Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Chapter eleven of The Time Machine byH. G. Wells. I have
already told you of the sickness andconfusion that comes with time traveling. And
this time I was not seated properlyin the saddle, but sideways and in
an unstable fashion. For an indefinitetime. I clung to the machine as
(00:24):
it swayed and vibrated, quite unheedinghow 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 thousandsof millions. Now, instead of reversing
(00:45):
the levers, I had pulled themover so as to go forward with them.
And when I came to look atthese indicators, I found that the
thousand's hand was sweeping round as fastas the second's hand of a watch into
futurity. As I drove on,a peculiar change crept over the appearance of
things. The palpitating grayness grew darker. Then, though I was still traveling
(01:07):
with prodigious velocity, the blinking successionof day and night, which was usually
indicative of a slower pace, returnedand more and more marked. This puzzled
me very much. At first,The alternations of night and day grew slower
and slower, and so did thepassage of the sun across the sky,
(01:30):
until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last, a steady twilight brooded
over the earth, a twilight onlybroken now and then when a comet glared
across the darkling sky. The bandof light that had indicated the sun had
long since disappeared, For the Sunhad ceased to set. It simply rose
(01:52):
and fell in the west, andgrew ever broader and more red. All
trace of the moon had vanished.The circling of the stars, growing slower
and slower, had given place tocreeping points of light. At last,
some time before I stopped, thesun, very red and very large,
(02:14):
halted motionless upon the horizon, avast dome, glowing with a dull heat,
and now and then suffering a momentaryextinction. At one time it had,
for a little while glowed more brilliantlyagain, but it speedily reverted to
its sullen red heat. I perceived, by this slowing down of its rising
(02:37):
and setting, that the work ofthe tidal drag was done the Earth had
come to rest with one face tothe Sun, even as in our own
time, the Moon faces the Earthvery cautiously. For I remembered my former
headlong fall, I began to reversemy motion. Slower and slower went the
(02:59):
circling hand hands, until the thousandsone seemed motionless, and the daily one
was no longer a mere mist uponits scale, Still slower, until the
dim outlines of a desolate beach grewvisible. I stopped very gently and sat
upon the time machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue.
(03:22):
Northeastward it was inky black, andout of the blackness shone brightly and steadily
the pale white stars. Overhead itwas a deep Indian red and starless,
and southeastward it grew brighter to aglowing scarlet, where cut by the horizon
lay the huge hull of the Sun, red and motionless. The rocks about
(03:46):
me were of a harsh reddish color, and all the trace of life that
I could see at first was theintensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point
on their southeastern face. It wasthe same rich green that one sees on
forest moss or on the lichen incaves. Plants, which like these grow
(04:08):
in a perpetual twilight. The machinewas standing on a sloping beach. The
sea stretched away to the southwest torise into a sharp, bright horizon against
the wan sky. There were nobreakers and no waves, for not a
breath of wind was stirring. Onlya slightly oily swell rose and fell like
(04:31):
a gentle breathing, and showed thatthe eternal sea was still moving and living.
And along the margin where the watersometimes 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 Iwas breathing very fast. The sensation reminded
(04:55):
me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air
to be more rarefied than it isnow. Far away up the desolate slope,
I heard a harsh scream, andsaw a thing like a huge white
butterfly go slanting and flittering up intothe sky and circling disappear over some low
(05:15):
hillocks beyond. The sound of itsvoice 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 takento be a reddish mass of rock,
was moving slowly towards me. ThenI saw the thing was really a monstrous
(05:38):
crab like creature. Can you imaginea crab as large as yonder table,
with its many legs moving slowly anduncertainly, its big claws swaying, its
long antennae like Carter's whips waving andfeeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at
you at either side of its metallicfront. It was corrugated and ornamented with
(06:01):
ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustationblotched it. Here and there. I
could see the many palps of itscomplicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
As I stared at this sinister apparitioncrawling towards me, I felt a
tickling on my cheek, as thougha fly had lighted there. I tried
(06:24):
to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned,
and almost immediately came another by myear. I struck at this and caught
something threadlike. It was drawn swiftlyout of my hand with a frightful qualm.
I turned and saw that I hadgrasped the antenna of another monster crab
(06:45):
that stood just behind me. Itsevil eyes were wriggling on their stalks,
its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast, ungainly claws,
smeared with an algile slime, weredescending upon me. In a moment,
my hand was on the lever,and I had placed a month between myself
and these monsters. But I wasstill on the same beach and saw them
(07:10):
distinctly. Now, as soon asI stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in thesomber light, among the foliated sheets of
intense green. I cannot convey thesense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky,the northward blackness, the salt dead sea,
(07:31):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters, the uniform,
poisonous looking green of the lichnous plants, the thin air that hurts one's
lungs, all contributed to an appallingeffect. I moved on a hundred years,
and there was the same red sun, a little larger, a little
(07:55):
duller, the same dying sea,the same chill air, and the same
crowd of earthy crestacea creeping in andout among the green weed and the red
rocks. And in the westward skyI saw a curved pale line like a
vast new moon. So I traveled, stopping ever and again in great strides
(08:18):
of a thousand years or more,drawn on by the mystery of the Earth's
fate, watching with a strange fascinationthe Sun grow larger and duller in the
westward sky, and the life ofthe old Earth eb away at last more
than thirty million years. Hence thehuge red hot dome of the Sun had
(08:39):
come to obscure nearly a tenth partof the darkening heavens. Then I stopped
once more, for the crawling multitudeof crabs had disappeared, and the red
beach, save for its livid greenliverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless, And
now it was flecked with white.A bitter cold assailed me rare white flakes.
(09:01):
Ever and again came eddying down tothe northeastward. The glare of snow
lay under the starlight of the sablesky, and I could see an undulating
crest of hillocks, pinkish white Therewere fringes of ice among the sea margin,
with drifting masses further out, butthe main expanse of that salt ocean,
(09:22):
all bloody under the eternal sunset,was still unfrozen. I looked about
me to see if any traces ofanimal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension
still kept me in the saddle ofthe machine. But I saw nothing moving
in earth, or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone
(09:46):
testified that life was not extinct.A shallow sand bank that appeared in the
sea, and the water had recededfrom the beach, I fancied I saw
some black object flopping about upon thisbank, But it became motionless as I
looked at it, and I judgedthat my eye had been deceived, and
(10:07):
that the black object was merely arock. The stars in the sky were
intensely bright and seemed to me totwinkle very little. Suddenly I noticed that
the circular westward outline of the sunhad changed, that a concavity a bay,
had appeared in the curve. Isaw this grow larger for a minute.
(10:31):
Perhaps I stared aghast at this blacknessthat was creeping over the day,
and then I realized that an eclipsewas beginning. Either the Moon or the
planet Mercury was passing across the Sun'sdisk naturally. At first I took it
to be the Moon, but thereis much to incline me to believe that
(10:52):
what I really saw was the transitof 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, andthe showering white flakes in the air increased
in number. From the edge ofthe sea came a ripple and whisper.
(11:13):
Beyond these lifeless sounds, the worldwas silent, silent. It would be
hard to convey the stillness of it. All, the sounds of man,
the bleating of sheep, the criesof birds, the hum of insects,
the stir that makes the background ofour lives. All that was over.
(11:33):
As the darkness thickened, the eddyingflakes grew more abundant, dancing before my
eyes, and the cold of theair more intense. At last, one
by one, swiftly, one afterthe other, the white peaks of the
distant hills vanished into blackness. Thebreeze rose to a moaning wind. I
(11:54):
saw the black central shadow of theeclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment,
the pale stars alone were visible.All else was rayless obscurity. The
sky was absolutely black. A horrorof this great darkness came on me.
(12:15):
The cold that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing
overcame me. I shivered, anda deadly nausea seized me. Then like
a red hot bow in the skyappeared the edge of the sun. I
got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing
(12:37):
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 waterof the sea. It was a round
thing, the size of a footballperhaps, or it may be bigger,
and tentacles trailed down from it.It seemed black against the weltering blood red
(13:01):
water, and it was hopping fitfullyabout. Then I felt I was fainting,
but a terrible dread of lying helplessin that remote and awful twilight sustained
me. While I clambered upon thesaddle end of chapter eleven,
Chapter eleven of The Time Machine byH. G. Wells. I have
already told you of the sickness andconfusion that comes with time traveling. And
this time I was not seated properlyin the saddle, but sideways and in
an unstable fashion. For an indefinitetime. I clung to the machine as
(00:24):
it swayed and vibrated, quite unheedinghow 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 thousandsof millions. Now, instead of reversing
(00:45):
the levers, I had pulled themover so as to go forward with them.
And when I came to look atthese indicators, I found that the
thousand's hand was sweeping round as fastas the second's hand of a watch into
futurity. As I drove on,a peculiar change crept over the appearance of
things. The palpitating grayness grew darker. Then, though I was still traveling
(01:07):
with prodigious velocity, the blinking successionof day and night, which was usually
indicative of a slower pace, returnedand more and more marked. This puzzled
me very much. At first,The alternations of night and day grew slower
and slower, and so did thepassage of the sun across the sky,
(01:30):
until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last, a steady twilight brooded
over the earth, a twilight onlybroken now and then when a comet glared
across the darkling sky. The bandof light that had indicated the sun had
long since disappeared, For the Sunhad ceased to set. It simply rose
(01:52):
and fell in the west, andgrew ever broader and more red. All
trace of the moon had vanished.The circling of the stars, growing slower
and slower, had given place tocreeping points of light. At last,
some time before I stopped, thesun, very red and very large,
(02:14):
halted motionless upon the horizon, avast dome, glowing with a dull heat,
and now and then suffering a momentaryextinction. At one time it had,
for a little while glowed more brilliantlyagain, but it speedily reverted to
its sullen red heat. I perceived, by this slowing down of its rising
(02:37):
and setting, that the work ofthe tidal drag was done the Earth had
come to rest with one face tothe Sun, even as in our own
time, the Moon faces the Earthvery cautiously. For I remembered my former
headlong fall, I began to reversemy motion. Slower and slower went the
(02:59):
circling hand hands, until the thousandsone seemed motionless, and the daily one
was no longer a mere mist uponits scale, Still slower, until the
dim outlines of a desolate beach grewvisible. I stopped very gently and sat
upon the time machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue.
(03:22):
Northeastward it was inky black, andout of the blackness shone brightly and steadily
the pale white stars. Overhead itwas a deep Indian red and starless,
and southeastward it grew brighter to aglowing scarlet, where cut by the horizon
lay the huge hull of the Sun, red and motionless. The rocks about
(03:46):
me were of a harsh reddish color, and all the trace of life that
I could see at first was theintensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point
on their southeastern face. It wasthe same rich green that one sees on
forest moss or on the lichen incaves. Plants, which like these grow
(04:08):
in a perpetual twilight. The machinewas standing on a sloping beach. The
sea stretched away to the southwest torise into a sharp, bright horizon against
the wan sky. There were nobreakers and no waves, for not a
breath of wind was stirring. Onlya slightly oily swell rose and fell like
(04:31):
a gentle breathing, and showed thatthe eternal sea was still moving and living.
And along the margin where the watersometimes 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 Iwas breathing very fast. The sensation reminded
(04:55):
me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air
to be more rarefied than it isnow. Far away up the desolate slope,
I heard a harsh scream, andsaw a thing like a huge white
butterfly go slanting and flittering up intothe sky and circling disappear over some low
(05:15):
hillocks beyond. The sound of itsvoice 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 takento be a reddish mass of rock,
was moving slowly towards me. ThenI saw the thing was really a monstrous
(05:38):
crab like creature. Can you imaginea crab as large as yonder table,
with its many legs moving slowly anduncertainly, its big claws swaying, its
long antennae like Carter's whips waving andfeeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at
you at either side of its metallicfront. It was corrugated and ornamented with
(06:01):
ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustationblotched it. Here and there. I
could see the many palps of itscomplicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
As I stared at this sinister apparitioncrawling towards me, I felt a
tickling on my cheek, as thougha fly had lighted there. I tried
(06:24):
to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned,
and almost immediately came another by myear. I struck at this and caught
something threadlike. It was drawn swiftlyout of my hand with a frightful qualm.
I turned and saw that I hadgrasped the antenna of another monster crab
(06:45):
that stood just behind me. Itsevil eyes were wriggling on their stalks,
its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast, ungainly claws,
smeared with an algile slime, weredescending upon me. In a moment,
my hand was on the lever,and I had placed a month between myself
and these monsters. But I wasstill on the same beach and saw them
(07:10):
distinctly. Now, as soon asI stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in thesomber light, among the foliated sheets of
intense green. I cannot convey thesense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky,the northward blackness, the salt dead sea,
(07:31):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters, the uniform,
poisonous looking green of the lichnous plants, the thin air that hurts one's
lungs, all contributed to an appallingeffect. I moved on a hundred years,
and there was the same red sun, a little larger, a little
(07:55):
duller, the same dying sea,the same chill air, and the same
crowd of earthy crestacea creeping in andout among the green weed and the red
rocks. And in the westward skyI saw a curved pale line like a
vast new moon. So I traveled, stopping ever and again in great strides
(08:18):
of a thousand years or more,drawn on by the mystery of the Earth's
fate, watching with a strange fascinationthe Sun grow larger and duller in the
westward sky, and the life ofthe old Earth eb away at last more
than thirty million years. Hence thehuge red hot dome of the Sun had
(08:39):
come to obscure nearly a tenth partof the darkening heavens. Then I stopped
once more, for the crawling multitudeof crabs had disappeared, and the red
beach, save for its livid greenliverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless, And
now it was flecked with white.A bitter cold assailed me rare white flakes.
(09:01):
Ever and again came eddying down tothe northeastward. The glare of snow
lay under the starlight of the sablesky, and I could see an undulating
crest of hillocks, pinkish white Therewere fringes of ice among the sea margin,
with drifting masses further out, butthe main expanse of that salt ocean,
(09:22):
all bloody under the eternal sunset,was still unfrozen. I looked about
me to see if any traces ofanimal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension
still kept me in the saddle ofthe machine. But I saw nothing moving
in earth, or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone
(09:46):
testified that life was not extinct.A shallow sand bank that appeared in the
sea, and the water had recededfrom the beach, I fancied I saw
some black object flopping about upon thisbank, But it became motionless as I
looked at it, and I judgedthat my eye had been deceived, and
(10:07):
that the black object was merely arock. The stars in the sky were
intensely bright and seemed to me totwinkle very little. Suddenly I noticed that
the circular westward outline of the sunhad changed, that a concavity a bay,
had appeared in the curve. Isaw this grow larger for a minute.
(10:31):
Perhaps I stared aghast at this blacknessthat was creeping over the day,
and then I realized that an eclipsewas beginning. Either the Moon or the
planet Mercury was passing across the Sun'sdisk naturally. At first I took it
to be the Moon, but thereis much to incline me to believe that
(10:52):
what I really saw was the transitof 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, andthe showering white flakes in the air increased
in number. From the edge ofthe sea came a ripple and whisper.
(11:13):
Beyond these lifeless sounds, the worldwas silent, silent. It would be
hard to convey the stillness of it. All, the sounds of man,
the bleating of sheep, the criesof birds, the hum of insects,
the stir that makes the background ofour lives. All that was over.
(11:33):
As the darkness thickened, the eddyingflakes grew more abundant, dancing before my
eyes, and the cold of theair more intense. At last, one
by one, swiftly, one afterthe other, the white peaks of the
distant hills vanished into blackness. Thebreeze rose to a moaning wind. I
(11:54):
saw the black central shadow of theeclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment,
the pale stars alone were visible.All else was rayless obscurity. The
sky was absolutely black. A horrorof this great darkness came on me.
(12:15):
The cold that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing
overcame me. I shivered, anda deadly nausea seized me. Then like
a red hot bow in the skyappeared the edge of the sun. I
got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing
(12:37):
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 waterof the sea. It was a round
thing, the size of a footballperhaps, or it may be bigger,
and tentacles trailed down from it.It seemed black against the weltering blood red
(13:01):
water, and it was hopping fitfullyabout. Then I felt I was fainting,
but a terrible dread of lying helplessin that remote and awful twilight sustained
me. While I clambered upon thesaddle end of chapter eleven,
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