Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the
Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why
were they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said,
to question Weena about this Underworld, but here again I was
disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and
presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic
was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she
burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw
in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about
the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of her
human inheritance from Weena’s eyes. And very soon she was smiling and
clapping her hands, while I solemnly burnt a match.
IX.
The Morlocks
“It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up
the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a
peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the
half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in
spirit in a zoological museum. And they were filthily cold to the
touch. Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic
influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to
appreciate.
“The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little
disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I
had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite
reason. I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the
little people were sleeping in the moonlight—that night Weena was among
them—and feeling reassured by their presence. It occurred to me even
then, that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its
last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these
unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin
that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both these
days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I
felt assured that the Time Machine was only to be recovered by boldly
penetrating these mysteries of underground. Yet I could not face the
mystery. If only I had had a companion it would have been different.
But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness
of the well appalled me. I don’t know if you will understand my
feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
“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 roused 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.
“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.