The Time Machine - Chapter 8

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Episode Transcript

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Chapter eight of The Time Machine byH. G. Wells. I found
the Palace of Green Porcelain when weapproached it about noon, deserted and falling
into ruin. Only ragged vestiges ofglass remained in its windows, and great
sheets of the green facing had fallenaway from the corroded metallic framework. It

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lay very high upon a turfy downand looking northeastward. Before I entered it,
I was surprised to see a largeestuary or even creek, where I
judged Wandsworth and Battersea must have oncebeen. I thought, then, though
I never followed up the thought ofwhat might have happened or might be happening
to the living things in the sea. The material of the palace proved on

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examination to be indeed porcelain, andalong the face of it I saw an
inscription in some unknown character. Ithought rather foolishly that Weena might help me
to interpret this, but I onlylearned that the bare idea of writing had
never entered her head. She alwaysseemed to me, I fancy, more

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human than she was, perhaps becauseher affection was so human. Within the
big valves of the door, whichwere open and broken, we found instead
of the customary hall, a longgallery lit by many side windows. At
the first glance I was reminded ofa museum. The tiled floor was thick

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with dust, and a remarkable arrayof miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same
gray covering. Then I perceived,standing strange and gaunt in the center of
the hall, what was clearly thelower part of a huge skeleton. I
recognized by the oblique feet that itwas some extinct creature after the fashion of

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the megatherium. The skull and upperbones lay beside it in the thick dust,
and in one place, where rainwaterhad dropped through a leak in the
roof, the thing itself had beenworn away. Further in the gallery was
the huge skeleton barrel of a brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going

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towards the side, I found whatappeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing
away the thick dust, I foundthe old familiar glass cases of our own
time, but they must have beenair tight, to judge from the fair
preservation of some of their contents.Clearly we stood among the ruins of some

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latter day South Kensington. Here apparentlywas the paleontological section, and a very
splendid array of fossils. It musthave been though the inevitable process of decay,
that had been staved off for atime, and had, through the
extinction of bacteria and fungi, lostninety nine hundreds of its force, was

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nevertheless, with extreme sureness, ifwith extreme slowness, at work again upon
all its treasures. Here and thereI found traces of the little people in
the shape of rare fossils, brokento pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds,
and the cases had in some instancesbeen bodily removed by the morlocks.

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As I judged, the place wasvery silent, the thick dust deadened our
footsteps. Weena, who had beenrolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass
of a case, presently came asI stared about me, and very quietly
took my hand and stood beside me. And at first I was so much

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surprised by this ancient monument of anintellectual age, that I gave no thought
to the possibilities it presented. Evenmy preoccupation about the time machine receded a
little from my mind. To judge, from the size of the place,
this palace of green Purslain had agreat deal more in it than a gallery
of paleontology, possibly historical galleries.It might be even a library. To

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me, at least in my presentcircumstances, these would be vastly more interesting
than this spectacle of old time geology. In decay exploring, I found another
short gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals,
and the side of a block ofsulfur set my mind running on gunpowder.
But I could find no saltpeter,indeed no nitrates of any kind,

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doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago.Yet the sulfur hung in my mind and
set up a train of thinking.As for the rest of the contents of
that gallery, though on the wholethey were the best preserved of all I
saw, I had little interest.I am no specialist in mineralogy, and

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I went on down a very ruinousaisle running pa to the first hall I
had entered. Apparently this section hadbeen devoted to natural history, but everything
had long since passed out of recognition. A few shriveled and blackened vestiges of
what had once been stuffed animals,desiccated mummies in jars that had once held

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spirit, a brown dust of departedplants. That was all I was sorry
for that, because I should havebeen glad to trace the patent readjustments by
which the conquest of animated nature hadbeen attained. Then we came to a
gallery of simply colossal proportions, butsingularly ill lit, the floor of it,

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running downward at a slight angle fromthe end at which I entered.
At intervals, wide globes hung fromthe ceiling, many of them cracked and
smashed, which suggested that originally theplace had been artificially lit. Here I
was more in my element, forrising on either side of me were the
huge bulks of big machines, allgreatly corroded and many broken down, but

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some still fairly complete. You know, I have a certain weakness for mechanism,
and I was inclined to linger amongthese, the more so as for
the most part they had the interestof puzzles, and I could make only
the vaguest guesses at what they were. For I fancied that if I could

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solve their puzzles, I should findmyself in possession of powers that might be
of use against the morlocks. Suddenly, Weena came very close to my side,
so suddenly that she startled me.Had it not been for her,
I do not think I should havenoticed that the floor of the gallery sloped
at all. Footnote. It maybe, of course, that the floor

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did not slope, but that themuseum was built into the side of a
hill. Editor. The end Ihad come in at was quite above ground,
and was lit by rare slit likewindows. As you went down the
length, the ground came up againstthese windows, until at last there was
a pit like the area of aLondon house before each, and only a

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narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about
the machines, and had been toointent upon them to notice the gradual dimunition
of the light until Weena's increasing apprehensionsdrew my attention. Then I saw that
the gallery ran down at last intoa thick darkness. I hesitated, and

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then as I looked round me,I saw that the dust was less abundant
and its surface less. Even furtheraway towards the dimness, it appeared to
be broken by a number of small, narrow footprints. My sense of the
immediate presence of the morlocks revived.At that I felt that I was wasting

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my time in the academic examination ofmachinery. I called to mind that it
was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon,
no refuge, and no means ofmaking a fire. And then down
in the remote blackness of the gallery, I heard a peculiar pattering and the

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same odd noises I had heard downthe well. I took Weena's hand,
then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a
machine, from which projected a levernot unlike those in a signal box.
Clambering up the stand and grasping thislever in my hands, I put all

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my weight upon its sideways. Suddenly, Weena, deserted in the central aisle,
began to whimper. I had judgedthe strength of the lever pretty correctly,
for it snapped after a minute strain, and I rejoined her with a
mace in my hand, more thansufficient, I judged for any morlock's skull
I might encounter. And I longedvery much to kill a morlock, or

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so very inhuman you may think towant to go killing one's own descendants.
But it was impossible, somehow tofeel any humanity in the things. Only
my disinclination to leave Weena and apersuasion that if I began to slake my
thirst for murder, my time machinemight suffer, restrained me from going straight

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down the gallery and killing the brutes. I heard, well, mace in
one hand and Weena in the other. I went out of that gallery and
into another and still larger one,which, at the first glance reminded me
of a military chapel hung with tatteredflags. The brown and charred rags that
hung from the sides of it Ipresently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books.

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They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had
left them. But here and therewere warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that
told the tale well enough. HadI been a liter rymen, I might
perhaps have moralized upon the futility ofall ambition. But as it was,

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the thing that struck me with thekeenest force was the enormous waste of labor
to which this somber wilderness of rottingpaper testified. At the time, I
will confess that I thought chiefly ofthe philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers
upon physical optics. Then, goingup a broad staircase, we came to

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what may once have been a galleryof technical chemistry. And here I had
not a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at one end, where the
roof had collapsed, this gallery waswell preserved. I went eagerly to every
unbroken case, and at last,in one of the really air tight cases,
I found a box of matches.Very eagerly I tried them. They

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were perfectly good. They were noteven damp. I turned to Weena dance.
I cried to her in her owntongue, for now I had a
weapon, indeed, against the horriblecreatures we feared. And so, in
that derelict museum, upon the thicksoft carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge
delight, I solemnly performed a kindof composite dance, whistling the land of

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the leal as cheerfully as I could. In part it was a modest can
can, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance, so
far as my tailcoat permitted, andin part original, for I am naturally
inventive. As you know now,I still think that for this box of

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matches to have escaped the wear oftime for immemorial years was most strange.
As for me it was a mostfortunate thing. Yet oddly enough I found
a far unlikelier substance, and thatwas camphor. I found it in a
sealed jar that, by chance,I suppose had been really hermetically sealed.

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I fancied at first that it wasparaffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly,
But the odor of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay, this
volatile substance had chanced to survive,perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It
reminded me of a Sepia painting Ihad once seen, done from the ink

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of a fossil bellumnite that must haveperished and become fossilized millions of years ago.
I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was
inflammable and burned with a good brightflame, was in fact an excellent candle,
and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however,
nor any means of breaking down thebronze doors. As yet, my

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iron crowbar was the most helpful thingI had chanced upon. Nevertheless, I
left that gallery greatly elated. Icannot tell you all the story of that
long afternoon. It would require agreat effort of memory to recall my explorations
in at all the proper order.I remember a long gallery of rusting stands

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of arms, and how I hesitatedbetween my crowbar and a hatchet or a
sword. I could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron
promised best against the bronze gates.There were numbers of guns, pistols,
and rifles, and most were massesof rust, but many were of some
new metal and still fairly sound.But any cartridges or powder there may once

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have been had rotted into dust.One corner I saw was charred and shattered,
perhaps, I thought, by anexplosion. Among the specimens. In
another place was a vast array ofidols Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician,
every country on Earth, I shouldthink. And here, yielding to

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an irresistible impulse, I wrote myname upon the nose of a stee tight
monster from South America that particularly tookmy fancy. As the evening drew on
my interest, Waned, I wentthrough gallery after gallery, dusty, silent,
often ruinous, the exhibit sometimes mereheaps of rust, and late nite

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sometimes fresher. In one place,I suddenly found myself near the model of
a tin mine, and then,by the merest accident, I discovered in
an air tight case two dynamite cartridges. I shouted eureka and smashed the case
with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a

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little side gallery, I made myessay. I never felt such a disappointment
as I did in waiting five ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never
came. Of course, the thingswere dummies, as I might have guessed
from their presence. I really believethat had they not been so, I

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should have rushed off incontinently and blownsphinx bronze doors, and as it proved
my chances of finding the time machineall together into non existence. It was
after that I think that we cameto a little open court within the palace.
It was turfed and had three fruittrees. So we rested and refreshed

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ourselves. Towards sunset, I beganto consider our position. Night was creeping
upon us, and my inaccessible hidingplace had still to be found, but
that troubled me very little. NowI had in my possession a thing that
was perhaps the best of all defensesagainst the Morlocks. I had matches.

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I had the camphor in my pockettoo, if a blaze were needed.
It seemed to me that the bestthing we could do would be to pass
the night in the open, protectedby a fire. In the morning there
was the getting of the time machine. Towards that. As yet I had
only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt

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very differently towards those bronze doors.Up to this I had refrained from forcing
them, largely because of the mysteryon the other side. They had never
impressed me as being very strong,and I hoped to find my bar of
iron not altogether inadequate for the work. End of Chapter eight.