IX The Morlocks chapter 9 paragraph 3 among 13 paragraphs
<<
“It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me
farther and farther afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the
south-westward towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I
observed far-off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast
green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It
was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the façade
had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well as the
pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese
porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I
was minded to push on and explore. But the day was growing late, and I had
come upon the sight of the place after a long and tiring circuit; so I
resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day, and I returned
to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena. But next morning I
perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the Palace of Green
Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by another
day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the descent without
further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well
near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
>>
<<
“Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when
she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely
disconcerted. ‘Good-bye, little Weena,’ I said, kissing her;
and then putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the
climbing hooks. Rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my
courage might leak away! At first she watched me in amazement. Then she
gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with
her little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I
shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the
throat of the well. I saw her agonised face over the parapet, and smiled to
reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I
clung.
>>
<<
“I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The
descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of
the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller
and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the
descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my
weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I
hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again.
Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on
clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.
Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disc, in which a star was
visible, while little Weena’s head showed as a round black
projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more
oppressive. Everything save that little disc above was profoundly dark, and
when I looked up again Weena had disappeared.
>>
<<
“I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to
go up the shaft again, and leave the Underworld alone. But even while I
turned this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense
relief, I saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender
loophole in the wall. Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a
narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not too
soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the
prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a
distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of
machinery pumping air down the shaft.
>>
<<
“I do not know how long I lay. I was arroused by a soft hand
touching my face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches and,
hastily striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the
one I had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the
light. Living, as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness,
their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of
the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way. I have no
doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to
have any fear of me apart from the light. But, so soon as I struck a match
in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters
and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest
fashion.
>>
<<
“I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently
different from that of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to
my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was
even then in my mind. But I said to myself, ‘You are in for it
now,’ and, feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of
machinery grow louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to
a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a
vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of
my light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning
of a match.
>>
<<
“Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines
rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim
spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the bye, was very
stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly-shed blood was in
the air. Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal,
laid with what seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have
survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the
heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the
shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again! Then the
match burnt down, and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in
the blackness.
>>
<<
“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such
an experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with
the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be
infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without
arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke—at times I missed
tobacco frightfully!—even without enough matches. If only I had
thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in
a second, and examined it at leisure. But, as it was, I stood there with
only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me
with—hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that
still remained to me.
>>
<<
“I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the
dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my
store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment
that there was any need to economise them, and I had wasted almost half the
box in astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as
I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine,
lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar
unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those
dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being
gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The
sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.
The sudden realisation of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing
came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly
as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me
again. They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each
other. I shivered violently, and shouted again—rather discordantly.
This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer
laughing noise as they came back at me. I will confess I was horribly
frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the
protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap
of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I
had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I
could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like
the rain, as they hurried after me.
>>
<<
“In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no
mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light,
and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how
nauseatingly inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and
great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness
and bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated
again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost
burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the
edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt
sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped
from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my last match … and
it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and,
kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks,
and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and
blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way,
and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.
>>
<<
“That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or
thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest
difficulty in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle
against this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the
sensations of falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow,
and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I fell upon my
face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my
hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then, for a time,
I was insensible.
>>
X 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.
>>
<<
“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…”
>>
<<
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.
>>
<<
“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.
>>