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The Time Machine
Chapter 10. When Night Came
"Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before".
Except for my night's anguish over losing the Time Machine, I had hoped to escape, but these discoveries shook that hope.
Until now I had thought blocked by the childlike simplicity of the little people and by unknown forces I must understand to overcome.
But there was a totally new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks.
There was something inhuman and evil about them.
I instinctively hated them, Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit.
My concern was with the pit and how to get out of it.
Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.
"The enemy I feared may surprise you".
It was the darkness of the new moon.
Weena had put this into my head by some at first strange remarks about the Dark Nights.
It wasn't now very difficult to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean.
The moon was on the wane, Each night there was a longer time of darkness.
And I now understood in some small degree the reason for the little Upperworld people's fear of the dark.
I wondered vaguely what foul evil the Morlocks might do under the new moon.
I felt pretty sure now that my second idea was all wrong.
The Upperworld people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants.
But that had long since passed away.
The two species that had come from the evolution of man were sliding down toward, or had already reached, a very new relationship.
The Eloi, like the Carlovignan kings, had decayed to mere beautiful uselessness.
They still had the earth only by permission.
The Morlocks, subterranean for countless generations, had at last found the daylight intolerable.
And the Morlocks made their clothes, I guessed, and took care of the Eloi's daily needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.
They did it as a horse paws with its foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals for sport.
Ancient and gone necessities had impressed it on their bodies.
But clearly the old order was already partly reversed.
The doom of the delicate ones was coming fast.
Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had driven his brother out of ease and sunshine.
And now that brother was coming back changed.
Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson again.
They were becoming acquainted with Fear, and suddenly the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld came into my head.
It seemed odd how it came to me.
It didn't come in the flow of my thoughts but almost like a question from outside.
I tried to recall its shape, I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I couldn't tell what it was then.
"Still, however helpless the little people were in the face of their mysterious Fear, I was different".
I came out of our age, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear doesn't paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors.
I at least would defend myself, Without delay I decided to make myself arms and a strong place where I might sleep.
With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of the confidence I had lost.
I had lost it when I realised what creatures night after night I lay exposed to.
I felt I couldn't sleep again until my bed was safe from them.
I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.
"I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found nothing that seemed to me inaccessible".
All the buildings and trees seemed easily usable by such skillful climbers as the Morlocks, judging by their wells.
Then the tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the shining walls came back to my memory.
In the evening, taking Weena like a child on my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west.
The distance, I had thought, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen.
I had first seen the place on a wet afternoon when distances are deceivingly small.
Also the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working through the sole.
They were comfortable old shoes I used indoors, so I was lame.
And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, black against the pale yellow of the sky.
"Weena had been very pleased when I began to carry her, but after a while she wanted me to put her down."
"She ran along by my side and sometimes dashed off to either hand to pick flowers to put in my pockets."
"My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at last she had decided they were a strange kind of vase for flowers."
"At least she used them for that."
"And that reminds me!"
"In changing my jacket I found."
The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table.
Then he resumed his narrative, speaking softly as he gathered his thoughts again.
"As the hush of evening came over the world and we climbed the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the grey stone house".
I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and made her understand we sought shelter there from her Fear.
You know that great pause that comes upon things before dusk?
Even the breeze stops in the trees.
To me there's always an air of waiting about that evening stillness.
The sky was clear, distant, and empty except for a few low bars in the sunset.
Well, that night the waiting took the colour of my fears.
In that dark calm my senses seemed extra sharp.
I thought I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet.
I could almost see the Morlocks on their ant-hill going here and there and waiting for the dark.
In my excitement I felt they'd take my entering their burrows as a declaration of war.
And why had they taken my Time Machine?
"So we went on in the quiet, and twilight deepened into night".
The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.
The ground grew dim and the trees turned black.
Weena's fears and her tiredness grew on her.
I took her in my arms and talked to her and stroked her.
Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms around my neck and, closing her eyes, pressed her face to my shoulder.
So we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked into a small river.
I waded it and climbed the other side of the valley, past many sleeping houses, and by a statue.
It was a Faun, or some such figure, but without a head, there were acacias there as well.
So far I hadn't seen any Morlocks.
But it was early in the night, and the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.
"From the top of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black before me".
I hesitated, I could see no end to it on the right or the left.
Feeling tired, my feet in particular were very sore, I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I stopped, and sat down on the grass.
I could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was unsure of my direction.
I looked into the depth of the wood and thought of what it might hide.
Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars.
Even if there were no other danger, I did not want my imagination to think about that danger.
There would still be roots to trip over and tree trunks to hit.
I was very tired after the excitements of the day.
So I decided not to face it but to spend the night on the open hill.
"Weena, I was glad to see, was fast asleep".
I carefully wrapped her in my jacket and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise.
The hillside was quiet and empty, but from the black wood there came now and then a stir of living things.
Above me the stars shone, for the night was very clear.
I felt a friendly comfort in their twinkling.
All the old constellations were gone from the sky.
That slow movement which isn't noticed in a hundred human lives had long since moved them into strange groups.
But the Milky Way seemed still the same torn streamer of stardust as before.
Southward, as I judged it, was a very bright red star that was new to me.
It was even more splendid than our own green Sirius.
And among all these sparkling points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.
"Looking at these stars suddenly made my troubles and the cares of life seem small".
I thought of their unfathomable distance and the slow unavoidable drift of their movements from the unknown past into the unknown future.
I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes.
Only forty times had that silent revolution happened during all the years I had travelled.
During these few revolutions, all the activity and traditions and complex organisations had been wiped out.
Nations, languages, literatures, hopes, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, were gone.
In their place were these weak creatures who had forgotten their great ancestry, and the white Things that made me afraid.
Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species.
For the first time, with a sudden shiver, I clearly realised what the meat I had seen might be.
Yet it was too horrible to dwell upon, and I forced myself away.
I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and star-like under the stars, and immediately pushed the thought away.
Through that long night I kept my mind off the Morlocks and passed the time trying to find old constellations in the new confusion.
The sky stayed very clear, except for a thin cloud or two, No doubt I dozed at times.
As the night went on, a faint light appeared in the eastward sky like the reflection of some colourless fire.
The old moon rose thin, pointed, and white.
And close behind it, and passing it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first and then growing pink and warm.
No Morlocks had come near us, Indeed, I had seen none on the hill that night.
And in the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed my fear had been unreasonable.
I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel had swollen at the ankle and was painful under the heel.
So I sat down again, took off my shoes, and threw them away.
"I woke Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and threatening".
We found some fruit to break our fast.
We soon met others of the delicate ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight as if night wasn't part of nature.
And then I thought again of the meat I had seen.
I felt sure now what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last weak stream from the great flood of humanity.
Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had become scarce.
Possibly they had lived on rats and similar vermin.
Even now man is far less picky and exclusive in his food than before, far less than any monkey.
His dislike of human flesh isn't a deep instinct.
And so these inhuman sons of men, !
I tried to look at the thing in a scientific way.
After all, they were less human and more distant than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.
And the intelligence that would have made this state of things terrible had gone.
Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fat cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks kept and hunted, and probably watched for breeding.
And there was Weena dancing at my side!
"Then I tried to protect myself from the horror coming on me by seeing it as a strict punishment of human selfishness".
Man had been content to live in ease and joy on the labour of his fellow-man.
He had used Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.
I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay, but this attitude was impossible.
However great their mental decline, the Eloi had kept too much of the human shape to fail to claim my sympathy.
They made me, by force, a sharer in their decline and their Fear.
"I had then very unclear ideas about what I should do next".
My first was to find some safe place of shelter and to make myself arms of metal or stone as I could.
That need was immediate, for without shelter I could not hope to survive the night.
Next I hoped to find a way to make fire, to have a torch, for nothing would be more useful against the Morlocks.
Then I wanted to make some tool to open the bronze doors under the White Sphinx, I thought of a battering ram.
I believed that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I'd find the Time Machine and escape.
I couldn't imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far.
I had decided to bring Weena with me to our own time.
Turning these plans over in my mind, I made our way towards the building my fancy had chosen as our home.