Chapter 5 (The Time Machine)

01V.

02As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the northeast.

03The bright little figure ceased to move about below.

04A noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night.

05I determined to descend and find where I could sleep.

06I looked for the building I knew.

07Then 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.

08I could see the silver birch against it.

09There was a tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there was the little lawn.

10I looked at the lawn again.

11A queer doubt chilled my complacency.

12No, said I stoutly to myself, that was not the lawn.

13But it was the lawn, for the white leprous face of the sphinx was towards it.

14Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to me?

15But you cannot.

16The time machine was gone.

17At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.

18The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation.

19I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing.

20In another moment I was in a passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope.

21Once I fell headlong and cut my face.

22I lost no time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin.

23All the time I ran I was saying to myself, they have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes, out of the way.

24Nevertheless, I ran with all my might.

25All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach.

26My breath came with pain.

27I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hill-crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes.

28And I am not a young man.

29I cursed aloud as I ran, at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby.

30I cried aloud, and none answered.

31Not a creature seemed to be stirring in the moonlit world.

32When I reached the lawn, my worst fears were realized.

33Not a trace of the thing was to be seen.

34I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes.

35I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair.

36Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous in the light of the rising moon.

37It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.

38I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and intellectual inadequacy.

39That is what dismayed me.

40The sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished.

41Yet, for one thing, I felt assured.

42Unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time.

43The attachment of the levers, I will show you the method later, prevented anyone from tampering with it in that way when they were removed.

44It had moved and was hid only in space.

45But then where could it be?

46I think I must have had a kind of frenzy.

47I remember running violently in and 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.

48I remember, too, late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist until my knuckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs.

49Then, sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of stone.

50The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted.

51I slipped on the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables, almost breaking my shin.

52I lit a match, and went on past the dusty curtains, of which I have told you.

53Then I found a second great hall, covered with cushions, upon which, perhaps, a score or so of the little people were sleeping.

54I have no doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises, and the splutter and flare of a match.

55For they had forgotten about matches.

56"'Where is my time-machine?' I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together.

57I must have been very queer to them.

58Some laughed.

59Most of them looked sorely frightened.

60When I saw them standing round me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as it was possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying to revive the sensation of fear.

61For, reasoning from their daylight behavior, I thought that fear must be forgotten.

62Abruptly, 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.

63I heard cries of terror, and their little feet running and stumbling this way and that.

64I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky.

65I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me.

66I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind, a strange animal in an unknown world.

67I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and fate.

68I 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 absolute wretchedness.

69I had nothing left but misery.

70Then 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.

71I 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.

72Then things came clear in my mind.

73With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my circumstances fairly in the face.

74I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself.

75Suppose the worst, I said.

76Suppose the machine altogether lost, perhaps destroyed.

77It behooves me to be calm 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 make another.

78That would be my only hope, perhaps, but better than despair.

79And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious world.

80But, probably, the machine had only been taken away.

81Still, I must be calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or cunning.

82And with that, I scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering where I could bathe.

83I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled.

84The freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness.

85I had exhausted my emotion.

86Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself wondering at my intense excitement overnight.

87I made a careful examination of the ground about the little lawn.

88I wasted some time in futile questionings, conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as came by.

89They all failed to understand my gestures.

90Some were simply stolid.

91Some thought it was a jest and laughed at me.

92I had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty, laughing faces.

93It 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.

94The turf gave better counsel.

95I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of the Sphinx and the marks of my feet, where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine.

96There were other signs of removal about, with queer, narrow footprints, like those I could imagine made by a sloth.

97This directed my closer attention to the pedestal.

98It was, as I think I have said, of bronze.

99It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep-framed panels on either side.

100I went and rapped at these.

101The pedestal was hollow.

102Examining the panels with care, I found them discontinuous with the frames.

103There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as I supposed, opened from within.

104One thing was clear enough to my mind.

105It took no very great mental effort to infer that my time-machine was inside that pedestal.

106But how it got there was a different problem.

107I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me.

108I turned, smiling to them, and beckoned them to me.

109They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it.

110But at my first gesture towards this, they behaved very oddly.

111I don't know how to convey their expression to you.

112Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman.

113It is how she would look.

114They went off, as if they had received the last possible insult.

115I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result.

116Somehow his manner made me feel ashamed of myself.

117But, as you know, I wanted the time-machine, and I tried him once more.

118As he turned off, like the others, my temper got the better of me.

119In 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.

120Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.

121But I was not beaten yet.

122I banged with my fist at the bronze panels.

123I thought I heard something stir inside.

124To be explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle, but I must have been mistaken.

125Then I got a big pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations, and the vertigris came off in powdery flakes.

126The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it.

127I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me.

128At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place.

129But I was too restless to watch long.

130I am too accidental for a long vigil.

131I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours, that is another matter.

132I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the hill again.

133Patience, said I to myself.

134If you want your machine again, you must leave that Sphinx alone.

135If 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.

136To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless.

137That way lies monomania.

138Face this world.

139Learn its ways.

140Watch it.

141Be careful of two hasty guesses at its meaning.

142In the end, you will find clues to it all." Then, suddenly, the humor of the situation came into my mind.

143The 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.

144I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.

145Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself.

146I laughed aloud.

147Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me.

148It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze.

149Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance.

150I 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.

151I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there.

152Either I missed some subtle point, or their language was excessively simple, almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs.

153There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language.

154Their sentences were usually simple, and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.

155I 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.

156Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, tethered me in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.

157So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant richness as the Thames Valley.

158From 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.

159Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond the land rose into blue, undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky.

160A peculiar feature which presently attracted my attention was the presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to me, of a very great depth.

161One lay by the path up the hill, which I had followed during my first walk.

162Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, currents, curiously wrought, and protected by a little cupula from the rain.

163Sitting 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.

164But in all of them I heard a certain sound—a thud-thud-thud, like the beating of some big engine.

165And I discovered, from the flaring of the matches, that a steady current of air set down the shafts.

166Further, 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.

167After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers, standing here and there upon the slopes.

168For above them there was often just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun-scorched beach.

169Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine.

170I was at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people.

171It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.

172And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance, and the like conveyances during my time in this real future.

173In 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.

174But 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 traveller amid such realities as I found here.

175Conceive the tale of London, which a negro, fresh from central Africa, would take back to his tribe.

176What 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?

177Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him.

178And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe?

179Then think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the golden age!

180I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort.

181But save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.

182In the matter of sepulchre, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs.

183But it occurred to me that possibly there might be cemeteries, or crematoria, somewhere beyond the range of my explorings.

184This, again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point.

185The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me still more, that, aged and infirm among these people, there were none.

186I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure.

187Yet I could think of no other.

188Let me put my difficulties.

189The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining halls and sleeping apartments.

190I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind.

191Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork.

192Somehow such things must be made.

193And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency.

194There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them.

195They 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.

196I could not see how things were kept going.

197Then again, about the time-machine.

198Something, I knew not what, had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the white sphinx.

199Why?

200For the life of me I could not imagine.

201Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars.

202I felt I lacked a clue.

203I felt—how shall I put it?

204Suppose 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.

205Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of eight hundred and two thousand seven hundred and one presented itself to me.

206That day, too, I made a friend of a sort.

207It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with a cramp and began drifting downstream.

208The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer.

209It 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 weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.

210When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and wading in at a point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to land.

211A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her.

212I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any gratitude from her.

213In that, however, I was wrong.

214This happened in the morning.

215In the afternoon, I met my little woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my center from an exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers, evidently made for me and me alone.

216The thing took my imagination.

217Very possibly, I had been feeling desolate.

218At any rate, I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift.

219We were soon seated together in a little stone arbor, engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles.

220The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a child's might have done.

221We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands.

222I did the same to hers.

223Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough.

224That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended, as I will tell you.

225She was exactly like a child.

226She wanted to be with me always.

227She 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.

228But the problems of the world had to be mastered.

229I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.

230Yet her distress when I left her was very great.

231Her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion.

232Nevertheless, she was, somehow, a great comfort.

233I thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me.

234Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her.

235Nor, until it was too late, did I clearly understand what she was to me.

236For, 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 Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home.

237And I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.

238It was from her, too, that I learned that fear had not yet left the world.

239She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me.

240For once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them.

241But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things.

242Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful.

243It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing.

244I discovered then, among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept in droves.

245To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult of apprehension.

246I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping alone within doors, after dark.

247Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena's distress, I insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.

248It troubled her greatly, but in the end, her odd affection for me triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm.

249But my story slips away from me as I speak of her.

250It must have been the night before her rescue that I was awakened about dawn.

251I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps.

252I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some grayish animal had just rushed out of the chamber.

253I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable.

254It was that dim gray hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colorless and clear-cut, and yet unreal.

255I got up and went down into the great hall, and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace.

256I thought I would make a virtue of necessity and see the sunrise.

257The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light.

258The bushes were inky black, the ground a somber gray, the sky colorless and cheerless.

259And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts.

260There were several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures.

261Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body.

262They moved hastily.

263I did not see what became of them.

264It seemed that they vanished among the bushes.

265The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand.

266I was feeling that, chill, uncertain, early morning feeling you may have known.

267I doubted my eyes.

268As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and its vivid coloring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view keenly, but I saw no vestige of my white figures.

269They were mere creatures of the half-light.

270They must have been ghosts, I said.

271I wonder whence they dated.

272For a queer notion of Grant Allen's came into my head and amused me.

273If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them.

274On that theory, they would have grown innumerable some eight hundred thousand years since, and it was no great wonder to see four at once.

275But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head.

276I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the time machine.

277But Weena was a pleasant substitute.

278Yet, all the same, they were soon destined to take far deadlier possession of my mind.

279I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this golden age.

280I cannot account for it.

281It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.

282It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future.

283But 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.

284As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy.

285And it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate.

286Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.

287Well, 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.

288Clabbering among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone.

289By contrast, with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me.

290I entered it groping, for the change from light to blackness made spots of color swim before me.

291Suddenly I halted spellbound.

292A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness.

293The old, instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me.

294I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs.

295I was afraid to turn.

296Then 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.

297Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke.

298I will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled.

299I put out my hand and touched something soft.

300At once the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me.

301I turned with my heart in my mouth and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me.

302It blundered against a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry.

303My impression of it is, of course, imperfect.

304But I know it was a dull white, and had strange, large, grayish-red eyes.

305Also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.

306But, as I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly.

307I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours, or only with its forearms held very low.

308After an instant's pause, I followed it into the second heap of ruins.

309I 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.

310A sudden thought came to me.

311Could this thing have vanished down the shaft?

312I lit a match, and looking down, I saw a small white, moving creature, with large, bright eyes, which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated.

313It made me shudder.

314It was so like a human spider.

315It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first time a number of metal foot and hand-rests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft.

316Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped, and when I lit another the little monster had disappeared.

317I do not know how long I sat peering down that well.

318It was not for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was human.

319But gradually the truth dawned on me.

320That man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals.

321That 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 heir to all the ages.

322I thought of the flickering pillars, and of my theory of an underground ventilation.

323I began to suspect their true import.

324And what, I wondered, was this lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization?

325How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful upper worlders?

326And what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft?

327I 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.

328And withal, I was absolutely afraid to go.

329As I hesitated, two of the beautiful upper world people came running in their amorous sport across the daylight in the shadow.

330The male pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.

331They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned pillar, peering down the well.

332Apparently, 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, and turned away.

333But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse them.

334I tried them again about the well, and again I failed.

335So presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what I could get from her.

336But my mind was already in revolution.

337My guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment.

338I had now a clue 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.

339And, very vaguely, there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.

340Here was the new view.

341Plainly, this second species of man was subterranean.

342There were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long-continued underground habit.

343In the first place there was the bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the dark—the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance.

344Then those large eyes, with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things—witness the owl and the cat.

345And last of all, that evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty, yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the light—all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the retina.

346Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and these tunnelling were the habitat of the new race.

347The presence of ventilating shafts and wells along the hill-slopes—everywhere, in fact, except along the river valley—showed how universal were its ramifications.

348What's so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this artificial underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was done?

349The notion was so plausible, that I at once accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human species.

350I 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.

351At first, proceeding 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.

352No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you, and wildly incredible, and yet, even now, there are existing circumstances to point that way.

353There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation.

354There is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance.

355There are the new electric railways.

356There are subways.

357There are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.

358Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky.

359I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever-larger underground factories, spending a still increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end.

360Even 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?

361Again, 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.

362About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.

363And this same widening gulf, which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process, and the increased facilities for and 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.

364So, 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 labor.

365Once 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.

366Such 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 upper-world people were to theirs.

367As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.

368The great triumph of humanity I had dreamed of, took a different shape in my mind.

369It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I had imagined.

370Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science, and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day.

371Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow-man.

372This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time.

373I had no convenient Cicerone in the pattern of the utopian books.

374My explanation may be absolutely wrong.

375I still think it is the most plausible one.

376But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at least attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay.

377The too perfect security of the upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

378That I could see clearly enough already.

379What had happened to the underworlders I did not yet suspect.

380But from what I had seen of the Morlocks, that, by the way, was the name by which the creatures were called, I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the Eloi, the beautiful race that I already knew.

381Then came troublesome doubts.

382Why had the Morlocks taken my time-machine?

383For I felt sure it was they who had taken it.

384Why, too, if the Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me?

385And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark?

386I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this underworld, but here again I was disappointed.

387At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them.

388She shivered as though the topic was unendurable, and when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears.

389They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that golden age.

390When I saw them, I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of the human inheritance from Weena's eyes.

391And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a match.

392End of chapter 5