الفصل الفصل 4 · IV. Time Travelling

. Time Travelling

“I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time

Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the

workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the

ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it’s

sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday; but on Friday, when

the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel

bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so

that the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten

o’clock today that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I

gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of

oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a

suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at

what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one

hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost

immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation

of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before.

Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had

tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it

had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past

three!

“I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both

hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark.

Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards

the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the

place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I

pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the

turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The

laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow

night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and

faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb

confusedness descended on my mind.

“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time

travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly

like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I

felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I

put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The

dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me,

and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every

minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had

been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression

of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any

moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast

for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively

painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the

moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a

faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still

gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one

continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a

splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun

became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter

fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and

then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

“The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon

which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and

dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown,

now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge

buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole

surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes.

The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round

faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and

down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that

consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the

white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by

the bright, brief green of spring.

“The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They

merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked,

indeed, a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to

account. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind

of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I

scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new

sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my

mind—a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread—until at last

they took complete possession of me. What strange developments of

humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilisation, I

thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim

elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and

splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings

of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I

saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there, without any

wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth

seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of

stopping.

“The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance

in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled

at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to

speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of

intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of

myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant

bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle

that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching

explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all

possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to

me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had

cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man

has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the

same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute

strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the

machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely

upset my nerves. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust

of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I

lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over,

and I was flung headlong through the air.

“There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been

stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was

sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still

seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was

gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a

garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their

mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating

of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud

over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I

was wet to the skin. ‘Fine hospitality,’ said I, ‘to a man who has

travelled innumerable years to see you.’

“Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and

looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white

stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy

downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.

“My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew

thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for

a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in

shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being

carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to

hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick

with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless

eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the

lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant

suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a

minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as

the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from

it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and

that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun.

“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 hillside 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.

Ch