’Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.  I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.  I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes.  Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed.  And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.  Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror.  Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be.  Yet it was too horrible!  I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

’Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations in the new confusion.  The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy cloud or so.  No doubt I dozed at times.  Then, as my vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white.  And close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then growing pink and warm.  No Morlocks had approached us.  Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night.  And in the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable.  I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung them away.

’I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and forbidding.  We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast.  We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night.  And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen.  I felt assured now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity.  Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks’ food had run short.  Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like vermin.  Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—­far less than any monkey.  His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct.  And so these inhuman sons of men——!  I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.  After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.  And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone.  Why should I trouble myself?  These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—­probably saw to the breeding of.  And there was Weena dancing at my side!