The Time Machine: Chapters 10–13

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.

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.

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration.

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.

In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach.

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.

Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame.

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.

My fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so.

The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came upon me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

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.