The Time Machine Chapter 5

Books at bedtime by Calming Anxiety , the time machine, chapter 5, in the golden age.

In another moment, we were standing face to face, eye and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes, the absence from his bearing any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he turned to his two others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet liquid tongue. There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed me, it came into my head oddly enough that my voice was too harsh and deep for them, so I shook my head and pointing to my ears shook it again. He came a step forward, hesitated and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was for real. There was nothing in this at all that was alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence, a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease, and besides, they looked so frail but I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them as if they were like nine pins. But I made a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the time machine. Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine, I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and I put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication. And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their trest and china type of prettiness, their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and the cheek. There was not the faintest suggestion of it on their face, and their eyes were singularly minute. Their mouths were small, with bright red rather thin lips, and their little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild, and this may seem ego-tism on my part.

I've bansied even that there were a certain lack of interest I might have expected in them. As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round, smiling, and speaking in soft-cuing notes to each other, I began the conversation. I pointed to the time machine into myself, then hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun. At once, a quaintly pretty little figure in checkered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder. For a moment I was staggered, though the import to this gentlshka was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly, with these creatures formed. You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had always anticipated that the people of the year 802,000 would be incredibly in front of this in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five year old children, asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm, it let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the time machine in vain. I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a thunder clap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and bowed. Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether new to me and put it about my neck.

The idea was received with melodious applause, and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the light can scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then someone suggested that their playing should be exhibited in the nearest building. And so I was led past the syncs of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment towards a vast gray edifice of fretted stone. As I went with them, the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came with irresistible merriment to my mind. The building had a huge entry and was altogether of colossal dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and with the big open portals that yawned before my shadowy and mysterious ways.

My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long-nig collected and yet weedless garden. I saw a small number of tall spikes of strange white flowers measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the wax and petals. They grew scattered as if wild, among the variegated shrubs, but as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The time machine was left deserted on the turf among the roaded entrance. The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly broken and were the warn. Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered. I, dressed in dingy 19th century garments, looked grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft colored robes and shining white limbs in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech. The big doorway opened, inter-op proportionately great hall hung with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows partially glazed with coloured glass and partially unglased, admitted a tempered light. The floor, this was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates or slabs or blocks, and it was so much warm as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations as to be deeply channeled among the more frequent ways.

Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from the floor, upon which these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a kind of high petrofied raspberry in orange, but for the most part they were strange. Between the tables were scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so forth into the round openings in the side of the tables. I was not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry, as I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure. And perhaps the thing that struck me the most was its dilapidated look, the stained glassed windows which displayed only a geometrical pattern were broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end with thick griff and it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was fractured. Nevertheless the general effect was extremely rich in picturesque. There were perhaps a couple of hundred people dining in the hall, and most of them seated as near to me as they could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over the fruit that they were eating. All were clad in the same soft yet strong silky material.

Fruit, by the by, was all their diet. These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugiverous also. Indeed I found afterwards that horses cattle-sheet dogs had followed the ice catheterus into extinction, but the fruits were very delightful, one in particular that seemed to be in season all the time I was there. A flowery thing in a three-sided husk was especially good, and I made it my staple. At first I was puzzled by all the strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import. However, I am telling you, in my fruit dinner, in the distant future now, so soon as my appetite was a little check. I determined to make a resolute attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly, that was the next thing to do.

The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of these up, I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning. At first, my efforts met with a stare of surprise, or inextingishable laughter, but presently, a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name. They had to chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and my first attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of genuine, if uncivil amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children and persisted, and presently, I had a score of now-and-substantives, at least at my command, and then I got to demonstrate pronouns, and even the verb to eat. But it was slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations.

So I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons a little dose each day when they felt inclined, and very little doses I found before long, for I never met people more indolent and more easily fatigued.