examining me was indescribably unpleasant.  The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness.  I shouted at them as loudly as I could.  They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again.  They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other.  I shivered violently, and shouted again—­rather discordantly.  This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me.  I will confess I was horribly frightened.  I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare.  I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.  But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.

’In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.  I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.  You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked—­those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—­as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.  But I did not stay to look, I promise you:  I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third.  It had almost burned 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 tugged backward.  I lit my last match ... and it incontinently went out.  But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me:  all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.

’That climb seemed interminable to me.  With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me.  I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold.  The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness.  Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling.  At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.  I fell upon my face.  Even the soil smelt 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 insensible.

VII