The Time Machine Read online

  XI

  'I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comeswith time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in thesaddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinitetime I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quiteunheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dialsagain I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial recordsdays, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, andanother thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers,I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when Icame to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand wassweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch--intofuturity.

  'As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance ofthings. The palpitating greyness grew darker; then--though I wasstill travelling with prodigious velocity--the blinking successionof day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,returned, and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very muchat first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower,and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemedto stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded overthe earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glaredacross the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated thesun had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set--itsimply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and morered. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars,growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points oflight. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and verylarge, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing witha dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. Atone time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again,but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by thisslowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidaldrag 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 reversemy motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands until thethousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer amere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of adesolate 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 palewhite stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, andsouth-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut bythe horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. Therocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace oflife that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetationthat covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. Itwas the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on thelichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetualtwilight.

  'The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched awayto the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against thewan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath ofwind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like agentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still movingand living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke wasa thick incrustation of salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was asense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathingvery fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience ofmountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefiedthan it is now.

  'Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw athing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up intothe sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. Thesound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myselfmore 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 movingslowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrouscrab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table,with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big clawsswaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling,and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallicfront? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses,and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could seethe many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as itmoved.

  'As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felta tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried tobrush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almostimmediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caughtsomething threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With afrightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antennaof another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyeswere wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive withappetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime,were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, andI had placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I wasstill on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as Istopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in thesombre light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.

  'I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung overthe world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the saltDead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirringmonsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenousplants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to anappalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the samered sun--a little larger, a little duller--the same dying sea, thesame chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping inand out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westwardsky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.

  'So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of athousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate,watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and dullerin the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. Atlast, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome ofthe sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darklingheavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude ofcrabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid greenliverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked withwhite. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and againcame eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow layunder the starlight of the sable sky and I could see an undulatingcrest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along thesea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanseof that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was stillunfrozen.

  'I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. Acertain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of themachine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The greenslime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. Ashallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had recededfrom the beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping aboutupon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and Ijudged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object wasmerely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemedto me to twinkle very little.

  'Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sunhad changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. Isaw this grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at thisblackness that was creeping over the day, and then I realized thatan eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury waspassing across the sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to bethe moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what Ireally saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near tothe earth.

  'The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in fresheninggusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the airincreased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple andwhisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent?It would be hard to
convey the stillness of it. All the sounds ofman, 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. Atlast, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks ofthe distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to amoaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweepingtowards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. Allelse was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

  'A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smoteto my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. Ishivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bowin the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine torecover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the returnjourney. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thingupon the shoal--there was no mistake now that it was a movingthing--against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, thesize of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentaclestrailed down from it; it seemed black against the welteringblood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt Iwas fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remoteand awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.