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The Time Machine
Chapter 14. The Further Vision
"I've already told you about the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling".
This time I wasn't sitting properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable way.
For a long time I clung to the machine as it swayed and shook, not caring where I went.
When I looked at the dials again, I was amazed to see where I had arrived.
One dial shows days, another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of millions.
Now, instead of moving the levers back, I had pushed them forward to go on.
When I looked at these indicators, I found the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch into the future.
"As I drove on, a strange change came over the appearance of things".
The palpitating greyness of the sky and sea slowly grew much darker and heavier.
Then, though I was still travelling fast, the blinking of day and night, which normally shows slower time, returned and grew more distinct.
This puzzled me very much at first.
The turns of night and day grew slower, and the sun's movement across the sky seemed to stretch through centuries.
At last a steady twilight lay over the earth, broken now and then when a comet shone across the dark sky.
The band of light that had shown the sun had long since gone, for the sun had stopped setting.
It simply rose and fell in the west and grew broader and redder.
All sign of the moon had gone.
The turning of the stars, growing slower and slower, had become slow points of light.
At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, stood motionless on the horizon.
It was a vast dome glowing with a dull heat and now and then lost its light for a moment.
At one time it had for a little while shone more brightly again, but it soon went back to its dull red heat.
I saw from this slowing of its rising and setting that the work of tidal drag was finished.
The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, just as in our time the moon faces the earth.
Very carefully, for I remembered my previous headlong fall, I began to reverse my movement.
Slower and slower moved the circling hands until the thousands one seemed still and the daily one was no longer a mere mist on its scale.
Still slower, until the dim outlines of a lonely beach became visible.
"I stopped very gently and sat on the Time Machine, looking around".
The sky was no longer blue, overhead it had turned a deep, burning red.
To the north-east it was inky black, and out of the blackness the pale white stars shone brightly and steadily.
Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless.
To the south-east the sky grew to a glowing scarlet where the huge hull of the sun lay, red and motionless.
The rocks around me were a harsh, reddish colour.
The only trace of life I could first see was intensely green vegetation covering every projecting point on their south-eastern face.
It was the same rich green seen on forest moss or cave lichen, such plants grow in an unending twilight.
"The machine was standing on a sloping beach".
The sea stretched away to the south-west, rising into a sharp bright horizon against the pale sky.
There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was moving.
Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing and showed that the eternal sea was still moving.
And along the margin where the water sometimes broke there was a thick crust of salt, pink under the strange sky.
I felt a weight in my head, and I noticed I was breathing very fast.
The feeling reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air was thinner than it's now.
"Far away up the lonely slope I heard a harsh scream."
"I saw something like a huge white butterfly slanting and fluttering up into the sky, circling and disappearing over some low hillocks beyond."
The sound of its voice was so sad that I shivered and sat more firmly on the machine.
Looking round again, I saw that what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me.
Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature.
Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table?
Its many legs moved slowly and uncertainly, and its big claws swayed.
Its long antennae, like carters' whips, waved and felt, and its stalked eyes shone at you on either side of its metal front.
Its back was folded and decorated with ugly bumps, and a greenish crust spotted it here and there.
I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
"As I stared at this terrible sight crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek as if a fly had landed there".
I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it came back, and almost at once another touched my ear.
I struck at this and caught something threadlike.
It was pulled swiftly out of my hand.
With a frightful shock, I turned, and I saw I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me.
Its evil eyes wriggled on stalks, its mouth seethed with appetite, and its clumsy claws, covered with algal slime, came down on me.
In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had put a month between myself and these monsters.
But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them clearly now as soon as I stopped.
Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there in the dim light among the foliated sheets of intense green.
"I can't give the full sense of horrible desolation that hung over the world".
The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salty Dead Sea, and the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-moving monsters created a dreadful scene.
The uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants and the thin air that hurts one's lungs added to the awful effect.
I moved on a hundred years, there was the same red sun, a little larger and a little duller.
The same dying sea and the same cold air remained.
The same crowd of earthy crustacea crept in and out among the green weed and the red rocks.
And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.
So I travelled, stopping again and again in great leaps of a thousand years or more.
I was drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate and watched with a strange interest.
The sun grew larger and duller in the westward sky as the old earth's life died away.
At last, thirty million years later, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to hide a tenth of the dark sky.
Then I stopped again, the crawling crabs were gone, and the red beach, save for pale green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless.
And now it was covered with white.
A bitter cold hit me, Rare white flakes came twisting down.
To the north-east the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the black sky.
And I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white.
There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with moving masses farther out.
But the main area of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, remained unfrozen.
"I looked around to see if any signs of animal life remained".
A certain vague fear still kept me in the saddle of the machine.
But I saw nothing moving in earth or sky or sea.
The green slime on the rocks alone showed that life wasn't dead.
A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had pulled away from the beach.
I thought I saw some black object moving on this bank, but it stopped as I looked.
And I judged my eye had been deceived and that the black object was only a rock.
The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.
"Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed and that a hollow, a bay, had appeared in the curve".
I watched this dark patch slowly grow larger across the sun's disk.
For a minute perhaps I stared in horror at this blackness that was moving over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was starting.
Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the sun's disk.
At first I naturally thought it was the moon.
But much makes me believe I really saw an inner planet pass very close to the earth.
"The darkness grew quickly".
A cold wind began to blow in stronger gusts from the east, and the falling white flakes in the air grew more many.
From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper.
Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent.
Silent? It would be hard to say the stillness of it.
All human sounds, the bleating of sheep, birds' cries, insects' hum, the stir forming our life's background, had ceased.
As the darkness thickened, the spinning flakes grew more and more, dancing before my eyes, and the cold of the air more intense.
At last, one by one, quickly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness.
The breeze rose to a moaning wind.
I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse moving towards me.
In another moment the pale stars alone were visible.
All else was lightless darkness, the sky was absolutely black.
"A horror of this great darkness came on me".
The cold that struck to my marrow and the pain I felt in breathing overcame me.
I shivered, and a deadly nausea took me.
Then like a red-hot bow in the sky the edge of the sun appeared.
I got off the machine to recover myself.
I felt dizzy and unable to face the return journey.
As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing on the shoal.
There was no mistake now that it was a moving thing against the red water of the sea.
It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or it may be bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it.
It seemed black against the rolling blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about, then I felt I was fainting.
But a terrible fear of lying helpless in that far and awful twilight kept me while I climbed back onto the saddle.
"So I came back".
For a long time I must have been unconscious on the machine.
The blinking cycle of the days and nights returned, the sun got golden again, the sky blue.
I breathed more freely, the changing contours of the land rose and fell.
The hands spun backward on the dials.
At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the signs of failing humanity.
These too changed and went, and others came.
Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slowed down.
I began to recognise our own pretty and familiar architecture.
The thousands hand ran back to the starting point, the night and day passed more slowly.
Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me.
Very gently now I slowed the machine down.
"I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me".
I think I told you that when I set out, before my speed became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room.
She moved, as it seemed to me, like a rocket.
As I returned, I passed again through that moment when she crossed the laboratory.
But now every motion of hers seemed to be the exact opposite of her previous ones.
The door at the lower end opened.
And she glided quietly up the laboratory, back first, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered.
Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment, but he passed like a flash.
"Then I stopped the machine and saw around me again the old familiar laboratory, my tools, my equipment just as I had left them".
I got off the thing very shakily and sat down on my bench.
For several minutes I shook violently, then I became calmer.
Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been.
I might have slept there and the whole thing have been a dream.
"And yet not exactly".
The machine had started from the south-east corner of the laboratory.
It had come to rest again in the north-west against the wall where you saw it.
That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx into which the Morlocks had carried my machine.
"For a time my brain stopped working".
Presently I got up and came through the passage here, limping because my heel was still painful and feeling very dirty.
I saw the Pall Mall Gazette on the table by the door.
I found the date was indeed today, and looking at the clock I saw the hour was almost eight o'clock.
I heard your voices and the clatter of plates.
I hesitated because I felt so sick and weak.
Then I smelled good wholesome meat and opened the door on you.
You know the rest, I washed and dined and now I'm telling you the story.