Chapter 3 (The Time Machine)

01CHAPTER III.

02I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the time machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop.

03There 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 sound enough.

04I 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.

05It was at ten o'clock today that the first of all time machines began its career.

06I 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.

07I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

08I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second.

09I seemed to reel.

10I felt a nightmare sensation of falling, and looking around, I saw the laboratory exactly as before.

11Had anything happened?

12For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me.

13Then I noted the clock.

14A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten.

15Now it was nearly half past three.

16I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

17The laboratory got hazy and went dark.

18Mrs.

19Wachet came in and walked, apparently, without seeing me, towards the garden door.

20I 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.

21I pressed the lever over to its extreme position.

22The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.

23The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter.

24Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.

25An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

26I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time-traveling.

27They are excessively unpleasant.

28There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback, of a helpless, headlong motion.

29I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.

30As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing.

31The 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 marking a day.

32I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air.

33I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things.

34The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.

35The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.

36Then, 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.

37Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grayness.

38The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color, like that of early twilight.

39The 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.

40The landscape was misty and vague.

41I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me gray and dim.

42I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green.

43They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away.

44I saw huge buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dreams.

45The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and flowing under my eyes.

46The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.

47Presently, 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.

48The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now.

49They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration.

50I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account.

51But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so, with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity.

52At first, I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations.

53But 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.

54What strange developments of humanity!

55What 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.

56I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time.

57And yet, it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.

58I saw a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there, without any wintry intermission.

59Even through the veil of my confusion, the earth seemed very fair.

60And so, my mind came round to the business of stopping.

61The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied.

62So long as I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.

63I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances.

64But 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.

65This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine.

66But then, I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk, one of the risks a man has got to take.

67Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.

68The 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 nerve.

69I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith.

70Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and, incontinently, the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.

71There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears.

72I may have been stunned for a moment.

73A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on a soft turf in front of the over-set machine.

74Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone.

75I looked round me.

76I 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 hailstones.

77The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke.

78In a moment I was wet to the skin.

79Fine hospitality, said I, to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.

80Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet.

81I stood up and looked round me.

82A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour.

83But all else of the world was invisible.

84My sensations would be hard to describe.

85As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly.

86It was very large, for a silver birch tree touched its shoulder.

87It was of a white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx.

88But the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover.

89The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze and was thick with verdigris.

90It chanced that the face was towards me.

91The sightless eyes seemed to watch me.

92There was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.

93It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease.

94I stood looking at it for a little space, half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour.

95It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner.

96At 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.

97I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me.

98What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?

99What might not have happened to men?

100What if cruelty had grown into a common passion?

101What if, in this interval, the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?

102I might seem some old-world, savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.

103Already 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.

104I was seized with a panic fear.

105I turned frantically to the time-machine and strove hard to readjust it.

106As I did so, the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm.

107The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished, like the trailing garments of a ghost.

108Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness.

109The 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.

110I felt naked in a strange world.

111I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop.

112My fear grew to frenzy.

113I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again, grappling fiercely, wrist and knee with the machine.

114It gave under my desperate onset and turned over.

115It struck my chin violently.

116One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude to mount again.

117But with this recovery of a prompt retreat, my courage recovered.

118I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future.

119In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes.

120They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.

121Then I heard voices approaching me.

122Coming through the bushes by the white sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running.

123One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine.

124He was a slight creature, perhaps four feet high, clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt.

125Sandals, or buskins, I could not clearly distinguish which, were on his feet.

126His legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare.

127Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.

128He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail.

129His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much.

130At the sight of him, I suddenly regained confidence.

131I took my hands from the machine.

132End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3 End of Chapter 3