'Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before.

Hitherto, except during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt

a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these new

discoveries.

Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the

little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome;

but there was an altogether new element in

the sickening quality of the Morlocks--a something inhuman and malign.

Instinctively I loathed them.

Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with

the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose

enemy would come upon him soon.

'The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new moon.

Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the

Dark Nights.

It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark

Nights might mean. The moon was on the wane: each night there

was a longer interval of darkness.

And I now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the

little Upper-world people for the dark.

I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the

new moon. I felt pretty sure now that my second

hypothesis was all wrong.

The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks

their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away.

The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards,

or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship.

The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.

They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks,

subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface

intolerable.

And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their

habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.

They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing

animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on

the organism.

But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed.

The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace.

Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease

and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back

changed!

Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew.

They were becoming reacquainted with Fear.

And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-

world.

It seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of

my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside.

I tried to recall the form of it.

I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the

time.

'Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious Fear, I

was differently constituted.

I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not

paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself.

Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might

sleep.

With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that

confidence I had lost in realizing to what creatures night by night I lay exposed.

I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them.

I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.

'I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found nothing

that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible.

All the buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as

the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be.

Then the tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of

its walls came back to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon

my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west.

The distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer

eighteen.

I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively

diminished.

In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working through

the sole--they were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors--so that I was lame.

And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted

black against the pale yellow of the sky.

'Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a while she

desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off

on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets.

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were

an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.

At least she utilized them for that purpose.

And that reminds me! In changing my jacket I found...'

The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two

withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table.

Then he resumed his narrative.

'As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the hill crest

towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the house of grey

stone.

But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and

contrived to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear.

You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk?

Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation

about that evening stillness.

The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the

sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the

colour of my fears.

In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened.

I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could,

indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither

and waiting for the dark.

In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a

declaration of war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?

'So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night.

The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.

The ground grew dim and the trees black.

Weena's fears and her fatigue grew upon her.

I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her.

Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and, closing her

eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder.

So we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked

into a little river.

This I waded, and went up the opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping

houses, and by a statue--a Faun, or some such figure, minus the head.

Here too were acacias.

So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and the

darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.

'From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black before

me. I hesitated at this.

I could see no end to it, either to the right or the left.

Feeling tired--my feet, in particular, were very sore--I carefully lowered Weena from

my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon the turf.

I could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my

direction. I looked into the thickness of the wood and

thought of what it might hide.

Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars.

Even were there no other lurking danger--a danger I did not care to let my imagination

loose upon--there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the tree-boles to

strike against.

'I was very tired, too, after the excitements of the day; so I decided that I

would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.

'Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep.

I carefully wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the

moonrise.

The hill-side was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now

and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was

very clear.

I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling.

All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which

is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them

in unfamiliar groupings.

But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-

dust as of yore.

Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was

even more splendid than our own green Sirius.

And amid all these scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and

steadily like the face of an old friend.

'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!

'Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by

regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.

Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man,

had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time

Necessity had come home to him.

I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay.

But this attitude of mind was impossible.

However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of

the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their

degradation and their Fear.

'I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue.

My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms of

metal or stone as I could contrive.

That necessity was immediate.

In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so that I should have the

weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient against these

Morlocks.

Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the

White Sphinx. I had in mind a battering ram.

I had a persuasion that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light

before me I should discover the Time Machine and escape.

I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away.

Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time.

And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building which

my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.

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CHAPTER VIII

'I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted