’I looked up again at the crouching white shape,
and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon
me. What might appear when that hazy curtain
was altogether withdrawn? What might not have
happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into
a common passion? What if in this interval the
race had lost its manliness and had developed into
something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly
powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal,
only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common
likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently
slain.
’Already I saw other vast shapes—huge
buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns,
with a wooded hill-side dimly creeping in upon me
through the lessening storm. I was seized with
a panic fear. I turned frantically to the Time
Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I
did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm.
The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like
the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in
the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown
shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The
great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct,
shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and picked
out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along
their courses. I felt naked in a strange world.
I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air,
knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My
fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space,
set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist and
knee, with the machine. It gave under my desperate
onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently.
One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I
stood panting heavily in attitude to mount again.
’But with this recovery of a prompt retreat
my courage recovered. I looked more curiously
and less fearfully at this world of the remote future.
In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer
house, I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes.
They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards
me.
’Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming
through the bushes by the White Sphinx were the heads
and shoulders of men running. One of these emerged
in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon
which I stood with my machine. He was a slight
creature—perhaps four feet high—clad
in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather
belt. Sandals or buskins—I could not
clearly distinguish which—were on his feet;
his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was
bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time
how warm the air was.
’He struck me as being a very beautiful and
graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His
flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind
of consumptive—that hectic beauty of which
we used to hear so much. At the sight of him
I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands
from the machine.
