1One Thursday evening in his house at Richmond, the Time Traveller set a small table before the fire and placed on it a glittering framework of brass, ivory and crystal, scarcely bigger than a clock. His guests crowded round. "It's beautifully made," said the Medical Man. "It took two years to make," came the reply.2It was only a model, he explained: one little white lever would send it gliding into the future, the other would bring it back. Then, instead of pressing the lever himself, he took the Psychologist's hand and guided his forefinger onto it, so that nobody could call it a trick.3The lever turned. A breath of wind made the lamp flame jump and blew out a candle on the mantel, and the little machine swung round, glimmered like a ghost, and was gone. Only the lamp was left on the table. It was travelling too fast to see, said the Psychologist, like the spoke of a spinning wheel.4Lamp in hand, the Time Traveller led them down a draughty corridor to his laboratory, where a full-sized machine of nickel, ivory and quartz stood nearly finished. "Upon that machine I intend to explore time," he said. None of them quite knew how to take it, and over the Medical Man's shoulder, Filby winked solemnly.5The next Thursday the host was missing. His note asked the Medical Man to start dinner at seven without him. At the table sat new guests: a joking Editor, a young Journalist and a silent bearded man. Then the door opened quietly, and the Time Traveller stood there, dusty, pale and grey, limping in bloodstained socks. "Good heavens! man, what's the matter?"6He went up to wash and change, and while he was gone the Editor and Journalist made fun of the whole business. Hadn't they any clothes-brushes in the Future? Then he came back in evening dress and ate mutton like a starving tramp. "Have you been time travelling?" I asked. "Yes," he nodded, his mouth full.7When he had finished, he led them into the smoking-room and sat back in his easy-chair. "I've lived eight days... such days as no human being ever lived before!" he said. "But no interruptions! Is it agreed?" They all agreed. The listeners sat in shadow, and only his white, earnest face shone in the circle of the little lamp as he began his story.8At ten o'clock that morning the Time Traveller sat in the saddle, gripped the starting lever with both hands and pressed it over. The laboratory went hazy and dim, and when his housekeeper, Mrs. Watchett, came in, she seemed to shoot across the room towards the garden door like a rocket, never seeing him at all.9He pushed the lever to its extreme. Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing, until the flicker merged into a deep blue twilight and the jerking sun became a band of fire across the sky. Trees puffed up and vanished like vapour, and great buildings rose faint and fair, and passed like dreams.10Afraid that stopping might jam him, atom by atom, into some solid wall, he lost his nerve and lugged over the lever. The machine went reeling over and flung him onto soft turf in a pitiless hailstorm. Through the grey downpour loomed a colossal winged sphinx of white marble, weather-worn, with the faint shadow of a smile on its lips.11As the sun broke through, panic seized him and he wrestled the machine upright, ready to flee. Then voices came through the bushes by the Sphinx: slight people in rich robes, about four feet high, were running towards him. Seeing how frail and beautiful the first one was, he took his hands from the machine.12The little people of the future walked up to him without the slightest fear. They laughed into his eyes and patted his hands, back and shoulders with soft pink fingers, to make sure he was real. When some of them began feeling at the Time Machine, he quietly unscrewed its small levers and slipped them into his pocket.13He pointed to the machine, to himself, and then to the sun, trying to show Time. A small Eloi in chequered purple and white copied him and made a sound of thunder. Did he come from the sun in a thunderstorm? These people, the Time Traveller realised, were no wiser than five-year-olds, and for a moment he felt he had built his machine for nothing.14He nodded and gave them a thunderclap so loud that they jumped back and bowed. Then one of them laughed and hung a chain of strange, lovely flowers round his neck, and soon they were all throwing blossoms at him. Covered in flowers, he was led past the smiling White Sphinx towards a huge grey building.15Inside the great hall, which was grand but falling to ruin, the Eloi lounged on cushions beside low stone tables heaped with strange fruit and ate with their fingers. He was hungry, so he joined them, since fruit was all they ever ate. He tried to learn some of their words, but they got bored quickly and drifted off to play.16At sunset he climbed alone to a hilltop and sat on a mossy bench of yellow metal with griffin-head arms. Below lay a world made into one garden, full of palaces and ruins and dotted with wells and cupolas. "I had happened upon humanity upon the wane," he thought. Life had grown too safe, and the red sunset seemed like the sunset of mankind.17The full moon rose over the White Sphinx. On the little lawn below, where he had left the Time Machine, there was nothing. He ran the two miles down the hill in ten minutes, fell and cut his face, and ran on. Now he circled the empty turf with his hands clutching his hair, while the Sphinx seemed to smile at him in mockery.18In a frenzy he beat the bushes until his knuckles bled, then stumbled into the dark palace. In a second hall a score of Eloi lay asleep on cushions. He burst in among them with a spluttering match, shaking them awake. 'Where is my Time Machine?' he bawled. Some laughed; most shrank back, sorely frightened, and he fled out again into the moonlight.19All night he raved among the moonlit ruins, crying out to God and Fate, feeling hopelessly cut off from his own kind. At last, worn out, he lay on the ground beside the Sphinx and wept with utter wretchedness until he fell asleep. When he woke it was full day, and sparrows were hopping on the turf beside him.20In the calm morning he worked it out: with its levers removed, the machine could not have travelled in time, only in space. A groove in the turf and queer narrow footprints led to the hollow bronze pedestal. He hammered at its panels with a river pebble and thought he heard a faint chuckle inside. 'Patience,' he told himself at last. 'Face this world. Learn its ways.'21On his third day, still puzzling over this strange world, the Time Traveller saw a little Eloi woman seized by cramp and swept downstream while her friends only watched. None of them tried to help. He waded quickly into the river, caught the poor mite and drew her safely to the bank.22That afternoon she ran to meet him with cries of delight and a great garland made for him alone. Her name was Weena, and she followed him everywhere like a child. Fearless by day, she dreaded the dark above everything else, yet for his sake she slept away from the crowds, her head pillowed on his arm.23All over the hills stood round, bronze-rimmed wells. A steady draught blew down into them, and from far below came a thud—thud—thud, like a great engine. Waking restless one grey dawn, the Time Traveller stepped outside and saw pale, ape-like figures hurrying up the slope. "They must have been ghosts," he told himself.24One blazing morning he groped into a dark ruined gallery and froze: two glowing eyes were watching him. A pale thing darted past and fled into another ruin. He followed it, struck a match over a well-shaft, and saw it clambering down metal rungs like a human spider, white and flaxen-haired, with huge eyes fixed on him.25Slowly the truth dawned on him. Man had split into two kinds: the Eloi of the sunlit world and these Morlocks of the dark below, perhaps the idle rich and the toiling workers, drawn apart over the ages. When he pressed Weena about the Underworld, she burst into tears. Only when he solemnly struck a match did she smile again.26For two days he put it off. He even glimpsed a great green palace far away and told himself he must explore it first. Then he knew he was only dodging his fear, and went to the well in the ruin. When Weena saw him climb over the edge, she gave a piteous cry and pulled at him with her little hands.27The shaft went down perhaps two hundred yards, and the metal bars were made for creatures far smaller and lighter than he was. Halfway down, one bent under his weight and almost swung him off into the blackness. He hung by one hand. When he looked up again, Weena's head had vanished from the little disc of sky.28Resting in a side tunnel, he woke to a soft hand touching his face. He struck a match, and pale creatures fled from the light. Further on he found a vast cavern of machines, where Morlocks shrank into the shadows. Some way off stood a little white table laid with a meal of meat. The Morlocks, he realised, ate flesh.29He had only four matches left. In the dark, lank fingers felt his face, plucked at his clothes and pulled him back. He fled down the tunnel, striking one match after another. At the shaft's edge, hands seized his feet. His last match went out at once, but he kicked himself free and scrambled up the bars.30The climb seemed endless, and near the top a deadly faintness almost made him let go. At last he dragged himself over the well-mouth and staggered out of the ruin into blinding sunlight. He fell on his face, and even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Weena was kissing his hands as the other Eloi gathered round.31With the Dark Nights of the new moon coming, the Time Traveller set off with Weena at evening for the far-off Palace of Green Porcelain, hoping to find a safe refuge. Weena skipped beside him, picking flowers to tuck into his pockets, which she had decided must be odd little vases.32Night fell before they reached it, so he stopped above a black forest and wrapped the sleeping Weena in his jacket. All the old constellations had gone. Gazing up, he suddenly understood what the meat he had seen underground must be. "Yet it was too horrible!" He looked at Weena's sleeping face and pushed the thought away.33At dawn no Morlocks had come, and the day made his fears seem foolish. Around noon, footsore, the two came to the Palace of Green Porcelain. It stood high on a grassy down, deserted and falling to ruin, with great sheets of its green facing fallen away and a strange inscription that Weena could not read.34Inside was a dusty ruined museum, like a far-future South Kensington. Giant dinosaur skeletons stood in the thick grey dust, and old glass cases still held fossils. The place was so silent that Weena, who had been playing with a sea urchin, came quietly and took his hand. Further on lay a vast gallery of huge, corroded machines.35Deep in the machine hall the floor sloped down into darkness, and the dust there was broken by small, narrow footprints. Then came a pattering from below, the same sound he had heard down the well. Weena whimpered as he climbed a machine, threw all his weight on an iron lever and snapped it off — a mace for any Morlock skull.36Mace in hand, he led Weena through a library where the books had rotted into brown rags. Upstairs, in an airtight case, he found a box of matches that still worked! "Dance," he cried, and danced for Weena in the dust, whistling. He also found a jar of camphor, which burns like a bright candle, and pocketed it too.37They left the Palace at sunset, his arms full of firewood, but it was full night before they reached the forest. Feverish from two sleepless days, he glimpsed three crouching white figures in the bushes behind them. To cover their retreat he set his sticks alight — and Weena, who had never seen flame, reached for the dancing red tongues as if they were a toy.38He carried her into the black wood, but soon came a pattering behind, then soft hands tugging at his coat. Weena shivered and went still. When his match flared, the Morlocks fled — and Weena lay in a faint at his feet. He had turned about so often that he was lost, so he built a smoky fire right there, while eyes shone around him “like carbuncles”.39He sat to rest by the fire and woke in darkness, the fire out, his matches gone, soft hands dragging him down and little teeth nipping at his neck. His hand found the iron lever. With his back to a tree he swung it at the blackness — until the dark grew red, and the Morlocks began streaming past him in flight. His first fire was sweeping through the forest after them.40Racing the flames, he burst into a clearing ringed with fire. On a hillock under a scorched hawthorn, thirty or forty Morlocks blundered about, blinded and helpless in the glare, moaning to each other. Seeing their misery, he stopped striking. He searched every corner for Weena, but she was gone. All night he sat on the summit, begging to wake from the nightmare.41At dawn he searched once more, but there was no trace of Weena — lost somewhere in the burnt forest. Spotting the Palace of Green Porcelain through the haze, he tied grass about his feet and limped across the smoking ashes towards the Time Machine, terribly alone. Then, in his trouser pocket, he found a few loose matches after all.42By morning he reached the yellow-metal seat where he had first looked out on this lovely garden. Now he knew what its beauty hid: the Eloi lived like cattle, and the Morlocks, when other meat failed them, fed on them. Seeing Eloi bathe where he had saved Weena, he felt a keen stab of grief. "How brief the dream of the human intellect had been."43He slept through the day, then walked down to the White Sphinx at sunset with his crowbar and matches ready for a siege. Instead the bronze doors stood wide open. Inside, the Time Machine sat on a raised platform, cleaned and oiled. He guessed it was a trap, and nearly laughing, he threw away his bar and stepped inside.44The bronze panels clanged shut behind him, and the Morlocks came giggling through the dark. His matches would light only on their box, so he fought blind, butting his head to win back a lost lever as pale fingers clutched at him. At last he fixed the lever on and pulled it over. The hands slipped away into the grey rush of time.45He fled forward, clinging to the saddle, until the days stopped and a huge red sun hung still above a silent, oily sea. Across the red rocks crept giant crabs as big as tables, and one reached its slimy claws down from behind him. He wrenched the lever and leapt on — a month, a century, a thousand years at a stride.46More than thirty million years on, the crabs had vanished and snow drifted over the lifeless beach. Out on a sandbank something round and black, trailing tentacles, hopped about. Then a shadow crept across the sun, the wind moaned, and the world sank into freezing, soundless black. "All the sounds of man, the cries of birds, the hum of insects — all that was over."47Sick and giddy, he dragged himself into the saddle and fled home as the sun turned golden and the sky blue again. Back in his own laboratory he glimpsed Mrs. Watchett gliding backward across the room, undoing her walk of that morning. Then the machine stopped; he sat trembling on his bench before limping towards the smell of dinner and his waiting guests.48His tale was over. The Editor laughed and called it a fine story, and no one believed a word. But the Medical Man took Weena's withered white flowers to the lamp and frowned. "I certainly don't know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?" The Time Traveller hesitated, then said: "Certainly not."49Suddenly afraid it had all been a dream, the Time Traveller snatched up the lamp and carried it, flaring red, down the corridor, and we followed. There stood the machine, squat and askew, its ivory smeared, grass and moss on its lower parts, one rail bent awry. He ran his hand along it. "The story I told you was true."50Next day he met me with a camera and a knapsack. "If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimens and all." Minutes later I heard a click and a thud; a gust whirled past me, glass fell from the skylight, and I glimpsed a ghostly figure in whirling black and brass, fading away.51I waited for his second, stranger story, but the Time Traveller vanished three years ago and has never returned. I wonder in which age he wanders. Yet I keep, for my comfort, two strange white flowers, shrivelled and brown now, witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
Adapted from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, public domain. Pictures are AI illustrations drawn for this edition.
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