Chapter 8 (The Time Machine)

01CHAPTER VIII.

02I found the palace of green porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.

03Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework.

04It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking northeastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must have once been.

05I thought then, though I never followed up the thought, of what might have happened, or might be happening, to the living things in the sea.

06The material of the palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character.

07I thought, rather foolishly, that Wina might help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head.

08She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.

09Within the big valves of the door, which were open and broken, we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows.

10At the first glance I was reminded of a museum.

11The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering.

12Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton.

13I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the megatherium.

14The skull and upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away.

15Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton-barrel of a brontosaurus.

16My museum hypothesis was confirmed.

17Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time.

18But they must have been air-tight, to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.

19Clearly, we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington.

20Here, apparently, was the paleontological section, and a very splendid array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was, nevertheless, with extreme sureness, if with extreme slowness, at work again, upon all its treasures.

21Here and there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare fossils, broken to pieces, or threaded in strings upon reeds.

22And the cases had, in some instances, been bodily removed, by the morlocks, as I judged.

23The place was very silent.

24The thick dust deadened our footsteps.

25Weena, who had been rolling a sea-urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.

26And, at first, I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented.

27Even my preoccupation about the time machine receded a little from my mind.

28To judge from the size of the place, this palace of green porcelain had a great deal more in it than a gallery of paleontology.

29Possibly historical galleries.

30It might be, even, a library.

31To me, at least in my present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of old-time geology in decay.

32Exploring, I found another short gallery running transversely to the first.

33This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulfur set my mind running on gunpowder.

34But I could find no saltpeter.

35Indeed, no nitrates of any kind.

36Doubtless, they had deliquest ages ago.

37Yet the sulfur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking.

38As for the rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I saw, I had little interest.

39I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.

40Apparently, this section had been devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition.

41A few shriveled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown dust of departed plants, that was all.

42I was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been attained.

43Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered.

44At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling, many of them cracked and smashed, which suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit.

45Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete.

46You know, I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these.

47The more so, as for the most part, they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for.

48I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles, I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.

49Suddenly, Weena came very close to my side.

50So suddenly that she startled me.

51Had it not been for her, I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all.

52It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill.

53Editor.

54The end I had come in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare, slit-like windows.

55As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit, like the area of a London house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top.

56I went slowly along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena's increasing apprehensions drew my attention.

57Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.

58I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less abundant, and its surface less even.

59Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small, narrow footprints.

60My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that.

61I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery.

62I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire.

63And then, down in the remote blackness of the gallery, I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well.

64I took Weena's hand.

65Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal-box.

66Clambering up the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways.

67Suddenly Weena, deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper.

68I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute's strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand, more than sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock's skull I might encounter.

69And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so.

70Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's own descendants.

71But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.

72Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder, my time-machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the brutes I heard.

73Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery, and into another and still larger one, which, at the first glance, reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags.

74The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books.

75They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them.

76But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.

77Had I been a literary man, I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition.

78But as it was, the thing that struck me with the keenest force was the enormous waste of labor to which this somber wilderness of rotting paper testified.

79At the time, I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.

80Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry.

81And here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries.

82Except at one end, where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved.

83I went eagerly to every unbroken case.

84And, at last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches.

85Very eagerly I tried them.

86They were perfectly good.

87They were not even damp.

88I turned to Weena.

89Dance!

90I cried to her in her own tongue.

91For now, I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared.

92And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling the land of the Lille as cheerfully as I could.

93In part it was a modest can-can, in part a step-dance, in part a skirt-dance, so far as my tailcoat permitted, and in part original.

94For I am naturally inventive, as you know.

95Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was most strange.

96As for me, it was a most fortunate thing.

97Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor.

98I found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed.

99I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly.

100But the odor of camphor was unmistakable.

101In the universal decay, this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries.

102It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil bellum night, that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.

103I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable, and burned with a good bright flame, was in fact an excellent candle, and I put it in my pocket.

104I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors.

105As yet, my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced upon.

106Nevertheless, I left that gallery greatly elated.

107I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon.

108It would require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order.

109I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword.

110I could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates.

111There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles.

112And most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.

113But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into dust.

114One corner I saw was charred and shattered, perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the specimens.

115In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth, I should think.

116And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a stetite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.

117As the evening drew on, my interest waned.

118I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibit sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.

119In one place, I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin mine, and then, by the merest accident, I discovered, in an airtight case, two dynamite cartridges.

120I shouted, Eureka!

121and smashed the case with joy.

122Then came a doubt.

123I hesitated.

124Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay.

125I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came.

126Of course, the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence.

127I really believed that, had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown sphinx, bronze doors, and, as it proved, my chances of finding the time-machine altogether into non-existence.

128It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace.

129It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees.

130So we rested and refreshed ourselves.

131Toward sunset, I began to consider our position.

132Night was creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to be found.

133But that troubled me very little now.

134I had in my possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defenses against the Morlocks.

135I had matches.

136I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed.

137It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire.

138In the morning, that was the getting of the time-machine.

139Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron mace.

140But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards those bronze doors.

141Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the other side.

142They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the work.

143End of chapter 8