’I told some of you last Thursday of the principles
of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing
itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it
is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the
ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the
rest of it’s sound enough. I expected to
finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the putting
together was nearly done, I found that one of the
nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this
I had to get remade; so that the thing was not complete
until this morning. It was at ten o’clock
to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its
career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws
again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod,
and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide
who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same
wonder at what will come next as I felt then.
I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping
one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately
the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare
sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the
laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened?
For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked
me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before,
as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past
ten; now it was nearly half-past three!
’I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the
starting lever with both hands, and went off with
a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark.
Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without
seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose
it took her a minute or so to traverse the place,
but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like
a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme
position. The night came like the turning out
of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow.
The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and
ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then
day again, night again, day again, faster and faster
still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and
a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
’I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations
of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant.
There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon
a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion!
I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent
smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like
the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion
of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from
me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky,
leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a
day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed
and I had come into the open air. I had a dim
impression of scaffolding, but I was already going
too fast to be conscious of any moving things.
The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too
fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness
and light was excessively painful to the eye.
