Chapter Chapter 17 · Epilogue

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he

swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy

savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the

Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian

brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the

phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or

beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he go

forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but

with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems

solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot

think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory,

and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own

part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long

before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the

Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation

only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy

its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as

though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is

a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his

story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white

flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that

even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness

still lived on in the heart of man.