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The Time Machine
Chapter 9. The Morlocks
"It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the new-found clue in what was clearly the proper way".
I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pale bodies.
They were the half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum.
And they were filthy and cold to the touch.
Probably my shrinking was largely due to the influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to understand.
"The next night I didn't sleep well".
Probably my health was a little upset.
I was full of perplexity and doubt.
Once or twice I felt intense fear for which I could see no clear reason.
I remember creeping quietly into the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the moonlight.
That night Weena was among them, I felt calmer because they were there.
It occurred to me even then that in a few days the moon must pass its last quarter, and the nights would grow dark.
When that happened, the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more frequent.
And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who avoids an inevitable duty.
I felt sure that the Time Machine had to be recovered by boldly entering these mysteries underground.
Yet I couldn't face the mystery, If only I had had a companion it would have been different.
But I was horribly alone, and even to climb down into the darkness of the well scared me.
I don't know if you'll understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe with my back to anything.
"It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps, that drove me farther and farther in my exploring trips".
Going southwest toward the rising land now called Combe Wood, I saw, toward nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green building unlike any I'd seen.
It was larger than the largest palaces or ruins I knew, and the front had an Oriental look.
The face of it had the shine and pale-green tint, a bluish-green, of a certain kind of Chinese porcelain.
This different look suggested a different use, and I was minded to go on and explore.
But the day was growing late, and I had come upon the place after a long tiring circuit.
So I decided to delay the adventure until the next day.
And I went back to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena.
But next morning I saw clearly enough that my curiosity about the Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception.
It let me avoid, for another day, an experience I feared.
I decided I'd make the descent without more waste of time, and set out early toward a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
"Little Weena ran with me".
She danced beside me to the well, but when she saw me lean over the mouth and look down, she seemed strangely upset.
'Good-bye, little Weena,' I said, kissing her.
Then putting her down, I felt along the parapet for the climbing hooks.
Rather hastily, I must confess, for I feared my courage might leak away.
At first she watched me in wonder.
Then she gave a most piteous cry, and running to me she began to pull at me with her little hands.
I think her opposition made me more determined to go on.
I shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well.
I saw her agonised face over the parapet, and smiled to reassure her.
Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks I was holding.
"I had to climb down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards".
I descended by metal bars fixed to the well's sides, made for a creature much smaller and lighter than me.
I was soon cramped and tired by the descent.
And not simply tired, One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness below.
For a moment I hung by one hand, and after that I didn't dare to rest again.
Though my arms and back were sharply painful, I went on climbing down the sheer drop as quickly as possible.
Looking up, I saw the opening, a small blue disc, with a star visible in it, while little Weena's head showed as a round black shape.
The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive.
Everything except that little disc above was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again Weena had gone.
"I was in an agony of discomfort".
I thought of trying to go up the shaft again, and leave the Underworld alone.
But even while I turned that over in my mind I kept on descending.
At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly to the right of me a narrow gap in the wall.
Swinging myself in, I found it was the opening of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest.
It wasn't too soon, My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the long terror of a fall.
Besides this, the total darkness had hurt my eyes.
The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.
"I don't know how long I lay".
I was roused by a soft hand touching my face.
Starting up in the darkness, I grabbed my matches and hastily struck one, seeing three stooping white creatures like the one above ground.
They hurried back immediately into the darkness before the light could reveal them.
Living, as they did, in what seemed to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, like the pupils of deep sea fishes.
And they reflected the light in the same way.
I have no doubt they could see me in that lightless gloom.
And they didn't seem to have any fear of me except of light.
But as soon as I struck a match to see them, they fled at once, vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels.
Their eyes glared at me in the strangest way.
"I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different from that of the Overworld people".
So I was left to my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind.
But I said to myself, 'You're in for it now,' and feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder.
Presently the walls opened out into a wider space, revealing shadowed forms and machinery.
I reached a large open space, striking another match, I saw I had entered a vast arched cavern stretching into utter darkness.
The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match.
"Necessarily my memory is vague".
Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare.
The place, by the way, was very stuffy and oppressive, and the faint smell of fresh blood was in the air.
Some way down the central view was a little table of white metal, laid with what seemed a meal.
The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous.
Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to supply the red joint I saw.
It was all very indistinct, blurred by my fear and the weak matchlight.
The heavy smell, the big meaningless shapes, the obscene figures hiding in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again.
Then the match burnt down, stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.
"I have thought since how especially ill-equipped I was for such an experience".
When I set out with the Time Machine, I had an absurd idea.
I thought the men of the Future would be far ahead of us in all their tools.
I had come without weapons, without medicine, without anything to smoke.
At times I missed tobacco badly, Even without enough matches.
If only I had thought of a Kodak.
I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and studied it at leisure.
But as it was, I stood there with only the weapons and powers that Nature had given me.
Hands, feet, and teeth, these, and four safety matches that still remained to me.
"I was afraid to push into all this machinery in the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light that I found my matches had run low".
It had never occurred to me until that moment that I needed to save them.
And I had wasted almost half the box in surprising the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty.
Now, as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank fingers felt over my face.
And I smelled a peculiar unpleasant odour.
I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me.
I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently taken, and other hands behind me pulling at my clothes.
The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.
The sudden realisation of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and acting came home to me very clearly in the darkness.
I shouted at them as loudly as I could.
They started away, and then I could feel them coming back.
They grasped me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other.
I shivered violently, and shouted again rather harshly.
This time they weren't so much alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me.
I'll admit I was horribly frightened, I decided to strike another match and escape under its light.
I did so, and using a scrap of paper from my pocket to help the flicker, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.
I had barely entered this when my light was blown out.
In the black I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves and pattering like rain as they hurried after me.
"In a moment I was grabbed by several hands, and there was no doubt that they were trying to pull me back".
I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.
You can hardly imagine how disgusting and inhuman they looked.
Those pale chinless faces and great lidless pinkish grey eyes.
They stared in their blindness and wonder.
But I didn't stay to look, I promise you.
I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third.
It had almost burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft.
I lay down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.
Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and as I did so my feet were grasped from behind.
And I was violently pulled backward, I lit my last match and it at once went out.
But I had my hand on the climbing bars now.
Kicking violently, I freed myself from the Morlocks' clutches and quickly climbed up the shaft.
They stayed peering and blinking up at me.
All but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and nearly secured my boot as a trophy.
"That climb seemed endless to me".
With the last twenty or thirty feet a deadly sickness came on me.
I had the greatest trouble keeping my hold.
The last few yards was a terrible fight against this faintness.
Several times my head swam, and I felt all the signs of falling.
At last, however, I got over the well mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.
I fell on my face, Even the soil smelled sweet and clean.
Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi.
Then, for a time, I was unconscious.