The Time Machine Read online

  III

  'I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the TimeMachine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in theworkshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one ofthe ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest ofit'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 thenickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to getremade; so that the thing was not complete until this morning. Itwas at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines beganits career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, putone more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in thesaddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feelsmuch the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I tookthe starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other,pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed toreel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round,I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? Fora moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I notedthe clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minuteor so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

  'I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with bothhands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and wentdark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeingme, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so totraverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the roomlike a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. Thenight came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another momentcame to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainterand ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, nightagain, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filledmy ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

  'I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of timetravelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feelingexactly like that one has upon a switchback--of a helpless headlongmotion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminentsmash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of ablack wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently tofall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky,leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposedthe laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air.I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going toofast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail thatever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession ofdarkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in theintermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through herquarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circlingstars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, thepalpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness;the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminouscolor like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streakof fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuatingband; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then abrighter circle flickering in the blue.

  'The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hill-sideupon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above megrey 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 flowingunder my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered myspeed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sunbelt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute orless, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; andminute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, andvanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.

  'The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. Theymerged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarkedindeed a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable toaccount. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with akind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. Atfirst I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything butthese new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressionsgrew up in my mind--a certain curiosity and therewith a certaindread--until at last they took complete possession of me. Whatstrange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon ourrudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came tolook nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuatedbefore my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising aboutme, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as itseemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up thehill-side, and remain there, without any wintry intermission. Eventhrough the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And somy mind came round to the business of stopping.

  'The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding somesubstance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So longas I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcelymattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping like a vapourthrough the interstices of intervening substances! But to come toa stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, intowhatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimatecontact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemicalreaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion--would result, and blowmyself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions--into theUnknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while Iwas making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as anunavoidable risk--one of the risks a man has got to take! Now therisk 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, thefeeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I toldmyself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance Iresolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged overthe lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I wasflung headlong through the air.

  'There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may havebeen 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 theconfusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on whatseemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendronbushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms weredropping in a shower under the beating of the hail-stones. Therebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the machine, and drovealong the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin."Fine hospitality," said I, "to a man who has travelled innumerableyears to see you."

  'Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up andlooked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some whitestone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazydownpour. But all else of the world was invisible.

  'My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hailgrew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was verylarge, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of whitemarble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings,instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread sothat it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was ofbronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face wastowards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was thefaint shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather-worn,and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stoodlooking at it for a little space--half a minute, perhaps, or half anhour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before itdenser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment andsaw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky waslightening with the promise of the sun.

  'I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the fulltemerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear whenthat hazy curtain
was altogether withdrawn? What might not havehappened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion?What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and haddeveloped into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelminglypowerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the moredreadful and disgusting for our common likeness--a foul creature tobe incontinently slain.

  'Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricateparapets and tall columns, with a wooded hill-side dimly creepingin upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panicfear. I turned frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard toreadjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through thethunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished likethe trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blueof the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled intonothingness. The great buildings about me stood out clear anddistinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and picked outin white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. Ifelt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel inthe clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My feargrew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and againgrappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave undermy desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. Onehand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavilyin attitude to mount again.

  'But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. Ilooked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remotefuture. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearerhouse, I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They hadseen me, and their faces were directed towards me.

  'Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes bythe White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One ofthese emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn uponwhich I stood with my machine. He was a slight creature--perhapsfour feet high--clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with aleather belt. Sandals or buskins--I could not clearly distinguishwhich--were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and hishead was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warmthe air was.

  'He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, butindescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the morebeautiful kind of consumptive--that hectic beauty of which we usedto hear so much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence.I took my hands from the machine.