March 6, 2025 • 13 mins
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is a classic science fiction novel that follows an unnamed scientist, known as the Time Traveller, who invents a machine that allows him to travel through time. He journeys to the distant future, arriving in the year 802,701, where he encounters two distinct races: the gentle, childlike Eloi and the sinister, underground-dwelling Morlocks. As he explores this strange future, he realizes the dark implications of humanity’s evolution. The novel explores themes of class struggle, the passage of time, and the fate of civilization, making it one of the most influential works in science fiction history.
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eleven of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Time Machine,
Chapter eleven. I have already told you of the sickness
and confusion that comes with time traveling. And this time
(00:21):
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
(00:44):
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 second's hand of a watch into futurity. As
(01:07):
I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance
of things. The palpitating grayness grew darker. Then, though I
was still traveling with prodigious velocity, The blinking succession of
day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,
returned and more and more marked. This puzzled me very
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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,
(02:10):
growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points
of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun,
very 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,
(02:35):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:19):
grew visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the
time machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue.
Northeastward 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 southeastward it
(03:43):
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 color,
and all the trace of life that I could see
at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every
projecting point on their southeastern face. It was the same
(04:08):
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 southwest to rise into
a sharp, bright horizon against the wan sky. There were
(04:30):
no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of
wind was stirring. Only a slightly 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
(04:50):
salt pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense
of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I
was breathing very fat. 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
(05:11):
away up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream
and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go
slanting and flittering 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
(05:35):
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 crablike creature.
Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table,
with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big
(05:56):
claws swaying, its long antennae like Carter's whips waving and feeling,
and its stalked eyes gleaming at you at 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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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 saw that I
had grasped the antennae of another monster crab that stood
just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks,
(06:58):
its mouth was all alive without appetite, and its vast,
ungainly claws, smeared with an algeal slime, were descending upon me.
In a moment, my hand was on the lever, and
I placed a month between myself and these monsters. But
I was still on the same beach and saw them distinctly. Now,
(07:18):
as soon as I stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in the somber 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,
(07:40):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters,
the uniform, poisonous looking green of the likeness 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,
(08:04):
the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the
same crowd of earthy crestacea 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 traveled, stopping ever and again
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkening heavens.
Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its
livid green liver wortz and lichens, seemed lifeless, And now
it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me
(09:08):
rare white flakes. Ever and again came eddying down to
the northeastward. The glare of snow lay under the starlight
of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating
crest of hellicks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice
among the sea margin, with drifting masses further out, but
the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under
(09:31):
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
(09:55):
testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sand bank
that 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
(10:17):
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
(10:40):
stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day,
And then I realized 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
(11:02):
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,
(11:23):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:06):
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
(12:31):
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.
(12:52):
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,
(13:16):
but a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote
and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the
saddle end of chapter eleven.
Chapter eleven of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Time Machine,
Chapter eleven. I have already told you of the sickness
and confusion that comes with time traveling. And this time
(00:21):
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
(00:44):
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 second's hand of a watch into futurity. As
(01:07):
I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance
of things. The palpitating grayness grew darker. Then, though I
was still traveling with prodigious velocity, The blinking succession of
day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,
returned and more and more marked. This puzzled me very
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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,
(02:10):
growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points
of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun,
very 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,
(02:35):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:19):
grew visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the
time machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue.
Northeastward 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 southeastward it
(03:43):
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 color,
and all the trace of life that I could see
at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every
projecting point on their southeastern face. It was the same
(04:08):
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 southwest to rise into
a sharp, bright horizon against the wan sky. There were
(04:30):
no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of
wind was stirring. Only a slightly 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
(04:50):
salt pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense
of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I
was breathing very fat. 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
(05:11):
away up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream
and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go
slanting and flittering 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
(05:35):
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 crablike creature.
Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table,
with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big
(05:56):
claws swaying, its long antennae like Carter's whips waving and feeling,
and its stalked eyes gleaming at you at 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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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 saw that I
had grasped the antennae of another monster crab that stood
just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks,
(06:58):
its mouth was all alive without appetite, and its vast,
ungainly claws, smeared with an algeal slime, were descending upon me.
In a moment, my hand was on the lever, and
I placed a month between myself and these monsters. But
I was still on the same beach and saw them distinctly. Now,
(07:18):
as soon as I stopped, dozens of them seemed to
be crawling here and there in the somber 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,
(07:40):
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow stirring monsters,
the uniform, poisonous looking green of the likeness 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,
(08:04):
the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the
same crowd of earthy crestacea 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 traveled, stopping ever and again
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkening heavens.
Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its
livid green liver wortz and lichens, seemed lifeless, And now
it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me
(09:08):
rare white flakes. Ever and again came eddying down to
the northeastward. The glare of snow lay under the starlight
of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating
crest of hellicks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice
among the sea margin, with drifting masses further out, but
the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under
(09:31):
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
(09:55):
testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sand bank
that 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
(10:17):
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
(10:40):
stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day,
And then I realized 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
(11:02):
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,
(11:23):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:06):
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
(12:31):
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.
(12:52):
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,
(13:16):
but a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote
and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the
saddle end of chapter eleven.
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