The Time Machine Chapter 10

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety, The Time Machine, Chapter 10, When Night Came.

Now, indeed, I seemed in a worst case than before. Hither too, 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.

Hither too, I had merely thought myself, impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I'd only to understand to overcome. But there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Moorlocks, 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. Weenah had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the Dark Night.

It was not now such a difficult problem to guess what was coming, the Dark Knights would 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 upper world people for the Dark. I wondered vaguely, what foul villainy it might be that the Moorlocks did unto the new moon.

I felt, sure now, that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The upper world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Moorlocks their mechanical servant. But that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards or who already had arrived at an altogether new relationship.

The Eli, like the Karl Avergain, Kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on suffering. Since the Moorlocks subterranean for innumerable generations had come at last to find the daylight surface intolerable. And the Moorlocks made their garments, iron-fird, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through a survival of an old habit of service.

They did it as a standing horse paused 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 a pain. 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 Eli had begun to learn one old lesson in you. They were becoming re-acquainted 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 could not tell what it was at the time. Still, however helpless, a 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 paralyze a mystery has lost its terror. I at least would defend myself. Without further delay, I did terman 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 to. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them. I shared it with horror to think how they must have already examined me. I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but I found nothing that commended itself into my mind as inaccessible.

All the buildings and trees seemed easily practical to such dexterous climbers as the more locks, to judge by their wells must be. Then the tall pinnacles of the palace of the Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to my memory, and in the evening, taking weener 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 18.

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 sun. They were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors, so that I was lame. It was already long past sunset when I came inside the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky. Weener 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 Weener, but at the last she had concluded that they were eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration. At least she used to lie to them for that purpose, and that reminds me in changing my jacket I found. The time travelled the pause, 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 lush of the evening crept over the world, and we proceeded over the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weener grew tired and wanted to return to the house of the Greystone. But, I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the palace of the Green Porcelain to her, and she can try to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge there from her fear. You know, that great pause that comes upon things before her, even the breeze stops in the trees. To me, there is always an air of expectation about the evening stillness.

The sky was clear, remote, and empty, saved 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 prenaturally sharpened. I fancied, I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet.

Could, indeed, almost see through it, to the mallocks on their ant hill going hither 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. Weeners' fears, and her fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms, and talked to her in Christa. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms around my neck, and closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder.

Where we went down a long slope into a valley, and there, in the dimness, I almost walked into a little river. This I waited, and went up on the opposite side of the valley, passed a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue of form, or some such figure, minus the head. So far, I had seen nothing of the mallocks, 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 weenah from my shoulders as I haunted, 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 may hide. Under that dense tangle of branches, one would be out of sight of the star, even where there were no lurking strangers. A danger I did not care to let imagination loose upon.

There would still be all the roots to stumble over, and the tree-bolts to strike again. I was very tired too, after the excitement of the day, so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill. Weenah, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moon-right.

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 an unfamiliar grouping.

But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of Stardas as Yulth Yul. Southwood, as I judged it, was a very bright red star that was new to me. It was even more splendid than our own green series. And amid all of these scintillating points of light, one bright planet shone kindly insteadly, 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 un-pathenable distance, and the slow, inevitable drift of their movements, out of the unknown past and into the unknown future. I thought of the great, processional 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 organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead, there were the 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, the sudden shiver claimed the clear knowledge of the what the meters that I had seen. Yet it was too horrible.

I looked a little weeners sleeping beside me, her face white and star-like under the stars, and forthwith dismissed that thought. Through the long night I held my mind off the warlocks as well as I could, and wild away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of 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 visual war on came of faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colorless fire, and the old moon-roams 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 more locks had approached us. Indeed I had seen none up the hill at night, and in the confidence of the 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 Weener, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and forboding. We found some fruit, where it 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 pitted this last people real, from the great flood of humanity.

Clearly, at some time and a long ago of human decay, the more locks 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 try to look, of the thing in the 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 at all meant it gone. Why should I trouble myself? Easy lie, where mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like moorlocks preserved and prayed upon, probably saw to the breeding of, and there was weenah dancing at my side.

Then I tried to preserve myself with the horror that was coming upon me by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content to live an ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow man, had taken necessity at his watchword in excuse. And in the fullness of time necessity had come home to him. I even tried.

A car-liled-like scorn of the wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mine was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the Eli had kept much of human form, not to claim my sympathy. And to make me, perforce a share in their degradation and their fear.

I had, at the time, a very vague idea 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 secure some means of fire so that I could have the weapon of a torture hand for nothing.

I knew would be more efficient against these more looks. Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of the bronze under the white spring. 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 more logs were strong enough to move it that 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, with which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.