The Time Machine
cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man
has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the
same cheerful light. The 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 nerves. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust
of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I
lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over,
and I was flung headlong through the air.
“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was
sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was
gone. I looked round me. I 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. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud
over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I
was wet to the skin. ‘Fine hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has
travelled innumerable years to see you.’
“Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and
looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white
stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy
downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.
“My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew
thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for
a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in
shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being
carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to
hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick
with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless
eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the
lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant
suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a
minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as
the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At 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.
“I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity
of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy
curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this
interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into
something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might
seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and
disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently
slain.
“Already 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. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned
frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I
did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The grey
downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a
ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint
brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The 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. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps
a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will
swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth,
and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave
under my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently.
One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily
in attitude to mount again.
“But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I
looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote
future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house,
I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and
their faces were directed towards me.
“Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the
White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these
emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I
stood with my machine. He was a slight creature—perhaps four feet
high—clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt.
Sandals or buskins—I could not clearly distinguish which—were on his
feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing
that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
“He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but
indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful
kind of consumptive—that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so
much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my
hands from the machine.
V.
In the Golden Age
“In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile
thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my
eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at
once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke
to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.
“There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps
eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them
addressed me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too
harsh and deep for them. So I shook my head, and, pointing to my ears,
shook it again. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my
hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and
shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in
this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty
little people that inspired confidence—a graceful gentleness, a certain
childlike ease. And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy
myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like ninepins. But I made
a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling
at the Time Machine. Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought
of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the
machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and
put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in
the way of communication.
“And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further
peculiarities in their Dresden china type of prettiness. Their hair,
which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek;
there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears
were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather
thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and
mild; and—this may seem egotism on my part—I fancied even that there
was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
“As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round
me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the
conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then,
hesitating for a moment how to express Time, I pointed to the sun. At
once a quaintly pretty little figure in chequered purple and white
followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of
thunder.
“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was
plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these
creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I
had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and
Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art,
everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed
him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old
children—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a
thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their
clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of
disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had
built the Time Machine in vain.
“I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of
a thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and
bowed. Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful
flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was
received with melodious applause; and presently they were all running
to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I
was almost smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the like can
scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of
culture had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should
be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx
of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a
smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone.
As I went with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a
profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible
merriment, to my mind.
“The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal
dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of
little people, and with the big open portals that yawned before me
shadowy and mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over
their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long
neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of
strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of
the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among the variegated
shrubs, but, as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The
Time Machine was left deserted on the turf among the rhododendrons.
“The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not
observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions
of old Phœnician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that
they were very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly
clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in
dingy nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded
with flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright,
soft-coloured robes and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of
laughter and laughing speech.
“The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with
brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with
coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The
floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not
plates nor slabs—blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the
going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along
the more frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable
tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised, perhaps, a foot from
the floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a
kind of hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they
were strange.
“Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon