’I have already told you of the sickness and
confusion that comes with time travelling. And
this time I was not seated properly in the saddle,
but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an
indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed
and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when
I brought myself to look at the dials again I was
amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records
days, and another thousands of days, another millions
of days, and another thousands of millions. Now,
instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them
over so as to go forward with them, and when I came
to look at these indicators I found that the thousands
hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand
of a watch—into futurity.
’As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over
the appearance of things. The palpitating greyness
grew darker; then—though I was still travelling
with prodigious velocity—the blinking succession
of day and night, which was usually indicative of a
slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked.
This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations
of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did
the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed
to stretch through centuries. At last a steady
twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken
now and then when a comet glared across the darkling
sky. The band of light that had indicated the
sun had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased
to set—it simply rose and fell in the west,
and grew ever broader and more red. All trace
of the moon had vanished. The circling of the
stars, growing slower and slower, had given place
to creeping points of light. At last, some time
before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted
motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with
a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary
extinction. At one time it had for a little while
glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted
to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing
down of its rising and setting that the work of the
tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest
with one face to the sun, even as in our own time
the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for
I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse
my motion. Slower and slower went the circling
hands until the thousands one seemed motionless and
the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale.
Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate
beach grew visible.
’I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time
Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer
blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out
of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale
white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red
and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter
to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay
the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless.
The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour,
and all the trace of life that I could see at first
was the intensely green vegetation that covered every
projecting point on their south-eastern face.
It was the same rich green that one sees on forest
moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which
like these grow in a perpetual twilight.
