’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  What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?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.

IV