The Time Machine: Chapter 14–Epilogue

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.

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 sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky.

And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky.

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.

The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine.

Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there.

As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve.

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 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.

The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed.

For a time my brain went stagnant.

Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest.

The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host.

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.

He thought the tale a “gaudy lie.”

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.

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.

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.

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!