in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear, except for The Time Machine
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a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as
my vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky,
like the reflection of some colourless fire, and the old
moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And close behind,
and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale
at first, and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks
had approached us. Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill
that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it almost
seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I stood
up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the
ankle and painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took
off my shoes, and flung them away.
‘I awakened Weena, and we went down into the
wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and
forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to break our
fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and
dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing
in nature as the night. And then I thought once more of
the meat that I had seen. I felt assured now of what it was,
and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble
rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some
time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks’ food
had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like
vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and The Time Machine
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exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any
monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-
seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men——! I
tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all,
they were less human and more remote than our cannibal
ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And the
intelligence that would have made this state of things a
torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These
Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks
preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to the breeding
of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
‘Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that
was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous
punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content
to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-
man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse,
and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to
him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched
aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was
impossible. However great their intellectual degradation,
the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to
claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in
their degradation and their Fear. The Time Machine
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‘I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I
should pursue. My first was to secure some safe place of
refuge, and to make myself such arms of metal or stone as
I could contrive. That necessity was immediate. In the
next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so that
I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing,
I knew, would be more efficient against these Morlocks.
Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open
the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx. I had in
mind a battering ram. I had a persuasion that if I could
enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I
should discover the Time Machine and escape. I could not
imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far
away. Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own
time. And turning such schemes over in my mind I
pursued our way towards the building which my fancy
had chosen as our dwelling. The Time Machine
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VIII
‘I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we
approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.
Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and
great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the
corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy
down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I
was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I
judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I
thought then—though I never followed up the thought—
of what might have happened, or might be happening, to
the living things in the sea.
‘The material of the Palace proved on examination to
be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an
inscription in some unknown character. I thought, rather
foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but
I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never
entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more
human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so
human.
‘Within the big valves of the door—which were open
and broken—we found, instead of the customary hall, a The Time Machine
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long gallery lit by many side windows. At the first glance I
was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with
dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was
shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived,
standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what
was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognized
by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after
the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the upper
bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place,
where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof,
the thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery
was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My
museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the
side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and
clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass
cases of our own time. But they must have been air-tight
to judge from the fair preservation of some of their
contents.
‘Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day
South Kensington! Here, apparently, was the
Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid array of
fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of
decay that had been staved off for a time, and had,
through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-The Time Machine
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nine hundredths of its force, was nevertheless, with
extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work again
upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the
little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or
threaded in strings upon reeds. And the cases had in some
instances been bodily removed—by the Morlocks as I
judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust
deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a
sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently
came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand
and stood beside me.
‘And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient
monument of an intellectual age, that I gave no thought to
the possibilities it presented. Even my preoccupation about
the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
‘To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of
Green Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery
of Palaeontology; possibly historical galleries; it might be,
even a library! To me, at least in my present
circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than
this spectacle of oldtime geology in decay. Exploring, I
found another short gallery running transversely to the
first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the
sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on The Time Machine
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gunpowder. But I could find no saltpeter; indeed, no
nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages
ago. Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train
of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of that gallery,
though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I
saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy,
and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel
to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had
been devoted to natural history, but everything had long
since passed out of recognition. A few shrivelled and
blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals,
desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a
brown dust of departed plants: that was all! I was sorry for
that, because I should have been glad to trace the patent
readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature
had been attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply
colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it
running downward at a slight angle from the end at which
I entered. At intervals white globes hung from the
ceiling—many of them cracked and smashed—which
suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit.
Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side
of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly
corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly The Time Machine
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complete. You know I have a certain weakness for
mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the
more so as for the most part they had the interest of
puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what
they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I
should find myself in possession of powers that might be of
use against the Morlocks.
‘Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So
suddenly that she startled me. Had it not been for her I do
not think I should have noticed that the floor of the
gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may be, of course, that
the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into
the side of a hill.-ED.] The end I had come in at was quite
above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As
you went down the length, the ground came up against
these windows, until at last there was a pit like the ‘area’ of
a London house before each, and only a narrow line of
daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about
the machines, and had been too intent upon them to
notice the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena’s
increasing apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw
that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness. I
hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the
dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further The Time Machine
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away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a
number of small narrow footprints. My sense of the
immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt
that I was wasting my time in the academic examination
of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far
advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon,
no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then down
in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar
pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the
well.
‘I took Weena’s hand. Then, struck with a sudden idea,
I left her and turned to a machine from which projected a
lever not unlike those in a signal-box. Clambering upon
the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my
weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in the
central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength
of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute’s
strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more
than sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock skull I might
encounter. And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or
so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing
one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow,
to feel any humanity in the things. Only my disinclination
to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I began to slake The Time Machine
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my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer,
restrained me from going straight down the gallery and
killing the brutes I heard.
‘Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I
went out of that gallery and into another and still larger
one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military
chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred
rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized
as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since
dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left
them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked
metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a
literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the
futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck
me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour
to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.
At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS and my own
seventeen papers upon physical optics.
‘Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what
may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry. And
here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at
one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well
preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at The Time Machine
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last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of
matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly
good. They were not even damp. I turned to Weena.
‘Dance,’ I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had
a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared.
And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft
carpeting of dust, to Weena’s huge delight, I solemnly
performed a kind of composite dance, whistling THE
LAND OF THE LEAL as cheerfully as I could. In part it
was a modest CANCAN, in part a step dance, in part a
skirt-dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part
original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
‘Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have
