Read the chapter
The Time Machine
Chapter 8. Explanation
"So far as I could see, all the world showed the same rich beauty as the Thames valley".
From every hill I climbed I saw the same abundance of fine buildings, varied in material and style.
I saw the same groups of evergreens and the same trees and tree ferns full of blossom.
Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose into blue rolling hills, and then faded into the calm sky.
A strange feature that soon caught my attention was certain circular wells, some, as it seemed to me, very deep.
One lay by the path up the hill which I had followed on my first walk.
Like the others, it had a rim of bronze, curiously worked, and was kept dry by a small cupola.
Beside the wells, looking down the dark shaft, I saw no flash of water, nor could my match make a reflection.
But in all of them I heard a sound, a thud thud thud, like a great engine beating.
From the flare of my matches I found that a steady current of air ran down the shafts.
I threw a scrap of paper into one, and instead of floating down it was at once sucked out of sight.
"After a time, I began to link these wells with tall towers standing here and there on the slopes."
"Above them there was often that same heat shimmer you see on a hot beach."
Putting things together, I formed a strong idea of an extensive system of underground ventilation, whose true meaning was hard to imagine.
At first I thought it was part of the sanitary system of these people.
It was an obvious idea, but it was absolutely wrong.
"And here I must admit that I learned very little about drains and bells and ways of transport and similar comforts during my time in this real future".
In some visions of Utopias and future times I have read, there is much detail about buildings and social arrangements.
Such details are easy to invent when the whole world is only in your imagination.
But they are totally out of reach to a real traveller among the realities I found here.
Think of the tale of London which a negro, just come from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe.
What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like.
Yet we, I suppose, should be ready enough to explain these things to him.
And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untraveled friend either understand or believe.
Think how small the gap is between a negro and a white man of our own time.
Think how wide the gap is between myself and these people of the Golden Age.
I felt many unseen things that increased my comfort.
Except for a general idea of automatic organisation, I fear I can give you very little of the difference.
"In the matter of burial, for example, I saw no signs of crematoria nor anything that suggested tombs".
But it occurred to me that, perhaps, there might be cemeteries or crematoria somewhere beyond the range of my exploring.
This, again, was a question I put to myself, and at first my curiosity was completely defeated on the point.
The thing puzzled me, and it led me to another observation that puzzled me more, namely that there were no aged and infirm among these people.
"I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilisation and a decayed humanity didn't last long".
Yet I could think of no other theory.
Let me explain my difficulties, the several large palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining halls and sleeping rooms.
I could find no machinery, no tools of any kind.
Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need replacing, and their sandals, though plain, were fairly complex pieces of metalwork.
Somehow such things must be made, and the little people showed no sign of any creative skill.
There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of imports among them.
They spent all their time in gentle play, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful way, in eating fruit and sleeping.
I couldn't see how things were kept going.
"Then, again, about the Time Machine, something, I knew not what, had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx".
Why, For the life of me I couldn't imagine.
Those waterless wells too, those flickering pillars.
I felt I lacked a clue, I felt how shall I put it.
Suppose you found an inscription with sentences here.
There in clear plain English, and mixed with them others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you.
On the third day, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One showed itself to me.
"That day also I made a friend of a sort".
While I watched the little people bathing, one seized with cramp and began drifting downstream.
The main current ran rather fast, but not too strong for even a fair swimmer.
This will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange lack in these creatures.
None of them made the least attempt to rescue the weak little thing that was drowning before their eyes.
I slipped off my clothes, waded in lower down, caught the poor mite and drew her safely to land.
A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round.
And I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her.
I had come to such a low view of her kind that I didn't expect any thanks from her.
On that point, however, I was wrong.
"This happened in the morning".
In the afternoon I met my little woman, as I think she was, as I was returning toward my centre from an exploration.
She met me with cries of delight and gave me a big garland of flowers evidently made for me and me alone.
The thing moved my imagination, Very likely I had been feeling lonely.
At any rate I did my best to show my thanks for the gift.
We soon sat together in a little stone arbour, talking mostly with smiles.
The creature's friendliness affected me like a child's might.
We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands, I did the same to hers.
Then I tried to talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed to fit.
That was the start of a strange friendship which lasted a week and ended as I'll tell you.
"She was exactly like a child".
She wanted to be with me always.
She tried to follow me everywhere.
On my next journey I tired her out and at last left her exhausted, calling after me rather sadly.
But the tasks of the world had to be met.
I hadn't, I told myself, come into the future to carry on a small flirtation.
Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her protests at parting were sometimes wild.
And I think, all told, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion.
Still she was, somehow, a great comfort.
I thought it was mere childish love that made her cling to me.
Until it was too late, I didn't clearly know what I had done to her when I left.
Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me.
She merely seemed fond of me and, in her weak, useless way, showed that she cared.
This little doll of a creature soon made my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx feel almost like coming home.
I'd watch for her tiny figure of white and gold as soon as I came over the hill.
"It was from her too that I learned that fear hadn't left the world".
She was fearless enough in the daylight.
And she had the oddest trust in me, for once in a foolish moment I made threatening grimaces at her and she simply laughed.
But she feared the dark, feared shadows, feared black things.
Darkness to her was the one dreadful thing.
It was a strongly felt emotion, and it made me think and watch.
I found then, among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark and slept in crowds.
To enter them without a light threw them into a panic of fear.
I never found one outdoors, or one sleeping alone indoors, after dark.
I was such a fool that I missed that lesson, and despite Weena's distress I insisted on sleeping apart from the sleeping multitudes.
It worried her greatly, but in the end her odd love for me won.
For five nights during our time together, including the last night, she slept with her head on my arm.
But my story slips away from me as I speak of her.
It must have been the night before her rescue that I was woken about dawn.
I had been restless, dreaming very unpleasantly that I was drowned and that sea anemones were touching my face with their soft feelers.
I woke with a start and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the room.
I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable.
It was that dim grey hour when things are coming out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut and yet unreal.
I got up and went down into the great hall and so out upon the flagstones before the palace.
I thought I'd make a virtue of necessity and see the sunrise.
"The moon was setting and the dying moonlight and the first pale light of dawn were mixed in a ghastly half light".
The bushes were inky black, the ground a dark grey, the sky colourless and cheerless.
And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts.
Three times as I looked at the slope I saw white figures.
Twice I thought I saw a white, ape-like creature running up the hill, once near the ruins a group carrying a dark body.
They moved quickly, I didn't see what happened to them.
It seemed they vanished among the bushes.
The dawn was still unclear, you must understand.
I had that chill uncertain early morning feeling you may have known, I doubted my eyes.
"As the east grew brighter and the day light came and its vivid colour came back to the world, I looked carefully".
But I saw no sign of my white figures.
They were creatures of the half light.
They must have been ghosts,' I said, 'I wonder from when they came.' A queer idea of Grant Allen's amused me.
If each generation dies and leaves ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them.
On that theory they'd be countless some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence and it was no great wonder to see four at once.
But the joke didn't satisfy me, I thought of those figures all the morning until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head.
I linked them in some vague way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the Time Machine.
But Weena was a pleasant replacement, yet they were soon to gain a much deadlier hold on my mind.
"I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age".
I can't explain it, it may be that the sun was hotter or the earth nearer the sun.
It's usual to assume that the sun will keep cooling steadily in the future.
But people unfamiliar with the younger Darwin forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body.
As these disasters happen, the sun will blaze with renewed energy and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that the sun was much hotter than we know it.
Well, one very hot morning, my fourth, I think, I sought shelter from the heat and glare in a huge ruin.
It stood near the great house where I slept and fed.
Then, quite unexpectedly, this strange thing happened in the ruined gallery before me.
Climbing among these piles of stone, I found a narrow gallery whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone.
By contrast with the brightness outside, it seemed at first completely dark to me.
I went in feeling my way, for the change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before my eyes.
Suddenly I stopped as if spellbound, a pair of eyes shining by reflection against the daylight outside was watching me from the dark.
"The old instinctive fear of wild beasts came on me".
I clenched my hands and kept looking into the glaring eyes.
I was afraid to turn, then the thought of the absolute safety in which humanity seemed to live came into my head.
And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark.
Overcoming my fear somewhat I moved a step and spoke.
I must admit my voice was harsh and not steady.
I put out my hand and touched something soft.
At once the eyes darted aside and something white ran past me.
I turned, heart in my mouth, and saw a queer ape-like figure, head held low, running across the sunlit space behind me.
It hit a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow under another pile of ruined stone.
My impression of it is imperfect, but I know it was a dull white with large greyish-red eyes and flaxen hair on its head and back.
But, as I say, it went too fast for me to see clearly.
I can't even say whether it ran on all fours or only with its forearms held very low.
After a pause I followed it into the second heap of ruins, I couldn't find it at first.
After a time in the deep dark I found one of those round well-openings, half closed by a fallen pillar.
A sudden thought came to me, Could this Thing have gone down the shaft.
I lit a match and looked down to see a small white creature with large bright eyes staring steadily as it went down.
It made me shudder, it was so like a human spider.
It was climbing down the wall, and I saw for the first time metal foot- and hand-rests forming a ladder down the shaft.
The match burned my fingers, fell from my hand and went out, by the time I lit another, the little monster was gone.
"I don't know how long I sat looking down that well".
It wasn't for some time that I could force myself to believe the thing I had seen was human.
But slowly the truth came to me that Man hadn't stayed one species but had split into two different animals.
I realized my graceful children of the Upper World weren't the only descendants of our time.
The bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing that had flashed before me was also heir to all the ages.
"I thought of the flickering pillars and of my idea of underground ventilation".
I began to suspect their real meaning.
And what, I wondered, was this Lemur doing in my plan of a perfectly balanced system.
How was it linked to the lazy peace of the beautiful Overworlders.
And what was hidden down there at the bottom of that shaft.
I sat on the edge of the well, telling myself there was nothing to fear.
I told myself I must go down there to find the answer to my problems.
And yet I was absolutely afraid to go.
As I hesitated two of the beautiful upper world people came running in their amorous play across the daylight in the shadow.
The male chased the female throwing flowers at her as he ran.
"They seemed upset to find me my arm against the overturned pillar peering down the well".
Apparently it was thought bad form to notice these openings.
When I pointed to one and tried to ask a question in their tongue, they were even more upset.
They turned away, but they were curious about my matches and I struck some to amuse them.
I asked them again about the well and again I failed.
So soon I left them meaning to go back to Weena and see what I could get from her.
But my mind was already in revolt and my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new view.
I had now a clue to the meaning of these wells and to the ventilating towers.
I had a clue to the ghosts' mystery, and a hint of the bronze gates' meaning and the Time Machine's fate.
And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.
"Here was the new view".
Clearly this second species of Man was underground.
There were three things in particular that made me think its rare coming above ground came from a long continued underground life.
First there was the bleached look common in animals that live mostly in the dark the white fish of the Kentucky caves for example.
Then those large eyes with their power to reflect light are common features of nocturnal creatures witness the owl and the cat.
Observers noted confusion in bright sun, hasty fumbling toward shadows, and the strange head posture in light.
All these behaviors supported the theory of extreme sensitivity of the retina.
"Beneath my feet then the earth must be tunnelled enormously and these tunnels were the home of the New Race".
The presence of ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes everywhere in fact except along the river valley showed how far its branches went.
What more natural than assume it was in this Underworld that the work needed for the comfort of the daylight race was done.
The idea was so believable that I at once accepted it and went on to assume how this split of the human species had come about.
I dare say you'll guess the shape of my theory though for myself I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.
At first, and moving from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me.
I thought the gradual widening of the present temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer was the key to the whole thing.
No doubt it'll seem strange enough to you and wildly unbelievable and yet even now there are things to point that way.
There's a tendency to use underground space for the less showy parts of civilisation.
There's the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, and new electric railways and subways.
There are underground workshops and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.
Clearly I thought this tendency must have increased until Industry had slowly lost its right in the sky.
I mean that it had gone deeper into larger and larger underground factories spending more and more of its time there until in the end.
Even now doesn't an East end worker live in such artificial conditions as to be almost cut off from the natural surface of the earth.
Again, the split tendency of richer people is becoming clear.
No doubt this is due to their more refined education and the widening gap with the rude violence of the poor.
It's already leading to the closing off, in their interest, of large parts of the surface of the land.
About London for example perhaps half the prettier country is kept against intrusion.
The widening gap is caused by longer, costlier higher education and greater opportunities and temptations toward refined habits for the rich.
It'll make the exchange between class and class, promotion by intermarriage that slows the splitting of our species along class lines, less common.
So in the end, above ground you must have the Haves pursuing pleasure, comfort, and beauty.
Below ground, the Have-nots, the Workers, grow ever more fitted to the conditions of their labour.
Once they were there, they'd no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns.
If they refused, they'd starve or be suffocated for arrears.
Such of them as were so made as to be miserable and rebellious would die.
In the end, with the balance fixed, the survivors would become well fitted to the conditions of underground life.
They would be as happy in their way as the Overworld people were in theirs.
As it seemed to me the refined beauty and the thin pale look followed naturally enough.
"The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind".
It hadn't been such a triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I had imagined.
Instead I saw a true aristocracy armed with a perfected science and carrying to a logical end the industrial system of today.
Its triumph hadn't been simply a victory over Nature but a victory over Nature and fellow man.
This I must warn you was my theory at the time.
I had no ready guide in the pattern of the Utopian books.
My explanation may be absolutely wrong, I still think it's the most reasonable one.
But even on this view the balanced civilisation once reached had long since passed its high point and had fallen into decay.
The too perfect safety of the Overworlders had led them to a slow fall into degeneration to a general shrinking in size strength and intelligence.
That I could see clearly enough already.
What had happened to the Undergrounders I didn't yet guess.
The Morlocks, that, by the way, was the name by which these creatures were called.
From what I had seen, I fancied the change in human type was deeper than among the Eloi, the beautiful race I knew.
"Then came troublesome questions".
Why had the Morlocks taken my Time Machine.
For I felt sure it was they who had taken it.
Why too if the Eloi were masters could they not give the machine back to me.
And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark.
I went as I have said to ask Weena about this Underworld but here again I was disappointed.
At first she wouldn't understand my questions and soon she refused to answer them.
She shivered as though the topic was unbearable.
And when I pressed her perhaps a little harshly she burst into tears.
They were the only tears except my own I ever saw in that Golden Age.
When I saw them I stopped worrying about the Morlocks and focused on removing those signs of her human past from Weena's eyes.
And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands while I solemnly burned a match.