The Time Machine Chapter 11

books at their time by Calming Anxiety. The Time Machine, Chapter 11, The Palace of Green Possilent. I found the palace of Green Possilent when we approached it about noon, deserted, and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows and great sheets of green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a trophy down and looking northease wood before I entered it. I was surprised to see a large estuary or even creek where I judged ones worth and battersy must have been. I thought then, though I never followed up on the thought of what might have happened or might be happening to the living things in the sea. The material of the palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I thought rather foolishly that weiner might be able to help me interpret this, but I only learnt that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human. Within the big halves of the door, which were open and broken, we found instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled thought was thick with dust and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering. 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 a mega-theorium, the skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust and in one place where rain water had dropped through a leak in the roof. The thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was a huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed.

Going towards the side I found what had appeared to be sloping shelves and clearing away the thick dust. I found the old familiar glass cases of her own time, but they must have been airtight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents. Clearly we stood amongst the ruins of some latter days South Kensington. Here apparently was a paleo-tological section and very splendid array of fossils it must have been. Though the inevitable process of decay that had been starved off for a time and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost 99 hundreds of its force was nevertheless with extreme sureness if the extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken into pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds and the cases had in some instances been bodily removed by the moor logs as I judged. The place was very silent, the thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weiner who had been rolling a search in down the sloping grass of a case presently came as I stared about me and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me. And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual age that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented. Even my preoccupation about the time machine receded a little from my mind.

To judge from the size of the place this palace of green porcelain had a great deal more in it than a gallery of paleontology. Possibly historical galleries it might be even a library.

To me at least in my present circumstances this would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of old time geology in decay. Exploring I found another short gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals and the sight of a block of sulfur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find no salt-peter, indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had ceased ages ago. Yet the sulfur hung on in my mind and set up a train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of the gallery, though on the hall they were the best preserved of all, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition. A few frivoled and black infestiges of what had once been stuffed animals desecrated mummies in jars that had once held spirit a brown dust of departed plants. That was all. I was sorry for that because I should have been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit. The floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered. At intervals, it globes hung from the ceiling, many of them cracked and smashed, which suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me with a huge bulks of big machines. All of them greatly corroded and many broken down, but still fairly complete. You know, I have a certain weakness for mechanism. And I was inclined to linger more among these, the more so for as most of the part that they had interest of puzzles. And I could make only the vagus guesses of what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the more logs. Suddenly, Weiner came very close to my side, so suddenly that she startled me. Had it not been for her, I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. Footnote, it may be of course that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of the hill.

The end I had come in was a great way above the ground and was lit by rare, slit-like windows. As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit like the area of a London house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intense upon them to notice the gradual demunuation of the light until Weiner's increasing the apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw, but the gallery run down at last into the thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked around me, I saw that the dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the more locks revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in this academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of the gallery, I heard a peculiar pattering and the same odd noises that I'd heard down the well. I took Weiner's hand, then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her, and turned to a machine from which projected a lever, not unlike those of a signal box. Clambring upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all of my weight upon its sideways. Suddenly Weiner, deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand, more than sufficient, I judged that any more locks skull I might encounter. And I longed, very much to kill a more lock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's own descendants, but it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in these things. Only my disinconation to leave Weiner, and a persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder, my time is sheep, my suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery, and killing the broods I heard. Well, mace in one hand, and Weiner in the other, I went out of the gallery, and into another, and still larger one, which, at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel, hung with tattered flags, the brown and charred racks that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognised as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasp that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man, I might perhaps have moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me the keenest that with us the force was the enormous waste of labour to which this somber willness of rotting paper testified. At the time, I will confess that I thought chiefly of the filth of soft-for-call transactions of my own 17 papers upon physical optics.

Then, going up a broad staircase, we went came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry, and here, I had not a little hope of useful discoveries, except at one end, the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case, and at last, in one of the rarely airtight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them, they were perfectly good, they were not even damp. I turned to weiner, dance I cried to her in her own tongue, for now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust to weiner's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling the land of the liel as cheerfully as I could. In part, it was a modest can-can in part, a step dance, in part a skirt dance, so far as my tailcoat permitted, and in part, original, for I am naturally invented, as you know. Now, I still think that for this box of matches to escape the wear of time for in memorable years was a most strange as for me, it was most fortunate thing. Yet oddly enough, I found a far unlikely substance, and that was can-for. I found it in a sealed jar that by chance I suppose had been really, himetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin waxed and smashed the glass accordingly, but the odor of campfire was unmistakable. In the universal decay, this volatile substance had chance to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting that I had once seen done for the ink of a fossil.

This must have perished and become fossilised millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was flammable and burnt with a good bright flame and was in fact an excellent candle, so I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As yet, my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chance to pump. Nevertheless, I left the gallery greatly elated. I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would require a great effort of memory, trucker, or all my explorations in proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols and rifles, the most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal and still fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder that there may once have had had now rotted into dust. One corner, I saw his charred and shattered, perhaps I thought by an explosion among the specimens. In another place was a vast array of idols, Polines in Mexican, Grecian finition, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible oiled puns, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steachite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy. As the evening drew on, my interest waned, I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous. The exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and the lignine, sometimes fresher. In one place, I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin mine and then by the mirrored accident I discovered in an airtight case, two dynamite cartridges. I shouted, "Urika" and smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt, I hesitated, then selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay, I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course, these things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence.

I really believe that they had not been so, I would have rushed off incontinently and blown sphinx bronze doors and, as it proved, my chances of finding the time machine all together into non-existence. It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace. It was turfed and I had three fruit trees, so we rested and refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset, I began to consider our position. Night was creeping upon us and my inaccessible hiding place had still to be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my position a thing that was perhaps the best of all defenses against the Morlocks. I had matches. I had the camp for in my pocket too, if I blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning, there was the getting of the time machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my eye in mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards these bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I had hoped to find my iron bar of iron, not altogether inadequate, for the work.