The Time Machine | Page 9

upset my nerve. I told
myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith.
Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling
over, and I was flung headlong through the air.
`There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned for a
moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the
overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the
confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little

lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and
purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hail-stones. The
rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground
like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. "Fine hospitality," said I, "to a man who
has travelled innumerable years to see you."
`Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked round me. A
colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the
rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.
`My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the
white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder.
It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead
of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The
pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that
the face was towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint
shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an
unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space--half a minute,
perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it
denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the hail curtain
had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the Sun.
`I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came
suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?
What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common
passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into
something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some
old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common
likeness--a foul creature to be incontinently slain.
`Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns,
with a wooded hill-side 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.
`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.
`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