apologize,’ he said. ‘I was simply starving. I’ve had a most
amazing time.’ He reached out his hand for a cigar, and
cut the end. ‘But come into the smoking-room. It’s too
long a story to tell over greasy plates.’ And ringing the bell
in passing, he led the way into the adjoining room.
‘You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the
machine?’ he said to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and
naming the three new guests.
‘But the thing’s a mere paradox,’ said the Editor.
‘I can’t argue to-night. I don’t mind telling you the
story, but I can’t argue. I will,’ he went on, ‘tell you the
story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you
must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly.
Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It’s true—every
word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at four
o’clock, and since then … I’ve lived eight days … such
days as no human being ever lived before! I’m nearly worn The Time Machine
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out, but I shan’t sleep till I’ve told this thing over to you.
Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions! Is it agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed
‘Agreed.’ And with that the Time Traveller began his
story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first,
and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more
animated. In writing it down I feel with only too much
keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink —and, above all,
my own inadequacy—to express its quality. You read, I
will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the
speaker’s white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little
lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot
know how his expression followed the turns of his story!
Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the
smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of
the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the
knees downward were illuminated. At first we glanced
now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do
that, and looked only at the Time Traveller’s face. The Time Machine
26 of 148
III
‘I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of
the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself,
incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little
travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked,
and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it’s sound enough. I
expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the
putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the
nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had
to get remade; so that the thing was not complete until
this morning. It was at ten o’clock to-day that the first of
all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap,
tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the
quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide
who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder
at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting
lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other,
pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I
seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and,
looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had
anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my
intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A The Time Machine
27 of 148
moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or
so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!
‘I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever
with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory
got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and
walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden
door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the
place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like
a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position.
The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in
another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew
faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
‘I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of
time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a
feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a
helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace,
night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The
dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall
away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across
the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute The Time Machine
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marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been
destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim
impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast
to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail
that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling
succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to
the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the
moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to
full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently,
as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night
and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky
took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous
color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a
streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter
fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save
now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
‘The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the
hill-side upon which this house now stands, and the
shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees growing
and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now
green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw
huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams.
The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting
and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials The Time Machine
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that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.
Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down,
from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that
consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and
minute by minute the white snow flashed across the
world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief
green of spring.
‘The unpleasant sensations of the start were less
poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of
hysterical exhilaration. I remarked indeed a clumsy
swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to
account. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so
with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself
into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce
thought of anything but these new sensations. But
presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my
mind—a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread—
until at last they took complete possession of me. What
strange developments of humanity, what wonderful
advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought,
might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim
elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I
saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more
massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it The Time Machine
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seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green
flow up the hill-side, and remain there, without any
wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my
confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind
came round to the business of stopping,
‘The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding
some substance in the space which I, or the machine,
occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through
time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak,
attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the
interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop
involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule,
into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms
into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a
profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching
explosion —would result, and blow myself and my
apparatus out of all possible dimensions—into the
Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and
again while I was making the machine; but then I had
cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk— one of the
risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I
no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that
insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the
sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the The Time Machine
31 of 148
feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my
nerve. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a
gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an
impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently
the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong
through the air.
‘There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I
may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was
hissing round me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of
the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but
presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was
gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a
little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron
bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple
blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of
the hail-stones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a
cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground like
smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. ‘Fine
hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has travelled
innumerable years to see you.’
‘Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I
stood up and looked round me. A colossal figure, carved
apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly The Time Machine
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beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour.
But all else of the world was invisible.
‘My sensations would be hard to describe. As the
columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more
distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched
its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something
like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being
carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed
to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze,
and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was
towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there
was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly
weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion
of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a
minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and
to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At
last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the
hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky was
lightening with the promise of the Sun.
‘I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and
the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me.
What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether
withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What The Time Machine
33 of 148
if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had
developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and
overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world
savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for
our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently
slain.
‘Already I saw other vast shapes—huge buildings with
intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hill-side
dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I
was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the
Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so
the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The
grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like the
trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue
of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud
whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about me
stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the
thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the unmelted
hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked in a
strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear
air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My
fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth,
and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the
machine. It gave under my desperate onset and turned The Time Machine
34 of 148
over. It struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle,
the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude
to mount again.
‘But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage
recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this
world of the remote future. In a circular opening, high up
in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures
clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces
were directed towards me.
‘Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through
the bushes by the White Sphinx were the heads and
shoulders of men running. One of these emerged in a
pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I
stood with my machine. He was a slight creature—perhaps
four feet high—clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist
with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins—I could not clearly
distinguish which—were on his feet; his legs were bare to
the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed
for the first time how warm the air was.
