The Time Machine | Page 8

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 color 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 hill-side 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 civilization, 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 hill-side, 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 far-reaching 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