Time Travelling
“I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and
showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a
little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail
bent; but the rest of it’s sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday; but on
Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel
bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so that the
thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten o’clock today that the
first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws
again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I
suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at
what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the
stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I
seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw
the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I
suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment
before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly
half-past three!
“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and
went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett
came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I
suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to
shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme
position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment
came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever
fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb
confusedness descended on my mind.
“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They
are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a
switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation,
too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the
flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently
to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it
every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had
been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of
scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving
things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The
twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.
Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through
her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars.
Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day
merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of
blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun
became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating
band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle
flickering in the blue.
“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which
this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees
growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew,
spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair,
and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting
and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my
speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up
and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my
pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed
across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of
spring.
“The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged
at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy
swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my mind was
too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung
myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of
anything but these new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions
grew up in my mind—a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread—until at
last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments of
humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilisation, I thought,
might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that
raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising
about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it
seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and
remain there, without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my
confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the
business of stopping.
“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity
through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated—was
slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to
come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into
whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact
with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a farreaching explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me
again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully
accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man has got to take! Now
the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is
that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and
swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
absolutely upset my nerves. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust
of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over
the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong
through the air.
“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on
soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but
presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me.
I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by
rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were
dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding,
dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground
like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. ‘Fine hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a
man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.’
“Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked round
me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed
indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else
of the world was invisible.
“My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew
thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver
birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a
winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides,
were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of
bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me;
the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on
the lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion
of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a minute, perhaps, or half
an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or
thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain
had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the
sun.
“I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my
voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain was
altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty
had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its
manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and
overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only
the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be
incontinently slain.
“Already I saw other vast shapes—huge buildings with intricate parapets and
tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the
lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the Time
Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote
through the thunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like
the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer
sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great
buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the
thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along
their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in
the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to
frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist
and knee, with the machine. It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It
struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood
panting heavily in attitude to mount again.
“But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked
more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future. In a circular
opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in
rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
“Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the
White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these
emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with
my machine. He was a slight creature—perhaps four feet high—clad in a purple
tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins—I could not
clearly distinguish which—were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and
his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air
was.
“He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but
indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of
consumptive—that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the sight
of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
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