer and pursued. The Time Machine Chapter 12 in the Darkness Listening note Inside the forest, flame reveals only fragments, white bodies, grasping hands, and weiner beside him. The traveller's confidence in fire becomes dangerous when the blaze spreads beyond his control. Wells turns a technological advantage into another force that cannot be fully managed, echoing the novel's larger doubts about progress. We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above the horizon. I was determined to reach the whites, thinks early the next morning, and air the dusk I

2:44:58purposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible that night, and then, building a fire to sleep in the protection of its glare. Accordingly, as we went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my arms full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides weiner was tired. And I, also, began to suffer from sleepiness too, so that it was full night before we reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge weiner 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 more locks with it. While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against their blackness,

2:46:00I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the bare hillside, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting place, I thought that with my matches and my camphor I could contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should have to abandon my firewood, so rather reluctantly I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our retreat. I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn even when it is focused by dew drops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts.

2:47:05Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smolder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decade, and two, the art of firemaking had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to weiner. She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up and in spite of her struggles plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I could see, through the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that and turned again to the dark trees before me. It was very black and weiner clung to me convulsively,

2:48:08but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems. Overhead it was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us here and there. I lit none of my matches because I had no hand free. Upon my left arm I carried my little one, in my right hand I had my iron bar. For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet the faint rustle of the breeze above and my own breathing and the throb of the blood vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering behind me. I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct and then I caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the underworld. There were evidently several of the morelocks and they were closing in upon me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm. And weiner shivered violently and became quite still. It was time for a match.

2:49:13But 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 cooling sounds from the morelocks. 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 morelocks in flight amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket and prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane. Then I looked at Weiner. She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless with her face to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed scarcely to breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the ground and as it split and fled up and drove back the morelocks and the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her. There were behind seemed full of

2:50:15the 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 Weiner, 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 Weiner still motionless down upon a turfy bowl and very hastily as my first lump of camphor wained, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and there out of the darkness round me the morelocks I shone like car-bunkles. The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match and as I did so, two white forms that had been

2:51:16approaching Weiner dashed hastily away. One was so blinded by the light that he came straight for me and I felt his bones grind under the blow of my fist. He gave a hoop of dismay, staggered a little way and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor and went on gathering my bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage above me, for since my arrival on the time machine a matter of a week no rain had fallen. So instead of casting about among the trees for fallen twigs I began leaping up and dragging down branches. Very soon I had a choking smokey fire of green wood and dry sticks and could economise my camphor. Then I turned to where Weiner 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

2:52:18must have made me heavy of a sudden. Moreover the vapor of camphor was in the air. My fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary after my exertion and sat down. The wood too was full of a slumbrous murmur that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all was dark and the moorlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the matchbox and it had gone. Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept and my fire had gone out and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous

2:53:22spider'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 eye and 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 Wiener were lost but I determined to make the more locks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree swinging the iron bar before me. The hole would 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

2:54:25at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope. What if the morelocks 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 morelocks about me, three battered at my feet and then I recognised with incredulous surprise that the others were running in an incessant stream as it seemed from behind me and away through the wood in front. And their back seemed no longer white but reddish. As I stood a gabe 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 morelocks 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.

2:55:25It was my first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Wiener 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 morelocks path. It was a close race. Once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was outflanked and had to strike off to the left. But at last I emerged upon a small open space and as I did so a more lock 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 thing I think of all that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hilo-court tumulus, surmounted by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest with yellow tongues already rising from it,

2:56:28completely encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some 30 or 40 more locks, dazzled by the light and heat and blundering hither and dither against each other in their bewilderment. At first I did not realise their blindness and struck furiously at them with my bar in a frenzy of fear as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare and I struck no more of them. Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time the flames died down somewhat and I feared the foul creatures would presently be able to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing some of them before this should happen but the fire burst out again brightly and I stayed my hand. I walked about the hill

2:57:30among them and avoided them, looking for some trace of weenah. But weenah 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 uproost of smoke streamed across the sky and through the rare tatters of that red canopy remote as though they belonged to another universe, shone the little stars. Two or three mollocks came blundering into me and I drove them off with blows of my fists trembling as I did so. For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the ground with my hands and got up and sat down again and wandered here and there and again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to let me awake. Thrice I saw mollocks but their heads down in a kind of agony and rush into the flames.

2:58:36But at last above the subsiding red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and the whitening and blackening tree stumps and the diminishing numbers of these dink creatures came the white light of the day. I searched again for traces of weenah but there were none. It was plain that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined. As I thought of that I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations about me but I contained myself. The hillyc 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's finks. And so leaving the remnant of these damped souls still going hither and dither 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

2:59:37still pulsated internally with fire towards the hiding place of the time machine. I walked slowly for I was almost exhausted as well as lame and I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little weenah. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now in this old familiar room it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss. But that morning it left me absolutely lonely again, terribly alone. I began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you and with such thoughts came a longing that was pain. But as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The box must have leaked before it was lost. Chapter Reflection. The traveller survives the moorlocks and the burning wood, but weenah is lost in the confusion. Grief, exhaustion and necessity pull him onward toward the

3:00:40window. Chapter 13 returns to the place where the journey began, offering the machine at last, but only inside a trap designed by enemies who understand his desire to escape. The Time Machine. By H. Gene Wells. Chapter 13. The Trape of the Whitesfinks. Listening note. Morning restores the beautiful surface, but the traveller can no longer see innocence without the system beneath it. The open sphinx offers his machine as bait. Darkness, touch, and a single missing box of matches compress the conflict into seconds as the moorlocks close around him. 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

3:01:45magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and dither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weiner and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the underworld. I understood now what all the beauty of the overworld people covered. Very pleasant was their day as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same. I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchward. It had attained its hopes to come to this at last. Once life and property must have reached almost absolute safety.

3:02:50The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toyler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. It is a law of nature we overlook that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers. So as I see it, the upper world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness and the underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection, absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of an underworld,

3:03:55however 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 need 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 802701. It may be as wrong an explanation as mortal it could invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me and as that I give it to you. After the fatigues, excitement 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.

3:04:57Catching myself at that, I took my own hint and spreading myself out upon the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep. I awoke a little before sun setting. I now felt safe against being caught napping by the moorlocks and stretching myself I came on down the hill towards the whites' finks. I had my crowbar in one hand and the other hand played with the matches in my pocket. And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal of the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into grooves. At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter. Within was a small apartment and on a raised place in the corner of this was the time machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here, after all my elaborate preparations for the siege of the whites' finks was a meek surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry

3:05:58not 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. I was surprised to find it had been carefully alled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the moorlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose. Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the dark, trapped. So the moorlocks thought, at that I chuckled gleefully. I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me. Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers and depart then like a ghost.

3:07:01But I had overlooked one little thing. The matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box. You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little broots were close upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with the levers and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then came one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight against their persistent fingers for my levers and at the same time feel for the studs over which these fitted. One, indeed, they almost got away from me. As it slipped from my hand, I had to but in the dark with my head I could hear the moorlocks skull ring to recover it. It was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest. I think this last scramble. But at last the lever was fixed and pulled over. The clinging hand slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself in the same gray light and

3:08:05tumult I have already described. Chapter Reflection The machine's levers return just in time and the traveller escapes by moving farther into time rather than home. His last theory of Eloy and Moorlock is offered humbly as an interpretation not a final scientific law. Chapter 14 carries him beyond human history to a dying earth under a swollen fading sun. The Time Machine By H. Jean Wells Chapter 14 The Further Vision Chapter 14 Listening Note The traveller overshoots every human future and reaches a shoreline under a red, motionless sun. Vast crabs and a darkening sky replace social speculation with cosmic scale. Wells makes deep time almost silent, stripping away civilization, familiar species, and finally the expectation that earth itself will remain hospitable.

3:09:07Chapter 14 I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time traveling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite inheeding how I went and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records days and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now instead of reversing the levers I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the second hand of a watch into futurity. As I drove on a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating grainess grew darker then though I was still traveling with prodigious velocity, the blinking succession of day and night which was usually indicative of a

3:10:10slower pace, returned and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower and so did the passage of the sun across the sky until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared, for the sun had ceased to set, it simply rose and fell in the west and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower had given place to creeping points of light. At last, sometime before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly

3:11:12again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands until the thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere misd upon its scale. Still slower until the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the time machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North eastward it was inky black and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless and southeastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet wear cut by the horizon lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless.

3:12:17The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their southeastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves, plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight. The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the southwest to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the W.A.N. sky. There were no breakers and no waves for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. An along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick encrustation of salt pink under the lured sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience

3:13:18of mountaineering and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now. Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly ghost landing and fluttering up into the sky and circling disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round me again I saw that quite near what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly. It's big claws swaying, it's long and tenny like Carter's whips, waving and feeling and it stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front. Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses and a greenish encrustation blotched it here and there.

3:14:19I could see the many palpire of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved. As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand but in a moment it returned and almost immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this and caught something thread-like. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful quam I turned and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite and its vast ungainly claws smeared with an algal slime were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there in the somber light

3:15:23among the foliated sheets of intense green. I cannot convey the sense of a bomb-enable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt-dead sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous looking green of the likeness plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs, all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years and there was the same red sun, a little larger, a little dullar, the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westward sky I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon. So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strained fascination the sun grow larger and dullar in the westward sky and the life of the old earth ever way. At last, more

3:16:25than thirty million years hence, the huge red hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, safe for its livid green liverwats and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came edging down. To the northeastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses farther out, but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen. I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea.

3:17:28The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied, I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little. Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed, that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared a gas to this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet mercury was passing across the sun's disc. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near to the earth. The darkness grew a pace, a cold wind began to blow in

3:18:34freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleeding of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives. All that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes, and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment, the pale stars alone were visible. All else was railous of security. The sky was absolutely black.

3:19:36A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smoke to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused, I saw again the moving thing upon the shell. There was no mistake now that it was a moving thing against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or it may be bigger and tentacles trailed down from it, it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting, but a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle. Chapter Reflection

3:20:38A final leap reveals cold, eclips like darkness and a barely moving world. The vision is not conquest, but mortality extended to the planet. Chapter 15 reverses the machine toward home, compressing ages once more until the laboratory, the dinner guests, and the ordinary present become strange forms of safety. The Time Machine By H. Jean Wells Chapter 15, the Time Travelers Return Listening Note The return journey runs the earlier transformations backward, bleak coast becomes green world, ruined landscape becomes familiar ground, and a moving house rebuilt itself around the machine. Wells uses reverse motion to remind us that home is only one brief arrangement of matter inside a much longer history. So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed,

3:21:42the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom, the fluctuating contours of the land-ebt and flowed. The hand spun backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize our own pretty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting point, the night and day flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently now I slowed the mechanism down. I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, traveling as it seemed to me like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute

3:22:47when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hylia for a moment, but he passed like a flash. Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off the thing very shakily and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the whole thing have been a dream. And yet, not exactly, the thing had started from the southeast corner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the northwest against the wall

3:23:50where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the white sphinx into which the mollocks had carried my machine. For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling sorely begrimmed. I saw the pole mall Gazette on the table by the door. I found the date was indeed today, and looking at the timepiece saw the hour was almost eight o'clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated, I felt so sick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat and opened the door on you. You know the rest. I washed and dined, and now I am telling you the story. Chapter Reflection The machine stops in the laboratory only hours after it departed, though the Traveller carries days of injury and memory. He now understands the disordered room and his own entrance

3:24:54at dinner. Chapter 16 returns control of the story to the skeptical listeners, who must decide what testimony, damage, and two unfamiliar flowers can prove. The Time Machine By H. Jean Wells Chapter 16 After the Story Listening Note The dinner table becomes a courtroom without a verdict. The time Traveller allows his guests to call the account a lie, prophecy, or dream, yet the battered machine and wiener's flowers resist easy dismissal. Wells balances the editor's mockery against the narrator's desire to test the claim for himself. I know, he said, after a pause, that all this will be absolutely incredible to you, but to me the one incredible thing is that I am here tonight in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures. He looked at the medical man, no. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie or a prophecy.

3:26:01Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it? He took up his pipe and began, in his older custom manner, to tap with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the time Traveller's face and looked round at his audience. They were in the dark and little spots of colour swam before them. The medical man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar, the sixth. The journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were motionless. The editor stood up with a sigh.

3:27:04What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories, he said, putting his hand on the time Traveller's shoulder. You don't believe it. Well, I thought not. The time Traveller turned to us. Where are the matches, he said. He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. To tell you the truth, I hardly believe it myself. And yet, his eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe and I saw he was looking at some half-heeled scars on his knuckles. The medical man rose, came to the lamp and examined the flowers. The gynecineum's odd, he said. The psychologist lent forward to see, holding out his hand for a specimen. I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one, said the journalist. How shall we get home? Plenty of cabs at the station said the psychologist.

3:28:10It's a curious thing, said the medical man, but I certainly don't know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them? The time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly, certainly not. Where did you really get them, said the medical man? The time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. They were put into my pocket by Weiner when I traveled into time. He stared round the room. I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a time machine or a model of a time machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times, but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from?

3:29:11I must look at that machine. If there is one, he caught up the lamp swiftly and carried it, flaring red through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, an asque, a thing of brass, ebony, ivory and translucent glimmering quarts. Solid to the touch for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it, and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts and one rail bent to eye. The time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench and ran his hand along the damaged rail. It's all right now, he said. The story I told you was true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in the cold. He took up the lamp, and in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking room. He came into the hall with us and helped the editor on with his

3:30:12coat. The medical man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork at which he laughed hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling goodnight. I shared a cab with the editor. He thought the tale of Gordy Lie. For my own part one was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the time machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial looking mass swayed like a bow shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days

3:31:16when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The time Traveller met me in the smoking room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me and gave me an elbow to shake. I'm frightfully busy, said he with that thing in there. But is it not some hoax? I said, Do you really travel through time? Really and truly I do. And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. I only want half an hour, he said. I know why you came and it's awfully good of you. There's some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time traveling up to the hilt, specimens and all. If you'll forgive my leaving you now? I consented, hardly comprehending them the full

3:32:20import of his words and he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair and took up a daily paper. What was he going to do before lunch time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the time Traveller. As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. The time traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, in distinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment, a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct,

3:33:20but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The time machine had gone. Say for a subsiding stir of dust the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pain of the skylight had apparently just been blown in. I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring the door into the garden opened and the man servant appeared. We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. Has Mr. Gone Out That Way said I? No, Sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here. At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richards and I stayed on waiting for the time traveller, waiting for the second, perhaps still strange a story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.

3:34:27The time traveller vanished three years ago. And as everybody knows now, he has never returned. Chapter Reflection The narrator finds the traveller preparing for another brief expedition and watches him vanish again. This time the machine does not return on schedule and three years pass without explanation. The epilogue keeps the mystery open, asking where he went while shifting attention from prediction to the meaning of the flowers he left behind. The Time Machine By H. Gene Wells Chapter 17 Epilogue Listening Note The closing page refuses to turn the journey into a sold case. The narrator imagines many possible destinations but possesses only two brittle flowers as evidence. Their survival matters because they carry no mechanical explanation. They suggest that tenderness and gratitude endured

3:35:28in a future the traveller otherwise described bleakly. One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past and fell among the blood-drinking hairy savages of the age of unpolished stone into the abyss of the Cretaceous Sea or among the Grotesque's Orients the huge reptilian broods of the Jurassic Times. He may even now if I may use the phrase be wandering on some pleasiasaurus haunted oolitic coral reef or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward into one of the nearer ages in which men are still men but with the riddles of our own time answered and its worrisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time. I say, for my own part.

3:36:29He, I know, for the question had been discussed among us long before the time machine was made, thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank is a vast ignorance littered a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers, shriveled now and brown and flat and brittle to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man. Chapter Reflection The time traveler remains absent and the future remains uncertain. Welles ends by setting human pessimism beside a small act of care, allowing the flowers to challenge the grand theories built around them. The machine opened time as a scientific dimension,

3:37:33but the novel closes on the modest question of what qualities may still be worth carrying across it.