Chapter 7 (The Time Machine)

01Chapter 7 of The Time Machine by H.

02G.

03Wells.

04This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

05The Time Machine.

06Chapter 7.

07Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before.

08Hitherto, 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.

09Hitherto, 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.

10But there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks, a something inhuman and malign.

11Instinctively, I loathed them.

12Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit.

13My concern was with the pit and how to get out of it.

14Now, I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.

15The enemy I dreaded may surprise you.

16It was the darkness of the new moon.

17Wina had put this into my head by some, at first, incomprehensible remarks about the dark nights.

18It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming of dark nights might mean.

19The moon was on the wane.

20Each night there was a longer interval of darkness.

21And now I understood to some slight degree, at least, the reason of the fear of the little upper-world people for the dark.

22I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon.

23I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong.

24The upper-world people might once have been the favored aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants.

25But that had long since passed away.

26The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship.

27The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.

28They still possessed the earth on sufferance, since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable.

29And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.

30They 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.

31But clearly the old order was already in part reversed.

32The nemesis of the Delicate Ones was creeping on apace.

33Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother-man out of the ease and the sunshine.

34And now that brother was coming back changed.

35Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew.

36They were becoming reacquainted with fear.

37And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the underworld.

38It 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.

39I tried to recall the form of it.

40I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.

41Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious fear, I was differently constituted.

42I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when fear does not paralyze and mystery has lost its terrors.

43I, at least, would defend myself.

44Without further delay, I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep.

45With 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.

46I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them.

47I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.

48I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible.

49All the buildings and trees seemed easily practical to such dexterous climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be.

50Then 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 southwest.

51The distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been near eighteen.

52I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon, when distances are deceptively diminished.

53In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working through the sole.

54They were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors, so that I was lame.

55And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.

56Weena 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.

57My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.

58At least she utilized them for that purpose.

59And that reminds me, in changing my jacket, I found...

60The time-traveler paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table.

61Then he resumed his narrative.

62As the hush of the 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.

63But 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.

64You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk?

65Even the breeze stops in the trees.

66To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.

67The sky was clear, remote, and empty, save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset.

68Well, that night the expectation took the color of my fears.

69In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened.

70I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet.

71Could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill, going hither and thither and waiting for the dark.

72In my excitement, I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war.

73And why had they taken my time-machine?

74So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night.

75The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.

76The ground grew dim and the trees black.

77Weena's fears and her fatigue grew upon her.

78I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her.

79Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder.

80So we went down a long slope into a valley, and there, in the dimness, I almost walked into a little river.

81This I waited, and went up on the opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping-houses, and by a statue, a fawn or some such figure, minus the head.

82Here, too, were acacias.

83So 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.

84From the brow of the next hill, I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black before me.

85I hesitated at this.

86I could see no end to it, either to the right or the left.

87Feeling tired, my feet in particular were very sore, I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon the turf.

88I could no longer see the palace of green porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction.

89I looked into the thickness of the wood, and thought of what it might hide.

90Under that dense tangle of branches, one would be out of sight of the stars.

91Even 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-bowls to strike against.

92I was very tired, too, after the excitements of the day.

93So I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.

94Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep.

95I carefully wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise.

96The hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood, there came, now and then, a stir of living things.

97Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear.

98I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling.

99All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however.

100That slow movement, which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings.

101But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of stardust as of yore.

102Southward, as I judged it, was a very bright red star that was new to me.

103It was even more splendid than our own green Sirius.

104And amid all these scintillating points of light, one bright planet shone kindly and steadily, like the face of an old friend.

105Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles, and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

106I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow, inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

107I thought of the great processional cycle that the pole of the earth describes.

108Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed.

109And 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.

110Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white things of which I went in terror.

111Then 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.

112Yet it was too horrible.

113I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

114Through 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 in the new confusion.

115The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy cloud or so.

116No doubt I dozed at times.

117Then, as my vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colorless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white.

118And close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then growing pink and warm.

119No Morlocks had approached us.

120Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night.

121And in the confidence of renewed day, it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable.

122I 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.

123I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant, instead of black and forbidding.

124We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast.

125We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight, as though there were no such thing in nature as the night.

126And then I thought once more of the meat I had seen.

127I felt assured now of what it was.

128And from the bottom of my heart, I pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity.

129Clearly, at some time in the long ago of human decay, the Morlocks' food had run short.

130Possibly, they had lived on rats and such-like vermin.

131Even now, man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was, far less than any monkey.

132His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct.

133And so, these inhuman sons of men...

134I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.

135After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.

136And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone.

137Why should I trouble myself?

138These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon, probably saw to the breeding of.

139And there was Weena dancing at my side.

140Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.

141Man 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.

142I even tried a Carlisle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay.

143But this attitude of mind was impossible.

144However 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.

145I had, at that time, very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue.

146My first was to secure some safe place of refuge and to make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive.

147That necessity was immediate.

148In 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.

149Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the white sphinx.

150I had in mind a battering-ram.

151I 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.

152I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away.

153Weena 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.

154End of chapter 7