Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 1: The Time Traveller’s Secret

CEFR: B2

The Time Traveller was explaining a difficult idea to us.

His pale gray eyes were bright and alert, and his face, usually calm and colorless, was flushed with energy. The fire burned strongly, and the soft glow from the electric lights reflected off the silver lilies on the table, catching the bubbles as they rose and vanished in our glasses.

The chairs we sat in were his own design. Instead of resisting the body, they seemed to shape themselves around it, holding you comfortably rather than merely supporting you. The room had that easy, unhurried feeling that comes after dinner, when no one is in a hurry and thought moves freely, without the need for strict accuracy.

As he spoke, he made his points carefully, tapping the air with a long, thin finger. We listened while sitting back, relaxed, watching his intensity with quiet interest. To us, it seemed like another clever idea, a paradox to be admired rather than believed.

“You’ll need to pay close attention,” he said. “I’m going to challenge one or two ideas that almost everyone accepts without question. Geometry, for example. What you were taught at school is built on a mistake.”

“That’s a large claim to start with,” said Filby. He was argumentative by nature and had red hair.

“I’m not asking you to accept anything without reason,” the Time Traveller replied. “You’ll see soon enough that I only need you to agree to a few simple points. You know, of course, that a mathematical line has no thickness. A line of zero width has no physical existence. You were taught that. The same is true of a mathematical plane. These are abstractions, not real things.”

“That’s fair enough,” said the Psychologist.

“Then consider this,” the Time Traveller went on. “If something has only length, breadth, and thickness, it still cannot truly exist.”

“There I disagree,” said Filby. “Solid objects exist. All real things—”

“So people assume,” the Time Traveller said. “But let me ask you something. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

“I don’t follow,” said Filby.

“Can a cube that exists for no time at all truly exist?”

Filby stopped speaking and thought.

“Any real object,” the Time Traveller continued, “must extend in four directions. Length. Breadth. Thickness. And duration. Time. We overlook this because of a weakness in our perception, which I’ll explain shortly. There are four dimensions. Three are what we call space. The fourth is time.”

He paused briefly, then went on.

“We make an artificial distinction between time and the three dimensions of space because our awareness moves in only one direction along time. From the beginning of our lives to the end.”

“That,” said a very young man who was struggling to relight his cigar over the lamp, “is very clear.”

“It’s remarkable how often this is overlooked,” the Time Traveller said, sounding slightly more pleased. “This is what people mean when they talk about the Fourth Dimension, though many of them don’t realize it. It’s simply another way of describing time. There is no real difference between time and the dimensions of space, except that our consciousness moves along it.”

He looked around the room.

“Some people misunderstand this idea completely. You’ve all heard what they say about the Fourth Dimension.”

“I haven’t,” said the Provincial Mayor.

“They say this,” the Time Traveller replied. “Space, as mathematics describes it, has three dimensions. Length, breadth, and thickness. These are defined by three planes at right angles to one another. Some thinkers ask why there should be exactly three. Why not another direction at right angles to all the others?”

He held up a finger.

“They’ve even tried to imagine a geometry of four dimensions. Professor Simon Newcomb spoke on this subject recently in New York. You know how we can represent a three-dimensional object on a flat surface, which itself has only two dimensions. In the same way, they believe a three-dimensional model could represent a four-dimensional form, if we could learn how to see it properly.”

“I think I understand,” said the Provincial Mayor. He frowned, lips moving slightly as if repeating the idea to himself. After a moment, his face brightened briefly. “Yes. I think I see.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” the Time Traveller said, “that I’ve been working on this four-dimensional geometry for some time. Some of the results are curious. Imagine a man at eight years old. Then at fifteen. Then at seventeen. Then at twenty-three. Each image is a section. A three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional being, which itself does not change.”

He waited while we absorbed this.

“Scientists already know this, whether they admit it or not,” he went on. “Time is a kind of space. Here’s a simple example. A weather chart.”

He traced a line in the air with his finger.

“This line shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was high. Last night it fell. This morning it rose again. The mercury did not move through space in the ordinary sense. But it traced a line. That line exists in time.”

The Medical Man stared into the fire.

“If time really is a fourth dimension of space,” he said, “why is it treated as something separate? And why can’t we move through it the way we move through space?”

The Time Traveller smiled.

“Are you sure we move freely through space?” he asked. “We can move forward and sideways easily enough. People always have. But what about up and down? Gravity limits us.”

“There are balloons,” said the Medical Man.

“Before balloons,” the Time Traveller replied, “people had almost no freedom of vertical movement, except jumping or walking on uneven ground.”

“Still,” said the Medical Man, “they could move a little.”

“Much easier to go down than up,” said the Time Traveller.

“And you can’t move at all through time,” said the Medical Man. “You can’t escape the present moment.”

“My dear sir,” said the Time Traveller, “that is where you’re mistaken. That is where everyone is mistaken. We are always leaving the present moment. Our minds move along the time dimension at a steady rate, from birth to death. Just as we would fall steadily if we began life high above the earth.”

“But the real difficulty,” said the Psychologist, interrupting him, “is this. You can move freely in all directions of space, but you cannot move freely in time.”

“That,” said the Time Traveller, “is the starting point of my discovery. And even there, you’re not quite right when you say we cannot move in time.”

He shifted slightly in his chair.

“When you remember something very clearly, you return to the moment it happened. You become absent-minded, as people say. For an instant, you move backward along the time dimension.”

He paused, letting that sink in.

“Of course, we cannot remain there. Any more than an animal can remain six feet above the ground. But a civilized person has an advantage over an animal. We have balloons. We can rise against gravity. And there’s no reason to believe we won’t one day learn to control our movement through time as well.”

“Oh, this is all—” Filby began.

“Why not?” the Time Traveller said calmly.

“It’s against reason,” said Filby.

“Whose reason?” asked the Time Traveller.

“You can prove anything with arguments,” said Filby. “But you won’t convince me.”

“Perhaps not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the point of my work in four-dimensional geometry. Long ago, I began to suspect the possibility of a machine—”

“A machine to travel through time!” cried the Very Young Man.

“Yes,” said the Time Traveller. “A machine that could move through space and time, in any direction the operator chose.”

Filby laughed.

“But I have experimental proof,” said the Time Traveller.

“That would be useful for historians,” said the Psychologist. “One could go back and verify accepted accounts. The Battle of Hastings, for example.”

“You would draw attention,” said the Medical Man. “People in the past were not kind to things that didn’t belong.”

“One could learn Greek directly from Homer or Plato,” said the Very Young Man.

“In that case,” someone said, “they’d certainly fail you. Scholars have improved Greek since then.”

“And there’s the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Imagine investing money and going ahead to collect it.”

“To discover a society,” I said, “built on strict communism.”

“Of all the wild ideas—” began the Psychologist.

“Yes,” said the Time Traveller. “That’s how it seemed to me as well. Which is why I said nothing about it until—”

“Experimental proof!” I said. “You intend to test it?”

“The experiment!” said Filby, sounding tired.

“Let’s see it,” said the Psychologist. “Even if it’s nonsense.”

The Time Traveller looked around the room. He smiled faintly. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he walked slowly out. We heard his slippers along the long corridor, fading toward the laboratory.

The Psychologist looked at the rest of us.

“I wonder what he has.”

“Some trick,” said the Medical Man.

Filby began to tell a story about a magician he had once seen, but before he could finish, the Time Traveller returned.

He carried a small metallic framework in his hand. It glittered in the firelight. It was no larger than a clock and very finely made. Parts of it were ivory. Other parts were made of some clear crystalline material.

I must be exact here. What follows is impossible to explain, unless his account is accepted.

He took one of the small octagonal tables scattered around the room and placed it in front of the fire, with two of its legs on the hearthrug. On this table he set the model. Then he pulled up a chair and sat down.

The only other object on the table was a small lamp with a shade, positioned so that its bright light fell directly on the machine. Around the room were perhaps a dozen candles. Two stood in brass holders on the mantel. Others were set in wall sconces. The room was brightly lit.

I sat in a low armchair nearest the fire and moved it forward so that I was almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched from the right, in profile. The Psychologist watched from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist.

We were all paying close attention.

It seems impossible to me now that any trick, no matter how cleverly done, could have been carried out under these conditions.

The Time Traveller looked from us to the machine.

“Well?” said the Psychologist.

“This,” said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows on the table and pressing his hands together above the model, “is only a model. It represents my plan for a time machine.”

He pointed to it.

“You’ll notice it’s uneven in shape. And this bar here has a strange appearance, as though it were not entirely real. Here are two small white levers.”

The Medical Man stood and bent over the table.

“It’s beautifully made,” he said.

“It took two years,” said the Time Traveller.

When we had all leaned in to look, he continued.

“This lever sends the machine forward through time. This one reverses it. This small saddle represents the seat of the time traveller.”

He paused.

“In a moment, I will press the lever. The machine will move. It will vanish. It will pass into time.”

He looked at each of us.

“Examine it carefully. Examine the table. I don’t want to destroy this model and then be told I’m a fraud.”

There was a brief pause. The Psychologist looked as though he might speak to me, then decided against it.

The Time Traveller reached toward the lever.

“No,” he said suddenly. “Give me your hand.”

He turned to the Psychologist, took his hand in his own, and guided his forefinger toward the lever.

“You press it.”

So it was the Psychologist himself who set the model Time Machine in motion.

We all saw the lever move.

I am absolutely certain there was no trick.

There was a sudden breath of air. The flame of the lamp flickered. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out. The little machine spun slightly, grew indistinct, and for a moment looked like a faint ghost of itself. It appeared as a swirl of pale brass and ivory.

Then it was gone.

It had vanished.

The table was bare, except for the lamp.

No one spoke.

After a moment, Filby said he was damned.

The Psychologist recovered first. He bent down and looked under the table. At that, the Time Traveller laughed softly.

“Well?” he said.

He stood up, walked to the mantel, and began filling his pipe with his back to us.

We looked at one another.

“Are you serious?” said the Medical Man. “Do you truly believe that machine has travelled through time?”

“Yes,” said the Time Traveller. He bent to light a spill at the fire. Then, pipe lit, he turned to watch the Psychologist’s face.

The Psychologist, to show he was not unsettled, took a cigar and attempted to light it without cutting it.

“What’s more,” said the Time Traveller, “I have a full-sized machine nearly finished in the laboratory.”

He nodded toward the door.

“When it’s complete, I intend to travel in it myself.”

“You mean to say that machine went into the future?” said Filby.

“Into the future,” said the Time Traveller, “or into the past. I can’t say which with certainty.”

There was a pause.

Then the Psychologist spoke.

“If it went anywhere,” he said, “it must have gone into the past.”

“Why?” asked the Time Traveller.

“Because it hasn’t moved in space,” said the Psychologist. “If it had gone into the future, it would still be here now. It would have passed through this moment.”

“But if it went into the past,” I said, “we should have seen it before. Last Thursday. And the Thursday before that. And so on.”

“Serious objections,” said the Provincial Mayor, turning toward the Time Traveller with a neutral expression.

“Not at all,” said the Time Traveller. He looked at the Psychologist. “You can explain it.”

The Psychologist nodded.

“That’s a simple matter of perception,” he said. “Presentation below the threshold. Diluted perception.”

He turned to us.

“We don’t see it for the same reason we don’t see a spinning wheel spoke or a bullet in flight. If it’s moving through time much faster than we are, it doesn’t remain long enough in any moment to register clearly.”

He passed his hand through the empty space above the table.

“If it moves through a minute of time while we move through a second, the impression it creates is only a fraction of what it would otherwise be.”

He laughed lightly.

“You see?”

We sat and stared at the empty table for a short while.

Then the Time Traveller asked what we thought.

“It sounds reasonable tonight,” said the Medical Man. “But wait until morning. Let’s see what common sense says then.”

“Would you like to see the machine itself?” said the Time Traveller.

He took up the lamp and led the way down the long, drafty corridor to the laboratory.

I remember the flickering light. His broad head in silhouette. The moving shadows on the walls. We followed him, uncertain and skeptical.

In the laboratory, we saw a larger version of the model we had just watched disappear. Parts of it were nickel. Parts were ivory. Some components were clearly cut from crystal. The machine was mostly complete, but twisted crystal bars lay unfinished on the bench beside sheets of drawings.

I picked one up to examine it more closely. It appeared to be quartz.

“Are you serious?” said the Medical Man. “Or is this another trick, like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?”

“On that machine,” said the Time Traveller, raising the lamp, “I intend to explore time.”

He looked at us steadily.

“I have never been more serious in my life.”

None of us knew how to respond.

I caught Filby’s eye over the Medical Man’s shoulder.

He winked at me, solemnly.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 2: The Time Traveller Returns

CEFR: B2

I don’t think any of us truly believed in the Time Machine at that point.

The trouble was the Time Traveller himself. He was one of those men who are almost too sharp to trust. You never felt you’d seen his whole mind. Even when he sounded open, you had the sense there was a clever reserve behind it, something held back, something ready to appear at the right moment. His honesty felt polished. And because of that, we suspected a trick.

If Filby had shown the model and explained it in the Time Traveller’s own words, we might have doubted Filby less. We would have understood Filby’s motives. A plain man can read another plain man. But the Time Traveller had a streak of whim in him, and that made us cautious. With him, the same thing that would have made another man famous looked like a performance.

It’s a mistake to do things too easily. People begin to think the ease is the trick. The serious men among us, the ones who wanted to treat the matter seriously, never felt completely safe doing it. They sensed that staking their reputations for judgment on the Time Traveller was like filling a nursery with delicate china.

So between that Thursday and the next, I don’t think any of us spoke much about time travelling. Still, the thought kept running in the background. The odd possibilities. The logic that almost worked. The practical impossibility that sat beside it. The mess of cause and effect it hinted at. The confusion it suggested.

For my part, I couldn’t stop thinking about the model. That little vanishing act stayed with me. I remember discussing it with the Medical Man when I met him on Friday at the Linnaean. He told me he’d seen something similar once in Germany and said the candle going out mattered. But he couldn’t tell me how the thing was done.

The next Thursday I went again to Richmond. I was one of his most regular guests. I arrived late and found four or five men already gathered in his drawing room. The Medical Man stood by the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in the other. I looked around for our host.

“It’s half past seven now,” the Medical Man said. “I suppose we’d better start dinner.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“You’ve just arrived?” the Doctor said. “It’s odd. He’s unavoidably detained. He sent this note. He says we should begin at seven if he isn’t back, and that he’ll explain when he comes.”

“It would be a shame to let dinner spoil,” said the Editor of a well-known daily paper.

The Doctor rang the bell.

Besides the Doctor and myself, only the Psychologist had been at the previous dinner. The others were Blank, the Editor, a journalist, and another man I didn’t know. He was quiet and shy, with a beard. I don’t think he opened his mouth all evening. I’ve always thought of him as the Silent Man.

At the table, there was a good deal of wondering about the Time Traveller’s absence. Half as a joke, I suggested time travelling.

The Editor turned to me. “Time travelling? Explain that.”

The Psychologist volunteered an account. It was accurate enough, but he delivered it the way a man describes something he doesn’t quite believe in himself. He called it an ingenious paradox and a clever trick.

He was in the middle of it when the door to the corridor opened slowly, without a sound.

I was facing the door and saw it first.

“Well,” I said. “At last.”

The door opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood there.

I made a noise I couldn’t help. The Medical Man saw him next.

“Good heavens,” he said. “Man, what’s happened to you?”

Everyone turned.

He looked as if he’d walked in from a road accident. His coat was dusty and filthy, with smears of green down the sleeves. His hair was disordered, and it looked greyer than I remembered, whether from dust or from something else I couldn’t say. His face was very pale. There was a cut on his chin, half healed. His expression was drawn and exhausted, as though he had been in pain for days.

For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, blinking as if the light hurt him. Then he came into the room. He walked with a limp, the kind you see in men whose feet are ruined from long walking.

We stared at him in silence, waiting.

He didn’t speak. He moved to the table and reached toward the wine. The Editor filled a champagne glass and pushed it to him. He drank it in one pull. It seemed to steady him. The faintest trace of his old smile flickered across his face.

“What on earth have you been doing?” the Doctor asked.

The Time Traveller didn’t seem to hear.

“Please don’t stop on my account,” he said, with a slight stumble over the words. “I’m all right.”

He held out his glass again, drank another, and nodded as if he were testing the effect.

“That’s good,” he said.

His eyes sharpened. A little color returned to his cheeks. He looked from face to face with a slow, dull approval, then around the comfort of the room as if checking that it was real.

“I’m going to wash and dress,” he said. “Then I’ll come down and explain. Save me some of that mutton. I’m starving for meat.”

He looked across at the Editor, who wasn’t often there, and made a small polite remark about seeing him. The Editor started a question.

“Tell you presently,” the Time Traveller said. “I’m… not myself yet. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

He set his glass down and walked toward the stairs.

That limp was clearer now. And as he went out, I saw his feet.

He had nothing on them but torn socks, stained with blood.

The door closed behind him.

For a moment I considered following, then stopped myself. He hated fuss. He hated being surrounded.

My mind drifted, blank for a second, trying to catch up to what I’d seen.

Then the Editor spoke, almost to himself, like a man writing headlines.

“Remarkable behavior of an eminent scientist.”

The Journalist laughed.

“What’s the game?” he said. “Is he playing at being a tramp? I don’t follow.”

I caught the Psychologist’s eye. His look matched mine. I thought again of that limp, the blood-stained socks, the way he’d drunk the champagne like medicine. I don’t think the others had noticed his feet.

The Medical Man recovered first. He rang for a hot plate, because the Time Traveller disliked servants waiting at table. The Editor grunted and returned to his knife and fork. The Silent Man did the same, awkwardly.

Dinner resumed.

Conversation came back in short bursts, broken by pauses of unease. The surprise still sat heavily on us. Then the Editor’s curiosity got the better of him.

“What do you make of it?” he said. “Is this about that machine of his?”

“I’m sure it is,” I replied, and I went over again, as carefully as I could, what the Psychologist had shown us the week before.

The new guests listened with open disbelief. The Editor raised objections at once.

“What exactly is this time travelling?” he said. “You don’t pick up dust by rolling around in a paradox.”

As the idea amused him more and more, he drifted into caricature. He wondered aloud whether the future had no clothes brushes. The Journalist joined in eagerly. Both of them were of the new school, lighthearted, irreverent, quick to laugh. They found it easy to make sport of the whole thing.

“Our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow reports—” the Journalist began, raising his voice.

He was cut off by the door opening again.

The Time Traveller had returned.

He was now dressed in ordinary evening clothes. Nothing remained of his earlier appearance except the haggard look about his face. He paused for a moment, then took his place at the table without comment.

The Editor burst into laughter.

“So these gentlemen say you’ve been travelling into the middle of next week,” he said. “Tell us all about it. What will you take for the story?”

The Time Traveller smiled faintly, in his old way.

“Where’s my mutton?” he said. “It’s a fine thing to put a fork into meat again.”

“Story,” cried the Editor.

“Story be hanged,” the Time Traveller said. “I want food. I won’t say a word until I’ve got something into my system. Thanks. And the salt.”

I leaned forward.

“One question,” I said. “Have you been time travelling?”

“Yes,” he said, with his mouth full, nodding once.

The Editor laughed softly.

“I’d give a shilling a line for that,” he said.

The Time Traveller pushed his glass toward the Silent Man and tapped it with his fingernail. The Silent Man, who had been staring fixedly at his face, started and poured him more wine.

The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable.

Questions kept rising to my lips and stopping there. I could see the same thing happening with the others. The Journalist tried to ease the tension by telling a string of anecdotes. No one paid much attention.

The Time Traveller ate with the appetite of a man who has gone without food far too long. The Medical Man smoked and watched him closely, his eyes half closed. The Silent Man drank champagne steadily, with a kind of nervous determination.

At last, the Time Traveller pushed his plate away.

“I suppose I should apologize,” he said. “I was simply starving. I’ve had a most extraordinary experience.”

He reached for a cigar and clipped the end.

“But not here,” he went on. “This isn’t a story for greasy plates. Let’s go into the smoking room.”

He rang the bell as he rose and led the way into the next room.

As he settled into his chair, he turned to me.

“You told Blank and Dash and Chose about the machine?” he asked, naming the three new men.

“I did,” I said.

“But it’s nothing more than a paradox,” the Editor broke in.

“I’m not going to argue tonight,” the Time Traveller said. “I’m too tired for that. I don’t mind telling you what happened. But I can’t argue. Not now.”

He paused, then looked at each of us in turn.

“I’ll tell you the story,” he said. “You won’t believe it. Most of it will sound like nonsense. That can’t be helped. It’s true all the same. Every word of it.”

He leaned back, gathering himself.

“I was in my laboratory at four o’clock this afternoon. Since then, I’ve lived eight days. Days like no one has lived before. I’m worn out. But I won’t sleep until I’ve told you what happened. Then I’ll go to bed.”

He lifted a hand slightly.

“But no interruptions. I want to tell it straight through. Is that agreed?”

“Agreed,” said the Editor.

The rest of us echoed him.

He began to speak.

At first he talked like a man close to exhaustion. His voice was steady but subdued. As he went on, it gathered strength. Most of us sat in shadow. The candles in the smoking room had not been lit. Only the Journalist’s face and the Silent Man’s legs, from the knees down, caught the light of the lamp.

At first we glanced at one another. After a while, we stopped doing even that. Our eyes stayed on the Time Traveller.

“I told some of you last Thursday,” he said, “about the principles of the Time Machine. I showed you the thing itself, unfinished, in my workshop. It’s here now. Travel-worn, you might say. One ivory bar is cracked. A brass rail is bent. But it still works.

“I expected to finish it on Friday. When I was nearly done, I discovered that one of the nickel bars was an inch too short. I had to have it remade. Because of that, the machine wasn’t complete until this morning.

“It was ten o’clock today when the first Time Machine began its career.”

He stopped for a second, then continued.

“I went over every screw again. I put one last drop of oil on the quartz rod. Then I sat in the saddle. I suppose a man about to pull a trigger feels much the same curiosity about what comes next.

“I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping lever in the other. I pressed the first, and almost at once the second.

“I felt as if I were falling. I looked around. The laboratory looked exactly the same. For a moment I thought nothing had happened. Then I noticed the clock.

“A moment before, it had been just past ten. Now it was nearly half past three.”

He drew a breath.

“I set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and pushed it forward.”

The room seemed to tighten around him as he spoke.

“The laboratory blurred and darkened. Mrs. Watchett came in and crossed the room. She didn’t see me. She seemed to rush across the space like a shadow.

“I pushed the lever farther.”

Night fell as suddenly as a lamp going out. Then came day. Then night again. Faster and faster. The room faded away. A low humming filled my ears. My thoughts grew dull and confused.”

“I can’t properly describe the sensation,” he went on. “It was extremely unpleasant. There was the same helpless feeling you get on a runaway ride. A headlong motion. And with it, the constant expectation of a crash.

“As I increased speed, night followed day like the beating of dark wings. The laboratory faded and fell away. I saw the sun leap across the sky, jumping from place to place. Each leap marked a day.

“For a time, I thought the house must have vanished and that I had come out into the open air. I caught a vague glimpse of scaffolding, but I was already moving too fast to make sense of anything. Even the slowest thing you can imagine would have flashed past me.

“The alternation of light and darkness hurt my eyes. In the brief darkness, I saw the moon spinning rapidly through its phases. I caught faint glimpses of the stars.

“As I went faster still, night and day blended into a steady gray. The sky deepened into a rich blue, like an endless twilight. The sun stretched into a burning arc. The moon became a pale band. The stars vanished, except for rare flickers.

“The landscape below me was vague and shifting. I was still on the hillside where this house stands now. The slope rose beside me, gray and indistinct. Trees appeared and changed like drifting smoke. They grew, spread, shuddered, and vanished. Great buildings rose and fell like dreams.

“The whole surface of the earth seemed to melt and flow. The little hands on the dials that measured my speed raced faster and faster.

“After a time, I noticed that the sun’s path was swaying up and down. Seasons were passing in moments. I was traveling more than a year each minute. Snow flashed across the land and disappeared. Spring followed it, brief and bright.

“The worst of the unpleasant sensations faded then. What remained turned into something like wild excitement. I noticed that the machine was swaying clumsily, though I couldn’t account for it. My mind was too confused to focus on that. With a kind of reckless resolve, I pushed myself forward into the future.

“At first, I hardly thought at all. Then curiosity returned. And with it, fear.

“What would humanity become? What strange developments might appear when I finally stopped? What advances might have been made upon our rough civilization?

“I saw vast buildings rising around me. They were larger than anything of our time. They seemed solid, yet unreal, as if built from mist. The hillside turned a deep, lasting green. There was no sign of winter.

“Even through my confusion, the earth looked fair.

“Then my thoughts turned to stopping.

“That was where the danger lay. While I traveled quickly, I passed through matter like vapor. To stop meant forcing myself, particle by particle, into whatever lay in my path. It meant bringing my body into contact with another substance so closely that a violent reaction might occur. Possibly an explosion that would destroy both the machine and myself.

“I had thought about this risk many times while building the machine. Then, it had seemed like one of the risks a man accepts when he chooses to do something new. Now that the risk was unavoidable, I did not view it so calmly.

“The strangeness of everything, the constant swaying, and above all the feeling of prolonged falling had shaken my nerves. I told myself I could never stop.

“And then, in a moment of impatience, I decided to stop at once.

“I pulled the lever over.

“The machine lurched. I was thrown forward.

“There was a sound like thunder. I may have been stunned for a moment.

“When I became aware again, hail was falling around me. I was sitting on soft turf beside the overturned machine. Everything looked gray. The hailstones rebounded and danced around me like smoke. In a moment, I was soaked through.

“‘A fine welcome,’ I said aloud, ‘to a man who has traveled so far to see you.’

“Then I noticed a large shape beyond the bushes. A tall white figure, barely visible through the downpour.

“I stood and watched as the hail thinned.

“The figure grew clearer. It was enormous. A silver birch reached its shoulder. It was carved from white stone, shaped like a winged sphinx, its wings spread wide as if it were hovering. The pedestal beneath it was bronze, thick with green corrosion.

“The face was turned toward me. The eyes were blank, but they seemed to watch. There was a faint suggestion of a smile on the lips. The stone was worn by time in a way that suggested decay.

“I stood looking at it for a long while. I can’t say how long. The hail thinned further. The sky began to brighten.

“And then the full danger of my journey struck me.”

He paused, then went on more slowly.

“What would appear when the storm cleared?” he said. “What might humanity have become? What if cruelty had grown stronger? What if the race had changed into something cold, unsympathetic, and powerful? I might seem like some ancient animal, fit only to be destroyed.

“Even as I thought this, more shapes appeared through the thinning hail. Vast buildings with tall columns and intricate walls. A wooded hillside crept into view as the storm faded.

“Fear took hold of me. I turned back to the Time Machine and tried to set it upright. As I struggled with it, sunlight broke through the clouds. The hail vanished. The storm swept away as if it had never been.

“The sky above was a deep summer blue. The buildings around me stood clear and bright, their surfaces shining with rain and dotted with unmelted hail.

“I felt exposed. Naked in a strange world.”

“I felt as a bird might feel,” he went on, “suddenly alone in open air, knowing danger could come from anywhere. Panic rose quickly. I took a moment to breathe, set my teeth, and forced the machine upright. It struck my chin as it turned, and I stood there panting, one hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, ready to mount it again.

“But the moment I knew I could retreat, my courage returned.

“I began to look at the world more carefully and with less fear.

“In a round opening high in the wall of a nearby building, I saw figures. They were dressed in soft, flowing clothes. They had seen me, and their faces were turned toward me.

“Then I heard voices coming closer. Through the bushes near the White Sphinx, I saw heads and shoulders moving. People were running.

“One of them stepped out onto the path that led to the lawn. He was small, no more than four feet tall. He wore a purple tunic tied with a belt. His legs were bare to the knees. His feet were covered with light sandals. His head was uncovered.

“For the first time, I noticed how warm the air was.

“He struck me as graceful and beautiful, but extremely fragile. His flushed face reminded me of people weakened by long illness, yet still delicate and pleasant to look at.

“At the sight of him, my fear eased. I took my hands away from the machine.

“He came closer, smiling, and spoke in a soft, musical voice. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone was friendly.

“Others followed him. They were similar in size and appearance. They gathered around me, watching with open curiosity. None of them showed fear.

“I tried to speak to them. They listened but didn’t understand. One touched my coat. Another laughed quietly.

“They led me away from the machine. I hesitated, but I went with them. I glanced back once. The White Sphinx stood behind us, silent and unmoving.

“They brought me into one of the great buildings. Inside, it was cool and spacious. The walls were smooth. The light was soft and even.

“They gave me fruit to eat. It was strange, but pleasant. I was very hungry and ate quickly.

“They watched me as I ate. Their expressions were gentle. Childlike.

“I tried to ask questions. They answered me with smiles and soft sounds, but we shared no language.

“As I rested, my thoughts returned again to the Time Machine. It was still on the lawn, exposed. I wanted to go back to it.

“I stood and tried to leave. They didn’t stop me, but they clearly didn’t understand why I wished to go.

“When I reached the lawn, my heart sank.

“The Time Machine was gone.

“The place where it had stood was empty. Only the disturbed grass remained.

“For a moment, I couldn’t move. I felt cold, though the air was warm.

“They watched me, puzzled by my distress.

“I searched the area wildly. I ran my hands across the ground. I walked in circles, hoping I had somehow missed it.

“The machine was gone.

“With it went my sense of control. I had come here believing myself master of time. Now I was stranded.

“I felt helpless. Alone. The future, which moments earlier had seemed calm, now felt uncertain and dangerous.

“I turned back toward the White Sphinx.

“It stood unchanged. Its stone face was blank. The bronze base caught the light.

“A sudden thought came to me. The machine might be hidden inside it.

“I examined the pedestal closely. There was a panel. It was shut.

“My fear hardened into anger. I struck the bronze. The sound rang hollow.

“The little people watched, confused by my agitation.

“I tried to force the panel open. It wouldn’t move.

“And then I understood something terrible.

“I was at their mercy. And they did not even know it.

“That,” he said quietly, “was when I first felt truly lost.”

He stopped speaking.

The room around us was completely still. No one moved. No one spoke.

The lamp burned steadily on the table between us.

After a moment, he leaned back in his chair.

That was where his account ended for the night.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 3: A City of Ruins

CEFR: B2

In another moment, we were standing face to face.

I stood there, and so did this small, fragile being from the far future. He walked straight up to me and laughed openly into my face. What struck me at once was the complete absence of fear. He showed none at all. Then he turned to the two others who had followed him and spoke to them in a language unlike anything I had ever heard. It was soft, flowing, and musical.

More of them appeared. Soon there were eight or ten gathered around me. One spoke directly to me. It occurred to me, strangely enough, that my own voice would sound harsh and heavy to them. I shook my head and pointed to my ears to show I did not understand. He stepped closer, hesitated, then reached out and touched my hand.

Others followed his example. I felt light fingers on my back and shoulders. They were gentle, almost careful. They seemed to want to make sure I was solid. Real.

There was nothing threatening in this. On the contrary, something about these people invited trust. They had a graceful gentleness, an easy, childlike manner. They also looked so small and frail that I felt certain I could have scattered them without effort if I wished. Still, when I saw their pink fingers touching the Time Machine, I made a quick motion to stop them.

That was when I remembered a danger I had overlooked.

Leaning over the frame of the machine, I unscrewed the small levers that controlled its movement and put them into my pocket. Only then did I turn back and try again to communicate.

Looking more closely at their faces, I began to notice details I had missed at first. Their beauty was delicate and precise, like fine porcelain. Their hair was curly and stopped sharply at the neck and cheeks. There was no hair at all on their faces. Their ears were very small. Their mouths were small too, with bright red lips that were thin rather than full. Their chins came to a slight point. Their eyes were large and calm.

And though this may sound self-centered, I felt there was something missing. A lack of curiosity. They looked at me with pleasure, not interest.

They did not try to speak to me in any serious way. They simply stood nearby, smiling and murmuring softly to one another. Since they made no attempt to question me, I decided to begin.

I pointed to myself. Then to the Time Machine. Then, after a pause, I pointed toward the sun, trying to express the idea of time.

One of them, dressed in a checked purple and white garment, followed my gesture. Then, to my surprise, he imitated the sound of thunder.

For a moment I was taken aback, though his meaning was clear enough. The thought struck me sharply. Were these people foolish?

I had always assumed that the people of this distant age would be far beyond us in knowledge and understanding. And here was one of them asking, in effect, whether I had come from the sun in a storm.

It forced a judgment I had been holding back. Their light limbs. Their soft clothes. Their fragile appearance. A wave of disappointment passed through me. For an instant, I felt as if the Time Machine itself had been a mistake.

I nodded. I pointed again at the sun. Then I made as convincing a thunderclap as I could. The sound startled them. They stepped back and bowed slightly.

Then one of them came forward laughing, holding a chain of flowers unlike any I had ever seen, and placed it around my neck. The others responded with soft applause. Soon they were running back and forth, bringing more flowers, laughing as they threw them over me until I was nearly buried in blossoms.

It is difficult to describe how delicate and beautiful those flowers were. Generations of careful growth had shaped them into forms beyond anything familiar to me.

Someone then suggested that their curiosity should be satisfied inside one of the nearby buildings. They led me away, past the white stone sphinx, which seemed to watch us with the same faint smile, and toward a vast gray structure made of patterned stone.

As I went with them, the memory of my earlier expectations came back to me. I had imagined a grave, serious, highly intellectual future. The contrast struck me as almost absurd.

The building had an enormous entrance and was colossal in scale. I was mostly aware of the growing crowd around me and of the dark opening ahead. Beyond their heads, I caught glimpses of the world around us. It looked like a vast garden that had been left to grow freely. There were bushes and flowers everywhere, but no weeds. I noticed tall spikes of strange white blossoms, each nearly a foot across. They stood scattered among the shrubs as if wild. I did not study them closely then.

The Time Machine was left behind on the lawn among the rhododendrons.

The archway was richly carved, though much of the detail was worn and broken. I thought I saw traces of very ancient decorative styles. More of the people met us at the entrance. We went in together. I must have looked ridiculous among them, dressed in my heavy clothes, covered in flowers, surrounded by bright robes and pale limbs, all moving in a soft whirl of laughter.

The entrance opened into a vast hall draped in brown. The ceiling was lost in shadow. The windows were partly filled with colored glass and partly open, letting in gentle light. The floor was made of large blocks of a very hard white metal. The surface was deeply worn, grooved by countless feet over long ages.

Across the hall stood many stone tables, raised slightly from the floor. On them were piles of fruit. Some looked like exaggerated versions of raspberries or oranges. Most were unfamiliar.

Cushions lay scattered between the tables. My guides sat down and motioned for me to do the same. Without ceremony, they began to eat with their hands, tossing scraps into round openings along the table sides. I followed their example. I was hungry and thirsty.

As I ate, I looked around.

What struck me most was the state of decay. The stained glass was broken in many places. Dust lay thick on the curtains. One corner of a stone table near me was cracked. Yet the overall impression was still rich and striking.

There were perhaps two hundred people in the hall. Many sat as close to me as they could, watching with quiet attention while they ate. All wore the same soft, strong fabric.

Fruit was their only food. These people lived entirely on it. Later, I would learn that animals we depend on had long since vanished. For now, I simply ate what I was given. One fruit, in particular, enclosed in a three-sided husk, became a favorite.

When my hunger eased, I decided to try to learn their language.

I held up a piece of fruit and made questioning sounds. At first they stared or laughed. Eventually, a fair-haired one repeated a word. They talked among themselves at length. My attempts to copy their sounds caused a great deal of laughter. Still, I persisted.

Gradually, I learned the names of objects. Then simple pronouns. Even a verb or two. But progress was slow. They tired quickly and drifted away. I learned to accept their lessons in short bursts.

I had never met people so easily fatigued.

One thing became clear to me very quickly.

These little people had almost no staying power when it came to attention.

They would come toward me with excited cries, clustering around as if I were a new toy. Then, just as suddenly, they would lose interest and wander away, drawn by something else. When the meal ended and my first attempts at conversation faded, I noticed that nearly everyone who had gathered around me at the start was gone.

It surprised me how quickly I stopped noticing them myself.

As soon as my hunger was satisfied, I passed back through the great doorway and out into the open air. The sunlight was warm, and the world lay quiet and untroubled. As I walked, I kept meeting others of their kind. They would follow me for a short distance, laughing and talking among themselves, then leave me alone again.

The calm of evening settled over the land as I emerged fully from the building. The light of the setting sun spread across everything, soft and golden. At first, the scene confused me. Nothing matched the world I had known. Even the flowers seemed unfamiliar.

The large structure I had left stood on the slope of a wide river valley. The river itself lay some distance away. I realized that the Thames must have shifted from its old course, perhaps by as much as a mile.

I decided to climb to higher ground. From there, I hoped to gain a better view of the Earth as it existed in the year eight hundred and two thousand seven hundred and one. That, I should explain, was the date recorded by the small dials on the Time Machine.

As I walked uphill, I watched carefully for anything that might explain the strange mix of beauty and decay I saw everywhere. The splendor was undeniable. But it was splendor in ruins.

Not far up the slope, I came upon the remains of a vast structure. Huge blocks of granite lay bound together by masses of aluminum. The place formed a tangled maze of broken walls and collapsed heaps. Growing among the ruins were thick clusters of tall plants shaped like pagodas, their leaves tinted brown. They looked something like nettles, though they did not sting.

It was clearly the remains of some immense building. What purpose it had once served, I could not guess. I did not linger. At the time, I could not know that I would return to this place later, or that it would be tied to discoveries far stranger than anything I had yet seen.

From a terrace partway up the hill, I stopped to look around.

That was when I noticed something odd.

There were no small houses.

Here and there, palace-like buildings rose among the greenery. But the cottages and private homes so common in the English landscape were nowhere to be seen. It seemed that individual houses, and perhaps even households, no longer existed.

“Communism,” I said aloud to myself.

Almost at once, another thought followed.

I looked at the few small figures who had been trailing behind me. Suddenly, I saw something I should have noticed earlier. They were all dressed alike. Their faces were smooth and hairless. Their bodies had the same soft, rounded shape.

Men and women were indistinguishable.

The children, too, looked like smaller versions of the adults. Their bodies seemed developed far beyond what I would expect at such an age. Later, I found this impression confirmed.

Given the ease and safety of their lives, this lack of difference between the sexes seemed logical enough. Strength and physical division of roles are necessities in harsh conditions. Where life is secure and danger rare, those distinctions lose their purpose.

Where population is steady and survival assured, large families become unnecessary. Where violence is unknown and children are safe, there is little need for the strong structure of the family.

I reminded myself that this was only my interpretation at the time. Later, I would learn how incomplete it was.

As I continued upward, my thoughts were interrupted by a small, elegant structure that resembled a well beneath a dome. For a moment, I wondered at the idea of wells still existing, then returned to my reflections.

There were no large buildings near the crest of the hill. As I walked, the little people gradually fell behind. My strength, which seemed remarkable compared to theirs, carried me onward. Before long, I was alone for the first time.

With a sense of freedom and curiosity, I pressed on.

At the top, I found a seat made of a yellow metal I did not recognize. It was corroded in places with a pinkish rust and partly covered with soft moss. The armrests were shaped like the heads of griffins.

I sat down and looked out over the land.

The view was gentle and beautiful. The sun had already dipped below the horizon. The west burned with gold, crossed by bands of purple and red. Below lay the valley of the Thames. The river ran through it like a strip of polished steel.

Across the landscape stood the great buildings I had already seen, scattered among rich greenery. Some were clearly in ruins. Others still seemed in use. Here and there, white or silvery statues rose from the earth. Tall cupolas and slender obelisks broke the horizon.

There were no fences. No fields. No signs of ownership. No agriculture.

The world had become a garden.

As I watched, I began to form an explanation for what I had seen. It took shape slowly that evening. Later, I would understand that it was only part of the truth.

It seemed to me that humanity had reached a point of decline. The glowing sunset made me think of the fading of mankind itself.

For the first time, I began to consider a possible outcome of the social progress we pursue in our own age. The idea was unsettling, but not illogical.

Strength arises from need. Where life is safe, weakness survives just as well as strength.

Civilization had worked steadily to make life easier and more secure. Victory after victory had been won over nature. What were once dreams had become deliberate projects, carried through with success.

And here was the result.

As I sat there watching the light fade, my thoughts continued along the same line.

Sanitation and agriculture, as we practice them now, are still crude beginnings. Our science has only touched a small part of the vast field of disease, yet even so it presses forward steadily. We clear weeds here and there. We cultivate a handful of useful plants and leave the rest to compete as they can. We improve a few favored animals and fruits by slow selection, guided by imperfect knowledge and uncertain ideals.

All of this, I thought, must have been carried much further in the long span of time I had crossed.

Here, the air was free of insects. The earth showed no sign of weeds or fungus. Everywhere there were fruits and flowers, sweet and abundant. Butterflies drifted through the warm air. The goal of preventive medicine appeared to have been achieved. Disease had been removed. During all my time there, I saw no trace of sickness. Even decay itself, I would later learn, had been altered by these conditions.

Social victories seemed just as complete.

People lived in splendid shelters. They were well clothed. And I saw no one at work. There was no sign of struggle. No conflict between individuals or classes. No economic effort. Shops, trade, advertising, all the busy machinery of our own world, were gone.

On that peaceful evening, it was natural that I should see this as a kind of social paradise. The problem of overpopulation, I supposed, had been solved. Population had stopped growing.

But such a change must bring its own consequences.

What is the source of human intelligence and energy, if not difficulty and freedom? Conditions that reward strength, alertness, cooperation, and self-control. The family itself, and the fierce emotions tied to it, exist because children are fragile and danger is constant.

Where were those dangers now?

If hardship disappears, the traits shaped by hardship lose their purpose. Physical courage and the urge to fight, which once ensured survival, become useless or even harmful. In a world of perfect balance and safety, both physical and mental power would have little place.

For countless generations, I imagined, there had been no war. No wild animals. No serious disease. No need for labor. In such a world, what we would call the weak would survive just as easily as the strong. Perhaps even more easily. The strong would feel restless, driven by energy with nowhere to go.

The beauty of the buildings I had seen might have been the last expression of that unused energy. Art, refinement, pleasure. The final flowering before stillness.

That is often the fate of energy in security. It turns toward beauty and desire. Then comes weariness. Then decline.

Even that artistic impulse seemed nearly gone in the time I saw. Decorating themselves with flowers. Singing. Dancing in the sunlight. That appeared to be all that remained. And even that, I thought, would one day fade into quiet contentment.

We are sharpened by pain and necessity. Standing there, it seemed to me that this sharpening stone had finally been broken.

As darkness gathered, I felt confident in this explanation. It appeared simple. Complete. It accounted for the gentle people, their frailty, the ruined buildings, the absence of struggle.

Perhaps the controls they had placed on the population had worked too well. Their numbers may have declined. That would explain the abandoned structures scattered across the land.

It was a clear theory. Convincing. Neatly arranged.

And, like most such theories, it was wrong.

But at that moment, as the last light drained from the sky, I believed I had understood the world before me. I thought I had grasped the meaning of these graceful, idle people. I thought I had solved the problem of their existence.

I could not have been more mistaken.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 4: I Am Not Alone

CEFR: B2

As I stood there thinking over what seemed like the perfect triumph of humanity, the full moon rose.

It came up large and yellow in the northeast, flooding the land with pale silver light. The small figures below me stopped moving. Their laughter faded. A silent owl passed overhead. The air turned cold, and I shivered.

I decided to go down and find a place to sleep.

I searched for the building I recognized. Then my eyes drifted farther, across the valley, until they rested on the White Sphinx. It stood out clearly now, its pale stone bright against the dark. The silver birch leaned against its side. Below it lay the tangled rhododendron bushes. And there, beyond them, was the small lawn.

I looked at the lawn again.

A strange doubt crept over me.

“No,” I said aloud, forcing the thought away. “That was not the lawn.”

But it was the lawn.

The face of the sphinx was turned toward it. I knew the place at once.

You cannot imagine what I felt as the truth struck me.

The Time Machine was gone.

In that instant, the full meaning of my situation came down on me like a blow. The thought of losing my own time, of being stranded forever in this strange future, seized me physically. My throat tightened. My breath stopped. I felt as though invisible hands were gripping my chest.

The next moment, panic took over.

I ran.

I plunged down the slope with long, desperate strides. Once I fell headlong and struck my face. I did not stop to wipe the blood away. It ran warm along my cheek and chin as I struggled up and ran again.

All the while, I tried to reassure myself.

“They moved it,” I kept saying. “They pushed it aside. It’s under the bushes.”

Yet even as I told myself this, I knew it was false. There is a certainty that comes with extreme fear. I knew, without reasoning, that the machine had been taken beyond my reach.

My breathing burned in my chest. I think I ran the whole distance, perhaps two miles, in ten minutes. And I am not a young man.

I shouted aloud in my rage at my own foolishness. I cursed myself for leaving the machine. I cried out for help.

No one answered.

Nothing moved in that moonlit world.

When I reached the lawn, my worst fear was confirmed.

There was nothing there.

No sign of the machine. No trace of it at all.

I stood staring at the empty space. Cold spread through me. I felt weak. I ran around the area wildly, searching every corner, as though it might somehow be hidden in plain sight.

Then I stopped.

My hands went to my hair.

Above me, the White Sphinx rose tall and pale on its bronze pedestal. In the moonlight, it seemed to smile. The expression looked mocking. Cruel.

For a moment, I tried to comfort myself with the thought that the little people had moved the machine to shelter it. But I could not hold onto that hope. I knew too well their weakness. Their lack of strength. Their lack of understanding.

What terrified me was the sense that some other power had intervened. Something I had not suspected. Something capable of moving my invention without my knowledge.

One thing I knew for certain.

The machine had not traveled in time.

The levers were with me. Without them, it could not move through time. That I can explain to you later. The machine had moved only through space.

But where could it be?

I think I must have lost control of myself.

I remember running among the moonlit bushes around the sphinx. I startled a white creature that I took, at first, for a small deer. I remember beating the branches with my fists until my knuckles split and bled.

Later that night, sobbing and shouting in my misery, I stumbled toward the great stone building.

Inside, the hall was dark and silent. I slipped on the uneven floor and fell hard against one of the stone tables, nearly breaking my leg.

I struck a match.

The flame flared brightly in the darkness.

I moved past the dusty curtains and into another vast hall. There, on cushions, perhaps twenty of the little people lay sleeping.

My sudden appearance must have terrified them. They had forgotten matches. The light, the noise, my broken speech, all of it must have seemed monstrous.

“Where is my Time Machine?” I shouted, like an angry child.

I grabbed them. I shook them. I demanded answers they could not give.

Some laughed in confusion. Most were frightened.

Then it struck me that I was making everything worse.

I was trying to awaken fear in people who had forgotten it.

I dropped the match abruptly. It hissed and died on the stone floor. In my blind rush, I knocked one of the little people aside and stumbled back through the great dining hall, out into the moonlight again.

Behind me, I heard cries. Small feet ran in confusion. They scattered in every direction.

I do not remember clearly what I did after that. The loss had come too suddenly. It struck at the one thing that held my sense of safety together. I felt cut off from my own kind. Alone. A creature out of place in a world that was not built for me.

I must have run back and forth through the ruins, shouting and calling out in despair. I remember screaming aloud, calling on God and fate. My voice sounded strange to me, loud and harsh in the still night.

Fatigue came on me slowly, then all at once. A deep, crushing weariness settled into my body. The long night dragged on. I searched in places that made no sense. I wandered among pale ruins. I brushed against strange shapes in the darkness and started violently each time.

At last, I found myself back near the White Sphinx.

I collapsed onto the ground beside it and wept.

All anger drained away. All energy followed it. I was left with nothing but misery.

Sometime before morning, I slept.

When I woke, the sun was high. The light was clear and fresh. Two small birds hopped near me on the grass, close enough that I could have reached out and touched them.

For a moment, I did not understand where I was. I felt only a heavy sense of loss and emptiness. Then memory returned, and everything became clear.

Daylight changed things.

I could see my situation plainly now. The wild madness of the night before seemed foolish. I felt ashamed of my frenzy.

I spoke aloud to steady myself.

“Suppose the worst,” I said. “Suppose the machine is gone forever. Then I must remain calm. I must learn this world. I must understand these people. I must find tools and materials. Perhaps, in time, I can build another machine.”

It was a weak hope. But it was better than despair.

And after all, the world around me was still beautiful.

More likely, I told myself, the machine had only been hidden. If so, I would need patience and care. I would need to recover it through thought, not rage.

With that resolution, I stood up.

I felt stiff. My body ached. My clothes were filthy. The morning air made me want to wash myself.

I looked around, thinking of water.

As I went about my business, I was struck by how distant my fear now felt. The intensity of my panic surprised me in hindsight. It seemed unreal, like a fever dream.

I returned to the lawn and examined the ground carefully. I questioned any of the little people who passed by, using gestures and broken sounds.

They did not understand.

Some stared blankly. Some laughed, thinking it a joke. It was all I could do to stop myself from striking them. I hated myself for that feeling, but fear and anger had left something dark behind them.

The ground itself told me more.

I found a deep groove torn through the turf. It ran between the sphinx pedestal and the place where I had first arrived and struggled with the overturned machine.

There were other marks too. Narrow footprints. Oddly shaped. Like those of a slow, heavy animal.

I turned my full attention to the pedestal.

It was bronze, richly decorated. Not a solid block, as I had first thought. Panels were set into it on each side, framed deeply.

I struck the metal with my knuckles.

It rang hollow.

I examined the panels closely. They had no handles. No locks. They did not fit seamlessly into the frame. I began to think they opened from within.

The conclusion was obvious.

The Time Machine was inside.

How it had been put there was another matter.

As I stood there, two small figures dressed in orange appeared through the bushes. I smiled and waved them closer.

They came readily enough.

I pointed to the pedestal. I made signs that I wanted it opened.

At once, they reacted strangely.

I do not know how to describe their expression. Imagine making a deeply offensive gesture to someone sensitive. That is how they looked at me. They turned and hurried away, as if insulted beyond words.

I tried again with another, a gentle-looking little one in white.

The result was the same.

Something about his reaction made me feel ashamed.

But I needed the machine.

I tried again.

When he turned away, my temper snapped.

In three strides, I caught him by the loose cloth around his neck and dragged him toward the sphinx.

Then I saw his face.

Pure horror. Deep revulsion.

I released him at once.

I stepped back, shaken by myself more than by him.

For a moment, I stood there breathing hard, ashamed of what I had almost done. But the shame did not last. Fear pressed in again. I turned back to the sphinx.

I struck the bronze panels with my fist.

The sound rang hollow and deep. I listened closely. I thought I heard something move inside. A faint sound. Almost like a chuckle. But it may have been only my imagination.

I went to the river and found a heavy stone. I brought it back and began hammering at the bronze.

The metal dented. The green corrosion flaked away in powder. One of the decorative coils flattened under my blows. I struck again and again, in short bursts of effort, stopping only to catch my breath.

The little people must have heard me from far away. I saw them watching from the slopes. They kept their distance. They whispered to each other and pointed, but none came near.

Nothing happened.

At last, hot and exhausted, I dropped the stone and sat down to wait.

I tried to watch calmly. But I could not stay still. Waiting without acting was beyond me. I can work at a problem for years, but I cannot sit idle for a single day.

After a while, I stood and began to wander through the bushes toward the hill.

“Patience,” I told myself. “If you want the machine back, leave the sphinx alone. If they mean to keep it, destroying the bronze will not help. If they do not, you will get it back when you learn how to ask for it.”

To sit obsessively over a single puzzle in a world like this was dangerous. That way lay madness.

I needed to understand this place. To learn its habits. To watch before judging.

Then, suddenly, the humor of my situation struck me.

I had spent years of work to reach the future. Now, I was desperate to escape it.

I had built the most clever trap imaginable and stepped straight into it myself.

The thought made me laugh aloud. It was a bitter laugh, but real.

As I passed through the great palace again, I noticed that the little people avoided me. They turned away when they saw me coming. They slipped behind pillars or drifted off into gardens.

It may have been my imagination. Or it may have been the hammering. Either way, I made no attempt to follow them. I showed no sign of concern.

After a day or two, their behavior returned to normal.

I continued to learn what I could of their language. I also explored the surrounding area more carefully.

Either I was missing something subtle, or their speech was extremely simple. It seemed to consist almost entirely of concrete nouns and verbs. Abstract ideas were rare. Figurative language seemed absent.

Their sentences were short. Often only two words.

I could express simple needs. I could not express complex thoughts.

I decided to push thoughts of the Time Machine and the bronze doors as far back in my mind as possible. I trusted that deeper understanding would eventually lead me back to them.

Still, I could not roam far.

Some instinct held me close to the place where I had arrived. I moved in a rough circle only a few miles wide, always returning to the sphinx, the lawn, the palace.

Days passed.

The world remained calm. Too calm.

I began to notice small details I had overlooked before. Dark openings at the bases of some structures. Circular shafts covered by low domes. Grates half-hidden by plants.

At the time, they meant nothing to me.

I spent hours watching the people. Their lives followed no pattern I could detect. They ate when hungry. Slept when tired. Played briefly. Then rested again.

No one worked.

No one planned.

Their attention drifted easily. They lost interest quickly.

I could not decide whether they were happy or merely content.

Often, they would gather around me for a short time. They touched my clothes. My hands. My face. Then they wandered away.

They treated me like an amusing object.

At night, I lay awake listening to the silence.

Sometimes I thought I heard faint sounds rising from beneath the ground. Soft movements. A distant hum.

I told myself it was nothing.

My earlier theory still held in my mind. Humanity had conquered nature. In doing so, it had softened itself.

I believed I was seeing the final outcome of long peace.

But doubt crept in.

The avoidance around the sphinx. The reaction to the bronze pedestal. The marks on the turf. The narrow footprints.

These things did not fit.

Something else was at work.

Something unseen.

I began to feel watched.

Not openly. Not directly. But in the way one senses attention without seeing eyes.

I found myself looking over my shoulder more often. Pausing in mid-step for no reason.

The little people noticed nothing.

They lived on the surface of the world, unaware.

Or pretending to be.

I could not yet tell which.

I forced myself to remain calm.

Whatever had taken the machine, panic would not bring it back. I needed to think clearly. I needed to understand this world on its own terms, not as an extension of my own.

So I watched.

I watched how the little people moved. How they gathered and drifted apart. How they avoided certain places without appearing to notice that they were doing so.

They never went near the White Sphinx.

They passed it at a distance. Their paths curved around it. When I stood near it, they kept away from me.

At first, I thought this was because of my earlier outburst. But as days passed, I realized the avoidance went deeper than that.

The sphinx itself seemed to repel them.

The bronze pedestal was untouched. No flowers grew near its base. No one sat upon it. No one leaned against it.

It was as though it did not belong to their world.

I tried again, carefully, to approach the subject with them. I spoke of objects. Of places. Of myself. I tried to gesture toward the pedestal without appearing to ask anything of it.

Each time, their response was the same.

Discomfort.

They turned away. They looked ashamed. Afraid. Offended.

The feeling they conveyed was not fear of punishment. It was something closer to disgust. Or taboo.

That troubled me more than open terror would have.

I stopped trying.

I spent more time exploring the buildings. Many were nearly empty. Some were in ruins so old that vines had claimed them completely. Others stood whole but unused.

The scale of everything felt wrong. These people were too small, too slight, for the structures around them.

I found no workshops. No tools. No signs of manufacture.

Nothing was being made.

Nothing was being repaired.

Everything that existed was being slowly used up.

That realization stayed with me.

At night, I continued to hear faint sounds. Not voices. Not wind. Something else.

A dull, rhythmic noise. As if something moved far below the ground.

I tried to trace it. I stood still and listened. The sound faded when I focused on it, like a dream dissolving when you try to remember it.

The little people slept through it without stirring.

Their trust in the world around them was absolute.

Mine was gone.

I thought often about the narrow footprints I had seen near the lawn. They were not made by these small, light creatures. They were too deep. Too deliberate.

I thought about the groove in the turf. About the strength required to drag the machine.

Not much strength, perhaps. But more than the little people possessed.

I returned again and again to the sphinx.

I examined every inch of it. The stone was worn smooth by time. The bronze panels were scratched where I had struck them, but still unbroken.

I pressed my ear to the metal. I heard nothing.

And yet, I could not shake the certainty that the Time Machine was inside.

That certainty became a fixed point in my mind. Everything else revolved around it.

I began to think of the sphinx as a gate.

A boundary between what I could see and what I could not.

I did not know what lay beyond it.

Only that something did.

Despite all this, life went on quietly around me.

The little people continued to play, to eat fruit, to sleep in the sun. They laughed easily. They trusted me again, once my anger faded from memory.

They showed no sign that anything was wrong.

That disturbed me most of all.

If the machine had been taken by them, they would have shown guilt. Or pride. Or curiosity.

They showed nothing.

Which meant the act had not been theirs.

That left only one possibility.

There was something else in this world.

Something beneath its calm surface.

Something hidden.

As this idea took shape, my earlier theories began to crack. The vision of a peaceful ending to human history no longer satisfied me. It explained too little.

This world was not simply the result of comfort.

It was the result of separation.

I did not yet know how. Or why.

But I felt, with growing certainty, that humanity had not become one gentle people.

It had divided.

And whatever lived below had taken my machine.

I kept this thought to myself.

I learned more words. I learned names for places. For food. For sleep.

I learned nothing that explained the sphinx.

Still, I stayed near it.

Some instinct told me that my fate was tied to that silent shape.

I had lost control of time.

I had lost control of my future.

All that remained to me was observation.

And patience.

And the slow, steady fear that I had only begun to understand the danger I was in.

That was the moment, though I did not know it then, when my confidence finally broke.

Not in panic.

Not in despair.

But in quiet, permanent doubt.

And from that doubt, nothing I believed afterward was ever quite the same.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 5: Weena

CEFR: B2

As far as I could tell, the whole world shared the same rich growth I had seen along the river. Every hill I climbed showed the same kind of plenty. Great buildings covered the land, endless in number and different in shape and material. Dark evergreen thickets clustered between them. Trees stood heavy with blossoms, and tall tree ferns rose like umbrellas. Here and there, water caught the light and flashed like silver. Beyond that, the ground lifted into soft blue hills that rolled away until they melted into the calm sky.

There was one odd feature I kept running into, and it slowly began to bother me.

I started seeing circular wells set into the ground. There were several of them, and some looked very deep. One lay near the path I had taken up the hill on my first walk. Like the others, it had a rim of bronze, worked with careful patterns, and above it sat a small cupola that would keep rain out. I sat beside more than one of these wells and leaned over to look down into the dark shaft. I could not see the water. I could not even catch the faintest glint. I struck a match and held it over the opening. The light did not reach anything that looked like a surface. There was no reflection at all.

But I heard something.

From inside each well came a steady sound, a deep thud that repeated again and again, like the beat of a large engine. And when I lit matches over the mouth, I could see the flame pull downward. A steady current of air was flowing down into the shaft. To test it, I tore a bit of paper and dropped it in. It did not drift slowly. It was pulled down at once and vanished as if the well had swallowed it.

After a while, I began to connect these wells with tall towers I had noticed on the slopes. Above those towers, the air often shimmered the way it does above hot sand. When I put those details together, I started to suspect there was a wide system of underground ventilation. Still, I could not see what it was for. My first guess was simple. I thought it must be part of their sanitation, some grand system for keeping things clean and fresh.

It was a reasonable guess, and it was completely wrong.

I have to admit something else. In that future world, I learned very little about practical systems. I did not discover their drains, their signals, their methods of transport, or the small everyday conveniences that make life run smoothly. In some imagined futures people write about, everything is laid out. Buildings, laws, labor, and machines are described in detail. That is easy when the whole world exists in someone’s head. It is not easy when you are truly there, alone, moving through real places that do not pause for your questions.

Try to picture this. Imagine someone from deep inland Africa arriving in London for the first time. What story would he bring back? What would he know of railway companies, or social movements, or telephone wires, or the postal system? And we would be willing to explain those things to him if he asked. But even then, how much could he truly understand, and how much could he make his friends believe when he returned home?

Now consider the gap between him and a modern European. Then consider the gap between me and these people of the far future. I could feel that many things were working in the background to support their comfort. I sensed an automatic order in the world around me. But beyond that general impression, I cannot give you much. The details stayed out of reach.

Even death itself was a mystery to me. I saw no tombs. I saw nothing like a crematorium. No graveyards, no monuments, no signs of burial at all. I told myself there might be cemeteries somewhere beyond my walks. But the thought stayed with me, and my curiosity got nowhere. Then I noticed something that disturbed me more than the missing graves.

There were no old people.

I saw no one aged or weak. No one infirm. I could not find even a hint of the sick and the worn out. That fact did not fit well with my early theories.

At first, I had been pleased with my own explanations. I told myself I was looking at an automatic civilization, and at a humanity that had grown soft. But my satisfaction did not last. My ideas began to break apart.

Here were the problems.

The large buildings I explored were just places to live. Great halls for eating. Large rooms for sleeping. I found no machinery. No tools. No appliances. And yet these people wore pleasant cloth that had to be made and replaced. Their sandals were not decorated, but they were made of metalwork that was not simple. Someone had to produce those things. And yet the small people showed no creative drive at all. There were no shops. No workshops. No signs of trade or transport. They spent their time playing quietly. They bathed in the river. They flirted in a mild, childish way. They ate fruit and slept. I could not see how the world kept moving.

Then there was my Time Machine. Something had dragged it into the hollow base of the White Sphinx. Why would anyone do that? I could not imagine it. And the wells, and the towers, and the strange shimmer of air. I felt as if I was missing the key. It is hard to explain the feeling. It was like reading a text where most lines are clear, but every so often you hit a sentence made of unknown words. On my third day, that was how the world of eight hundred and two thousand years ahead looked to me. Familiar in parts, unreadable in others.

That same day, I made a kind of friend.

I was watching some of the little people bathing in the shallow water when one of them was struck by a cramp. The small figure began to drift downstream. The current was quick, but it was not strong. Any decent swimmer could have reached the child with ease. And that is what made the next part so unsettling.

No one moved.

Not one of them tried to help. They watched the weak little body slip away while it cried out. It was drowning right in front of them, and they did nothing.

When I understood what I was seeing, I acted without thinking. I tore off my clothes, ran down to a point lower along the bank, and waded in. I reached the child, caught it, and dragged it back to land. I rubbed its limbs until the stiffness passed. Soon it was breathing normally, and I saw it was safe before I left it there.

By that point, I had formed such a low opinion of their kind that I expected no thanks. I assumed the rescue would mean nothing to her.

I was wrong.

That morning passed. In the afternoon, as I walked back from another exploration toward the area near the White Sphinx, I met her again. She ran to me with clear delight and gave me a large garland of flowers. It was plainly made for me alone. Something in that simple act touched me more than I expected. Perhaps I had been lonely. Whatever the reason, I did my best to show I understood and valued the gift.

We soon sat together in a small stone arbor. We tried to communicate, mostly with smiles and gestures. Her friendliness affected me the way a child’s might. She handed me flowers. She kissed my hands. I returned the gesture and kissed hers. Then I tried words, slowly, and I learned her name.

Weena.

I did not know what it meant. Still, it suited her.

That was the start of a strange friendship that lasted a week, and ended the way I will tell you later.

Weena was like a child in almost every way. After that day, she wanted to stay close to me all the time. She tried to follow me wherever I went. On my next trip away from the buildings and gardens, I let her come with me for a while. But she tired quickly. Her small body could not keep pace with my longer stride, especially over hills and broken ground. When she finally lagged behind, I had to turn back and leave her. She called after me, worn out and pleading, and it struck me harder than it should have.

Still, I kept telling myself I had come here for a reason. I had not traveled through time to spend my days in a small flirtation, however harmless it looked. I needed answers. I needed my machine. I needed to understand this world before I could judge what it meant.

And yet, her devotion did not feel harmless to her.

Each time I left, her distress was real. Sometimes it looked almost desperate. There were moments where she tried to argue with me in her soft, limited way, tugging my sleeve and shaking her head. Once or twice she became frantic, as if she believed something terrible would happen if I went without her. In truth, her attachment brought me as much trouble as comfort.

But comfort, too.

In a world where nothing made sense, her simple loyalty became a kind of anchor. At first I assumed it was only childish affection. I did not understand what I was doing to her when I walked away. I did not understand what she was becoming to me. Not at first.

Yet, little by little, she changed the feeling of the place around the White Sphinx. Because she waited for me there, because she seemed glad simply that I returned, the area began to feel almost like a home base. When I crested a hill and looked down toward the open lawns and the pale stone buildings, I found myself scanning for her small figure, white and gold in the sunlight.

It was also through Weena that I learned something important.

Fear had not left this future world.

In daylight, she seemed fearless. She played and laughed like the others. She trusted me in a way that was strange, given how little we truly understood each other. Once, in a foolish moment, I made a threatening face at her, trying to see if she would flinch. She only laughed.

But when the light began to fade, she changed.

She dreaded the dark. She dreaded shadows. She dreaded anything black. Darkness itself, to her, was the one thing that carried terror. It was a sharp, almost passionate fear, and it made me watch more carefully. And then I began to notice things I had missed.

After sunset, the Eloi gathered into the great houses. They did not spread out. They packed together and slept in groups, almost like animals seeking warmth and safety. If you tried to enter among them without a light, you threw them into panic. They would cry out and cling to one another.

I never found one of them outdoors after dark. I never found one sleeping alone inside a building after dark either.

And still, I failed to understand what that meant.

Even with Weena pleading and trembling, I insisted on sleeping apart from the crowded halls. It is hard to explain my stubbornness. Perhaps I was clinging to the last pieces of independence I had left. Perhaps I did not want to become just another creature in their huddled groups. Or perhaps I simply did not yet accept that the fear they carried was grounded in something real.

Weena hated my choice. It upset her deeply. But in the end, her attachment to me won out. For five nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept beside me, her head resting on my arm.

When I speak of her, my story starts to drift. She pulls the mind away from the harder questions. But the harder questions were waiting, and they would not stay quiet much longer.

It must have been the morning before I rescued her from the river that something happened to me just before dawn.

I had slept badly. My dreams were heavy and unpleasant. I remember dreaming that I was drowning, and that soft sea creatures were brushing my face with their bodies. I woke suddenly, with my heart beating too fast, and with the odd feeling that something had just rushed out of the room.

For a moment I lay still, listening. I thought I heard the faint movement of something leaving. Then the silence returned, and I tried to sleep again. I could not. I felt restless, unsettled, as if the air itself had changed.

It was that grey hour when the night is lifting but the day has not yet arrived. Shapes are sharp, but everything still looks drained of color. The world feels real and unreal at once.

I got up. I went down into the great hall, and from there I walked out onto the stone flags in front of the building. I decided I would watch the sunrise and make use of my wakefulness.

The moon was setting. The last moonlight and the first thin light of dawn were mixed together in a sickly half-glow. The bushes looked like black ink. The ground was a dull grey. The sky had no warmth in it. It was colorless and flat.

As I looked up the slope, I thought I saw movement.

Three times, I saw pale shapes that looked like white figures. Twice, I thought I saw a solitary creature, white and ape-like, running up the hill with quick, awkward motion. Once, near the ruins, I saw a small group of them carrying something dark between them. They moved fast, low to the ground, and then vanished into the bushes.

The light was still weak. The scene was full of shadow and uncertainty. I felt the cold unease that sometimes comes in early morning. I doubted my own eyes.

As the eastern sky brightened and the true light of day began to return, I searched the slope again. I saw nothing. No sign of the pale figures. No trace of what I had imagined.

“They must have been ghosts,” I told myself, half in jest. “If so, I wonder how old they are.”

A strange thought came into my mind from something I had once read. It was an argument that if every generation leaves behind ghosts, then over enough time the world would become crowded with them. Eight hundred thousand years in the future, there would be countless ghosts, and it would not be surprising to see several at once.

But the idea did not satisfy me. It was an easy joke, and it covered nothing. I kept thinking about those pale shapes all morning, until the incident in the river pushed them aside. Even then, I could not fully forget them. In some vague way, I connected them with the white creature I had startled when I first searched in panic for my Time Machine.

Weena, after that, became a pleasant distraction. But the pale figures did not stay away for long. In time, they would return to my thoughts with a force that was far more serious.

I have already said the weather of that world was hotter than anything we know. I cannot explain it. It may be the sun had grown hotter. Or perhaps the earth had moved closer. People often assume the sun will cool as time passes. But those who do not follow certain scientific speculations forget something else. In the far future, planets may fall inward, one by one, into the sun. When that happens, the sun would blaze with new energy. It may be that some inner world had already met that end.

Whatever the cause, the fact was clear. The sun’s heat was stronger than ours.

One morning, very hot, I think it was my fourth day, I went seeking shade in a huge ruin near the building where I slept and ate. Among the broken stones, I found a narrow gallery. Its windows were blocked by fallen masonry, and compared to the bright sunlight outside, the passage looked almost completely black.

I stepped in, moving carefully, because the sudden change from glare to darkness made my eyes swim. Colored spots drifted in my vision. I groped forward.

Then I stopped.

I was frozen in place by the sight of two eyes.

They were watching me from the dark, bright with reflected light from behind me. They seemed to float, steady and alert, in that black space.

For a moment, an old instinct rose up in me. A deep animal fear. The kind you feel when you realize something wild is close and you do not know what it is.

I clenched my hands. I stared back. I was afraid to turn away. Then another thought came. Humanity, in this age, seemed to live in perfect safety. I remembered Weena’s fear of darkness. I forced myself to step forward and speak.

My voice sounded harsher than I intended. It did not feel controlled. I reached out and my hand touched something soft.

At once the eyes shifted. Something white moved quickly past me.

I spun around, my stomach tight, and saw a small ape-like figure running across the sunlit rubble outside. Its head was held down in a strange way. It stumbled against a block of granite, lurched sideways, and then disappeared into a deep shadow beneath another pile of broken stone.

I did not see it clearly. It moved too fast. But I remember its dull white color. I remember its large greyish-red eyes. I remember flaxen hair on its head and down its back. I cannot say for certain whether it ran on all fours or with its forearms low to the ground. The motion was too quick and too awkward.

After a brief pause, I followed it into the darker ruins. At first I could not find it. Then, deeper in the shadow, I came upon one of those circular openings, like a well, partly blocked by a fallen pillar.

A sudden idea struck me.

Had the creature slipped down the shaft?

I struck a match and leaned over the opening.

Far below, in the narrow shaft, I saw a small white shape moving downward. It had large, bright eyes that reflected the light back at me. It looked up as it climbed away, its gaze fixed on mine. The sight made me shudder. It was horribly like a human spider.

As it descended, I saw metal rungs set into the wall of the shaft. They formed a kind of ladder, clearly made for regular use. The creature moved quickly and with practice, gripping the bars with hands and feet. Then the match burned my fingers and dropped. The flame went out as it fell. When I lit another, the little figure had vanished.

I remained there, peering into the darkness, far longer than I would have guessed. It took time for me to accept what I had seen. At first, I tried to deny it. But gradually the truth settled in.

Humanity had not stayed one species.

It had divided.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 6: A Terrible Discovery

CEFR: B2

Episode 6

The graceful, childlike beings of the surface were not the only heirs of our age. That pale, unpleasant, nocturnal thing I had just seen was also descended from us.

I thought again of the ventilating towers. Of the wells. Of the strange shimmer in the air above them. A pattern began to form in my mind. I had believed I was looking at a balanced world, one that had reached a stable perfection. Now I saw that I had only seen half of it.

And what was hidden down there, beneath my feet?

I sat on the edge of the well and told myself there was no real danger. If I wanted answers, I would have to go down. I would have to face whatever lay below.

And yet I was afraid.

While I sat there, trying to gather my courage, two Eloi came running through the sunlight near the ruins. They were playing in their light, affectionate way. The male chased the female, tossing flowers at her. Their laughter echoed across the stones.

When they noticed me crouched beside the well, they seemed disturbed. It was clear they did not like me examining the opening. When I pointed at it and tried to frame a question in their simple language, they became even more uneasy. They turned away from the subject as if it were improper to speak of it.

I struck a few matches to amuse them. Fire still surprised them. But when I gestured toward the well again, they would not respond.

So I left them and made my way back toward the area near the White Sphinx. I meant to ask Weena what I could, though I did not expect much. My thoughts were shifting. My earlier explanations no longer held firm. I now had a clue to the meaning of the wells. A clue to the towers. A clue to the pale shapes I had seen at dawn. Even a clue, perhaps, to the bronze doors of the Sphinx and the disappearance of my machine.

A new view began to form.

The second species of humanity lived underground. That much seemed certain. There were three details that convinced me that their rare appearances above ground were not accidents but signs of a long adaptation to darkness.

First, their pale skin. Many creatures that live away from light lose their color. Cave fish, for example, are white and nearly transparent. Second, their large eyes. Animals that move at night often have wide pupils that reflect light. Owls and cats show the same trait. Third, the way that creature had moved in the sunlight. It had seemed confused, almost blinded. Its head was angled down as if it could not bear the brightness. It hurried toward shadow with clumsy urgency.

All of it pointed in one direction.

Beneath the earth lay a vast system of tunnels. The wells and shafts were part of that network. And those pale beings, which I would later know by name, made their home there.

If that was true, then what work was being done below?

Was it possible that the comfortable lives of the surface dwellers were supported by labor carried out in the dark? The idea felt natural. It fit the pieces I had gathered so far.

Once I accepted that, I tried to imagine how humanity could have split this way.

You may guess the shape of my first theory.

Looking at the problems of my own time, it seemed obvious. The growing divide between the wealthy and the laboring classes might have continued widening. There were already signs of industry moving underground in my era. Railways beneath the streets. Subways. Underground workrooms and restaurants. It was easy to imagine that this trend might expand. Industry might sink deeper and deeper, while comfort and beauty remained above.

The rich, seeking peace and distance from the harshness of labor, might close off large parts of the surface world for themselves. Even in my own time, much of the countryside near London was restricted. Education, refinement, and wealth were increasing the distance between classes. Intermarriage between them, which once softened division, might become rare.

If that happened over centuries, then eventually the split might harden into something permanent. Above ground, the privileged might live lives of ease and pleasure. Below ground, the workers might adapt to their environment. Over time, natural selection would shape them for darkness and confinement. Those who could not survive such conditions would die. Those who could would pass on their traits.

In the end, both groups might become suited to their roles. The surface race might grow delicate, beautiful, and weak. The underground race might become strong in its own way, fitted to machines and shadow.

At the time, this explanation seemed clear and even logical.

But it did not answer everything.

If the underground beings were workers, why had they taken my Time Machine? If the Eloi were masters, why did they show such helpless fear at night? Why could they not command the return of my machine? And if the division had once been social, had it remained that way? Or had something deeper and more disturbing taken shape?

I tried to question Weena about the underground world. I used gestures. I tried words she knew. At first she did not understand. When I repeated my attempts and pointed toward the wells, she began to tremble. She shook her head violently. She refused to answer.

When I pressed her more firmly, perhaps more sharply than I should have, she burst into tears.

They were the only tears I ever saw in that age, aside from my own.

The sight of them stopped me at once. Whatever truth lay below the earth, I could not pursue it at that moment. My only concern became drying those tears and bringing back her smile. I struck a match and held it up. The little flame fascinated her. Within moments she was clapping her hands again, the fear pushed back into whatever quiet corner of her mind it usually occupied.

But I could not forget what I had seen.

It took me two more days before I found the courage to descend into one of those shafts.

I must admit I felt a strong repulsion toward the pale creatures. They reminded me of preserved specimens in a museum, floating in jars of spirit. Their skin had that same lifeless color. And when I had touched one in the darkness, its flesh had been unpleasantly cold.

Part of my reluctance came from sympathy with the Eloi. Their disgust for the beings below was obvious, even if they would not speak of it.

Those next nights were restless. I slept poorly. My thoughts would not settle. Once or twice I felt a sharp fear that I could not clearly explain. I remember slipping quietly into the great hall where the Eloi slept in groups under the moonlight. Weena was among them that night. The sight of so many of them together calmed me for a time.

I also realized that the moon would soon grow thinner. The nights would darken. If those pale creatures preferred darkness, then their appearances above ground might become more frequent.

On both days I felt like a man avoiding a duty he knows cannot be escaped. I was certain my Time Machine would not be recovered without exploring the underground world. Yet I could not bring myself to face it. I was alone. Completely alone. The idea of climbing down into that black shaft without light or support filled me with dread.

It is difficult to explain, but I never felt secure with my back turned in that world.

That unease drove me to roam farther from my usual ground. I moved southwest toward rising country that in my time would have been known as Combe Wood. From a distance, in the direction that would once have been Banstead, I saw something new.

It was a vast green structure, larger than any building I had yet seen. Its surface had a pale bluish-green shine, like certain types of porcelain from China. Its shape was different from the other palaces. The facade had an almost Eastern character.

The sight of it stirred my curiosity. Perhaps it served a different purpose. Perhaps it would offer answers.

But the day was nearly over, and I had already walked far. I decided to return to Weena and leave that new place for another morning.

That night, with her small hands resting against mine, I understood the truth.

My interest in the green structure had been an excuse.

I was postponing the descent.

The following morning, I forced myself to act.

I chose a well near the ruins of granite and aluminum. I rose early, determined to end the hesitation.

Weena ran beside me, light and happy, unaware of what I meant to do. She danced at my side until we reached the well. But when she saw me lean over and look down into the darkness, her mood changed instantly.

“Good-bye, little Weena,” I said softly, though she could not understand the words.

I kissed her, set her gently aside, and reached for the metal rungs along the inner wall.

I moved quickly, afraid my courage would slip away if I paused.

At first she watched in confusion. Then she cried out sharply. She ran to me and began pulling at my clothing with her small hands. She tried to drag me back from the edge.

Strangely, her resistance strengthened my resolve. I shook her off, perhaps more roughly than I should have, and lowered myself into the mouth of the well.

I looked up once.

Her face was bent over the rim, full of distress. I tried to smile and reassure her. Then I turned my attention downward, to the uncertain bars beneath my feet.

The shaft stretched down farther than I had imagined. Perhaps two hundred yards. The descent depended on metal bars fixed into the sides. They were clearly designed for creatures smaller and lighter than myself. My limbs soon cramped. My muscles burned.

Then one of the bars bent under my weight.

It shifted suddenly and nearly threw me off into the darkness below.

For a moment I hung by one hand, suspended over the void. After that, I did not dare pause again. My arms and back ached, but I continued downward as quickly as I could manage.

Above me, the opening of the well had shrunk to a small circle of blue sky. A single star was still visible. For a brief moment, I saw Weena’s head silhouetted there. Then she was gone.

Below, the thudding sound I had heard from the surface grew louder and heavier. Everything around me was black except that distant circle of light.

Discomfort turned to real distress. I considered climbing back up and abandoning the attempt. But even while that thought passed through me, I continued descending.

At last, I saw a faint horizontal opening in the wall, a small passage branching off from the shaft.

With relief, I swung myself into it and lay down to rest. My arms trembled. My back was tight with pain. The darkness pressed in on me. The air vibrated with the steady pulse of machinery pumping air down the shaft.

I do not know how long I lay there.

I was brought back to alertness by the touch of a soft hand on my face.

I started violently and grabbed for my matches.

When I struck one, the small flame revealed three white figures crouched close to me. They were like the creature I had seen above, only now I saw them more clearly. They bent low, their limbs thin and oddly jointed. The light caught their eyes, which shone back at me with a strange, almost mechanical brightness.

As soon as the match flared, they shrank away from it. They moved with quick, darting motions, retreating into side tunnels and dark openings in the walls. But even as they fled, their eyes lingered, reflecting the light from the gloom.

It was clear they could see in that darkness far better than I could. They did not fear me in the dark. They feared the flame.

I tried to speak to them. The words I used for the Eloi meant nothing here. Their language, if they had one, was different. The sounds they made were low and rapid, and I could not make sense of them.

For a moment, the thought of retreat came strongly to me. I could still climb back up. I could leave the mystery unsolved.

But I had come too far for that.

“You are in it now,” I told myself quietly.

I rose and felt my way along the tunnel. The air throbbed with the steady rhythm of machinery. The sound grew louder as I advanced. The passage widened, and then the wall on one side fell away.

I struck another match.

The brief light showed that I had entered a vast underground chamber. The roof arched high above me, lost in shadow. The floor stretched outward beyond the reach of the flame. It was a cavern so large that my match seemed a weak and foolish thing inside it.

Shapes loomed in the darkness.

Great machines stood in rows, rising from the floor like black monuments. Their outlines were heavy and without grace. They cast thick shadows where the pale creatures moved and hid. The air felt close and heavy. There was a smell in it that I did not like. It carried a faint, metallic sweetness that suggested fresh blood.

Some distance ahead, I saw a low table made of white metal. On it lay what looked like part of a meal.

The Morlocks—though I did not yet know their name—were not vegetarians.

Even in that moment, with fear pressing on me, I remember wondering what large animal could have survived in that age to supply the red meat I thought I saw.

But the match burned down and stung my fingers. It fell and went out, leaving me in complete darkness again.

It was then that I understood how poorly prepared I was.

When I first set out with the Time Machine, I had assumed that humanity in the future would have surpassed us in every practical matter. I imagined I would be the ignorant one, surrounded by advanced tools and devices.

Instead, I stood alone underground with nothing but my own body and a handful of matches.

No weapons. No medicine. No food supplies. Not even tobacco, which I missed more than I care to admit. If I had brought even a simple camera, I could have captured that chamber in an instant and studied it later in safety. But I had brought nothing of the sort.

I had only my hands, my feet, my teeth, and four matches left in the box.

I hesitated to move farther into the cavern without light. I did not know what stood between those machines. And then it struck me with sudden force that I had wasted nearly half my supply of matches amusing the Eloi, who had never seen fire before.

Now I had four.

As I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine.

Long fingers brushed across my face.

I smelled again that unpleasant odor, close and sour. I sensed that I was surrounded. The breathing of several creatures reached my ears. Soft, rapid breaths.

Then I felt the matchbox shift in my hand.

Someone was trying to take it.

Other hands tugged at my clothing from behind.

The sensation was deeply disturbing. I could not see them, and yet I knew they were examining me. Touching my face. Testing my clothes. Whispering to one another in low tones I could not interpret.

The realization struck me hard. I had no idea how they thought. No idea what they intended. I did not even know whether I was prey, curiosity, or something else entirely.

I shouted.

The sound echoed through the cavern. They drew back for a moment. Then they crept closer again.

I felt them more boldly now. Fingers grasped my sleeves. One hand slid over my shoulder. They made a strange sound, something like a soft laugh, though it held no warmth.

I will not pretend I was calm.

Fear rose sharply in me. My skin prickled. I struck another match at once and held it high.

The light dazzled them. They recoiled, shielding their eyes. Their faces looked more inhuman than before. Pale, flat, chinless. Eyes large and lidless. Their features seemed unfinished, as if shaped for darkness and never meant for the sun.

I did not stay to observe them.

Using the light as a shield, I retreated toward the narrow tunnel I had entered from. I tore a scrap of paper from my pocket to extend the flame as long as possible.

But the match burned out quickly.

The darkness returned.

Behind me, I heard movement like wind in dry leaves. A pattering sound followed, light and rapid, like rain striking stone. They were pursuing me.

I stumbled into the tunnel. At once, hands caught me from behind. Several creatures seized my legs and pulled backward, trying to drag me away from the shaft.

I struck another match and waved it wildly.

Again, they fell back from the glare. Their eyes flashed white and red in the flame.

I did not stop to consider anything further. I scrambled toward the opening that led back to the shaft. The third match burned down just as I reached it.

I lay flat at the edge, dizzy from the steady pounding of the machinery below. I reached for the metal bars.

Then I felt my feet grasped again.

They were pulling harder this time.

I lit my last match.

It flared briefly and went out at once.

But my hands had already found the bars. I kicked downward with all my strength. My boot struck something soft and solid. The grip on my legs loosened. I wrenched myself free and began to climb.

Below me, I heard faint sounds of movement. I glanced down once. In the darkness, several pale faces were tilted upward. Their eyes reflected the small circle of light from above.

One creature began to climb after me.

It followed for several yards, clinging to the bars with surprising speed. Once, it nearly caught my boot. But the creature seemed weaker than I. It fell back before long.

The climb felt endless.

My muscles trembled from strain. Sweat ran down my back. The circle of light above seemed painfully far away.

Then, with perhaps twenty or thirty feet left, a wave of nausea swept over me. The constant thudding from below seemed to rise into my skull. My head swam. The shaft appeared to tilt.

Several times I felt the terrifying sensation of falling, though I still held tight.

The last stretch was a battle against faintness.

But at last, somehow, I reached the rim.

I dragged myself over the edge of the well and staggered into the sunlight. The sudden brightness blinded me. The air smelled clean and fresh beyond belief.

I fell forward onto the ground.

The earth beneath me felt warm and solid. Even the soil carried a sweet scent after the stifling air below.

Dimly, I became aware of Weena.

She was kissing my hands, my ears, making soft sounds of distress and relief. Other Eloi gathered near. Their voices floated above me, light and anxious.

Then everything went dark.

For a time, I lost consciousness.

When I came back to myself, the sun was high and bright.

I was lying on soft grass near the great building where the Eloi slept. Several of them were gathered around me, watching with wide, uncertain eyes. Weena was closest of all. Her small hand rested against my cheek as if to make sure I was truly there.

My head ached. My arms felt as though they had been torn from their sockets. For a few moments, I could not separate dream from memory. The darkness, the machines, the pale faces—all of it hovered at the edge of my thoughts.

Then it settled into place.

It had been real.

I sat up slowly. The Eloi seemed relieved by the movement. Weena smiled and touched my hands again, as though my return to awareness was a personal triumph for her.

I looked around at the quiet gardens, at the bright sky, at the delicate figures moving idly in the sunlight.

And I understood that the world above was no longer simple to me.

The surface peace was a shell.

Beneath it lay something active, organized, and far from gentle.

I rested that day. My body required it. But my mind did not rest.

The memory of the table in the cavern returned to me. The white metal surface. The red meat. At the time, I had assumed some animal must still survive to provide it.

But as the hours passed, that assumption began to crumble.

I had seen no large animals in that future world. No cattle. No sheep. No dogs even. The only living creatures I had encountered in any number were the Eloi.

The thought that formed next was one I resisted.

Yet it would not leave.

The Morlocks were carnivorous.

And the Eloi feared the dark.

The connection was terrible in its simplicity.

That evening, as the sun lowered and shadows lengthened across the lawns, I watched the Eloi more carefully than before. They laughed and played as usual. They gathered fruit. They wove flowers into one another’s hair.

But when the light faded further, a change came over them.

They began to move toward the great halls in groups. Their light voices softened. Their movements became more hurried. They clustered together, pressing close.

Weena clung to me with unusual intensity. She tried to draw me inside with the others. When I hesitated, she shook her head and made small pleading sounds.

For the first time, I did not dismiss her fear as childish.

That night, I did not sleep apart.

I lay among them in the wide hall, surrounded by small bodies breathing softly in the dark. Weena rested against me, her head on my arm as before. The moonlight streamed in pale through the open arches.

And still, even in that crowded space, I did not feel secure.

Several times I thought I heard movement outside. A faint rustle. A distant scraping. Each time, I held still and listened. The Eloi stirred at the slightest sound.

Nothing entered the hall.

But the sense of watchfulness remained.

Over the next day, I began to adjust my earlier theory.

At first, I had imagined the Morlocks as workers, sustaining the idle lives of the Eloi through mechanical labor below ground. That might once have been true.

But something had changed.

The Eloi were small. Fragile. Without strength or skill. They showed no capacity for defense. No curiosity. No awareness of danger beyond a simple fear of darkness.

The Morlocks, by contrast, maintained machines. They understood the shafts and tunnels. They moved with purpose in their own domain.

If the original division between classes had hardened into separate species, then perhaps the balance had shifted long ago.

What if the masters of the surface were no longer masters at all?

The idea formed slowly.

The Eloi were not ruling.

They were being kept.

Kept like cattle.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 7: A Fire in the Forest

CEFR: B2

Episode 7

The thought chilled me in a way the underground darkness had not.

It explained too much.

Their lack of old age. Their helplessness. Their fear at night. The red meat in the cavern.

I did not speak this suspicion aloud. Even if I had, there was no one to understand it. But from that day forward, I could not look at the Eloi without a deep unease.

Weena remained different in my mind.

Attachment is stubborn. Even when reason argues against it.

She trusted me. She followed me. She looked at me with a simple affection that had no calculation in it. If she was part of some terrible arrangement, she did not know it.

Or perhaps she knew in a way that did not require words.

I resolved then that I must recover my Time Machine. I would not leave it in the hands of the Morlocks. If they had taken it, then it was because they understood something of its purpose—or feared it.

And yet, I did not immediately descend again.

The memory of that chamber still pressed against me. The smell. The touch of unseen hands. The weakness of my light.

Instead, I turned my attention once more to the green structure I had glimpsed days before.

If the underground world was the present seat of power, then perhaps the surface ruins still held relics of an earlier age. Tools. Weapons. Anything that might give me advantage.

The next morning, I set out toward the rising land where the building stood. Weena insisted on coming with me. I did not refuse her.

The journey was long and tiring for her. The sun beat down hard. The heat seemed to rise from the ground itself. But she kept pace as best she could, her small hand sometimes gripping my fingers.

As we approached, the structure grew larger and more impressive.

Its pale green surface caught the light with a smooth shine. The walls rose high, with wide windows that had long ago lost their glass. The place had an air of abandonment, but not decay in the ordinary sense. It felt less like a ruin of neglect and more like a relic of a world that had moved on.

I stood before it and looked up.

The surface Eloi showed little interest in it. They rarely wandered so far from their gardens and halls. If answers were to be found, they would not come from them.

I turned to Weena and smiled. She smiled back, though I sensed she did not share my curiosity about the place.

Inside, the air was cooler.

Dust lay thick across the floor. Great shapes loomed in the dim light filtering through broken panes. It felt different from the other buildings. Less like a dwelling. More like a storehouse of something once valued.

As my eyes adjusted, I began to recognize forms.

Cabinets. Cases. Fragments of machinery. Objects made by hands that understood purpose and design.

For the first time since my arrival in that distant age, I felt something like hope.

If I could find tools here—if I could arm myself with something more than matches and bare hands—then I might face the underground world again on better terms.

Weena wandered behind me, touching objects with light curiosity. She did not seem frightened inside the building. Daylight still streamed in through high windows. It was shadowed, but not dark.

I moved deeper into the structure, stepping carefully over fallen beams and scattered debris.

The air smelled of dry dust and old things.

Somewhere within these walls, I believed, lay a remnant of the past strong enough to shift my position in this strange future.

And I meant to find it.

As I moved farther into the great green building, I began to understand what it had once been.

It was a museum.

Not in the sense of something small and carefully maintained, but in the grand scale of an age that believed its own knowledge would last forever. Vast halls opened one after another. Tall cases lined the walls. Some had fallen and shattered. Others stood intact but empty, their contents long since decayed.

Dust lay thick on everything.

In one gallery, I found the remains of machines. Their metal parts were rusted or fused. Belts had crumbled. Wheels were locked in place. Time had done its work thoroughly. In another section, I saw what must once have been displays of animals, preserved and arranged. Only fragments remained. The organic materials had not survived the centuries.

The building had endured, but its meaning had drained away.

Weena followed close behind me. At times she picked up small objects and turned them in her hands before dropping them again. She treated the place like a curiosity, not a storehouse of tools.

But I searched with purpose.

If humanity had left anything useful behind, it would be here.

In one long hall, I came upon something that made me pause.

There were cases containing weapons.

The glass fronts were cracked or gone. Inside lay shapes that were familiar to me. Swords. Spears. Even what looked like firearms, though their mechanisms were corroded beyond recognition.

I lifted one of the guns and tried to work it. The metal flaked in my hands. The barrel was clogged. The stock crumbled slightly at the edge. Whatever powder or ammunition had once accompanied it was long gone.

Time had rendered these weapons useless.

Still, the sight of them stirred something in me. They were signs of an age when humans defended themselves openly, when danger was faced with strength rather than avoidance.

I moved on.

In another area, I found cases filled with minerals and stones. Beautiful, but useless to me. In yet another, I discovered books—though they were no longer books in any practical sense. The pages had decayed into soft masses. The covers fell apart when touched.

Knowledge had not survived intact.

The realization struck me sharply. The people who built this place must have believed they were preserving their world. They thought their science, their art, their history would carry forward.

Yet here I stood, unable to read a single line of what they had saved.

The silence of that hall felt heavy.

Weena, unaware of my thoughts, tugged gently at my sleeve and pointed toward a darker section of the museum. I followed her gesture.

In a corner near a collapsed display, I saw something different.

It was a rack of wooden poles.

At first glance, they seemed too simple to matter. But when I lifted one, I felt its weight. It was sturdy. Straight. Solid.

Clubs.

Primitive compared to firearms, yes. But solid wood does not decay as quickly as metal mechanisms. I swung one experimentally through the air. It cut cleanly.

For the first time since my descent into the underworld, I felt less helpless.

If the Morlocks relied on darkness and numbers, then fire and force might counter them.

Fire.

The thought sharpened.

I had already seen how they recoiled from flame. A match had driven them back. What might a larger blaze do?

I began to search the building for anything that would burn.

In one area, I found what had once been a collection of chemical materials. Most of it was ruined. Bottles were shattered. Powders had fused into useless lumps. But in a cabinet that had remained sealed, I discovered small boxes.

Matches.

They were old, but dry. Carefully stored. When I struck one against the side of the box, it flared.

The relief I felt in that moment is difficult to express.

I had not realized how much my fear below had been tied to that small flame in my hand. Without light, I had been nearly powerless. With it, the Morlocks had retreated.

Now I had more than four.

I gathered the matches carefully. I took two wooden clubs. Weena watched me with wide eyes as I armed myself.

She did not understand what I was preparing for. But she sensed the change in me. The lightness I had shown in earlier days had faded. I moved with intention now.

As we stepped back out into the sunlight, the heat struck us again. The green surface of the museum shone behind us.

I paused and looked back at it once more.

The building was a tomb of knowledge. A monument to a species that had believed itself secure.

And yet, it had not prevented what followed.

Weena slipped her hand into mine.

The afternoon was already leaning toward evening. The journey back would take time. I knew we would have to cross wooded ground before reaching the open lawns near the White Sphinx.

The woods were thicker than the gardens near the main buildings. Tall trunks rose close together. Underbrush tangled around our legs. The air inside felt still and heavy.

Weena grew uneasy as the light shifted.

The sun dipped lower. Shadows lengthened between the trees. The heat began to fade, replaced by a cooler breath moving through the leaves.

I felt tension rise in her grip.

We were still some distance from the open ground when the light began to fail more quickly than I expected.

The forest darkened.

Weena stumbled once and nearly fell. I steadied her. She looked up at me with wide, fearful eyes. She did not want to go farther.

But we had to.

I struck a match.

The small flame burned bright in the deepening dusk. Weena moved closer to me at once, pressing against my side.

The woods seemed to shift around us. The darkness between the trunks felt deeper than before.

I told myself it was only imagination.

Then I heard it.

A faint movement. Not the wind. Not the settling of branches.

A rustle that carried intention.

I swung the club into my other hand and held the match high. The flame flickered and went out.

The darkness rushed in.

I struck another.

In the brief circle of light, I saw pale shapes moving among the trees.

Not one.

Several.

They kept to the shadows, but their eyes caught the flame. They blinked and drew back, but they did not retreat far.

They were watching.

Weena made a small sound and clutched at me. I lifted the club and swung it toward one shape that edged too close. It withdrew quickly, but more movement followed behind it.

They were gathering.

I understood then that night was their hour.

The match burned low. I dropped it and struck another.

The flame flared brighter this time. I used it to light a small branch from the forest floor. The dry wood caught slowly, then more strongly.

Fire spread along it.

The Morlocks hissed and shrank back from the growing light.

I swung the burning branch in a wide arc, forcing space around us. The club in my other hand felt solid and reassuring.

For a moment, I believed we might pass through the woods safely.

But the forest floor was thick with dry leaves.

As the branch burned, sparks fell.

I saw too late what I had begun.

A line of flame caught in the undergrowth. It crawled quickly along the ground, fed by dry matter. The heat surged outward. Smoke began to rise.

The Morlocks retreated farther into the dark, but the fire did not.

It spread.

The trees trapped the heat. The flames climbed low branches. Smoke thickened in the air.

Weena coughed and pressed her face against my side.

I tried to stamp out part of the spreading fire, but it had already moved beyond control. The wind shifted slightly and drove it forward.

The forest began to roar.

In the flickering light, pale shapes ran between the trunks. Some fled the flames. Others circled at the edges.

The fire, once started, had become its own force.

I seized Weena’s hand and pulled her toward a clearer path I thought I remembered. The smoke burned my throat. Sparks drifted through the air like glowing insects.

Behind us, the forest blazed.

Ahead, I could see the edge of the trees thinning.

We were close.

But the ground underfoot was uneven. Roots caught at our steps. Weena stumbled again. I lifted her briefly and carried her until my arms protested.

The roar of fire grew louder.

And somewhere within that chaos, I realized something was wrong.

Weena was no longer gripping my hand.

I turned sharply.

In the shifting smoke and firelight, I could not see her small white form.

I called her name.

There was no answer.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 8: Torchlight and Watching Eyes

CEFR: B2

Now, more than at any earlier point, I felt that my position had turned worse.

Up to then, except for that one night of raw panic when I first lost the Time Machine, I had still carried a steady belief that I would get out. I had told myself I was only delayed. The little people were gentle but helpless. They could not help me understand what was happening. And there were forces at work that I had not yet grasped. Still, I believed that once I understood those forces, I could deal with them.

But what I had begun to learn shook that confidence.

The Morlocks were not only unknown to me. There was something about them that felt wrong in a way I could not explain cleanly. Something cold. Something that did not fit any idea of human nature I was used to. I disliked them at once, and the feeling was not mild. It rose in me without effort.

Before this, my situation had felt like a man in a pit. The pit was the problem. The question was how to climb out.

Now it felt different. Now it felt like being caught, with the sense that the thing you fear will arrive soon.

And the enemy I dreaded most was not what you might expect.

It was not the Morlocks themselves, at least not directly.

It was the coming darkness of the new moon.

Weena had set that fear in motion without meaning to. She had tried to tell me something, in her limited way, about the Dark Nights. At first her remarks made no sense to me. But now I could guess what she meant. The moon was waning. Each night, the time between sunset and moonrise would grow longer. Each night would contain more complete darkness.

And I began to understand, at least a little, why the Eloi feared the night.

I found myself wondering what the Morlocks did when the world went fully black.

By then I no longer trusted my early explanation of this place. Once, I had imagined a simple arrangement. I had thought the people on the surface might have been the ruling class, and the Morlocks their underground workers, kept for industry and maintenance. That idea had seemed neat. It had seemed almost logical.

But it no longer held.

Whatever the past had been, it had shifted. The two kinds of creatures that had come out of humanity were settling into a new relationship, and it was not one I liked to picture.

The Eloi, with their pretty faces and their light, drifting lives, reminded me of rulers in old histories who kept their titles long after they had lost real power. They still lived in the open air. They still moved through gardens and sunshine. But it no longer felt like ownership.

It felt like permission.

The Morlocks had lived underground for countless generations. The surface, in daylight, had become painful to them. They could not endure it. That alone gave the Eloi a kind of safety. In sunlight, the Eloi could wander, laugh, sleep on the grass, as if the world belonged to them.

But the Morlocks were still there. And the longer I watched, the more it seemed that the Eloi’s easy life depended on the Morlocks in ways the Eloi did not understand.

The Morlocks made their clothes. Of that I felt nearly certain. They kept some machinery running. They maintained habits of work that must have begun in an earlier age. Perhaps it continued simply because it had been done for so long that it had become part of them, like an old motion that survives after its reason is forgotten.

Still, it was also clear that something had changed.

The old arrangement was already partly reversed.

Long ago, one part of humanity had forced another into darkness. It had driven them away from open air and ease and sunlight. And now, that buried race was still there, altered by its conditions, and no longer harmless.

And the Eloi, for all their softness, were beginning to learn something that their comfort had kept away from them.

They were learning fear again.

Then, abruptly, another memory surfaced.

The meat I had seen in the underground place.

It came into my mind in a strange way. Not as a natural step in the line of my thoughts, but as if something had dropped it there. As if it had been placed before me, like a question I had avoided.

I tried to picture it clearly. At the time, I had noticed it without thinking much about it. It had seemed familiar in shape, and yet I had not stopped to examine it.

Now the meaning threatened to become clear, and I forced myself away from it.

Whatever the Eloi were, and however helpless they might be, I kept telling myself I was not like them.

I came from our time, from a period when fear does not, as a rule, stop a man from acting. We live surrounded by unknowns, and we do not bow to them. We test them. We measure them. We try to master them.

At least, that is how I thought of it then.

I decided I would not remain exposed. I would make weapons. I would find a place to sleep that could not be reached easily. I needed some position that I could hold, even if only for a night at a time.

Until then, I could not see how I could sleep again without the thought of those white creatures moving around me, touching me, studying me, while I lay unconscious.

The idea made my skin turn cold.

That afternoon, I wandered through the Thames valley, looking for something that might serve as a refuge. I examined the ruined buildings. I looked at the trees. I tried to imagine what I could climb and what they could climb.

Nothing satisfied me.

The structures were open, broken, easy to enter. And the Morlocks, if their wells were any sign, were excellent climbers. They moved up and down vertical shafts as if it were nothing. A tree trunk would not stop them. A wall with gaps would not stop them.

Then the image of the Palace of Green Porcelain came back to me. Its tall pinnacles. The smooth gleam of its surface. Its height above the land.

In the evening, I lifted Weena onto my shoulder like a child and began walking toward the south-west.

I believed, at first, that it was only seven or eight miles away.

I was wrong.

The first time I had seen the place, it had been on a damp afternoon, the kind that makes distances look shorter than they are. Now, in clearer air and with tired legs, I realized the journey was much longer. Nearer eighteen miles, by my rough estimate.

And I was already hurt.

The shoes I wore were comfortable in my own time, but they were old indoor shoes, not made for long travel. One heel had loosened. A nail was working through the sole. By the time the sun had dropped low, I was limping badly.

It was long after sunset when the palace came into view at last, black against a pale yellow strip of sky.

Weena had been delighted at first to ride on my shoulder. She laughed, and pointed at things, and seemed to treat the journey like a game. But after a while she wanted to be put down. She ran beside me, light on her feet, darting away now and then to pick flowers.

She would return and push them into my pockets with great care.

My pockets had always confused her. She had examined them many times, as if expecting them to reveal some secret. In the end she decided, in her own way, that they were a strange kind of vase meant for flowers. And she used them as such.

That reminds me—

The Time Traveler paused. He slid his hand into his pocket, and without speaking placed two withered flowers on the small table. They were pale, large, and flattened by time and movement. Then he went on.

As we crossed a hill crest toward what I judged to be Wimbledon, the world grew quiet in that particular way it does before full dusk. Even the breeze seemed to stop. The sky was clear and empty, with only thin horizontal bars of cloud far down near the sunset.

Weena grew tired again and wanted to go back to the grey stone house near the Sphinx.

But I pointed to the distant outline of the palace and tried, as best I could, to make her understand that we were going there for safety. That we needed shelter from the dark she feared.

And in that stillness, with the last light draining away, my own fear colored everything I saw.

In that quiet before night, my senses felt sharpened in a way that was not entirely healthy.

The ground beneath my feet seemed hollow. I found myself imagining the tunnels below, the Morlocks moving through them in restless activity, waiting for the darkness to deepen. I wondered whether my earlier descent into their world had been taken as an act of aggression.

Had they seen it as a declaration of war?

And why had they taken my Time Machine?

We walked on as twilight settled. The blue of the distance faded to grey. One star appeared, then another. The shapes of the trees thickened into dark masses. The air cooled.

Weena’s fatigue increased. So did her fear.

I lifted her again and held her close. I spoke softly, though she could not understand my words. As the darkness deepened, she wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her face against my shoulder.

We descended a long slope into a valley, and in the dimness I nearly walked into a small river. I waded through it carefully, holding her high. The water was cold against my legs. On the far side, we climbed again and passed several silent houses, pale shapes in the gloom. We went by a statue—a figure of a faun, or something like it, missing its head. Acacia trees stood nearby, still and thin against the sky.

So far I had seen no Morlocks.

But it was still early in the night. The darkest hours, before the thin moon would rise, had not yet come.

From the crest of the next hill, I saw a thick wood stretching ahead. It lay black and solid before us. I could not see where it ended, either to the right or the left.

I stopped.

My feet were sore. The nail in my shoe had worked deeper into my heel. My whole body felt strained from the day’s walk. I lowered Weena gently and sat on the grass.

I could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain. I was no longer certain of my direction.

The wood troubled me.

Under that dense canopy we would lose the stars. The ground would be uneven. Roots would lie hidden. Trunks would rise suddenly out of the dark. Even without imagining any lurking danger, the forest itself was hazard enough.

And I was very tired.

I decided that I would not enter it. We would spend the night on the open hillside.

Weena had fallen asleep almost at once. I wrapped her carefully in my jacket and sat beside her to wait for the moon.

The hillside was quiet. From the dark edge of the wood, I heard movement now and then—nothing distinct, only the suggestion of life among leaves and branches.

Above us, the sky was very clear.

The stars gave me a strange sense of steadiness. Yet they were not the stars I had known.

The constellations of my own time had shifted. The slow turning of the earth’s axis over immense periods had rearranged the sky. The patterns I once recognized were gone. Only the Milky Way remained much as I remembered it—a pale band of light drawn across the darkness.

To the south, as I judged direction, a bright red star shone that was new to me. It seemed more vivid than Sirius had been in my own age. Among the scattered lights, one planet glowed steadily, not flickering like the stars. Its steady presence struck me with an odd familiarity.

Looking at the sky diminished my immediate troubles.

The distances involved were beyond comprehension. The slow drift of those lights from past to future continued without concern for human affairs. During all the years I had traveled forward, the earth’s pole had completed only forty of its great cycles. And in that span, all the nations, languages, institutions, and ambitions of the world I had known had vanished.

In their place stood these fragile beings on the surface—and the white creatures below.

Then the thought of the meat returned.

This time it did not hover at the edge of my mind. It came fully forward.

I saw again the pieces laid out in the underground chamber. Their shape. Their size.

And I understood.

The realization came with a physical chill.

I looked down at Weena, sleeping beside me, her face pale in the starlight. The thought was unbearable when placed next to her small form.

I forced it away.

Through that long night I tried to occupy my mind by tracing patterns in the unfamiliar stars. I searched for old constellations in the new arrangement. I told myself that the sky, at least, was constant in its laws.

At times I must have dozed, though I did not mean to.

At last, a faint whitening touched the eastern horizon. It was subtle at first, like the reflection of a distant flame. Then the thin old moon rose, pale and sharp-edged. Shortly after, dawn followed, washing the sky in soft light.

No Morlocks had approached us.

In the renewed clarity of day, my fears felt less certain. The hillside lay quiet and open. Nothing had disturbed us.

When I stood, my injured foot protested sharply. The ankle was swollen, and the nail had bruised the heel deeply. I sat again, removed my shoes, and threw them aside. They were no longer worth wearing.

I woke Weena, and together we descended into the wood.

In daylight it seemed almost harmless. The trees were green. Sunlight filtered through leaves. The ground was uneven but manageable. We found fruit and ate.

Before long we met other Eloi. They laughed and played in the open, as though night held no danger at all.

And once again, the memory of the meat returned.

Now I no longer doubted what it had been.

From the bottom of my heart, I pitied these delicate creatures. They were the last thin stream from a once powerful current of humanity.

At some distant stage in the long decline of the human race, the Morlocks’ original food supply must have failed. Perhaps they had first turned to vermin. Even in my own time, human diet is not as fixed or refined as we like to imagine. The idea of eating one’s own kind is not an instinct so deep that it cannot be broken under pressure.

And so these altered descendants of men—

I stopped myself.

I tried to consider it without emotion. If I viewed it only as a biological development, perhaps I could keep my balance. The Morlocks were further removed from us than the cannibal tribes of early history. The intelligence that would make such a condition unbearable had faded in both races.

Why should I torment myself?

These Eloi were like cattle kept and tended. Preserved and used.

And Weena walked beside me, laughing.

The thought did not sit easily.

I attempted to protect myself from the horror of it by treating it as a consequence of human choices. For ages, one part of humanity had lived in ease on the labor of another. Necessity had been cited as justification. In time, necessity had returned in another form.

For a moment, I even tried to hold the Eloi in contempt, as though that would steady me. But it did not last.

Whatever they had lost, they still carried the human shape.

That was enough to bind me to them.

At that stage my plans were still forming.

First, I needed a secure place to sleep. Second, weapons—metal if possible, stone if not. Third, fire in greater supply. A torch would give me real protection against the Morlocks. And finally, I would need some way to break open the bronze doors beneath the White Sphinx.

I imagined constructing a battering ram.

If I could enter those doors carrying light, I believed I would find the Time Machine inside. I doubted the Morlocks could have moved it far.

And I had decided one more thing.

If I escaped, Weena would come with me.

Holding these thoughts in mind, we continued toward the building I had chosen as our refuge.

As we walked, I turned these plans over again and again.

Fear, when it is not examined, spreads into everything. I did not want that. I wanted to reduce it to clear problems with clear responses.

The first necessity was shelter. I could not endure another night lying open to whatever might approach me in the dark. The knowledge that the Morlocks had already handled me while I slept—that they had crept close enough to touch my body and study it—made rest impossible.

The second necessity was arms.

Metal would be best. Failing that, heavy stone or wood. Something that would allow me to strike with certainty. I had already seen that the Morlocks were not large creatures. They relied on darkness and surprise. In direct conflict, with space and light, they were less formidable.

The third necessity was fire.

Nothing I had observed suggested they could endure it. The faintest flare sent them recoiling. A torch would give me reach. A blaze would give me territory.

And lastly, the doors beneath the White Sphinx.

I was convinced the Time Machine lay there. The Morlocks had taken it, but I did not believe they had destroyed it. I could not imagine them understanding its construction, and I doubted they had the strength or coordination to dismantle it. The bronze doors were heavy, but not beyond effort.

A beam used as a ram might suffice.

If I could break those doors and carry light before me, I believed I would regain the machine and escape.

Weena would come with me.

The thought of leaving her behind no longer presented itself as an option. However altered her people were, she had shown attachment, curiosity, trust. To abandon her to the cycle I had begun to understand felt impossible.

As the day advanced, I noticed how easily the Eloi drifted from one pleasure to another. They gathered fruit, laughed, rested, played simple games. They did not speak of night. They did not plan for it. They seemed to live within a narrow band of daylight existence, untouched by memory or foresight.

Their world had been reduced to what was immediately before them.

I could not decide whether this was innocence or decay.

Meanwhile, the Morlocks endured below.

The more I considered it, the less it resembled a simple conflict between two species. It seemed rather like the long result of separation. One branch of humanity had pursued comfort, refinement, surface beauty. The other had been confined to labor and necessity.

Over countless generations, those conditions had shaped them.

The Eloi had grown small, fragile, incurious. Their needs were met. They no longer struggled. They no longer questioned.

The Morlocks had adapted to darkness. They retained purpose. They maintained systems whose origins they may no longer have understood. Their bodies reflected the world they inhabited.

If there had once been mastery on the surface, it had not survived intact.

The arrangement now favored those below—at least when night fell.

I reflected that such change would not have occurred suddenly. First, a widening gap. Then separation. Then gradual adaptation. In time, memory would have faded. The Eloi would forget they had ever commanded. The Morlocks would forget they had ever served.

And I stood between them, carrying knowledge neither possessed.

By midmorning, the tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain rose again before us. In daylight, its smooth walls shone faintly. The structure still suggested strength, though decay had begun its work.

I felt some measure of relief at the sight of it.

If any place offered defensible height and solid walls, it was this.

Weena wandered near the entrance, gathering flowers along the broken steps. In sunlight she seemed almost free of fear.

Inside, the air was cool and dry. Dust lay thick across floors and surfaces. Shafts of light entered through broken windows and illuminated drifting particles in the still air.

I moved carefully through the galleries, considering them with more purpose than before.

This had once been a great repository of knowledge. Science, industry, art—stored and arranged. Yet preservation had failed. Materials had decayed. Meaning had dissolved.

I found myself wondering how long it had taken for understanding to disappear from the minds of those who built this place. Was there a final generation that recognized what was being lost? Or did decline move slowly enough that no one noticed when knowledge slipped away?

The thought was not comforting.

Human achievement, I saw, was not permanent. It required constant effort. Remove that effort long enough, and structures—both physical and intellectual—would fail.

Still, reflection did not replace action.

I began searching for materials that might serve my immediate purpose. I needed something long and strong—some beam or lever that could be used against the bronze doors of the Sphinx.

I found lengths of metal tubing. At first they seemed promising. But when I braced one and pressed down, it snapped. Corrosion had weakened it beyond use.

Wood had endured better.

In a storage area, I discovered heavier timbers that had once supported displays. Some remained solid. I tested one by setting it against a wall and applying my weight. It held.

I set it aside.

If I could use such a beam as a ram, perhaps I could force the doors.

I considered whether I might enlist help from the Eloi. But the thought faded quickly. They lacked any sense of coordinated effort. Faced with difficulty, they withdrew rather than gathered.

I would have to rely on myself.

Weena remained near me as I worked. At times she wandered into nearby rooms and returned, as if checking that I was still there. Her presence steadied me more than I expected.

At one window, I paused and looked out across the valley. In the distance, the White Sphinx stood small but distinct against the land.

Somewhere beneath it, my machine waited.

I imagined the Morlocks below, perhaps aware that I was preparing something.

Had they understood what the Time Machine was? Or had they simply been curious about it? If they had taken it for some practical purpose, perhaps it remained intact. If they had dismantled it—

I did not allow the thought to continue.

My plan settled into shape.

We would remain at the palace through the coming night. The upper galleries offered height and partial barriers. I would keep fire ready. At dawn, we would return toward the Sphinx with whatever tools I could manage.

If I could descend into the bronze enclosure carrying light, I believed I could confront whatever waited there.

As afternoon advanced, I gathered fruit and stored it near the entrance of a large hall. I arranged dry branches that could be lit quickly if needed. Weena carried small sticks and placed them beside mine, pleased to be involved though she did not understand the reason.

When evening approached again, the quiet before dusk returned.

The sky cleared into a deep blue. The air stilled.

I felt that same alertness rise within me. Not panic, but awareness. As though the ground beneath us concealed motion.

Weena drew closer.

I positioned us in an upper gallery where broken railings created a partial barrier. From there I could see the land in several directions.

I did not light a flame while daylight remained.

One by one, stars appeared.

The moon would rise late and thin. The hours before it would be the darkest.

I held one of the wooden clubs and waited.

When the last light drained from the sky, the palace walls darkened. The land below became shadow.

Weena pressed against me, her small body tense.

I listened.

At first there was nothing.

Then, faintly, movement below.

Not loud. Not distinct. But present.

I waited until the darkness was complete.

Then I struck a match.

The small flare lit the railing, the dust, and the pale curve of Weena’s cheek.

No Morlocks stood openly below.

But I did not assume they were absent.

I lit a prepared branch and let it burn steadily. The torchlight cast long, moving shadows against the walls.

For a time, nothing happened.

Then I saw them.

At the edge of the light, near the base of the palace wall, pale shapes shifted. Eyes caught the glow and vanished again. They kept to the boundary between illumination and darkness.

They did not cross into the light.

When I raised the torch slightly, several withdrew.

That confirmed what I needed to know.

Fire was not a mere discomfort to them. It was a barrier.

The night passed slowly.

At intervals, I glimpsed motion below. Once, I heard a faint scraping against stone. But none attempted to climb the smooth outer wall.

When the thin moon rose, its pale light mixed with my torch’s glow. The shapes below retreated further.

At last, dawn began to color the eastern sky.

The figures below thinned and disappeared.

When daylight returned fully, I let the torch burn out.

I had not slept at all.

Exhaustion weighed on me, but relief accompanied it. We had passed the darkest part of the moon’s cycle without attack.

And I had learned something important.

The Morlocks did not fear the Eloi.

They feared fire.

That knowledge would guide what came next.

When the sun stood higher, I gathered the clubs and the remaining matches.

We would return toward the White Sphinx in daylight.

I would attempt to break open the bronze doors.

The Morlocks had taken my machine for a reason.

Now I intended to discover what that reason was.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 9: Footprints in the Dimness

CEFR: B2

We came up to the Palace of Green Porcelain around noon. It stood high on a broad, grassy rise, exposed to the wind. From a distance it still looked imposing, but close up it was clearly abandoned and breaking down. The windows were mostly empty. Only ragged strips of glass clung here and there to the frames. Large plates of the green outer surface had fallen away, and the metal beneath showed through, corroded and stained.

Before we went inside, I turned and looked out to the north-east. I was surprised to see a wide stretch of water where I believed Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. It was not a narrow river. It looked more like an estuary, or a broad inlet, as though the sea had pushed farther inland than in my own day. The sight made me wonder, for a moment, what might have become of life in the oceans. But I did not follow the thought. I had enough to deal with on land.

When I examined the palace more closely, I found that the material truly was porcelain. Along the outer face ran an inscription, cut into the surface in characters I did not recognize. For a brief moment I imagined Weena might help me understand it. The idea was foolish. I learned quickly that even the concept of writing had never entered her mind. She did not have the faintest notion of marks standing for words.

More than once I had found myself thinking of her as more human than she was. Perhaps that was because her affection felt human. It was easy to be misled by that.

The great doors were open, cracked, and broken, like large valves forced apart and left that way. We passed through them and found, not a grand hall, but a long gallery lit by many side windows. At first glance it reminded me strongly of a museum.

The tiled floor was thick with dust. A remarkable collection of objects stood in the same grey covering, as if everything had been left in place and simply buried by time. Then, in the center of the hall, I saw something strange and gaunt that stood out even through the dust. It was clearly the lower portion of a huge skeleton, upright on heavy feet.

The angle of the feet made me think at once of some extinct creature like the Megatherium. The skull and upper bones lay beside it, scattered in the dust. In one place, rainwater had leaked through a hole in the roof and dropped steadily for years. Where it had fallen, the bones beneath were worn away.

Further in, I saw the great ribbed barrel of a Brontosaurus skeleton. That settled the matter. This really was a museum, and we had entered what must once have been its paleontological section.

Along the sides of the gallery I found sloping shelves. I brushed away the thick dust and uncovered the familiar glass cases of my own time. Many must have been air-tight, judging from how well some of their contents were preserved.

It felt as though we stood among the ruins of some later South Kensington. The fossil displays must once have been splendid. Even so, time had been at work. The usual processes of decay had been held back for a very long time. With bacteria and fungi largely gone, decomposition would have been weakened almost beyond recognition. But it had not stopped. It had only slowed. And now, over immense stretches of time, it had begun again, steadily and without hurry.

Here and there I saw traces of the Eloi. Rare fossils had been broken apart. Others had been threaded on reeds like beads. In some places entire cases had been removed. I suspected the Morlocks had done that.

The place was very silent. The dust softened our footsteps so thoroughly that we made almost no sound. Weena had been playing quietly, rolling a sea urchin fossil down the sloping glass of a case. After a while she came to me, took my hand, and stood beside me without speaking.

At first I was so taken by this remnant of an earlier intellectual age that I hardly thought of what it might offer me. Even my worry about the Time Machine slipped into the background for a short time.

The size of the palace suggested there must be more than this one fossil gallery. There might have been historical rooms. There might even have been a library. In my circumstances, I would have found those far more interesting than fossils decaying into dust. But I could not afford to lose myself in curiosity. I began exploring.

I found another short gallery running across the first. It appeared to be devoted to minerals. A block of sulphur caught my attention at once and set my thoughts moving. Sulphur meant gunpowder, or at least one part of it. I looked for saltpetre. I found none. In fact, I found no nitrates of any kind. They had likely dissolved or altered ages ago. Still, the sulphur remained in my mind and kept suggesting possibilities.

The rest of the minerals interested me little. I am no specialist in that field. I moved on down another aisle, badly damaged and partly collapsed, running parallel to the first hall. This section had apparently been natural history, but almost everything had passed out of recognition. There were a few shriveled blackened remnants that had once been stuffed animals, dried shapes in jars that had once held preserving spirits, and brown dust that had once been plants. That was all.

I was sorry to see it. I would have liked to trace, step by step, the changes by which life had adjusted itself to this new world. But the evidence was gone.

Then we came into a gallery of enormous size. It was poorly lit, and the floor sloped downward slightly away from the end where we entered. At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling, many cracked or smashed, suggesting the place had once been lit artificially.

Here I felt more at home.

On either side rose the bulk of large machines. They were corroded, many broken, but some still fairly complete. You know I have always had a weakness for machinery, and I was tempted to linger among them. They had the interest of puzzles. I could make only vague guesses at their purpose. More than once I found myself thinking that if I could understand them I might discover something useful against the Morlocks.

It was Weena who brought me back.

She suddenly pressed close against my side. The movement startled me. If she had not done that, I do not think I would have noticed how much the light had diminished.

At the end where we entered, the gallery was well above ground. Narrow windows admitted daylight. But as we went on, the earth rose against those windows. The openings grew smaller until, near the far end, each window seemed to look out into a kind of pit, with only a thin line of daylight at the top.

I had been too absorbed in the machines to notice the change until Weena’s growing unease forced my attention. Ahead, the gallery fell away into thick darkness.

I hesitated. Then I looked down at the dust again. Here, near us, it lay thick and smooth. But further on, toward the dimness, it was less even, and broken by many small, narrow footprints.

That revived my sense of danger at once. It reminded me that the Morlocks were near, and that I was wasting time with an academic interest while I still had no weapon, no refuge, and no reliable way to make fire.

And then, from deep within the darkness, I heard a faint pattering sound.

It was followed by the same odd noises I had heard before, down by the wells.

I took Weena’s hand.

Then a sudden idea came to me. I left her standing in the central aisle and turned toward a machine from which a lever projected, not unlike those in a signal box. I climbed up onto the stand, gripped the lever with both hands, and threw my weight against it sideways.

Behind me, Weena began to whimper.

The lever held for a moment. Then, after nearly a minute of strain, it snapped with a sharp crack. I climbed down with a heavy length of metal in my hand.

It would serve as a mace.

And with that in my grasp, I felt, for the first time that day, that I was not entirely helpless.

The weight of the metal bar in my hand steadied me. It was solid enough. I judged it would serve well against a Morlock skull.

I will admit that I felt a strong urge to test it.

You may think it strange to feel such hostility toward beings that might, in some distant sense, be descended from my own kind. But it was impossible to see anything of humanity in them. Their touch, their movements, their pale faces in the dark—everything in them repelled me.

Only two things restrained me from going down into that darkness and striking at whatever moved there. I would not leave Weena alone. And I feared that if I began such violence, I might somehow endanger my chances of recovering the Time Machine.

So instead, mace in one hand and Weena’s fingers in the other, I withdrew from that sloping gallery and entered another, even larger hall.

At first glance it reminded me of a military chapel hung with torn flags. Long strips of brown and blackened material hung from the walls in drooping lengths. For a moment I thought they were banners.

Then I looked closer.

They were books. Or what remained of them.

The paper had decayed into soft fragments. In most places it had fallen away entirely. No trace of print survived. Here and there I saw warped wooden boards and corroded metal clasps that once held volumes together. That was all.

If I had been a literary man, I might have paused to reflect on the fate of ambition and knowledge. But what struck me most was something simpler.

The sheer amount of labor.

All the effort that had gone into writing, printing, binding, preserving. All of it reduced to dust.

I confess that my first thought was not of poetry or philosophy. It was of the Philosophical Transactions, and of my own seventeen papers on physical optics.

That, perhaps, says something about me.

We went on, climbing a broad staircase. At the top we entered what must once have been a gallery of technical chemistry.

Here I felt a renewed sense of hope.

Except at one end, where part of the roof had collapsed, the room was well preserved. I went quickly from case to case, examining each one with care.

At last, in a cabinet that had clearly been sealed tightly, I found something that changed my situation at once.

A box of matches.

I opened it and struck one without delay. It flared up immediately. Dry. Sound. Not even damp.

For a moment I simply stood there, watching that small flame.

Then I turned to Weena.

“Dance,” I said to her, using one of the few words she understood from my tone if not my meaning.

Now I possessed something of real power.

Fire.

Against the Morlocks, fire would be more effective than any iron bar. It would give light, and light would give me space.

There, in that abandoned museum, on the thick carpet of dust, I performed what must have been an odd spectacle. To Weena’s great delight, I danced.

I whistled a tune I knew and moved as best I could. My coat restricted me, but I made do. It was part step dance, part imitation of something livelier, part invention. I cannot claim it was graceful.

Weena laughed and clapped her hands.

It was a brief moment of foolish relief in the midst of ruin.

Looking back, I still find it remarkable that such a fragile object as a box of matches should have survived through so many ages. It seemed unlikely. Yet there it was.

And I found something else, even more improbable.

In another sealed jar I discovered camphor. At first I took it for paraffin wax and broke the glass to examine it. The sharp scent made its identity clear at once.

In a world where so much had decayed, this volatile substance had endured. Perhaps the jar had been perfectly sealed. Perhaps it was mere chance.

I almost discarded it. Then I remembered that camphor burns with a bright, steady flame. It would serve well as a candle.

I put it carefully in my pocket.

I searched for explosives, something that might break through the bronze doors beneath the White Sphinx. I found nothing of the sort. No gunpowder. No chemicals that could be adapted to that purpose.

My iron mace remained my most useful tool.

Even so, I left that gallery in far better spirits than when I had entered it.

I cannot recount every step of that long afternoon in perfect order. I wandered through room after room, driven by curiosity and by the need to equip myself.

In one hall I found racks of weapons. Rusting swords, axes, spears. Stands filled with pistols and rifles.

I hesitated between taking a blade and keeping my iron bar. I could not carry both easily. In the end I chose the bar. It would be more useful against metal doors.

Many of the firearms were useless masses of rust. Some, however, appeared to be made of a newer alloy and were still fairly intact. But there was no ammunition. Any cartridges that had once existed had rotted away into dust.

In one corner part of the collection had been blackened and shattered. Perhaps an explosion had occurred there long ago.

In another place I came upon a large display of idols. Figures from many parts of the world—Polynesian, Mexican, Greek, Phoenician. The range of human culture gathered together in one room.

Moved by a strange impulse, I took a sharp fragment and scratched my name across the nose of a steatite figure from South America that had caught my attention.

It was a childish act. A small assertion that I had stood there, in that distant age.

As the afternoon wore on, my energy began to fade. I passed through gallery after gallery, dusty and silent, some partly ruined. In some rooms the exhibits had collapsed into unrecognizable heaps of rust and mineral residue. In others they remained surprisingly intact.

By chance I found myself near a model of a tin mine. Almost immediately after, I made what I believed was an extraordinary discovery.

In an air-tight case I saw two sticks of dynamite.

“Eureka,” I exclaimed, and smashed the case without hesitation.

For a moment I held the cartridges and imagined the possibilities. With dynamite I could blow open the bronze doors. I might even destroy the entire structure beneath the Sphinx.

Then doubt entered my mind.

The presence of dynamite in a museum display should have warned me. I carried one of the sticks to a small side gallery, set it down, and retreated to what I judged a safe distance.

I waited.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

Fifteen.

Nothing happened.

The realization came slowly.

They were replicas. Inert models.

I do not think I have ever felt a sharper disappointment. Had they been real, I might have rushed off at once and blown open the Sphinx and its doors. I might also have destroyed my only chance of recovering the Time Machine.

Perhaps it was fortunate that they were harmless.

After that, we came into a small open court within the palace. It was covered with grass, and three fruit trees still grew there.

We rested and ate. The fruit was fresh and sweet.

As the sun lowered, I began to consider our position.

Night was approaching, and I had not yet found a truly secure hiding place. But that troubled me less now.

I had matches.

I had camphor.

With fire, I could keep the Morlocks at a distance.

It seemed wiser to spend the night in the open courtyard, protected by a blaze, than to risk the enclosed darkness of some unknown chamber. In the morning, I would turn my full attention to the bronze doors beneath the White Sphinx.

Until then, my iron mace would have to suffice.

As the light continued to fade, I thought again about the bronze doors beneath the White Sphinx.

From the beginning, they had unsettled me. Not because they looked impossible to break, but because they concealed something. I had hesitated before them more than once. It was not their strength that had held me back. It was the uncertainty of what lay beyond.

Now that hesitation felt weaker.

With matches and camphor in my possession, I had something the Morlocks clearly feared. Fire gave me an advantage. It would not make me invulnerable, but it would give me space in which to act.

That changed the balance of my thoughts.

We remained in the open court as dusk gathered. The air cooled. A stillness settled over the palace grounds. The green porcelain walls darkened, and the sky above shifted from pale gold to grey.

I gathered what dry material I could find. Broken fragments of display frames, splintered wood, scraps of anything that would burn. Time had stripped much of the place of easily flammable material, but there was enough for a fire of reasonable size.

When I struck a match, the tiny flame seemed almost out of place in that distant world. It felt like a fragment of my own century, preserved and carried forward.

I lit a small heap first, then added more as it caught. The camphor burned with a clean, bright flame. Its white light cast sharp shadows against the courtyard walls.

Weena sat close beside me. Fire fascinated her. She leaned forward toward it, then shrank back slightly, uncertain. It delighted and disturbed her at the same time.

As the blaze strengthened, my earlier anxiety eased. The darkness beyond the courtyard seemed to pause at the edge of the light. I did not imagine that the Morlocks were far away. I believed they were watching. But they did not enter the circle of firelight.

The night deepened.

I remained awake. Each faint sound made me alert. Once or twice I heard a soft movement beyond the courtyard wall. A light pattering on stone. Nothing more.

Weena slept in short intervals. At times she stirred and clutched at me, then settled again when she saw the fire still burning.

While I watched the flames, my thoughts returned to the galleries we had explored that afternoon.

The ruins of knowledge. The labor that had gone into collecting, preserving, and arranging. The care taken to catalogue fossils and minerals, to build machines, to refine chemicals, to gather books from every corner of the world.

Now all of it lay in dust.

I did not try to shape those reflections into grand conclusions. It was enough to observe that the intellectual energy which had built such a place had long since faded. Whatever purpose had once driven that effort was gone.

The Eloi wandered in the sunlight, light-hearted and incurious. The Morlocks worked below, maintaining systems whose origin they may not have understood.

The world had not improved. It had changed.

I fed the fire again, careful not to waste the camphor. Even small fragments burned brightly. I resolved to conserve what remained.

The night passed without direct attack.

When at last the eastern sky began to pale, the courtyard took shape again in gentle light. The fire had burned low. The air felt cooler and clearer.

I rose and looked toward the distant White Sphinx.

It stood silent in the morning light.

Whatever lay beneath it, I would soon have to face it.

Weena woke slowly. In daylight her fear retreated. She moved about the courtyard more freely, as though night belonged to another world entirely.

We ate fruit from the trees and drank from a nearby trickle of water. Then I examined my equipment.

The iron mace was still sound. The box of matches remained nearly full. The camphor, though the jar was broken, would serve for some time yet.

I felt steadier than I had the day before.

Not confident in the way I had once been. That was gone. But I was no longer without means. I had tools. I had observed the habits of the Morlocks. I had a plan.

The Palace of Green Porcelain had given me what I needed—not answers, but preparation.

Before we left, I looked once more at the building. The broken green facing. The inscriptions I could not read. The silent halls filled with dust.

They stood as evidence of an age that had valued knowledge, and of the long erosion that followed.

I turned away.

With Weena beside me and the iron bar in my hand, I set out toward the White Sphinx and the bronze doors that guarded my machine.

The morning was clear.

It was time to act.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 10: The Trap Beneath the Sphinx

CEFR: B2

We left the Palace while the sun was still partly above the horizon. I had made up my mind to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning. Before dusk I meant to force my way through the woods that had stopped me before. My plan was to travel as far as I could that night, then build a fire and sleep with its light around us.

As we walked, I gathered dry sticks and bits of grass wherever I saw them. Before long my arms were full. That load slowed us more than I had expected. Weena was tired. I was worse. I had been without proper sleep for a night and two days. I felt feverish and irritable, and I could sense sleep pressing in on me like a weight. The thought of it frightened me. Sleep would bring darkness, and darkness would bring the Morlocks.

It was full night by the time we reached the edge of the wood.

We paused on a low hill thick with shrubs. The trees ahead formed a wall of black. Weena would have stopped there. She feared the darkness in front of us. I should have listened. Instead, a sharp sense of something approaching pushed me on. I cannot explain it clearly. It felt like calamity was close, and that if we hesitated we would be caught where we stood.

While we paused, I saw movement behind us.

Among the black bushes, faint against their darkness, three shapes crouched low. There was scrub and long grass all around, and it seemed to me we were exposed. I did not feel safe from their quiet approach.

The forest, I estimated, was less than a mile across. If we could get through it and reach the open hillside beyond, we would be safer. I believed that with my matches and the camphor I could keep enough light to guide us.

But if I was going to strike matches as we moved, I would need my hands free. That meant abandoning the bundle of sticks and grass I had collected. Reluctantly, I put it down.

Then another idea came to me. I decided I would light it.

At the time it seemed clever. I imagined the blaze would startle the creatures behind us and cover our retreat. I did not yet understand what an awful mistake it was. In the moment it felt like an advantage.

Have you ever considered how rare flame must be in a world without people, especially in a mild climate? The sun does not often burn vegetation, even when dew focuses the light. Lightning may strike and scorch, but it rarely spreads into a great fire. Decaying plants can smolder with heat, but seldom break into open flame. And in this distant age, the skill of making fire had been forgotten.

So when the match flared and the heap caught, the red tongues of flame were something strange in that world.

Weena stared at it in wonder. She wanted to run toward it and play with it. I believe she would have thrown herself into it if I had not stopped her.

I caught her up at once, and despite her struggling, I plunged into the wood.

For a short distance the glow behind us lit the path. I looked back once, and through the crowded trunks I could see the fire spreading from my heap into nearby bushes. A curved line of flame was crawling over the grass of the hill.

I laughed.

Then I turned again toward the dark trees ahead.

Inside the forest it was almost completely black. Only here and there a gap in the canopy showed a patch of distant sky. As my eyes adjusted, there was just enough light for me to avoid the trunks. I did not strike another match because I had no hand free. I carried Weena on my left arm, and in my right hand I held the iron bar.

For a while I heard nothing but twigs snapping under my feet, the faint rustle of air above, and my own breathing. The pulse in my ears sounded loud.

Then I became aware of a pattering behind me.

I pushed on, grimly. The pattering grew clearer. Then I heard the same odd voices and that queer cooing sound I had heard in the Underworld. There were several of them. They were closing in.

A moment later I felt a tug at my coat. Then something brushed at my arm.

Weena shivered violently and then became very still.

I needed light. But to strike a match I had to put her down.

I lowered her to the ground and reached into my pocket. At once a struggle began around my knees in the darkness. Weena made no sound at all. The Morlocks made their low noises, close to me now.

Soft hands crept over my coat and across my back. One touched my neck.

Then the match scratched and flared.

In that sudden light I saw white backs slipping away among the trees.

I quickly pulled out a piece of camphor, ready to light it as soon as the match burned down.

Then I looked at Weena.

She was lying face down, clutching at my feet, quite motionless.

A cold fear ran through me. I bent over her. She seemed scarcely to breathe.

I lit the camphor and flung it to the ground. It split and blazed up with a bright flame. The shadows drew back. The Morlocks withdrew, and beyond the light I could hear the stir and murmur of many of them moving among the trees.

Weena had fainted.

I lifted her carefully onto my shoulder and rose to push on. And then a worse realization struck me.

In fumbling for matches and turning in the struggle, I had twisted myself around more than once. Now I had no idea which direction I had been heading. For all I knew, I might have been facing back toward the Palace of Green Porcelain.

I felt sweat break out across my skin.

I had to decide quickly. I chose to build a fire and camp where we were.

I put Weena down, still limp and unmoving, on a low grassy mound at the base of a tree. As the first piece of camphor began to burn down, I hurriedly gathered sticks and leaves.

All around, in the darkness, eyes glinted like small points of red.

The camphor flickered and went out.

I struck another match. Two white shapes that had been creeping toward Weena dashed away at once. One, blinded by the light, came straight toward me. I struck it with my fist and felt the bones yield under the blow. It gave a cry, staggered a little way, and fell.

I lit another piece of camphor and went on gathering fuel for my fire. I noticed then how dry the foliage above me was. Since I had come to this age, no rain had fallen. So instead of searching among the roots for fallen twigs, I began pulling down branches.

Before long I had a smoky fire going, made of green wood and dry sticks. The smoke choked and drifted, but it burned, and I could save my camphor.

Then I turned back to Weena, where she lay beside my iron bar.

I tried to revive her. I spoke to her. I touched her face. She lay like someone dead. I could not even be sure whether she breathed.

Smoke blew toward me, and the vapour of camphor hung in the air. Weariness came over me suddenly. My fire would not need tending for a while. I sat down, meaning only to rest.

The wood seemed full of a drowsy murmur, a sound I could not understand. My head nodded. I opened my eyes. Closed them. Opened them again.

And then everything was dark.

Hands were on me.

I flung them off and reached for my matchbox.

It was gone.

In that instant I understood. I had slept. The fire had died. The Morlocks had returned.

The darkness was complete.

They closed around me from every side. Fingers gripped my neck, my arms, my coat. Something seized my hair and dragged me downward. I fell among them.

It is difficult to describe what that felt like. Their bodies were small, but there were many. Soft limbs pressed against me. Their breath touched my skin. I felt their teeth at my neck.

For a moment I believed it was the end.

Then my hand struck something hard.

The iron lever.

That contact cleared my mind at once. I rolled sharply and forced myself up, shaking them off as best I could. Holding the bar close, I thrust it forward into the darkness where I judged their faces must be.

I felt resistance. Flesh and bone gave under the blows. A cry rose. Something fell away from me.

For a brief second I was free.

A fierce excitement came over me. I knew that both Weena and I were likely lost. Yet I resolved that if I was to die there, the Morlocks would not take us without cost.

I backed against a tree and swung the iron bar before me in wide arcs. The whole forest seemed alive with their movement. Their voices rose in sharp, urgent cries. Their feet pattered over the ground.

Yet none came within reach.

A minute passed. Perhaps more. Their calls grew higher, more agitated. Their movements quickened. Still they held back.

Then a thought formed in my mind.

What if they were afraid?

No sooner had that idea taken shape than something changed.

The darkness around me began to grow faintly luminous.

At first I thought it was only my strained eyes. Then I began to see shapes more clearly. The trunks near me. The bodies at my feet. And the Morlocks running, not toward me, but away. They streamed past in one direction, fleeing deeper into the wood.

Their backs no longer looked pale.

They glowed red.

I smelled it then.

Burning wood.

The low murmur I had half-heard before deepened into a roar. A small red spark drifted across a patch of visible sky between the branches and vanished.

Understanding came at once.

The fire I had started on the hill had spread. It was coming through the forest.

I stepped away from the tree and looked back.

Through the dark pillars of the trunks I saw flames advancing, weaving between them. The undergrowth burned quickly. Branches caught and flared. The forest behind me was alight.

I turned at once to look for Weena.

She was gone.

The hissing and crackling behind me, the heavy thud as fresh trees burst into flame, left little time to think. Still gripping the iron bar, I followed the path the Morlocks had taken.

It became a race.

Once the flames advanced so fast on my right that I had to veer sharply left to avoid being trapped. Heat pressed against my side. Smoke thickened the air and made my eyes sting.

At last I broke out into a small open space.

As I emerged, a Morlock came blundering toward me, then past me, and went straight into the advancing fire.

What I saw next was the strangest sight of that distant age.

The open space was lit almost like day by the surrounding blaze. In the centre stood a small mound, crowned by a scorched hawthorn tree. Beyond it another arm of the burning forest curved around, forming a ring of flame that enclosed the clearing.

On the slope of the mound were perhaps thirty or forty Morlocks.

They stumbled against one another. They moved uncertainly, hands sweeping the air. The light dazzled them. At first I did not understand their confusion.

When one came near me, I struck at it in fear. I killed one and injured several others before I paused.

Then I watched one beneath the hawthorn. It groped blindly, its face turned away from the glare, making a low sound of distress.

They were blind in the light.

The realization stopped me.

I lowered the bar.

From time to time one would blunder toward me, and I would step aside quickly, heart racing. But I did not strike again without cause.

The flames shifted with the wind. For a moment they died down somewhat, and I feared the creatures would recover their sight. I even considered attacking them before that could happen.

Then the blaze surged again, bright and fierce. I remained where I was.

I moved slowly around the mound, keeping distance from the Morlocks, searching for any sign of Weena.

There was none.

At last I climbed to the top of the small hill and sat down.

Around me the Morlocks wandered in confusion. Their voices rose and fell in strange, distressed sounds. Smoke streamed upward. Through breaks in the drifting red canopy I could see the stars, remote and cold.

Two or three Morlocks collided with me in their blindness. I pushed them away with my fists, trembling at the contact.

For most of that night I was half convinced I was dreaming.

The scene was too strange. Fire circling a clearing. Blind white creatures stumbling in terror. Smoke and sparks rising into the sky.

I bit my arm. I shouted aloud, hoping to wake. I beat the ground with my hands. I stood, then sat again. I wandered a few steps and returned. Nothing changed.

Three times I saw Morlocks lower their heads in a kind of agony and rush into the flames.

The forest burned slowly. Trees cracked and fell. The ring of fire shifted inward and outward as fresh patches ignited and burned away.

Gradually the blaze lessened. The red glow sank lower. The smoke thinned.

Above the blackened trunks and glowing embers, the sky began to pale.

Day was coming.

When full daylight came, I rose from the mound.

The fire had sunk to embers. Charred trunks stood like blackened pillars. Smoke drifted low across the clearing. The number of Morlocks had diminished. Some lay still where they had fallen. Others moved weakly among the ashes.

I searched again for Weena.

There was no trace of her.

It was plain enough what had happened. In the confusion of the forest, she had been taken. The fire had done the rest.

I found, to my surprise, a grim kind of relief in one thought. If she had perished in the blaze, it would have been quick. She would not have endured what I had feared for her.

That thought steadied me.

For a moment anger rose in me. The creatures around me were helpless in the light. I could have struck them down with ease. I almost did.

But I restrained myself. It would not bring her back. It would not alter what had occurred.

The mound stood like an island in a sea of ash. From its height I could see, through the haze of smoke, the distant outline of the Palace of Green Porcelain. Using that as a reference, I fixed my direction toward the White Sphinx.

Leaving behind the remaining Morlocks, still wandering and making low sounds in the fading heat, I began to walk.

The ground was hot beneath my feet. Ash covered everything. Some blackened stumps still glowed faintly within. I tore long strips of grass and bound them around my feet for protection.

I limped forward.

Exhaustion pressed heavily upon me. My body ached. My throat burned from smoke. My head felt light.

More than the pain, it was the absence beside me that weighed most.

Weena had walked with me for so long that her small presence had become part of my movement. Now there was only silence.

In that bright morning light, her loss felt sharp and immediate. Here, in this room where I now speak, it feels distant, like a dream. But that morning it was real. I felt stripped of the one small comfort I had known in that future world.

As I walked under the clear sky, I thought of my house. Of my study. Of the familiar shape of my own hearth.

I thought of some of you.

With those thoughts came a longing that was almost physical.

Still, I forced myself onward.

Then, as I crossed the smoking ground, I made an unexpected discovery.

In my trouser pocket I felt something small and rigid.

I stopped and reached inside.

Loose matches.

The matchbox had been taken while I slept. But some matches had slipped free and remained in the lining of my pocket.

I drew them out and counted them carefully.

There were not many. Several were bent. But they were dry.

That small discovery steadied me more than I expected.

I still had fire.

The forest behind me continued to smolder. The sky above was bright and empty, as though nothing remarkable had occurred. The contrast felt unreal.

I walked slowly toward the White Sphinx.

From a distance it stood pale and unmoving against the sky. As I approached, I saw movement near its base.

Morlocks.

They were gathered in the shadow cast by the pedestal. In daylight they did not venture far into the open. Their pale bodies seemed diminished in the sun.

I tightened my grip on the iron bar and continued forward.

Some of them withdrew into deeper shadow as I neared. Others remained crouched, watching.

The bronze doors stood before me.

For a moment I paused.

Then I noticed something that stopped me.

The doors were not fully closed.

A narrow gap showed between them.

Previously I had found them shut tight. Now they stood slightly open.

The meaning was plain.

They wished me to enter.

The thought did not paralyze me. I was too exhausted for that. If the Time Machine lay within, I would have to face whatever waited.

I stepped toward the doors and placed my hand against one of the bronze leaves. It moved easily.

The interior beyond was dark.

Cool air drifted outward. It carried a faint smell of metal and damp stone.

I entered.

The doors swung shut behind me with a heavy sound that echoed in the enclosed space.

Darkness closed around me at once.

I stood still and listened.

There was a faint rustle. A slight movement somewhere beyond me.

I reached into my pocket and withdrew one of the matches.

Before striking it, I listened again.

Then I scratched it against the wall.

The small flame flared.

In that brief circle of light I saw it.

The Time Machine stood in the centre of the chamber.

It was exactly where I had left it.

Relief struck me so suddenly that I almost lost my balance.

Then I noticed something else.

The levers had been shifted.

I had not left them so.

In that instant I understood.

It was a trap.

The open doors. The waiting Morlocks outside. The altered levers. They had placed the machine there deliberately, expecting me to enter.

The match burned lower.

At the edge of the light I saw pale forms.

Morlocks.

They recoiled from the brightness but did not retreat far.

I stepped quickly to the machine and climbed into the seat. My hands found the controls by instinct.

The match burned down to my fingers.

I let it fall.

Darkness swallowed the chamber.

Hands seized at me. One grasped my arm. Another tugged at my coat.

I pulled the main lever with all my strength.

The machine lurched violently.

A roaring sound filled my ears.

The darkness dissolved into a blur of motion.

The Morlocks vanished.

Stone and bronze stretched into streaks. The chamber twisted away. The familiar rush of time returned.

The dials spun.

Light and shadow pulsed around me.

I did not slow at once. Some instinct kept my hand firm on the lever. I wanted distance. Not in space, but in time. Distance from the forest, from the fire, from the clearing of blind creatures, from the loss I could not undo.

Day and night flickered into one another. The sun became a tremor of light.

At last I eased the lever back.

The motion slowed.

The blur steadied.

The walls of my laboratory formed around me. The windows. The bench. The familiar outlines of instruments.

The machine gave a final shudder and stopped.

I remained seated for several seconds.

My hands still gripped the controls. My clothes were torn. My skin stung where small teeth had caught me.

The air smelled faintly of oil and metal.

It was evening.

Voices sounded faintly elsewhere in the house.

For a moment I did not move. The quiet of the room felt unreal after the roar of the burning forest and the cries in the dark.

At last I stepped down from the machine.

My legs trembled slightly.

Ash clung to my clothes. I brushed it away without thinking. The iron bar was still in my hand. I set it down.

When I looked at the clock, I saw that scarcely any time had passed here since my departure.

The dinner guests would soon arrive.

I stood there, gathering myself.

The events of the night remained vivid. The red glow of the fire. The crack of trees splitting. The blind Morlocks moving in confusion. And beneath all of it, the absence of Weena.

For a moment I considered returning at once.

But reason held me back. Time is not easily corrected. Even if I returned to that night, what would I change? The forest had burned. The Morlocks had been everywhere. My own actions had already shaped what followed.

Some losses cannot be undone.

I took the loose matches from my pocket and placed them on the table.

Strange how such small objects had carried such importance.

I looked at my reflection in the darkened window.

I seemed altered.

Not by years, but by experience.

The confidence with which I had once spoken of the future had thinned. The world I had seen had not fulfilled hopeful expectations. It had divided humanity into two diminished forms and left them bound in a bleak arrangement.

Footsteps approached along the hallway.

Ordinary sounds. Familiar voices.

I straightened my coat as best I could.

Whatever I had witnessed, I would now have to describe it.

I opened the door.

Light from the hallway spilled into the laboratory.

And I stepped back into my own time, carrying with me the memory of darkness and flame.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 11: At the Edge of Time

CEFR: B2

It was around eight or nine in the morning when I reached the same yellow metal seat where I had sat on the evening I arrived.

I looked out over the valley again, and I remembered what I had thought then. I had been too quick. The certainty I felt on that first evening now seemed almost foolish, and I found myself giving a short, bitter laugh at it.

The scene in front of me was much the same as before. The foliage was still thick and abundant. The great buildings still rose among the trees, half splendid and half broken down. The river still ran bright between its fertile banks. The Eloi moved among the trunks in their light clothing, passing in and out of the shade.

Some of them were bathing in the same stretch of water where I had pulled Weena out.

That sight stopped me for a moment. It brought back the memory with a sharpness I did not expect, and I had to look away from the water.

Then my eyes went back to the rounded domes that stood above the entrances to the underground world. They rose from the landscape like stains that would not blend. I could not see them now without thinking of what lay below.

On my first evening there, I had let the beauty of the place carry me. I had been ready to believe I was looking at a world that had finally settled into peace.

Now I could see what that calm covered.

The Eloi lived pleasant days. The sun and the soft air were enough for them. They did not watch for danger. They did not store food. They did not prepare for anything. They moved through their hours without the tension that shapes our own lives.

They reminded me of animals that have never needed to defend themselves.

And if there was no defense, then there was also no awareness of what required it.

I sat there and thought about the long path that might have led to this.

For a time, I imagined, human life must have become safer and safer. Property must have been protected. Work must have been organized. Comfort must have increased. The rich would have secured their ease. The worker would have secured his life and employment. In such a condition, the older social struggles might have seemed solved.

And after that, a great quiet.

Yet a quiet like that has a cost.

It is easy to forget a simple rule: intelligence is not a constant. It is a response. It grows where there is change, danger, and difficulty. Where habit is enough, thought becomes unnecessary. Where instinct always works, the mind does not need to stretch.

A creature that fits its environment too well becomes, in a sense, a mechanism. It repeats what works. It does not need to invent.

Only when conditions vary, only when needs shift and threats appear, does intelligence become useful.

As I saw it then, the people above ground had drifted toward fragility and ease. The people below, in contact with machinery, had been held to a different discipline. Even if their thinking was narrow, their work demanded a certain attention beyond simple habit.

But even that arrangement, however stable it might appear, could not be perfectly permanent.

Over time, something must have gone wrong in the supply and feeding of the underground world. The system that kept them alive must have faltered. Necessity returned, and it returned first below.

And when ordinary sources of food failed, they turned to what old habit might once have kept them from doing.

That was the shape the truth took in my mind as I sat there. It may be wrong. It may be a poor explanation. But it matched what I had seen, and at that point it was the only way I could connect the scattered facts into something coherent.

After the past days, after the running, the fear, the sleeplessness, and the loss, the warm sunlight and the still view were almost soothing. I was tired in a way that went beyond the body. My thoughts kept starting and stopping. I found myself drifting, then catching myself, then drifting again.

Finally I took the hint and lay down on the grass.

I slept for a long time.

When I woke, the sun was already low. The light had softened and the shadows had lengthened. I felt clearer, and I also felt, for the moment, less exposed. In daylight the Morlocks did not seem likely to rush openly at me.

I stretched and started down the hill toward the White Sphinx.

I carried my iron bar in one hand. With the other hand I kept touching the matchbox in my pocket, almost without thinking, as if I was checking that it was still there.

As I came closer to the pedestal, something stopped me.

The bronze doors were open.

They had slid down into their grooves in the stone, leaving the opening clear.

I halted in front of them.

For a moment I did not go in. I stood there, looking into the dark space beyond, weighing it. I had expected a struggle to force my way in. I had expected to use the bar.

Inside was a small chamber.

And there, on a raised part in the corner, stood my Time Machine.

The small levers were still in my pocket.

After all my planning and preparation, the machine was simply there, in plain sight, as if it had been returned without resistance. I let the iron bar fall from my hand. I almost felt a sense of wasted effort at not needing it.

Then another thought came.

Standing there at the threshold, I began to see what the Morlocks intended. The open doors were not a surrender. They were an invitation.

The idea was so clear that I nearly laughed.

I stepped through the bronze frame and went straight to the machine.

Up close, I saw that it had been tended to. The metal surfaces were clean. The moving parts looked oiled. It had the appearance of something that had been handled carefully. Later, I suspected they had tried to take it apart, working by touch and dim curiosity, trying to make sense of it in their own way.

I put my hand on the frame.

The feel of it was familiar, and for a moment that familiarity steadied me.

Then the trap closed.

The bronze panels slid up suddenly and struck the frame with a loud metallic clang.

The entrance vanished.

I was in darkness.

So far as they were concerned, I was caught.

For a moment I stood still and listened.

From outside came a soft sound of movement, and then a low, pleased murmur. They were close. They were waiting for the next part.

I reached into my pocket and took out a match. I needed a brief light. I had only to fix the levers into place, set the machine in motion, and leave the chamber behind.

I tried to strike the match.

Nothing.

I tried again.

In that instant I understood what I had done. I had taken the match, but not the box. These matches would not light except against their own surface.

The pause that followed was short.

I could hear them nearer now.

Then something touched my arm.

The touch on my arm was light, but it was enough.

I swung in the dark with the levers I was holding. I felt something recoil. At the same time I climbed onto the saddle of the machine, working by memory more than sight.

More hands reached for me.

They were not strong in any single grip, but there were many of them. Fingers closed on my sleeves, my wrists, the frame of the machine. They were searching for the levers. They understood enough to know those mattered.

I had to hold the levers and find the fittings at the same time.

There was no space for hesitation.

I bent forward and felt along the mechanism. In the darkness, every surface seemed altered. What had been clear in the light was uncertain now.

One lever nearly slipped from my grasp. As it slid, I lunged after it and struck my head against something hard. I heard a dull ringing sound and recovered it.

They pressed closer.

Their fingers were persistent. They returned again and again, even after I knocked them away.

At last I found one of the studs. I forced the lever down toward it.

A hand seized my wrist and pulled. I twisted free and pushed again. The lever scraped, then seated.

I reached for the second.

Again a hand caught it near the end and tried to draw it away. I pulled back harder. The lever slid across the fitting but did not settle.

I adjusted the angle and pressed down.

It went into place.

Without waiting, I pushed one of the levers over.

The pressure around me shifted at once.

The hands slipped away.

The darkness thinned.

The chamber dissolved into that familiar rushing grey. The bronze walls vanished. The sense of confined space gave way to motion.

The struggle was over.

For a few moments I did nothing but hold on.

In the confusion I had twisted sideways in the saddle. The machine swayed beneath me as it gathered speed. The vibration passed through the frame and into my body.

I have spoken before of the sickness that accompanies rapid movement through time. This time it came quickly. The sense of direction faltered. My balance felt uncertain.

I clung there until I could steady myself enough to look at the dials.

When I did, I saw that something had gone wrong.

One dial marks days. Another marks thousands of days. Another counts millions. Another measures thousands of millions.

In the struggle I had pulled the levers forward instead of back.

The hand that marks thousands of days was spinning at a speed like the second hand of a watch.

I was moving rapidly into the future.

For an instant I considered reversing at once.

But the machine was stable now. The violent shaking had eased. And I found myself unwilling to stop immediately. After what I had endured, there was a certain resolve in me to see further.

So I allowed it to continue.

As I drove on, a change came over the appearance of the world.

The grey blur deepened. It grew darker.

Then, although I was still traveling at great speed, the alternation of day and night began to show itself again. At first it was faint, then more distinct.

This puzzled me.

Usually, when I moved very quickly, day and night blended into a continuous light. Now they began to separate again.

The rise and fall of the sun slowed. The arc of its passage stretched. Each day seemed longer than the last.

The alternation continued to slow until each change of light appeared to last for centuries.

At last the blinking ceased.

A steady twilight spread over the Earth.

The sky darkened. From time to time a comet flashed across it, leaving a brief trail of light before fading.

The bright band that once marked the sun’s course disappeared. The sun no longer seemed to travel across the sky in the same way. Instead it rose and fell slowly in the west, growing broader and more deeply red.

The moon was no longer visible.

The stars no longer wheeled overhead. Their movement slowed to a creeping shift.

The sun swelled. It grew large in the sky, a red disk that seemed to hang near the horizon. Its light was dull and heavy.

Once it flared briefly, as if regaining some strength, then settled back into that same deep red glow.

Watching this, I began to understand.

The slowing of the sun’s apparent movement suggested that the Earth itself was slowing. The long drag of tidal forces must have done its work. The planet had come to show one face to the sun continuously, as the moon does to the Earth in our own time.

Remembering my earlier fall, I was cautious.

I began to slow the machine.

The hands on the dials eased their motion. The thousands hand slowed until it almost appeared still. The daily dial, which had been a blur, became readable.

Slower still.

The grey rush thinned.

Shapes began to emerge.

At last I saw the outline of a shoreline.

I brought the machine to rest as gently as I could.

For a few moments I remained seated, taking in what was before me.

The sky was no longer blue.

To the northeast it was black, and from that darkness steady white stars shone. They did not flicker.

Overhead the sky was a deep red, without stars.

To the southeast, where the horizon cut across the sky, the great body of the sun lay half-visible. It was immense and motionless.

The rocks around me were harsh and red.

At first I saw little sign of life.

Then I noticed a thick green growth clinging to surfaces that faced the sun. It spread over the rocks in flat sheets, like moss in a cave or lichen on stone.

The machine stood on a sloping beach.

The sea stretched away toward the southwest. Its surface was smooth. There were no breaking waves, no wind. Only a slow, heavy swell rose and fell, like breathing.

Along the edge where water touched sand, there was a crust of salt, faintly pink under the red sky.

As I sat there, I became aware of pressure in my head.

My breathing felt quick and shallow.

The sensation reminded me of high ground, where the air is thin. From that I judged that the atmosphere had changed.

Far up the slope, I heard a harsh cry.

I looked in that direction.

Something pale rose into the sky, fluttering at an angle. It was large, like an enormous butterfly. It circled once and vanished beyond low hills.

The sound it made was thin and empty.

I adjusted my seat on the machine and looked again at the ground near me.

What I had taken to be a reddish rock was moving.

Slowly.

Then I saw clearly what it was.

A crab-like creature, but of great size.

Imagine a crab as large as a table. Its legs moved in a steady, uncertain rhythm. Its claws swung outward. Long antennae waved, feeling the air. Its eyes, set on stalks, gleamed on either side of a hard front.

Its back was ridged. Patches of green growth clung to it.

I could see the small parts of its mouth working as it moved.

It was coming toward me.

I remained seated and watched it approach.

Its progress was slow, but it did not hesitate. Each leg lifted and set down in turn. The claws opened and closed as if testing what lay ahead. The antennae swept the air in long arcs.

There was no quickness in it. No sign of alertness. Only steady motion.

As I looked at it, I felt something brush lightly against my cheek.

I lifted my hand to brush it away, thinking at first it was an insect.

A moment later the touch came again, this time near my ear.

I struck at it and caught something thin between my fingers.

It slipped free at once.

A certain unease followed.

I turned.

Another of the creatures stood close behind me.

One of its long antennae had touched my face. Its eyes shifted on their stalks. The mouth parts moved in a constant, restless motion. The claws lifted slightly, heavy and wet with slime.

They were not slow because they lacked strength.

They were slow because nothing hurried them.

Without delay I seized the lever and pushed it forward.

The beach dissolved.

I carried myself a month ahead.

When I stopped, I was still on the same shore.

The position of the sun had altered slightly. The light had shifted. But the land and sea remained.

The creatures were still there.

In fact, I could see more of them now. They moved in different directions across the sand and among the green sheets of growth.

The scene did not change in character.

The red sky to the east. The blackness to the north. The slow sea. The salt along the shore. The thin air.

There was no sudden transformation.

I advanced again, this time a hundred years.

When I stopped, the difference was small.

The sun appeared a little larger. Its red was deeper. The sea had drawn back further from the land. The air felt colder.

The crabs continued their movement among the rocks and growth.

In the western sky I noticed a pale curved line, like a new moon.

I continued in this way.

I traveled forward in long intervals, sometimes a thousand years at a time. Each time I stopped and observed before moving on.

The changes accumulated gradually.

The sun increased in size.

Its color grew heavier.

The sea withdrew.

The green growth thinned in places.

The number of the crab-like creatures decreased.

There was no dramatic event. No single moment when the world altered at once.

There was only reduction.

At last, more than thirty million years beyond my own time, I stopped again.

The sun now filled a large part of the sky. It occupied nearly a tenth of the heavens.

Its light was dull and heavy.

The beach was nearly empty.

The crab-like creatures were gone.

The red rocks lay exposed, and only patches of green clung to them.

Then I noticed something new.

White flakes drifted in the air.

At first they were sparse. Then they increased.

A cold passed through my clothes.

To the northeast I saw a pale glare beneath the dark sky.

Snow lay across distant hills. Along the edge of the sea, ice formed a fringe. Further out, pieces of ice floated on the surface.

The main body of the sea was still unfrozen, dark beneath the red sun.

I remained seated.

I looked carefully for any movement.

I saw none in the sky. None on the land. None in the water.

Only the green growth on the rocks suggested that life had not entirely ended.

The water had receded from the beach. A shallow sandbank was exposed.

For a moment I thought I saw something dark moving upon it.

I watched.

It did not move again.

I concluded it must have been a rock.

The stars in the sky were bright and steady.

Then I saw that the outline of the sun had changed.

A dark curve appeared along its edge.

It widened.

For a brief time I could not understand what I was seeing.

Then I realized an eclipse had begun.

Either the moon, or perhaps Mercury, was passing between the Earth and the sun.

At first I assumed it was the moon. Later I wondered whether it might have been an inner planet passing close.

The darkness spread across the sun’s surface.

A wind rose from the east, sharp and cold.

The white flakes increased.

From the sea came a faint sound of movement.

Beyond that, there was nothing.

There were no animal calls. No insect hum. No distant sound of life.

As the shadow deepened, the flakes swirled more thickly. The cold intensified.

The distant white hills disappeared into darkness.

The wind strengthened into a low, steady sound.

The central shadow moved toward me.

Then the sun vanished completely.

Only the stars remained.

The sky was black.

For a moment I sat without moving.

The cold entered my limbs. My breathing grew painful in the thin air. A weakness came over me.

I began to shake.

A wave of nausea followed.

Then a narrow red edge appeared along the horizon.

The sun emerged again from eclipse.

A thin arc of light cut across the darkness.

I climbed down from the machine, hoping movement would steady me.

The ground felt uncertain beneath my feet. I was dizzy.

As I stood there, I saw movement again upon the exposed shoal.

This time there was no mistake.

Something moved there.

It was round, perhaps the size of a football or larger. Thin tentacles trailed from it. It moved in uneven hops across the red water.

It did not move with speed.

But it moved.

I watched it for a moment longer than was wise.

My strength was failing.

The air burned in my lungs. My vision wavered.

A simple thought came to me: if I lost consciousness there, I would not rise again.

That was enough.

I climbed back into the saddle.

My hands found the lever.

I pushed it backward.

The red shore blurred.

The ice and sea dissolved.

The enormous sun shrank.

Time resumed its rush.

Light and darkness alternated more rapidly. The air thickened. The sky regained its color.

I did not stop again until familiar signs began to appear.

Vegetation returned in recognizable forms. The sun became gold again. The sea moved with ordinary waves.

I carried myself backward in large strides.

The Earth resumed its normal rotation. Day and night returned to their usual pattern.

The landscape grew familiar.

At last I slowed carefully.

The grey rush faded.

The walls of my laboratory formed around me.

The floor was steady beneath the machine. The lamps cast their light. The instruments stood where I had left them.

I remained seated for some time.

By the clock, little time had passed.

But I had seen the Earth far beyond our own age.

At length I climbed down.

My clothes were torn and marked. My hands bore scratches. The cold and thin air had left their effect.

From beyond the door I heard voices.

My guests were still at dinner.

They had not known how long I had been gone.

I opened the door and entered the hall.

Their conversation stopped.

They looked at me.

I crossed the room and took my seat.

“I have been to the future,” I said.

And I began to tell them what I have told you.

For a moment after I spoke, none of them answered.

They were studying me.

I was aware that I must have looked altered. My clothes were stained and torn. There were marks on my hands. My face, I imagine, showed fatigue more plainly than I intended.

I asked for food and wine before I began the account in full. I needed both.

As I ate, I gathered my thoughts. What I had seen was clear in my mind, but the distance between that red shore and this familiar room felt difficult to cross.

At last I began.

I told them how I had returned to the metal seat that morning and reconsidered my early conclusions. I described the peaceful landscape and the structures rising among the trees. I explained how the entrances to the underground world no longer seemed harmless once I understood their purpose.

I told them how the surface people lived without caution or foresight. How comfort had dulled them. How the separation between those above and those below had led, in time, to a terrible dependence.

I spoke of my reasoning quietly. I made no claim that it was final truth. It was simply the pattern that had formed in my mind as I observed.

Then I described the White Sphinx.

I explained how I had approached it at sunset, prepared to force an entrance, and how instead I had found the doors open and the machine waiting.

I told them how I had understood, at the last moment, that the Morlocks meant to trap me in darkness.

And how nearly they had succeeded.

I described the struggle in the black chamber. The hands reaching for the levers. The difficulty of fastening them by touch alone. The narrow margin by which I escaped.

At this point some of my listeners shifted in their seats.

The Medical Man leaned forward. The Editor frowned slightly. The Journalist glanced at the clock, as though uncertain whether to treat the matter as fact or fiction.

I continued.

I told them how I had accidentally driven the machine forward into deep futurity. How the sun had slowed in its course. How the Earth had come to show one face to it constantly.

I described the red sky. The thin air. The crab-like creatures upon the beach.

I spoke of the slow withdrawal of the sea. The diminishing forms of life. The long fading.

When I came to the eclipse and the blackness that followed, I did not dramatize it. I stated only what I had observed: the wind rising, the snow falling, the sun obscured, the cold deepening.

I explained how I had seen that final moving thing upon the shoal, and how the fear of lying helpless in that place had driven me back to the machine.

By the time I had finished, the fire in the grate had burned lower.

The room felt smaller than it had before.

“I know,” I said at last, “that it must sound improbable.”

The Medical Man cleared his throat but did not interrupt.

“To me,” I continued, “the strangest fact is not what I saw there. It is that I am here now, in this room, speaking of it.”

There was a short silence.

The Editor stood and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“It is a remarkable story,” he said carefully. “You ought to write it.”

“You do not believe it,” I said.

He hesitated.

“Well…”

I nodded.

“I expected as much.”

I reached for my pipe and struck a match.

For a moment I doubted myself. The familiarity of the room pressed against the memory of the red shore. It seemed almost possible that I had dreamed it.

My eye fell upon two small white flowers lying on the table.

I picked them up.

They were withered now. Their petals were beginning to curl. But they were unlike any flower I had seen in our own time.

They had been placed in my pocket by Weena, just before the final night in the forest.

I turned them over in my hand.

“Where did you obtain those?” the Medical Man asked.

“They were given to me,” I said.

He examined them with interest.

“I do not recognize the order,” he murmured.

The Psychologist leaned forward as well.

The Journalist glanced again at his watch.

“It is nearly one,” he said. “How are we to return home?”

“Cabs can be found at the station,” someone replied.

The discussion drifted.

I found myself watching the flowers.

For a moment a doubt rose in me.

Had I constructed the machine at all? Had I built only a model and imagined the rest? Was the entire experience a product of speculation and fatigue?

The thought unsettled me more than the far future had done.

“I must look at the machine,” I said abruptly.

I took up a lamp and led them down the corridor.

There it stood.

Solid.

The brass and ivory frame was marked with scratches and bent slightly along one rail. There were stains upon the ivory and bits of grass clinging to the lower parts.

I placed my hand upon it.

It was real.

“The account I have given you is true,” I said quietly. “At least, it is true as I experienced it.”

We returned to the smoking room.

One by one the guests departed.

Some smiled politely. Some avoided my eye.

I stood in the doorway as they left, bidding them good night.

Later, I lay awake.

The red sun and silent shore remained in my mind.

The next day, I resolved to examine the machine again in full daylight.

When I entered the laboratory, it stood where it had rested the night before.

I placed my hand upon one of the levers.

The machine swayed slightly, as though it were less stable than it appeared.

The motion startled me.

A childhood memory rose unexpectedly, of being warned not to meddle with delicate mechanisms.

At that moment I heard footsteps.

I turned.

I was carrying a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other.

“I am occupied,” I said lightly. “But if you will wait until lunch, I can show you further proof.”

He hesitated, studying my face.

“You truly travel through time?” he asked.

“I do.”

He remained uncertain, but agreed to wait.

I went into the laboratory and closed the door.

What followed occurred in an instant.

There was a sharp sound. A gust of air. The crash of breaking glass.

The laboratory was suddenly empty.

The machine was gone.

Only a faint stirring of dust remained.

From that day to this, there has been no sign of it.

Some believe I fabricated the tale.

Some consider it speculation carried too far.

I cannot persuade them.

Yet I keep the two white flowers.

They are dried now. Brown and brittle.

But they remain.

And whenever I look at them, I remember that even at the end of the Earth, when strength and intellect had faded, something gentle endured.

Whether I return or not, that remains with me.

Book: The Time Machine (Modernized)

Chapter 12: Into the Unknown

CEFR: B2

“So I came back.”

“For a long time, I must have been unconscious on the machine. I can’t tell you how long. I only know that the flicker of day and night started up again. The sun turned golden. The sky went blue. I could breathe more freely. The shape of the land rose and fell in that shifting way you’ve seen before. The hands on the dials were spinning backward.

“Far away, I began to catch sight of the dim outlines of houses, and the signs of a worn-out humanity. Those shapes changed and slipped away, and other shapes took their place. Presently, when the dial that marks millions was back at zero, I eased the speed. I began to recognize our own familiar buildings. The hand that marks thousands ran back to its starting point. The changes between night and day slowed, slower and slower.

“Then the old walls of my laboratory came around me again. Very gently, I brought the mechanism down.

“There was one small thing I noticed, and it struck me as odd. I think I told you that when I first set out, before the speed became too high, Mrs. Watchett crossed the room. At that pace, she seemed to shoot across the laboratory like a rocket. On the return, I passed through that same minute again.

“But now every movement of hers was exactly reversed. The door at the lower end opened, and she seemed to glide backward up the laboratory, back first, and then vanish behind the door she had come in by before. Just before that, I thought I saw Hillyer for an instant, but he passed like a flash.

“Then I stopped.

“There was the old workshop again. My tools. My things. Everything as I had left it. I climbed down, unsteady, and sat on my bench. For several minutes I shook hard. Then I grew calmer. The place looked so ordinary that it might all have been sleep and dreaming.

“And yet not quite.

“When I began the journey, the machine had stood in the south-east corner. When I came back, it was in the north-west, against the wall where you saw it. That difference gives the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx, where the Morlocks had carried it.

“For a while my mind would not move at all. Then I got up and came through the passage, limping. My heel still hurt, and I was filthy and sore all over. I saw the Pall Mall Gazette on the table by the door. I checked the date. It was today. I looked at the clock and saw it was almost eight.

“I could hear your voices. I could hear the clatter of plates. I hesitated, because I felt sick and weak. Then I smelled good, solid food, and I opened the door and came in to you.

“You know the rest. I washed. I ate. And now I’m telling you what happened.”

He stopped.

For a little while, no one spoke. Then he went on, slower.

“I know,” he said, “that to you this must be impossible. But to me the one impossible thing is that I am here tonight in this old room, looking at your faces, and talking about it.”

He looked at the Medical Man.

“No. I can’t expect you to believe it. Call it a lie, or call it a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Say I’ve been thinking too much about where our race is going, until I’ve built this whole fiction out of my own mind. Treat my claiming it is true as nothing more than a device to make the story stronger.

“But if you take it as a story, then tell me—what do you think of it?”

He picked up his pipe and, in his usual way, began tapping it with a nervous little motion against the bars of the grate.

For a moment the room was still. Then chairs creaked. Shoes scraped on the carpet. I took my eyes from his face and looked around at the others. They sat in the dim light, and little spots of color seemed to float before them.

The Medical Man watched our host closely.

The Editor stared hard at the end of his cigar—his sixth.

The Journalist fumbled for his watch.

The others, as far as I recall, hardly moved.

The Editor got to his feet with a sigh.

“What a pity it is you’re not a writer of stories,” he said, and laid a hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.

“You don’t believe it?” the Time Traveller asked.

“Well—”

“I thought not.”

The Time Traveller turned toward us.

“Where are the matches?” he said.

He lit one and held it to his pipe, puffing.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I hardly believe it myself. And yet…”

His eyes dropped to the little table beside him, as if asking a question without words. Two small white flowers lay there, already withered.

He turned the hand that held his pipe, and I saw he was looking at half-healed scars on his knuckles.

The Medical Man rose and went to the lamp and examined the flowers.

“The structure is odd,” he said.

The Psychologist leaned forward, holding out his hand, wanting to see them more closely.

“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said the Journalist. “How are we to get home?”

“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.

“It’s a curious thing,” said the Medical Man. “But I don’t know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?”

The Time Traveller hesitated.

Then, all at once, “Certainly not.”

“Where did you really get them?” the Medical Man asked.

The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like a man trying to hold on to an idea that kept slipping.

“They were put into my pocket by Weena,” he said, “when I travelled into Time.”

He looked around the room.

“I’m damned if it isn’t all going,” he said. “This room, and you, and the ordinary air of every day—it presses too hard on my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or only a model? Or is it all just a dream?

“They say life is a dream, and sometimes a very poor one—but I can’t stand another that won’t fit. It’s madness. And where did the dream come from?

“I must look at that machine. If there is one.”

He snatched up the lamp and carried it, flaring red, out into the corridor.

We followed him.

We followed him down the corridor in silence.

The light from the lamp shook against the walls. His shadow stretched ahead of us. When he opened the laboratory door, the lamp threw its glow across the machine.

It stood there.

Squat. Uneven. A strange construction of brass, ebony, ivory, and pale quartz. Solid. I stepped forward and put my hand on one of the rails. It was firm to the touch. There were brown stains on the ivory. Bits of grass and moss clung to the lower parts. One of the rails was bent out of true.

It was no illusion.

The Time Traveller set the lamp on the bench and ran his fingers along the damaged rail.

“It’s all right now,” he said. “The story I told you was true. I’m sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.”

He picked up the lamp again, and we went back to the smoking room without speaking.

In the hall he helped the Editor into his coat. The Medical Man looked at him closely and suggested, with some hesitation, that he had been overworking himself. At that, the Time Traveller laughed loudly.

I remember him standing in the doorway, calling good night as we left.

I shared a cab with the Editor.

He dismissed the whole account as a bright invention. “A gaudy lie,” he called it, though not without admiration.

For my own part, I could not decide. The story was extraordinary. Yet the way he had told it was controlled and careful. He had not tried to persuade us. He had simply described.

That night I lay awake a long time, thinking about it.

The next day I resolved to see him again.

I was told he was in the laboratory. Being on easy terms in the house, I went up without ceremony. The laboratory was empty.

The machine stood where we had left it.

I looked at it for a minute and then reached out and touched one of the levers.

At once the whole structure swayed, like a branch shaken by wind. Its instability startled me. I had a sudden memory of childhood, of being warned not to touch something delicate and dangerous.

I stepped back and returned down the corridor.

The Time Traveller met me in the smoking room. He was coming from the house, carrying a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me and held out his elbow for a shake.

“I’m frightfully busy,” he said, nodding toward the laboratory.

“But is it not some hoax?” I asked. “Do you really travel through time?”

“Really and truly I do.”

He looked directly into my eyes when he said it.

Then he hesitated, and his gaze moved about the room.

“I only want half an hour,” he said. “I know why you’ve come, and it’s good of you. There are some magazines there. If you stay for lunch, I’ll prove it to you. Specimens and photographs. I’ll show you everything. If you’ll excuse me now.”

I agreed, though I did not fully grasp what he meant.

He nodded and went down the corridor. I heard the laboratory door slam.

I sat in a chair and took up a newspaper, though I found it hard to follow the print. What was he going to do before lunch?

Then I remembered that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two o’clock. I looked at my watch and saw I could barely keep that appointment.

I rose and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.

As I reached for the handle of the laboratory door, I heard an exclamation from within, cut short at the end. Then there was a sharp click and a heavy thud.

I opened the door.

A gust of air rushed past me. I heard the sound of broken glass falling.

The Time Traveller was not there.

For an instant, I thought I saw something—a faint and almost transparent figure seated in a whirling confusion of black and brass. It was so thin that I could see the bench behind it, with its papers and drawings, clear through the shape.

Then it vanished.

The machine was gone.

At the far end of the laboratory there was nothing but a faint swirl of dust. One pane of the skylight had been blown inward.

I stood staring, unable for a moment to understand what had happened.

The door that led into the garden opened, and the servant appeared.

We looked at one another.

“Has Mr. —— gone out that way?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said. “No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.”

Then I understood.

He had left again.

At the risk of disappointing Richardson, I stayed on. I waited for him to return. I waited for the second story, perhaps stranger still, and for the specimens and photographs he had promised.

But he did not return.

The Time Traveller vanished three years ago.

And he has never come back.

One cannot help wondering.

Will he ever return?

It may be that he swept backward into the past and lost himself there. He might have fallen among early men, in some age before written record, among people whose language we would not know. He might have found himself in a world of rough stone tools and raw forests.

He may have gone further still.

He could have dropped into ancient seas, among great reptilian creatures, in ages when the continents themselves were different. He might be wandering now, if one may use the word, along some prehistoric shore beneath unfamiliar stars.

Or perhaps he went forward again.

Perhaps he chose a nearer age than the distant one he described. A time when humanity still stands much as we do now, but with the questions that trouble us answered and the conflicts of our time resolved.

He did not speak hopefully about the progress of mankind. Long before the machine was made, we had discussed such matters. He believed that civilization was piling itself higher and higher without true balance. He thought that what we call advancement might one day turn back upon its makers.

If he traveled forward once more, perhaps he wished to see whether that view was justified.

If he went backward, perhaps he misjudged the levers.

There is no way to know.

For my own part, I cannot think that these present days of experiment, partial theories, and constant disagreement are the final state of our species. And yet I cannot say with certainty what lies ahead.

To me, the future is still dark.

It is a vast unknown, lit only in a few places by the memory of his account.

And I have, for my own comfort, two small white flowers.

They are shriveled now. Brown. Flat. Fragile.

They lie in a drawer among my papers.

Whatever else one may doubt, those flowers were real.

They stand as quiet evidence that even when strength and knowledge had faded, something gentle remained.

Whether he is lost in the past, wandering in the distant future, or gone beyond all return, I cannot say.

I can only say that I was there when he told the story.

I saw the machine.

I saw it vanish.

And I have kept the flowers.