The Time Machine Chapter 14

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety, the time machine chapter 14 of Further Vision.

I have already told you for the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling, and this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. From indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records days and another thousands of days, another millions of days and another thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them so far over as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands' hands were sweeping round as fast as the second hands of a watch into futurity. As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating grainers grew darker, then, though I was still travelling with prodigious versatility, the blinkings' accession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last, a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broke in now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared for the sun had ceased to set. It simply rose and fell in the west and grew even broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, sometime before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one time, it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat.

I perceived by this slowing down of its rising and settling, that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former head long form, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands, until the thousands of them were in the dark, and the only one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the time machine looking around. This guy was no longer blue. North eastward, it was inky black and out of the blackness shone brightly, insteadly, the pale white stars. Overhead, it was a deep Indian red in Starless, and south eastward, it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet, where, cut by the horizon, lay the large hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was only the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lycan in caves, plants which like these grew in the perpetual twilight. The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a deep-bright horizon against the whan-sky. There was no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living, and along the margin where the water sometimes broke, was a thick, incrustation of salt, pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it was now. Far away, up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky, and circling, disappear over some low hillock beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine, looking around me again. I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock, was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing, was really a monstrous, crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with as many legs moving slowly and uncertainly? It's big claw swaying, it's long antenna like Carter's whips waving and feeling, and it stalked eyes, gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front. Its back was corrugated and ornamented, as I angainly bosses, and a greenish, in crustacean blotchet here and there. I could see the many poulps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved. As I stared, at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this and caught something thread-like. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand, with a frightful quam I turned, and saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just by me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was alive with appetite, and its vast angainy claws smirred with an algal colc slime, with ascending upon me. In a moment my hand was upon the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters, but I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombalite among the foliated sheets of intense green. I cannot convey the sense of a bomb-enable desolation that hung over the world. The red, eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt-dead sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-staring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs, all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun, a little larger, a little dullar, the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crusty sea creeping in and out amongst the green weed in the red rocks, and in the westward sky I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.

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 ever way. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darklings' heaven. I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beak saved for its livid green light of works and lichens, seemed lifeless, and now it was flecked with white, a bitter cold assailed me, rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the northeastward, 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 among the sea-margin, with drifting masses further out, but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen. I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain, indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine, but I saw nothing moving in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct.

A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea, and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object, flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to meet twinkle very little. Suddenly, I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed, and a concavity, a bay had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared a gust at this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon, or the planet mercury, was passing across the sun's disc. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing near to the earth. The darkness grew a pace. A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the sharing white flakes in the air increased their number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. It would be hard to convey the stillness of it, all the sounds of man, the bleeding of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stars that make the background of our lives, all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes, and the cold of the air more intense. At last one by one swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment, the pale stars alone were visible, all else was raeless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. A horror of this great darkness came to me, the cold that smoked to my marrow and the pain I felt in breathing overcame me. I shivered, where deadly nausea seized me. Then, like a red hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused, I saw again the moving thing upon the show. There is 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. Then, I felt I was thinking, but a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me what I clambered upon the saddle.