Chương Chương 14 · XIV. The Further Vision

he Further Vision

“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.

“The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to

the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan

sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was

stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle

breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living.

And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick

incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of

oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast.

The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and

from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.

“Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing

like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky

and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of

its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly

upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what

I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me.

Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you

imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving

slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennæ, like

carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at

you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and

ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched

it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth

flickering and feeling as it moved.

“As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a

tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to

brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost

immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught

something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a

frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of

another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were

wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and

its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending

upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month

between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach,

and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them

seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the

foliated sheets of intense green.

“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the

world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea,

the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the

uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air

that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved

on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a

little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same

crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and

the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a

vast new moon.

“So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a

thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate,

watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in

the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more

than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had

come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I

stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared,

and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens,

seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold

assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the

north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable

sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white.

There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses

farther out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under

the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

“I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A

certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the

machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green

slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow

sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the

beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank,

but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye

had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The

stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very

little.

“Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had

changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this

grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness

that was creeping over the day, and then I realised that an eclipse was

beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the

sun’s disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is

much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of

an inner planet passing very near to the earth.

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts

from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in

number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond

these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to

convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of

sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the

background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened,

the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the

cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after

the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into

blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central

shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale

stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was

absolutely black.

“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.

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