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The Time Machine
Chapter 11. The Palace of Green Porcelain
"I found the Palace of Green Porcelain when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin".
Only ragged pieces of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metal framework.
It lay very high upon a turfy down.
Looking north eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek.
I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been there.
I thought then, though I never followed up the thought, of what might have happened, or might be happening, to the living things in the sea.
"The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown writing".
I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this.
But I only learnt that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head.
She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
"Within the big valves of the door, which were open and broken, we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows".
At the first glance I was reminded of a museum.
The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of mixed objects was covered by the same grey coating.
Then I saw, standing strange and thin in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton.
I recognised by the slanting feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium.
The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust.
In one place, where rainwater had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away.
Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus, My museum idea was confirmed.
I moved to the side, cleared away thick dust, and found sloping shelves with the old familiar glass cases of our time.
But they must have been air tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
"Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter day South Kensington".
Here, apparently, was the Palaeontology Section, and a very fine array of fossils it must have been.
The slow process of decay had been stopped for a time.
It had lost most of its force through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, yet was nevertheless at work again.
It worked with extreme certainty, though with extreme slowness, upon all its treasures.
Here and there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds.
And the cases had in some instances been taken away, by the Morlocks as I judged.
The place was very silent, the thick dust made our footsteps quiet.
Weena had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case.
She presently came while I stared about me and quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
"And at first I was so much surprised by this old monument of an intellectual age that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented".
Even my worry about the Time Machine went a little from my mind.
"To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology".
There were possibly historical galleries, it might be, even, a library.
To me, at least in my present situation, these would be far more interesting than this sight of old time geology in decay.
Exploring, I found another short gallery running across the first.
This looked to be for minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder.
But I could find no saltpetre, indeed no nitrates of any kind.
Doubtless they had dissolved ages ago, yet the sulphur stayed in my mind and set up a train of thinking.
As for the rest of the gallery's contents, though they were the best kept of all I saw, I had little interest.
I'm no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruined aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
Apparently this section had been for natural history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition.
A few shrunken and blackened remains of what had once been stuffed animals and dried mummies in jars that had once held spirit.
A brown dust of dead plants, that was all.
I was sorry for that because I should have been glad to trace the patient changes by which the control of living nature had been gained.
Then we came to a gallery of giant size, dark, the floor sloping downward from the end I entered.
At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling, many of them cracked and smashed, which showed that originally the place had been lit by electric light.
Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bodies of big machines.
They were all badly corroded and many were broken down, but some were still fairly complete.
You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to stay among these.
They were all the more interesting because, for the most part, they had the appeal of puzzles.
And I could make only the vaguest guesses at their purpose.
I thought that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.
"Suddenly Weena came very close to my side".
So suddenly she came very close that she startled me and made me jump.
Had it not been for her I don't think I'd have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all.
The end I had come in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare slit like windows.
As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows.
At last there was a pit like the area of a London house before each, with only a narrow line of daylight at the top.
I went slowly, puzzling about the machines, and was too focused to notice the loss of light until Weena's fear drew my attention.
Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.
I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less and its surface less even.
Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints.
My sense of the near presence of the Morlocks came back at that.
I felt that I was wasting my time in the study of machinery.
I remembered that it was already late in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no way of making a fire.
And then down in the distant blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well.
"I took Weena's hand".
Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a machine from which stuck a lever not unlike those in a signal box.
Climbing upon the stand and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways.
Suddenly Weena, left alone in the central aisle, began to whimper.
I had guessed the strength of the lever pretty correctly, it snapped after a minute's strain.
I came back to her with a mace in my hand, more than enough, I thought, for any Morlock skull I might meet.
And I wanted very much to kill a Morlock or two.
Very cruel, you may think, to want to kill one's own descendants.
But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any kindness for the things.
Only my unwillingness to leave Weena kept me from going straight down the gallery.
I also believed that if I began to satisfy my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer.
So I didn't kill the brutes I heard.
"With a mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I left that gallery and entered an even larger one."
"At first it looked like a military chapel hung with tattered flags."
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it I presently recognised as the rotting remains of books.
They had long since fallen to pieces, and every sign of print had gone from them.
But here and there were warped boards and cracked metal clasps that told the tale well enough.
Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have made a moral about the uselessness of all ambition.
But as it was, the thing that struck me most was the enormous waste of work to which this dark wilderness of rotting paper testified.
At the time I'll confess that I thought mainly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers on physical optics.
"Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry".
And here I had some hope of useful discoveries.
Except at one end where the roof had fallen in, this gallery was well kept.
I went eagerly to every unbroken case.
And at last, in one of the truly air tight cases, I found a box of matches.
Very eagerly I tried them, they were perfectly good.
They weren't even damp, I turned to Weena.
'Dance,' I cried to her in her own tongue.
For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared.
And so, in that ruined museum, upon the thick soft floor of dust, to Weena's great delight, I seriously performed a kind of mixed dance.
I whistled The Land of the Leal as cheerfully as I could.
It was partly a modest cancan, partly a step dance, partly a skirt dance as my tail coat allowed, and partly original.
For I'm naturally inventive, as you know.
"Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have survived the wear of time for countless years was most strange, and for me it was most fortunate".
Yet, oddly enough, I found a far more unlikely substance, and that was camphor.
I found it in a sealed jar that by chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed.
I thought at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly.
But the smell of camphor was clear.
In the universal decay this volatile substance had happened to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries.
It recalled a sepia painting I had seen, made from the ink of a fossil Belemnite fossilised millions of years ago.
I was about to throw it away.
But I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a bright flame, and was, in fact, an excellent candle.
And I put it in my pocket.
I found no explosives, however, nor any way of breaking down the bronze doors.
As yet my iron crowbar was the most useful thing I had found.
Still I left that gallery greatly pleased.
"I can't tell you all the story of that long afternoon".
It would take a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in the right order.
I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword.
I couldn't carry both, however, and my iron bar promised best against the bronze gates.
There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles.
Most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.
But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into dust.
One corner I saw was burned and shattered, perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the specimens.
In another place was a vast array of idols, Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth, I should think.
And here, giving in to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly pleased me.
"As the evening drew on, my interest faded".
I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruined, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.
In one place I found a model of a tin mine and, by accident, discovered two dynamite cartridges in an air-tight case.
I shouted 'Eureka' and smashed the case with joy.
Then came a doubt, I hesitated, then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my test.
I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came.
Of course the things were fake, as I might have guessed from their presence.
I really believe that had they not been so, I'd have rushed off at once and blown Sphinx and the bronze doors into nothing.
As it proved, I'd also have blown my chances of finding the Time Machine into nothing.
"It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace".
It was turfed and had three fruit trees.
So we rested and refreshed ourselves, Towards sunset I began to think of our position.
Night was coming, and my hard to reach hiding place had still to be found.
But that worried me very little now.
I had in my possession a thing that was perhaps the best of all defences against the Morlocks.
I had matches, I had the camphor in my pocket too if a blaze were needed.
It seemed to me that the best thing we could do was to spend the night in the open, protected by a fire.
In the morning there was the getting of the Time Machine.
For that, as yet, I had only my iron mace.
But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very different about those bronze doors.
Up to this I hadn't forced them, largely because of the mystery on the other side.
They had never seemed to me very strong, and I hoped to find my iron bar not wholly inadequate for the work.