’A horror of this great darkness came on me.
The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I
felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and
a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot
bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun.
I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt
giddy and incapable of facing the return journey.
As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving
thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake
now that it was a moving thing—against
the red water of the sea. It was a round thing,
the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger,
and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black
against the weltering blood-red water, and it was
hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting.
But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote
and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon
the saddle.
XII
’So I came back. For a long time I must
have been insensible upon the machine. The blinking
succession of the days and nights was resumed, the
sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed
with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours
of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun
backward upon the dials. At last I saw again
the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent
humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and
others came. Presently, when the million dial
was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize
our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands
hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and
day flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls
of the laboratory came round me. Very gently,
now, I slowed the mechanism down.
’I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me.
I think I have told you that when I set out, before
my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked
across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like
a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across
that minute when she traversed the laboratory.
But now her every motion appeared to be the exact
inversion of her previous ones. The door at the
lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory,
back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by
which she had previously entered. Just before
that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed
like a flash.
’Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me
again the old familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances
just as I had left them. I got off the thing
very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For
several minutes I trembled violently. Then I
became calmer. Around me was my old workshop
again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept
there, and the whole thing have been a dream.
’And yet, not exactly! The thing had started
from the south-east corner of the laboratory.
It had come to rest again in the north-west, against
the wall where you saw it. That gives you the
exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal
of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried
my machine.
