The Time Ships

Now that I had grown used to the quiet dignity of Nebogipfel, the bestial nature of these primal Morlocks, with their slack jaws, filthy and tangled hair, and hunched posture — some of them ran with their hands trailing on the ground — was distressing in the extreme.

We came on the edge of the forest abruptly. I stumbled out of the last line of trees, and found myself staggering across a meadow.

I hauled in great breaths of air, and turned to look back at the blazing wood. Smoke billowed up, forming a column which reached over the sky, obscuring the stars; and I saw, from the heart of the forest, huge flames — hundreds of feet tall — which stretched up like buildings. Morlocks continued to flee from the blaze, but in decreasing numbers; and those which emerged from the wood were disheveled and wounded.

I turned, and walked on through long, wiry grass. At first the heat was strong on my back; but after perhaps a mile it had diminished, and the fire’s crimson glare faded to a mere glow. We saw no more Morlocks after that.

I crossed over a hill, and in the valley beyond I came to a place I had visited before. There were acacias here, and a number of sleeping-houses, and a statue — incomplete and broken — which had reminded me of a Faun. I walked down the slope of this valley, and, cradled in its crook, I found a little river I remembered. Its surface, turbulent and broken, reflected the star-light. I settled beside the bank and laid Weena carefully on the ground. The water was cold and fast-ru

Thus, with Weena’s head cradled in my lap, I sat out the rest of that Dark Night.

In the morning I saw him emerge from the burnt forest in a pitiable state. His face was ghastly pale, and he had half-healed cuts on his face, a coat that was dusty and dirty, and a limp worse than a footsore tramp’s with only scorched grass bound up around his bloody feet. I felt a twinge of compassion — or perhaps of embarrassment — to see his wretchedness: had this really been me, I wondered? — had I presented such a spectacle to my friends, on my return, after that first adventure?

Again I had an impulse to offer help; but I knew that no assistance was necessary. My earlier self would sleep off his exhaustion through the brightness of the day, and then, as evening approached, he would return to the White Sphinx to retrieve his Time Machine.

Finally — after one last struggle against the Morlocks — he would be gone, in a whirl of attenuation.

So I stayed with Weena by the river, and nursed her while the sun climbed in the sky, and prayed that she might awaken.

Epilogue

My early days were the hardest, for I arrived here quite bereft of tools.

At first I was forced to live with the Eloi. I partook of the fruit brought to them by the Morlocks, and I shared the elaborate ruins they used as sleeping-halls.

When the moon waned, and the next sequence of Dark Nights came, I was struck by the boldness with which the Morlocks emerged from their caverns and assailed their human cattle! I set myself at the gate of a sleeping-house, with bits of iron and stone to serve as weapons, and in this way I was able to resist; but I could not keep them all out — the Morlocks swarm like vermin, rather than fight in the organized fashion of humans — and besides, I could defend only one sleeping-hall among hundreds dotted about the Thames Valley.

Those black hours, of fear and unparalleled misery for the defenseless Eloi, are as bleak as anything in my experience. And yet, with the coming of the day, that darkness was already banished from the little minds of the Eloi, and they were prepared to play and laugh as readily as if the Morlocks did not exist.

I was determined to make a change to this arrangement: for that with the rescue of Weena — had, after all, been my intention in returning here.

I have further explored the countryside hereabouts. I must have made a fine sight as I tramped the hills, with my wild and spectacular beard, my sunburnt scalp, and with my bulky frame draped in gaudy Eloi cloth! There is no transport, of course, and no beasts of burden to carry me, and only the remnants of my 1944 boots to protect my feet. But I have reached as far as Hounslow and Staines to the west, Barnet in the north, Epsom and Leatherhead to the south; and to the east, I have followed the Thames’s new course as far as Woolwich.

Everywhere I have found a uniform picture: the verdant landscape with its scattering of ruins, the halls and houses of the Eloi — and, everywhere, the grisly punctuation of the Morlock shafts. It may be that in France or Scotland the picture is very different! — but I do not believe it. The whole of this country, and beyond, is infested by the Morlocks and their subterranean warrens.

So I have been forced to abandon my first, tentative plan, which was to take a party of the Eloi out of the reach of the Morlocks: for now I know that the Eloi ca

I have begun, quietly, to seek other ways to live.

I determined to take up a permanent residence in the Palace of Green Porcelain. This had been one of my plans in my previous visit here, for, although I had seen evidence of Morlock activity there, that ancient museum with its large halls and robust construction had commended itself to me as defensible a fastness as I had found against the cu

I repeated and extended my exploration of the cavernous halls and chambers of the Palace. I settled, for my base, on that Hall of Mineralogy which I found on my first visit, with its well-preserved but useless samples of a wider array of minerals than I could name. This chamber is rather smaller than some of the others, and so more easily secured; and, when I had swept it of dust and built a fire, it came to seem almost homelike to me. Since then, by shoring up the broken valves of doors and fixing breaches in the ancient walls, I have extended my fastness into some adjoining halls. While investigating the Gallery of Palaeontology, with its huge and useless brontosaurus bones, I came across a collection of bones tumbled about and scattered on the floor, evidently by the playful Eloi, of which at first I could make no sense; but when I roughly assembled the skeletons, I thought that they were of a horse, a dog, an ox, and, I think, of a fox — in short, they were the last relics of the ordinary animals of my own, vanished England. But the bones were too scattered and broken, and my anatomical understanding too imprecise, for me to be sure of my identification.

I have also returned to that ill-lit and sloping gallery which contains the hulking corpses of great machines, for this has served me as a mine for improvised tools of all descriptions — and not just weapons, as was my first use of it. I spent some time on one machine which had the appearance of an electrical dynamo, for its condition was not too ruinous to look at, and I entertained fantasies of starting it up, and lighting such of the broken globes which hang from that chamber’s ceiling as would take a current. I calculated that that blaze of electric light, and the noise of the dynamo, would send the Morlocks fleeing as nothing else! — but I have nothing in the way of fuel or lubricants, and besides the small parts of the hulk are seized up and corroded, and I have perforce abandoned that project.