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Text

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Chapter 10

When Night Came

“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, 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. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—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. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible

remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult

problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might 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 Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul

villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt

pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld

people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks

their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two

species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down

towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The

Eloi, like the Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful

futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the

Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to

find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their

garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,

perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as

a standing horse paws 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 apace. 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 Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were

becoming reacquainted 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 I could not tell what it was at the time.

“Still, however helpless the 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 paralyse

and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself.

Without further delay I determined 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. I felt I could never sleep

again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to

think how they must already have examined me.

“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but

found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the

buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous

climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the

tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam

of its walls came back to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena

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 eighteen. 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 sole—they were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors—so that I

was lame. And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of

the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.

The Time Traveller paused, 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.

“Weena 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 Weena, but at the last she had

concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral

decoration. At least she utilised them for that purpose. And that

reminds me! In changing my jacket I found…”

“As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the

hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to

the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the

Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand

that we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great

pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in

the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that

evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save 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 preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel

the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see

through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither 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. Weena’s fears and her fatigue

grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed

her. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck,

and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So

we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I

almost walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the

opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a

statue—a Faun, or some such figure, minus the head. Here too were

acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, 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 Weena from my shoulder as I halted, 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 might hide. Under that

dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even

were there no other lurking danger—a danger I did not care to let my

imagination loose upon—there would still be all the roots to stumble

over and the tree-boles to strike against. I was very tired, too, after

the excitements of the day; so I decided that I would not face it, but

would pass the night upon the open hill.

“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in

my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. 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 unfamiliar

groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same

tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it)

was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even more

splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these scintillating

points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily 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 unfathomable

distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the

unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great

precessional 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 organisations, the nations, languages,

literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him,

had been swept out of existence. Instead were these 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, with a sudden shiver, came the clear

knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too

horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white

and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

“Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I

could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs

of the 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 vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the

reflection of some colourless fire, and the old moon rose, 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

Morlocks had approached us. Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that

night. And in the confidence of 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 Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and

pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith

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

pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly,

at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks’ 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 tried to

look at the thing in a 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 a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These

Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and

preyed upon—probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena

dancing at my side!

“Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon

me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man

had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his

fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the

fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a

Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this

attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual

degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim

my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and

their Fear.

“I had at that time very vague ideas 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 procure some means of fire, so

that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew,

would be more efficient against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to

arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the

White Sphinx. 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 Morlocks

were strong enough to move it 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 which my fancy had chosen as our

dwelling.

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