IV Time Travelling chapter 4 paragraph 11 among 14 paragraphs
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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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V In the Golden Age
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“In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this
fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into
my eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at
once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to
them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.
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“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 real. There was nothing in this at all
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 that I could fancy myself flinging the
whole dozen of them about like ninepins. 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 put these in my pocket.
Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication.
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“And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some
further peculiarities in their Dresden china type of prettiness. Their
hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek;
there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears
were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin
lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild;
and—this may seem egotism on my part—I fancied even that there
was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
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“As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood
round me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began
the conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then,
hesitating for a moment how to express Time, I pointed to the sun. At once
a quaintly pretty little figure in chequered purple and white followed my
gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.
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“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture
was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these
creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see, I had
always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two
Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us 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.
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“I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid
rendering of a thunderclap 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 like can
scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of
culture had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should be
exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of
white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my
astonishment, towards a vast grey 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.
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“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 me shadowy and
mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a
tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet
weedless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers,
measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the waxen 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 rhododendrons.
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“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 Phœnician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that
they were very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad
people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy
nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with
flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-coloured robes
and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing
speech.
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“The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung
with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with
coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor
was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor
slabs—blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the going to
and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along the more
frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of
slabs of polished stone, raised, perhaps, a foot from the floor, and upon
these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognised as a kind of hypertrophied
raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange.
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“Between the tables was 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
sides 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.
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“And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated
look. The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical
pattern, were broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the
lower end were thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the
marble table near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was
extremely rich and 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 they were eating. All were clad in the same soft, and yet strong,
silky material.
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“Fruit, by the bye, 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 frugivorous also. Indeed, I found afterwards
that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into
extinction. But the fruits were very delightful; one, in particular, that
seemed to be in season all the time I was there—a floury thing in a
three-sided husk—was especially good, and I made it my staple. At
first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers
I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.
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“However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future
now. So soon as my appetite was a little checked, 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 inextinguishable
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 noun substantives at least at
my command; and then I got to demonstrative 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 in little doses when
they felt inclined. And very little doses I found they were before long,
for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.
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VI The Sunset of Mankind
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“A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that
was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of
astonishment, like children, but, like children they would soon stop
examining me, and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my
conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all
those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how
speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the
portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I
was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow
me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and
gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.
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“The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the
great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At
first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from
the world I had known—even the flowers. The big building I had left
was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had
shifted, perhaps, a mile from its present position. I resolved to mount to
the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could
get a wider view of this our planet in the year Eight Hundred and Two
Thousand Seven Hundred and One, A.D. For that, I should explain, was the
date the little dials of my machine recorded.
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“As I walked I was watching for every impression that could
possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I
found the world—for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for
instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of
aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst
which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles
possibly—but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and
incapable of stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast
structure, to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was
destined, at a later date, to have a very strange experience—the
first intimation of a still stranger discovery—but of that I will
speak in its proper place.
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“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I
rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen.
Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished.
Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house
and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English
landscape, had disappeared.
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