worlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as I say, I had
four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched
mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was
sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard The Time Machine
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the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings
about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being
gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at
my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures
examining me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden
realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and
doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I
shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away,
and then I could feel them approaching me again. They
clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to
each other. I shivered violently, and shouted again rather
discordantly. This time they were not so seriously alarmed,
and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at
me. I will confess I was horribly frightened. I determined
to strike another match and escape under the protection of
its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of
paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the
narrow tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my
light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the
Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering
like the rain, as they hurried after me.
‘In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and
there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me
back. I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled The Time Machine
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faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman
they looked—those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless,
pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness and
bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I
retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I
struck my third. It had almost burned through when I
reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the
edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me
giddy. Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and,
as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind, and I was
violently tugged backward. I lit my last match … and it
incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the
climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged
myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily
clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and
blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed
me for some way, and wellnigh secured my boot as a
trophy.
‘That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last
twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I
had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold. The last
few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness.
Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of
falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth The Time Machine
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somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding
sunlight. I fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and
clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears,
and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then, for a time,
I was insensible. The Time Machine
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VII
‘Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before.
Hitherto, except during my night’s anguish at the loss of
the Time Machine, I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate
escape, but that hope was staggered by these new
discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself
impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and
by some unknown forces which I had only to understand
to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in
the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something
inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before,
I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my
concern was with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I
felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon
him soon.
‘The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the
darkness of the new moon. Weena had put this into my
head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the
Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem
to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The
moon was on the wane: each night there was a longer
interval of darkness. And I now understood to some slight The Time Machine
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degree at least the reason of the fear of the little Upper-
world people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul
villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new
moon. I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis
was all wrong. The Upper-world people might once have
been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their
mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away.
The two species that had resulted from the evolution of
man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at,
an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the
Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.
They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the
Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had
come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the
Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained
them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival
of an old habit of service. They did it as a standing horse
paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in
sport: because ancient and departed necessities had
impressed it on the organism. But, clearly, the old order
was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate
ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of
generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of
the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was The Time Machine
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coming back changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn
one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted
with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head the
memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-world. It
seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as
it were by the current of my meditations, but coming in
almost like a question from outside. I tried to recall the
form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I
could not tell what it was at the time.
‘Still, however helpless the little people in the presence
of their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I
came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human
race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its
terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further
delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness
where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could
face this strange world with some of that confidence I had
lost in realizing to what creatures night by night I lay
exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was
secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how
they must already have examined me.
‘I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of
the Thames, but found nothing that commended itself to
my mind as inaccessible. All the buildings and trees The Time Machine
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seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as the
Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall
pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the
polished gleam of its walls came back to my memory; and
in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my
shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The
distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it
must have been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the place
on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively
diminished. In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was
loose, and a nail was working through the sole—they were
comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors—so that I was
lame. And it was already long past sunset when I came in
sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale
yellow of the sky.
‘Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to
carry her, but after a while she desired me to let her down,
and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off
on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets. My
pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for
floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that
purpose. And that reminds me! In changing my jacket I
found …’ The Time Machine
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The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his
pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not
unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table.
Then he resumed his narrative.
‘As the hush of evening crept over the world and we
proceeded over the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena
grew tired and wanted to return to the house of grey
stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace
of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her
understand that we were seeking a refuge there from her
Fear. You know that great pause that comes upon things
before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me
there is always an air of expectation about that evening
stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a
few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that
night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that
darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened.
I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground
beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the
Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and
waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they
would receive my invasion of their burrows as a
declaration of war. And why had they taken my Time
Machine? The Time Machine
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‘So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened
into night. The clear blue of the distance faded, and one
star after another came out. The ground grew dim and the
trees black. Weena’s fears and her fatigue grew upon her. I
took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her.
Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms
round my neck, and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her
face against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope
into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked
into a little river. This I waded, and went up the opposite
side of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by
a statue—a Faun, or some such figure, MINUS the head.
Here too were acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the
Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and the darker
hours before the old moon rose were still to come.
‘From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood
spreading wide and black before me. I hesitated at this. I
could see no end to it, either to the right or the left.
Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were very sore—I
carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted,
and sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the
Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my
direction. I looked into the thickness of the wood and
thought of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of The Time Machine
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branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were
there no other lurking danger—a danger I did not care to
let my imagination loose upon—there would still be all
the roots to stumble over and the tree-boles to strike
against.
‘I was very tired, too, after the excitements of the day;
so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the
night upon the open hill.
‘Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully
wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait
for the moonrise. The hill-side was quiet and deserted, but
from the black of the wood there came now and then a
stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the
night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly
comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had
gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which
is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long
since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the
Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered
streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it)
was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even
more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all
these scintillating points of light one bright planet shone
kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend. The Time Machine
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‘Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own
troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of
their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift
of their movements out of the unknown past into the
unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle
that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had
that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I
had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the
activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the
nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere
memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of
existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had
forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of
which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear
that was between the two species, and for the first time,
with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what
the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I
looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white
and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the
thought.
‘Through that long night I held my mind off the
Morlocks as well as I could, and whiled away the time by
trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations
