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Title: The Time Machine

Author: H. G. Wells

Release date: October 2, 2004 [eBook #35]
Most recently updated: June 16, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME
MACHINE ***

T h e Ti m e M a c h i n e
An Invention

by H. G. Wells

CONTENTS

I Introduction
II The Machine
III The Time Traveller Returns
IV Time Travelling
V In the Golden Age
VI The Sunset of Mankind
VII A Sudden Shock
VIII Explanation
IX The Morlocks
X When Night Came
XI The Palace of Green Porcelain
XII In the Darkness
XIII The Trap of the White Sphinx
XIV The Further Vision
XV The Time Traveller’s Return
XVI After the Story
Epilogue

I.
Introduction

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and
his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and
the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the
bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents,
embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there
was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere, when thought runs gracefully
free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking
the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his
earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two
ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they
taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an
argumentative person with red hair.
“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground
for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course
that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They
taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere
abstractions.”
“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real
existence.”
“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real
things—”

“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube
exist?”
“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real
body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth,
Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh,
which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact.
There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of
Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal
distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it
happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along
the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”
“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his
cigar over the lamp; “that . . . very clear indeed.”
“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,”
continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness.
“Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people
who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only
another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and
any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves
along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that
idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth
Dimension?”
“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of
as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and
Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at
right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking
why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right
angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-
Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to
the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how
on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure
of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of

three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the
perspective of the thing. See?”
“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he
lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic
words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said after some time, brightening in a
quite transitory manner.
“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry
of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For
instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen,
another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are
evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his
Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”
“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause
required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is
only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record.
This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer.
Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose
again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this
line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognised? But certainly
it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude, was along
the Time-Dimension.”
“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, “if Time is
really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always
been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move about in
Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”
The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you so sure we can move freely in
Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and
men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But
how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”
“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.
“Easier, far easier down than up.”

“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
present moment.”
“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the
whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present
moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no
dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity
from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our
existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”
“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. “You can
move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.”
“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that
we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident
very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-
minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no
means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an
animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is
better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in
a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to
stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about
and travel the other way?”
“Oh, this,” began Filby, “is all—”
“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will
never convince me.”
“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the
object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long
ago I had a vague inkling of a machine—”
“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.
“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the
driver determines.”
Filby contented himself with laughter.
“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller.

“It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist
suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the
Battle of Hastings, for instance!”
“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man.
“Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the
Very Young Man thought.
“In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The
German scholars have improved Greek so much.”
“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One
might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on
ahead!”
“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic basis.”
“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the Psychologist.
“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—”
“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going to verify that?”
“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the Psychologist, “though it’s
all humbug, you know.”
The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and
with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the
room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his
laboratory.
The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s got?”
“Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,” said the Medical Man, and Filby
tried to tell us about a conjuror he had seen at Burslem, but before he had
finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s anecdote
collapsed.

II.
The Machine

The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic
framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made.
There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now
I must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is to be
accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small
octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the
fire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he placed the mechanism.
Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table
was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell upon the model.
There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks
upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly
illuminated. I sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward
so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat
behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial
Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left.
The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the
alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly
conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us
under these conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. “Well?” said
the Psychologist.
“This little affair,” said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the
table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, “is only a model.
It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it
looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about
this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” He pointed to the part with
his finger. “Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.”

The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. “It’s
beautifully made,” he said.
“It took two years to make,” retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we
had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: “Now I want you
clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine
gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle
represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the
lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and
disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy
yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be
told I’m a quack.”
There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to
speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his
finger towards the lever. “No,” he said suddenly. “Lend me your hand.”
And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual’s hand in his own
and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist
himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage.
We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery.
There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles
on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round,
became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of
faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished! Save for the
lamp the table was bare.
Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under
the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. “Well?” he said,
with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the
tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.
We stared at each other. “Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you in
earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled
into time?”
“Certainly,” said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire.
Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist’s face. (The
Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar
and tried to light it uncut.) “What is more, I have a big machine nearly

finished in there”—he indicated the laboratory—“and when that is put
together I mean to have a journey on my own account.”
“You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?” said
Filby.
“Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain, know which.”
After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. “It must have gone
into the past if it has gone anywhere,” he said.
“Why?” said the Time Traveller.
“Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into
the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have travelled
through this time.”
“But,” said I, “If it travelled into the past it would have been visible when
we came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here; and the
Thursday before that; and so forth!”
“Serious objections,” remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of
impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
“Not a bit,” said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist: “You think.
You can explain that. It’s presentation below the threshold, you know,
diluted presentation.”
“Of course,” said the Psychologist, and reassured us. “That’s a simple
point in psychology. I should have thought of it. It’s plain enough, and helps
the paradox delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this
machine, any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet
flying through the air. If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred
times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a
second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-
hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That’s
plain enough.” He passed his hand through the space in which the machine
had been. “You see?” he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time
Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.
“It sounds plausible enough tonight,” said the Medical Man; “but wait
until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

“Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?” asked the Time
Traveller. And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down
the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the
flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the
shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there
in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which
we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of
ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing
was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon
the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better
look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly serious? Or is this
a trick—like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?”
“Upon that machine,” said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, “I
intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life.”
None of us quite knew how to take it.
I caught Filby’s eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he
winked at me solemnly.

III.
The Time Traveller Returns

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine.
The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to
be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always
suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid
frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time
Traveller’s words, we should have shown him far less scepticism. For we
should have perceived his motives: a pork-butcher could understand Filby.
But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements,
and we distrusted him. Things that would have made the fame of a less
clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his
deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for
judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with eggshell china. So I
don’t think any of us said very much about time travelling in the interval
between that Thursday and the next, though its odd potentialities ran, no
doubt, in most of our minds: its plausibility, that is, its practical
incredibleness, the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter
confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied
with the trick of the model. That I remember discussing with the Medical
Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnæan. He said he had seen a similar
thing at Tübingen, and laid considerable stress on the blowing-out of the
candle. But how the trick was done he could not explain.
The next Thursday I went again to Richmond—I suppose I was one of
the Time Traveller’s most constant guests—and, arriving late, found four or
five men already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical Man was
standing before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in

the other. I looked round for the Time Traveller, and—“It’s half-past seven
now,” said the Medical Man. “I suppose we’d better have dinner?”
“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.
“You’ve just come? It’s rather odd. He’s unavoidably detained. He asks
me in this note to lead off with dinner at seven if he’s not back. Says he’ll
explain when he comes.”
“It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil,” said the Editor of a well-known
daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.
The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who
had attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor
aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man with a
beard—whom I didn’t know, and who, as far as my observation went, never
opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the
dinner-table about the Time Traveller’s absence, and I suggested time
travelling, in a half-jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that explained to him,
and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the “ingenious
paradox and trick” we had witnessed that day week. He was in the midst of
his exposition when the door from the corridor opened slowly and without
noise. I was facing the door, and saw it first. “Hallo!” I said. “At last!” And
the door opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood before us. I gave a cry
of surprise. “Good heavens! man, what’s the matter?” cried the Medical
Man, who saw him next. And the whole tableful turned towards the door.
He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared
with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me
greyer—either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded.
His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a cut half-healed;
his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a
moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light.
Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen
in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion
towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it
towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked
round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face.
“What on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor. The Time
Traveller did not seem to hear. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he said, with a

certain faltering articulation. “I’m all right.” He stopped, held out his glass
for more, and took it off at a draught. “That’s good,” he said. His eyes grew
brighter, and a faint colour came into his cheeks. His glance flickered over
our faces with a certain dull approval, and then went round the warm and
comfortable room. Then he spoke again, still as it were feeling his way
among his words. “I’m going to wash and dress, and then I’ll come down
and explain things.... Save me some of that mutton. I’m starving for a bit of
meat.”
He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was
all right. The Editor began a question. “Tell you presently,” said the Time
Traveller. “I’m—funny! Be all right in a minute.”
He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I
remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and
standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on
them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained socks. Then the door closed upon
him. I had half a mind to follow, till I remembered how he detested any fuss
about himself. For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering. Then,
“Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist,” I heard the Editor say,
thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this brought my attention back to
the bright dinner-table.
“What’s the game?” said the Journalist. “Has he been doing the Amateur
Cadger? I don’t follow.” I met the eye of the Psychologist, and read my own
interpretation in his face. I thought of the Time Traveller limping painfully
upstairs. I don’t think anyone else had noticed his lameness.
The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man,
who rang the bell—the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting at
dinner—for a hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and fork with a
grunt, and the Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was resumed.
Conversation was exclamatory for a little while with gaps of wonderment;
and then the Editor got fervent in his curiosity. “Does our friend eke out his
modest income with a crossing? or has he his Nebuchadnezzar phases?” he
inquired. “I feel assured it’s this business of the Time Machine,” I said, and
took up the Psychologist’s account of our previous meeting. The new guests
were frankly incredulous. The Editor raised objections. “What was this time
travelling? A man couldn’t cover himself with dust by rolling in a paradox,
could he?” And then, as the idea came home to him, he resorted to

caricature. Hadn’t they any clothes-brushes in the Future? The Journalist
too, would not believe at any price, and joined the Editor in the easy work
of heaping ridicule on the whole thing. They were both the new kind of
journalist—very joyous, irreverent young men. “Our Special Correspondent
in the Day after Tomorrow reports,” the Journalist was saying—or rather
shouting—when the Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in ordinary
evening clothes, and nothing save his haggard look remained of the change
that had startled me.
“I say,” said the Editor hilariously, “these chaps here say you have been
travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rosebery,
will you? What will you take for the lot?”
The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word.
He smiled quietly, in his old way. “Where’s my mutton?” he said. “What a
treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!”
“Story!” cried the Editor.
“Story be damned!” said the Time Traveller. “I want something to eat. I
won’t say a word until I get some peptone into my arteries. Thanks. And the
salt.”
“One word,” said I. “Have you been time travelling?”
“Yes,” said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.
“I’d give a shilling a line for a verbatim note,” said the Editor. The Time
Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his
fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started
convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was
uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my
lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to
relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller
devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp.
The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller
through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than
usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer
nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked
round us. “I suppose I must apologise,” he said. “I was simply starving. I’ve
had a most amazing time.” He reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut the
end. “But come into the smoking-room. It’s too long a story to tell over

greasy plates.” And ringing the bell in passing, he led the way into the
adjoining room.
“You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?” he said
to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming the three new guests.
“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” said the Editor.
“I can’t argue tonight. I don’t mind telling you the story, but I can’t argue.
I will,” he went on, “tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you
like, but you must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most
of it will sound like lying. So be it! It’s true—every word of it, all the same.
I was in my laboratory at four o’clock, and since then … I’ve lived eight
days … such days as no human being ever lived before! I’m nearly worn
out, but I shan’t sleep till I’ve told this thing over to you. Then I shall go to
bed. But no interruptions! Is it agreed?”
“Agreed,” said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed “Agreed.” And with
that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in
his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more
animated. In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness the
inadequacy of pen and ink—and, above all, my own inadequacy—to
express its quality. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you
cannot see the speaker’s white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little
lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his
expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers were in
shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only
the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the knees
downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now and again at each
other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time
Traveller’s face.

IV.
Time Travelling

>
“I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine,
and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There 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’s sound enough. I 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. It was at
ten o’clock today that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I 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. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to
his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I
took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed
the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a
nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory
exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that
my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it
seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past
three!
“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs.
Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the
garden door. I 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. I pressed the lever
over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp,
and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy,
then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again,

night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my
ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has
upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed
day like the flapping of a black wing. The 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. I
supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open
air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast
to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled
dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light
was excessively painful to the eye. Then, 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. Presently, as I went on, still gaining
velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous
greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid
luminous colour like that of early twilight; the 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.
“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon
which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim.
I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now
green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings
rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth
seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands
upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.
Presently 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.
“The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They
merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a
clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my

mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing
upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But 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. What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances
upon our rudimentary civilisation, I thought, might not appear when I came
to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before
my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more
massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of
glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain
there, without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my
confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the
business of stopping.
“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in
the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high
velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated
—was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening
substances! But 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. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was
making the machine; but then I had 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
these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With
a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands,
flinging peel and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the sides of
the tables. I was not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and
hungry. As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.
“And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The
stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were
broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end were
thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table

near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich
and picturesque. There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred people dining in
the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they could come, were
watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over the fruit they were
eating. All were clad in the same soft, and yet strong, silky material.
“Fruit, by the bye, was all their diet. These people of the remote future
were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal
cravings, I had to be frugivorous also. Indeed, I found afterwards that
horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.
But the fruits were very delightful; one, in particular, that seemed to be in
season all the time I was there—a floury thing in a three-sided husk—was
especially good, and I made it my staple. At first I was puzzled by all these
strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive
their import.
“However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now.
So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute
attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that was the
next thing to do. The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and
holding one of these up I began a series of interrogative sounds and
gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning. At
first my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but
presently a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and
repeated a name. They had to chatter and explain the business at great
length to each other, and my first attempts to make the exquisite little
sounds of their language caused an immense amount of genuine, if uncivil,
amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and
persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my
command; and then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb ‘to
eat.’ But it was slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get
away from my interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to let
them give their lessons in little doses when they felt inclined. And very little
doses I found they were before long, for I never met people more indolent
or more easily fatigued.

VI.
The Sunset of Mankind

“A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their
lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment,
like children, but, like children they would soon stop examining me, and
wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my conversational
beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had
surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to
disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the sunlit
world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting
more of these men of the future, who would follow me a little distance,
chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a
friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.
“The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great
hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At first
things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the
world I had known—even the flowers. The big building I had left was
situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted,
perhaps, a mile from its present position. I resolved to mount to the summit
of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider
view of this our planet in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven
Hundred and One, A.D. For that, I should explain, was the date the little
dials of my machine recorded.
“As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly
help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the
world—for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great
heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of
precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of
very beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles possibly—but wonderfully tinted

with brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging. It was evidently the
derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end built I could not
determine. It was here that I was destined, at a later date, to have a very
strange experience—the first intimation of a still stranger discovery—but of
that I will speak in its proper place.
“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested
for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen.
Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had
vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings,
but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our
own English landscape, had disappeared.
“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.
“And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-
dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I perceived that
all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the
same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not
noticed this before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact
plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing
that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were
alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their
parents. I judged then that the children of that time were extremely
precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification
of my opinion.
“Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt
that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would
expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the
institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere
militant necessities of an age of physical force. Where population is
balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a
blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring are
secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an
efficient family, and the specialisation of the sexes with reference to their
children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our
own time, and in this future age it was complete. This, I must remind you,
was my speculation at the time. Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell
short of the reality.

“While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a
pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory
way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of
my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill,
and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left
alone for the first time. With a strange sense of freedom and adventure I
pushed on up to the crest.
“There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognise,
corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft
moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins’ heads. I
sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the
sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen.
The sun had already gone below the horizon and the west was flaming gold,
touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the
valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I
have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated
greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white
or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the
sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no
signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had
become a garden.
“So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had
seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was
something in this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a half truth—or
only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)
“It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The
ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I
began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at
present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence
enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on
feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true
civilising process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily
on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed
another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately
put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!

“After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the
rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little
department of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its
operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture
destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of
wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they
can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—
gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a
seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient
breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague
and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is
shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better
organised, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the
eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating;
things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the
end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and
vegetable life to suit our human needs.
“This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done
indeed for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had
leapt. The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi;
everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies
flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained.
Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious
diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that even the
processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these
changes.
“Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in
splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged
in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical
struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which
constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden
evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise. The difficulty of
increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased
to increase.
“But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the
change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of

human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under
which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall;
conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon
self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and
the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for
offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in
the imminent dangers of the young. Now, where are these imminent
dangers? There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial
jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary
things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals,
discords in a refined and pleasant life.
“I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of
intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in
a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity
had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant
vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the
reaction of the altered conditions.
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless
energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own
time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a
constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for
instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man.
And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well
as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had
been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no
wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such
a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are
indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong
would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the
exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings
of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into
perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived—the flourish of
that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of
energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor
and decay.

“Even this artistic impetus would at last die away—had almost died in
the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the
sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that
would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the
grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me that here was that
hateful grindstone broken at last!
“As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple
explanation I had mastered the problem of the world—mastered the whole
secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised for
the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had
rather diminished than kept stationary. That would account for the
abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—
as most wrong theories are!

VII.
A Sudden Shock

“As 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
north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless
owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to
descend and find where I could sleep.
“I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the
figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as
the light of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver birch
against it. There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale
light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the lawn again. A queer
doubt chilled my complacency. ‘No,’ said I stoutly to myself, ‘that was not
the lawn.’
“But it was the lawn. For the white leprous face of the sphinx was
towards it. Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to
me? But you cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
“At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my
own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought
of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat
and stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a passion of fear and
running with great leaping strides down the slope. Once I fell headlong and
cut my face; I lost no time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran
on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin. All the time I ran I was
saying to myself: ‘They have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes
out of the way.’ Nevertheless, I ran with all my might. All 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. My breath came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole

distance from the hill crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten
minutes. And I am not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my
confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried
aloud, and none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that
moonlit world.
“When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realised. Not a trace of
the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space
among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the thing
might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands
clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal,
white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in
mockery of my dismay.
“I 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. That is what dismayed me: the sense of some
hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had
vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had
produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time.
The attachment of the levers—I will show you the method later—prevented
anyone from tampering with it in that way when they were removed. It had
moved, and was hid, only in space. But then, where could it be?
“I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I 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. I
remember, too, late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist
until my knuckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs. Then,
sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great
building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted. I slipped on
the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables, almost breaking
my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains, of which I have
told you.
“There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which,
perhaps, a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I 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. For they had forgotten about matches. ‘Where is my Time

Machine?’ I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them
and shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them. Some
laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When 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. For, reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought
that fear must be forgotten.
“Abruptly, 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. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and
stumbling this way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept
up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened
me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind—a strange animal in an
unknown world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon
God and Fate. I 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, even anger at the folly of leaving the machine having leaked
away with my strength. I had nothing left but misery. Then 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.
“I 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.
Then things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight, I
could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my
frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself. ‘Suppose the worst?’ I
said. ‘Suppose the machine altogether lost—perhaps destroyed? It behoves
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.’ That would be my only hope,
a poor hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a
beautiful and curious world.
“But probably the machine had only been taken away. Still, I must be
calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or cunning.
And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering

where I could bathe. I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled. The freshness of
the morning made me desire an equal freshness. I had exhausted my
emotion. Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself wondering at
my intense excitement overnight. I made a careful examination of the
ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in futile questionings,
conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as came by.
They all failed to understand my gestures; some were simply stolid, some
thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I had the hardest task in the world
to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces. It 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. The turf gave better counsel. I 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. There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow
footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed my
closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It
was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on
either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was hollow. Examining
the panels with care I found them discontinuous with the frames. There
were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as
I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind. It
took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside
that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.
“I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes
and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling
to them, and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to the
bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first
gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don’t know how to convey
their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture
to a delicate-minded woman—it is how she would look. They went off as if
they had received the last possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap
in white next, with exactly the same result. Somehow, his manner made me
feel ashamed of myself. But, as you know, I wanted the Time Machine, and
I tried him once more. As he turned off, like the others, my temper got the
better of me. In 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. Then I
saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.

“But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I
thought I heard something stir inside—to be explicit, I thought I heard a
sound like a chuckle—but I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big
pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in
the decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes. The delicate
little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away
on either hand, but nothing came of it. I saw a crowd of them upon the
slopes, looking furtively at me. At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch
the place. But I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a
long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for
twenty-four hours—that is another matter.
“I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes
towards the hill again. ‘Patience,’ said I to myself. ‘If you want your
machine again you must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take your
machine away, it’s little good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they
don’t, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it. To sit among all
those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies
monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too
hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.’ Then
suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the 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. I had made myself the most complicated
and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my
own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.
“Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people
avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to
do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the
avoidance. I 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. I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I
pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point or
their language was excessively simple—almost exclusively composed of
concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract
terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually
simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the
simplest propositions. I 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. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, tethered
me in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.

VIII.
Explanation

“So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant
richness as the Thames valley. From 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. Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose
into blue undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky. A
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.
One lay by the path up the hill which I had followed during my first walk.
Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously wrought, and
protected by a little cupola from the rain. Sitting 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. But in all of them I
heard a certain sound: a thud—thud—thud, like the beating of some big
engine; and I discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady
current of air set down the shafts. Further, 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.
“After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing
here and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often just such a
flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun-scorched beach.
Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive
system of subterranean ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to
imagine. I was at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of
these people. It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.
“And here I must admit that I learnt very little of drains and bells and
modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in this

real future. In 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. But 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. Conceive
the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take
back to his tribe! What 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? Yet we, at least, should be willing
enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how
much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe?
Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our
own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the
Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which
contributed to my comfort; but save for a general impression of automatic
organisation, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.
“In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of
crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that,
possibly, there might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the
range of my explorings. This, again, was a question I deliberately put to
myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point. The
thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled
me still more: that aged and infirm among this people there were none.
“I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an
automatic civilisation and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I
could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I
had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping
apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these
people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and
their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of
metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little people
displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops, no
workshops, no sign of importations among them. They 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. I could not see how things were kept
going.

“Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had
taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. Why? For the life of
me I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars.
I felt I lacked a clue. I felt—how shall I put it? Suppose 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? Well, 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!
“That day, too, I made a friend—of a sort. It happened that, as I was
watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was
seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran
rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It 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. When I realised
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. A little rubbing of
the limbs soon brought her round, and I had the satisfaction of seeing she
was all right before I left her. I had got to such a low estimate of her kind
that I did not expect any gratitude from her. In that, however, I was wrong.
“This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little woman,
as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre 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. The
thing took my imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At
any rate I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were soon
seated together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation, chiefly of
smiles. The creature’s friendliness affected me exactly as a child’s might
have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands. I did
the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena,
which, though I don’t know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate
enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week,
and ended—as I will tell you!
“She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She
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. But the problems of the world had to be
mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a
miniature flirtation. Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her
expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether,
I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was,
somehow, a very great comfort. I thought it was mere childish affection that
made her cling to me. Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I
had inflicted upon her when I left her. Nor until it was too late did I clearly
understand what she was to me. For, 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 neighbourhood of the White
Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny
figure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.
“It was from her, too, that I learnt that fear had not yet left the world. She
was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in
me; for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and
she simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows,
dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful. It was a
singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing. I
discovered then, among other things, that these little people gathered into
the great houses after dark, and slept in droves. To enter upon them without
a light was to put them into a tumult of apprehension. I never found one out
of doors, or one sleeping alone within doors, after dark. Yet 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.
“It 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. But my story slips
away from me as I speak of her. It must have been the night before her
rescue that I was awakened about dawn. I had been restless, dreaming most
disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea anemones were feeling over
my face with their soft palps. I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that
some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried to get to
sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour
when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless
and clear cut, and yet unreal. I got up, and went down into the great hall,

and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace. I thought I would
make a virtue of necessity, and see the sunrise.
“The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of
dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky black, the
ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up the hill I
thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned the slope, I
saw white figures. Twice 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. They moved hastily. I did not see what
became of them. It seemed that they vanished among the bushes. The dawn
was still indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain,
early-morning feeling you may have known. I doubted my eyes.
“As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and
its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view
keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere creatures
of the half-light. ‘They must have been ghosts,’ I said; ‘I wonder whence
they dated.’ For a queer notion of Grant Allen’s came into my head, and
amused me. If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at
last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown
innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no
great wonder to see four at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was
thinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena’s rescue drove them
out of my head. I associated them in some indefinite way with the white
animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the Time Machine.
But Weena was a pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon
destined to take far deadlier possession of my mind.
“I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of
this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter,
or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on
cooling steadily in the future. But 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. As these catastrophes occur, the sun
will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner planet had
suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was
very much hotter than we know it.

“Well, 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. Clambering among these
heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows
were blocked by fallen masses of stone. By contrast with the brilliancy
outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me. I entered it groping, for
the change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before me.
Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against
the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness.
“The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my
hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn.
Then 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. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I
will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and
touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something
white ran past me. I 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. It blundered against a block of granite,
staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath
another pile of ruined masonry.
“My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull
white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen
hair on its head and down its back. But, as I say, it went too fast for me to
see distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours, or only with its
forearms held very low. After an instant’s pause I followed it into the
second heap of ruins. I 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. A sudden thought came
to me. Could this Thing have vanished down the shaft? I lit a match, and,
looking down, I saw a small, white, moving creature, with large bright eyes
which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so
like a human spider! It 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. Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand,
going out as it dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster had
disappeared.

“I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for
some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had
seen was human. But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not
remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that
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.
“I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground
ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered, was
this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organisation? How
was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful Overworlders? And
what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft? I 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. And withal I was
absolutely afraid to go! As I hesitated, two of the beautiful upperworld
people came running in their amorous sport across the daylight in the
shadow. The male pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.
“They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned
pillar, peering down the well. Apparently 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. But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to
amuse them. I tried them again about the well, and again I failed. So
presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what I could
get from her. But my mind was already in revolution; my guesses and
impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I 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! And very vaguely there came a suggestion
towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.
“Here was the new view. Plainly, this second species of Man was
subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me
think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long-
continued underground habit. In 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. Then, those large eyes, with that capacity for

reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things—witness the owl
and the cat. And 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.
“Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and
these tunnellings were the habitat of the New Race. The presence of
ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes—everywhere, in fact,
except along the river valley—showed how universal were its ramifications.
What 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? The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it, and went on to
assume the how of this splitting of the human species. I 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.
“At 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. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and
wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to
point that way. There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less
ornamental purposes of civilisation; there is the Metropolitan Railway in
London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways,
there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and
multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had
gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I 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—! Even 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?
“Again, 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. About
London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against
intrusion. And 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. So, 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 labour. Once 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. Such 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 Overworld people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty
and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.
“The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape
in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-
operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a
perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system
of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a
triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my
theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the
Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is
the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced
civilisation that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith,
and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the
Overworlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a
general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly
enough already. What had happened to the Undergrounders I did not yet
suspect; but, from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the bye, was
the name by which these 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.
“Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time
Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the Eloi
were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were
they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question

Weena about this Underworld, but here again I was disappointed. At first
she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to
answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when
I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the
only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw them
I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in
banishing these signs of her human inheritance from Weena’s eyes. And
very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burnt a
match.

IX.
The Morlocks

“It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the
new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar
shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached colour
of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological
museum. And they were filthily cold to the touch. Probably my shrinking
was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of
the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.
“The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little
disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I had
a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason. I
remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the little people
were sleeping in the moonlight—that night Weena was among them—and
feeling reassured by their presence. It occurred to me even then, that in the
course of a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter, and the
nights grow dark, when the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from
below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old,
might be more abundant. And on both these days I had the restless feeling
of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I felt assured that the Time Machine
was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating these mysteries of
underground. Yet I could not face the mystery. If only I had had a
companion it would have been different. But I was so horribly alone, and
even to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me. I don’t
know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my
back.
“It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me farther
and farther afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the south-westward
towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I observed far-

off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure,
different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the
largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the façade had an Oriental look:
the face of it having the lustre, as well as the pale-green tint, a kind of
bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese porcelain. This difference in
aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and
explore. But the day was growing late, and I had come upon the sight of the
place after a long and tiring circuit; so I resolved to hold over the adventure
for the following day, and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of
little Weena. But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity
regarding the Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to
enable me to shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I
would make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the
early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
“Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when
she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely
disconcerted. ‘Good-bye, little Weena,’ I said, kissing her; and then putting
her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather
hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away! At
first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave a most piteous cry, and
running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands. I think her
opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I shook her off, perhaps a little
roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well. I saw her
agonised face over the parapet, and smiled to reassure her. Then I had to
look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung.
“I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The
descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of
the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller
and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the
descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my
weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment
I hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again.
Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on
clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.
Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disc, in which a star was
visible, while little Weena’s head showed as a round black projection. The
thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive.

Everything save that little disc above was profoundly dark, and when I
looked up again Weena had disappeared.
“I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up
the shaft again, and leave the Underworld alone. But even while I turned
this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense relief, I
saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the
wall. Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal
tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not too soon. My arms
ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror
of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect
upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping
air down the shaft.
“I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand touching my
face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches and, hastily
striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I had
seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the light. Living, as
they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were
abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes,
and they reflected the light in the same way. I have no doubt they could see
me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to have any fear of me
apart from the light. But, so soon as I struck a match in order to see them,
they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels, from which
their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion.
“I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently
different from that of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to my
own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even
then in my mind. But I said to myself, ‘You are in for it now,’ and, feeling
my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder.
Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to a large open space,
and striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern,
which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my light. The view
I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match.
“Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines rose
out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral
Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the bye, was very stuffy
and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly-shed blood was in the air.

Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with
what seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous! Even at
the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to
furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the heavy smell, the big
unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows, and only
waiting for the darkness to come at me again! Then the match burnt down,
and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.
“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an
experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with
the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be
infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without
arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke—at times I missed
tobacco frightfully!—even without enough matches. If only I had thought
of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a
second, and examined it at leisure. But, as it was, I stood there with only the
weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me with—hands, feet,
and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still remained to me.
“I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark,
and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of
matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that
there was any need to economise them, and I had wasted almost half the
box in astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as I
say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank
fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar
unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those
dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being
gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The
sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably
unpleasant. The sudden realisation of my ignorance of their ways of
thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted
at them as loudly as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them
approaching me again. They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd
sounds to each other. I shivered violently, and shouted again—rather
discordantly. This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a
queer laughing noise as they came back at me. I will confess I was horribly
frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the
protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of

paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I
had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I
could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like
the rain, as they hurried after me.
“In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no
mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and
waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly
inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-
grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment. But I did
not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated again, and when my second
match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost burnt through when I
reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the edge, for the throb of
the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt sideways for the
projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind, and I
was violently tugged backward. I lit my last match … and it incontinently
went out. But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking
violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks, and was
speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up
at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-
nigh secured my boot as a trophy.
“That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty
feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty in
keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this
faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of
falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered
out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I fell full upon my face. Even the
soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and
ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then, for a time, I was
insensible.

X.
When Night Came

“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, 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. Hitherto 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; but there was an altogether new
element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman
and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might
feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get
out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon
him soon.
“The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new
moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult
problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was
on the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now
understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little
Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it
might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now
that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld people might
once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical
servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had
resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had
already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the
Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still
possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for
innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface

intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and
maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an
old habit of service. They 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. But, clearly, the old order was
already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on
apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother
man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming
back—changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew.
They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into
my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld. It 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. I tried to
recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could
not tell what it was at the time.
“Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their
mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of
ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and
mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further
delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep.
With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that
confidence I had lost in realising to what creatures night by night I lay
exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from
them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have
examined me.
“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but
found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as
the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then 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 south-west. The distance, I had
reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen. I
had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively
diminished. In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail
was working through the sole—they were comfortable old shoes I wore
about indoors—so that I was lame. And it was already long past sunset

when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow
of the sky.
“Weena 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. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration. At
least she utilised them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In changing
my jacket I found…”
The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently
placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the
little table. Then he resumed his narrative.
“As the hush of 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. But 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. You know that great pause that comes
upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there
is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was
clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the
sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that
darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I
could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could,
indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and
thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would
receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had
they taken my Time Machine?
“So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The
clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out. The
ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her fatigue grew
upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her. Then, as
the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and, closing her
eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we went down a long
slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked into a little
river. This I waded, and went up the opposite side of the valley, past a
number of sleeping houses, and by a statue—a Faun, or some such figure,

minus the head. Here too were acacias. So 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.
“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to the
right or the left. Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were very sore—I
carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon
the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in
doubt of my direction. I looked into the thickness of the wood and thought
of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out
of sight of the stars. Even 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-boles to strike against. I was very tired,
too, after the excitements of the day; so I decided that I would not face it,
but would pass the night upon the open hill.
“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in
my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The hillside
was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now and
then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very
clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old
constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which
is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged
them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still
the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it)
was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even more splendid
than our own green Sirius. And amid all these scintillating points of light
one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.
“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the
gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the
slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the
unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of
the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred
during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions
all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organisations, the nations,
languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew
him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who

had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in
terror. Then 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. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little
Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and
forthwith dismissed the thought.
“Through 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. The sky kept very clear, except for
a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil wore on,
came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless
fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And close behind,
and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then
growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed, I had
seen none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it
almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I 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.
“I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and
pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to
break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing
in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night. And
then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured now of
what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill
from the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of
human decay the Morlocks’ food had run short. Possibly they had lived on
rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and
exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey. His prejudice
against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons
of men——! I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they
were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or
four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this
state of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi
were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed
upon—probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at
my side!

“Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon
me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man
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. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn
of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was
impossible. However 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.
“I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue. My
first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms
of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was immediate. In 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. Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break
open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx. I had in mind a battering
ram. I 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. I could not
imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away. Weena 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.

XI.
The Palace of Green Porcelain

“I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about
noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained
in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from
the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and
looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large
estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once
have been. I 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.
“The 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. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret
this, but I only learnt that the bare idea of writing had never entered her
head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps
because her affection was so human.
“Within 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. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor
was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was
shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and
gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge
skeleton. I recognised by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature
after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the 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. Further in
the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum
hypothesis was confirmed. Going 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. But they must have been air-tight to
judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
“Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!
Here, apparently, was the Palæontological 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. Here and there I found traces of the little people in the
shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds. And
the cases had in some instances been bodily removed—by the Morlocks, as
I judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps.
Weena, 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.
“And 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. Even
my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
“To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a
great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palæontology; possibly historical
galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least in my present
circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of
old-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another short gallery running
transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the
sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could
find no saltpetre; indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had
deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of
thinking. As 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. I am no
specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running
parallel to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had been
devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of
recognition. A few shrivelled 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! I was sorry for that, because I

should have been glad to trace the patient readjustments by which the
conquest of animated nature had been attained. Then 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. At intervals
white globes hung from the ceiling—many of them cracked and smashed—
which suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit. Here 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. You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I
was inclined to linger among these; the 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. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find
myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.
“Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she
startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that
the floor of the gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may be, of course, that the
floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill.—
ED.] The end I had come in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare
slit-like windows. As 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. I
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. Then I saw that the gallery ran
down at last into a thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round
me, I saw that the dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further
away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small
narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks
revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in this academic
examination of machinery. I 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. And 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.
“I took Weena’s hand. Then, 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. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands,
I put all my weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in the

central aisle, began to whimper. I 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 skull I
might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very
inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own descendants! But
it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things. Only 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.
“Well, 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. The brown and
charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognised as the
decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and
every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped
boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I
been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all
ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the
enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper
testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the
Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical
optics.
“Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been
a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful
discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery
was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at last, in
one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I
tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned to
Weena. ‘Dance,’ I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon
indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And 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
Leal as cheerfully as I could. In part it was a modest cancan, in part a step
dance, in part a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part
original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know.

“Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear
of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most
fortunate, thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and
that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had
been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax,
and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was
unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to
survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a
sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that
must have perished and become fossilised millions of years ago. I was
about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burnt
with a good bright flame—was, in fact, an excellent candle—and I put it in
my pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking
down the bronze doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I
had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
“I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would require a
great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order. I
remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated
between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry both,
however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates. There
were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses of rust, but
many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound. But any cartridges or
powder there may once have been had rotted into dust. One corner I saw
was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the
specimens. In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian,
Mexican, Grecian, Phœnician, every country on earth, I should think. And
here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a
steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
“As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery after
gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of
rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself
near the model of a tin mine, and then by the merest accident I discovered,
in an air-tight case, two dynamite cartridges! I shouted ‘Eureka!’ and
smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a
little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I
did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of
course the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their

presence. I really believe 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, all together into non-existence.
“It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the
palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and refreshed
ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position. Night was
creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to be found.
But that troubled me very little now. I had in my possession a thing that
was, perhaps, the best of all defences against the Morlocks—I had matches!
I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to
me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open,
protected by a fire. In the morning there was the getting of the Time
Machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron mace. But now, with my
growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up
to this, I had refrained from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on
the other side. They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I
hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the work.

XII.
In the Darkness

“We emerged from the Palace while the sun was still in part above the
horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next
morning, and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had
stopped me on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible
that night, and then, building a fire, to sleep in the protection of its glare.
Accordingly, as we went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw,
and presently had my arms full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was
slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena was tired. And I, also,
began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was full night before we
reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge Weena would have
stopped, fearing the darkness before us; but a singular sense of impending
calamity, that should indeed have served me as a warning, drove me
onward. I had been without sleep for a night and two days, and I was
feverish and irritable. I felt sleep coming upon me, and the Morlocks with
it.
“While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against
their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long
grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The
forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get
through it to the bare hillside, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether
safer resting-place; I thought that with my matches and my camphor I could
contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was evident
that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should have to abandon
my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put it down. And then it came into my
head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover
the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an
ingenious move for covering our retreat.

“I don’t know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be
in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun’s heat is rarely
strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is
sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and
blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may
occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely
results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been
forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of
wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
“She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast
herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up, and in spite of
her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a little way the
glare of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I could see, through
the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to
some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of
the hill. I laughed at that, and turned again to the dark trees before me. It
was very black, and Weena clung to me convulsively, but there was still, as
my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid
the stems. Overhead it was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue
sky shone down upon us here and there. I lit none of my matches because I
had no hand free. Upon my left arm I carried my little one, in my right hand
I had my iron bar.
“For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the
faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the
blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering behind me.
I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the
same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Underworld. There were
evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me.
Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm.
And Weena shivered violently, and became quite still.
“It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I did so,
and, as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness about
my knees, perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar cooing
sounds from the Morlocks. Soft little hands, too, were creeping over my
coat and back, touching even my neck. Then the match scratched and
fizzed. I held it flaring, and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in flight

amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket, and
prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane. Then I looked at
Weena. She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless, with her face
to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed scarcely to
breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the ground, and as it split
and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt down
and lifted her. The wood behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of a
great company!
“She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder and
rose to push on, and then there came a horrible realisation. In manœuvring
with my matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several times, and
now I had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my path. For all I knew,
I might be facing back towards the Palace of Green Porcelain. I found
myself in a cold sweat. I had to think rapidly what to do. I determined to
build a fire and encamp where we were. I put Weena, still motionless, down
upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as my first lump of camphor waned, I
began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and there out of the darkness round
me the Morlocks’ eyes shone like carbuncles.
“The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two
white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away. One
was so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his bones
grind under the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a
little way, and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor, and went on
gathering my bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage
above me, for since my arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a week, no
rain had fallen. So, instead of casting about among the trees for fallen twigs,
I began leaping up and dragging down branches. Very soon I had a choking
smoky fire of green wood and dry sticks, and could economise my
camphor. Then I turned to where Weena lay beside my iron mace. I tried
what I could to revive her, but she lay like one dead. I could not even satisfy
myself whether or not she breathed.
“Now, the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made
me heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air. My
fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary after
my exertion, and sat down. The wood, too, was full of a slumbrous murmur
that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all

was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their
clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box, and—it had
gone! Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a moment I knew
what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness
of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning
wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down.
It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures
heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider’s web. I was
overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled
over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave me
strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the
bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the
succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was
free.
“The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting
came upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined to
make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree,
swinging the iron bar before me. The whole wood was full of the stir and
cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch
of excitement, and their movements grew faster. Yet none came within
reach. I stood glaring at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope. What if
the Morlocks were afraid? And close on the heels of that came a strange
thing. The darkness seemed to grow luminous. Very dimly I began to see
the Morlocks about me—three battered at my feet—and then I recognised,
with incredulous surprise, that the others were running, in an incessant
stream, as it seemed, from behind me, and away through the wood in front.
And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I stood agape, I
saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of starlight between the
branches, and vanish. And at that I understood the smell of burning wood,
the slumbrous murmur that was growing now into a gusty roar, the red
glow, and the Morlocks’ flight.
“Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw, through the
black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It was my
first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she was gone.
The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree
burst into flame, left little time for reflection. My iron bar still gripped, I
followed in the Morlocks’ path. It was a close race. Once the flames crept

forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was outflanked and had to
strike off to the left. But at last I emerged upon a small open space, and as I
did so, a Morlock came blundering towards me, and past me, and went on
straight into the fire!
“And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all
that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with
the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted
by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest,
with yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the
space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty
Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blundering hither and thither
against each other in their bewilderment. At first I did not realise their
blindness, and struck furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as
they approached me, killing one and crippling several more. But when I had
watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the
red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness
and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them.
“Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting
loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time the
flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would
presently be able to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing
some of them before this should happen; but the fire burst out again
brightly, and I stayed my hand. I walked about the hill among them and
avoided them, looking for some trace of Weena. But Weena was gone.
“At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this strange
incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and making uncanny
noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on them. The coiling
uprush of smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rare tatters of that
red canopy, remote as though they belonged to another universe, shone the
little stars. Two or three Morlocks came blundering into me, and I drove
them off with blows of my fists, trembling as I did so.
“For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I bit
myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the ground with
my hands, and got up and sat down again, and wandered here and there, and
again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God
to let me awake. Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads down in a kind of

agony and rush into the flames. But, at last, above the subsiding red of the
fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and the whitening and
blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of these dim
creatures, came the white light of the day.
“I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain
that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it
relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed
destined. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of
the helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself. The hillock, as
I have said, was a kind of island in the forest. From its summit I could now
make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of Green Porcelain, and from
that I could get my bearings for the White Sphinx. And so, leaving the
remnant of these damned souls still going hither and thither and moaning,
as the day grew clearer, I tied some grass about my feet and limped on
across smoking ashes and among black stems that still pulsated internally
with fire, towards the hiding-place of the Time Machine. I walked slowly,
for I was almost exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the intensest
wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an
overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the
sorrow of a dream than an actual loss. But that morning it left me absolutely
lonely again—terribly alone. I began to think of this house of mine, of this
fireside, of some of you, and with such thoughts came a longing that was
pain.
“But, as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I
made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The
box must have leaked before it was lost.

XIII.
The Trap of the White Sphinx

“About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow
metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I
thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain
from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene,
the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent
ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes
of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some
were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that
suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape
rose the cupolas above the ways to the Underworld. I understood now what
all the beauty of the Overworld people covered. Very pleasant was their day,
as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of
no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been.
It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and
ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it
had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must
have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his
wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that
perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question
left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the
compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in
harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals
to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence
where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals

partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and
dangers.
“So, as I see it, the Upperworld man had drifted towards his feeble
prettiness, and the Underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that
perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute
permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of an Underworld,
however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had
been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began
below. The Underworld being in contact with machinery, which, however
perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained
perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than
the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit
had hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw it in my last view of the world of
Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One. It may be as
wrong an explanation as mortal wit could invent. It is how the thing shaped
itself to me, and as that I give it to you.
“After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days, and in spite
of my grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm sunlight were very
pleasant. I was very tired and sleepy, and soon my theorising passed into
dozing. Catching myself at that, I took my own hint, and spreading myself
out upon the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep.
“I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being caught
napping by the Morlocks, and, stretching myself, I came on down the hill
towards the White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the other
hand played with the matches in my pocket.
“And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal
of the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into
grooves.
“At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
“Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner of this
was the Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here, after
all my elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx, was a meek
surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use it.
“A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal.
For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks.
Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze

frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been
carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks had
even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its
purpose.
“Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of
the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels
suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the dark—
trapped. So the Morlocks thought. At that I chuckled gleefully.
“I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me.
Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers and
depart then like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little thing. The matches
were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.
“You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were
close upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at
them with the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine.
Then came one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight
against their persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for
the studs over which these fitted. One, indeed, they almost got away from
me. As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my head—I
could hear the Morlock’s skull ring—to recover it. It was a nearer thing
than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.
“But at last the lever was fixed and pulled over. The clinging hands
slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself
in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.

XIV.
The Further Vision

“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with
time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but
sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the
machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I
brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had
arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days, another
millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead of
reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them,
and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand
was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch—into futurity.
“As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things.
The palpitating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still travelling
with prodigious velocity—the blinking succession of day and night, which
was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more
marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and
day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the
sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight
brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet
glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun
had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set—it simply rose
and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the
moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower,
had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I
stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a
vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a
momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more
brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived

by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag
was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in
our own time the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered
my former headlong fall, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower
went the circling hands until the thousands one seemed motionless and the
daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the
dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.
“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round.
The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of
the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it
was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a
glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red
and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all
the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation
that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the
same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves:
plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight.
“The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away
to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky.
There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring.
Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed
that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where
the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the
lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I
was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience
of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it
is now.
“Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing
like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky and,
circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice
was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the
machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken
to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the
thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as
large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its
big claws swaying, its long antennæ, like carters’ whips, waving and

feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic
front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a
greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps
of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
“As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a
tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it
away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately
came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It
was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I
saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just
behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all
alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal
slime, were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever,
and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I was
still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped.
Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light,
among the foliated sheets of intense green.
“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the
stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform
poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s
lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years,
and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same
dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea
creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the
westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.
“So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand
years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a
strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and
the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years
hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth
part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling
multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid
green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with
white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came
eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the

starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks
pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting
masses farther out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under
the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.
“I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain
indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I
saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks
alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in
the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some
black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I
looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black
object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and
seemed to me to twinkle very little.
“Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had
changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow
larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was
creeping over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was beginning.
Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the sun’s disk.
Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to
believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very
near to the earth.
“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts
from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number.
From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless
sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness
of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the
hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was
over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant,
dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by
one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished
into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central
shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale
stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was
absolutely black.
“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my
marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a

deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the
edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and
incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw
again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it
was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing,
the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed
down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it
was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of
lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I
clambered upon the saddle.

XV.
The Time Traveller’s Return

“So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the
machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the
sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The
fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun
backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the
evidences of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others
came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I
began to recognise our own pretty and familiar architecture, the thousands
hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and
slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently,
now, I slowed the mechanism down.
“I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you that
when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had
walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I
returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the
laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of
her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly
up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which
she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a
moment; but he passed like a flash.
“Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar
laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off the
thing very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I
trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old
workshop again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the
whole thing have been a dream.

“And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east corner of
the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west, against the wall
where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to
the pedestal of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried my
machine.
“For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through
the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling
sorely begrimed. I saw the Pall Mall Gazette on the table by the door. I
found the date was indeed today, and looking at the timepiece, saw the hour
was almost eight o’clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I
hesitated—I felt so sick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat,
and opened the door on you. You know the rest. I washed, and dined, and
now I am telling you the story.

XVI.
After the Story

“I know,” he said, after a pause, “that all this will be absolutely incredible
to you, but to me the one incredible thing is that I am here tonight in this
old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these
strange adventures.” He looked at the Medical Man. “No. I cannot expect
you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the
workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race,
until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere
stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you
think of it?”
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap
with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary
stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I
took my eyes off the Time Traveller’s face, and looked round at his
audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam before
them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host.
The Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar—the sixth. The
Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were
motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity it is you’re not a writer of
stories!” he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.
“You don’t believe it?”
“Well——”
“I thought not.”
The Time Traveller turned to us. “Where are the matches?” he said. He lit
one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. “To tell you the truth... I hardly
believe it myself..... And yet...”

His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon
the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw he
was looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers.
“The gynæceum’s odd,” he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see,
holding out his hand for a specimen.
“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said the Journalist. “How shall
we get home?”
“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.
“It’s a curious thing,” said the Medical Man; “but I certainly don’t know
the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?”
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: “Certainly not.”
“Where did you really get them?” said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was
trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. “They were put into my
pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.” He stared round the room.
“I’m damned if it isn’t all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of
every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or
a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a
dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I can’t stand another that won’t
fit. It’s madness. And where did the dream come from? … I must look at
that machine. If there is one!”
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the
door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the
lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew, a thing of brass,
ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch—for I
put out my hand and felt the rail of it—and with brown spots and smears
upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail
bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand
along the damaged rail. “It’s all right now,” he said. “The story I told you
was true. I’m sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.” He took up
the lamp, and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The
Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he

was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him
standing in the open doorway, bawling good-night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a “gaudy lie.” For my
own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic
and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the
night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the Time
Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms
in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared
for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched the
lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough
shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer
reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I
came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-
room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one
arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave
me an elbow to shake. “I’m frightfully busy,” said he, “with that thing in
there.”
“But is it not some hoax?” I said. “Do you really travel through time?”
“Really and truly I do.” And he looked frankly into my eyes. He
hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. “I only want half an hour,” he
said. “I know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some
magazines here. If you’ll stop to lunch I’ll prove you this time travelling up
to the hilt, specimens and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?”
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and
he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory
slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he
going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an
advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two.
I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I
got up and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly
truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me
as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass
falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a
ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a
moment—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of

drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed
my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the
further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had,
apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had
happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing
might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-
servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. “Has Mr. —— gone
out that way?” said I.
“No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him
here.”
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on,
waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger
story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I
am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller
vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never
returned.

Epilogue

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he
swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages
of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or
among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic
times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some
plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of
the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which
men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its
wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my
own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment,
fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time!
I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed
among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but
cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of
civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and
destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though
it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast
ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have
by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and
brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength
had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of
man.

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