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March 6, 2025 16 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.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eight of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Time Machine,
Chapter eight. I found the Palace of green Porcelain when
we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.

(00:22):
Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and
great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from
the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a
turfy down and looking northeastward. Before entered it, I was
surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where
I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must have once been. I thought, then,

(00:46):
though I never followed up the thought of what might
have happened or might be happening to the living things
in the sea. The material of the palace proved on
examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of
it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I
thought rather foolishly that Weena might help me to interpret this,

(01:11):
but I only learned that the bare idea of writing
had never entered her head. She always seemed to me,
I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her
affection was so human Within the big valves of the door,
which were open and broken. We found, instead of the

(01:31):
customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows.
At the first glance I was reminded of a museum.
The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable
array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same gray covering.
Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the center

(01:52):
of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of
a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique feet that
it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the megatherium.
The skull and upper bones lay beside it in the
thick dust, and in one place where rain water had
dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself

(02:13):
had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the
huge skeleton barrel of a brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed.
Going towards the side, I found what appeared to be
sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found
the old, familiar glass cases of our own time, but

(02:35):
they must have been air tight, to judge from the
fair preservation of some of their contents. Clearly we stood
among the ruins of some latter day South Kensington. Here
apparently was the palaeontological section, and the very splendid array
of fossils. It must have been, though the inevitable process

(02:57):
of decay, that had been staved off for a time,
and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost
ninety nine hundreds of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness,
if with extreme slowness, at work again upon all its treasures.
Here and there I found traces of the little people

(03:17):
in the shape of rare fossils, broken to pieces or
threaded in strings upon reeds, and the cases had in
some instances been bodily removed by the morlocks. As I judged,
the place was very silent, the thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena,
who had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping

(03:38):
glass of a case, presently came as I stared about me,
and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
And at first I was so much surprised by this
ancient monument of an intellectual age, that I gave no
thought to the possibilities it presented, even my preoccupation. About

(03:59):
the time my machine receded a little from my mind
to judge from the size of the place, this palace
of green porcelain had a great deal more in it
than a gallery of paleontology, possibly historical galleries. It might
be even a library. To me, at least in my

(04:19):
present circumstances, 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 sight of a
block of sulfur set my mind running on gunpowder. But

(04:40):
I could find no saltpeter, indeed no nitrates of any kind.
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 whole they were the best preserved of
all I saw, I had little interest. I am no

(05:03):
specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very
ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
Apparently this section had been 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,

(05:23):
desiccated mummies, and jars that had once held spirit, a
brown dust of departed plants. That was all I was
sorry for that, because I should have been glad to
trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated
nature had been attained. Then we came to a gallery
of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill lit, the floor

(05:47):
of it running downward at a slight angle from the
end at which I entered. At intervals, white globes hung
from the ceiling, many of them cracked and smashed, which
suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit. Here
I was more in my element, for rising on either
side of me were the huge bulks of big machines,

(06:09):
all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still
fairly complete. You know, I have a certain weakness for mechanism,
and I was inclined to linger among these. The more
so as for the most part they had the interest
of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses
at what they were. For I fancied that if I

(06:32):
could solve their puzzles, I should find myself 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 have noticed that the floor
of the gallery sloped at all. Footnote. It may be,

(06:52):
of course, that the floor did not slope, but that
the museum was built into the side of a hill. Editor.
The and I had come in at was quite above ground,
and was lit by rare slit like windows. As you
went down the length, the ground came up against these windows,
until at last there was a pit like the area

(07:14):
of a London house before each, and only a narrow
line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along,
puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon
them to notice the gradual diminution of the light until
Weena's increasing apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw that

(07:35):
the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.
I hesitated, and then as I looked round me, I
saw that the dust was less abundant and its surface less.
Even further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be
broken by a number of small, narrow footprints. My sense

(07:56):
of the immediate presence of the morlocks revived. At that
I felt that I was wasting my time in the
academic examination of machinery. 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 of
making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness

(08:17):
of the gallery, I heard a peculiar pattering and the
same odd noises I had heard down the well. I
took Weena's hand, then struck with a sudden idea, I
left her and turned to a machine from which projected
a lever not unlike those in a signal box. Clambering

(08:38):
up the stand and grasping this lever in my hands,
I put all my weight upon its sideways. Suddenly, Weena,
deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had
judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it
snapped after a minute's strain, and I rejoined her with
a mace in my hand, more than sufficient, I judged

(08:58):
for any morlock skull I might encounter, and I longed
very much to kill a morlock or so very inhuman.
You may think to want to go killing one's own descendants,
But it was impossible, somehow to feel any humanity in
the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena and a

(09:20):
persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder,
my time machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight
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

(09:42):
a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and
charred rags that hung from the sides of it I
presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had
long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print
had left them. But here and there were warped boards
and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.

(10:06):
Had I been a literary man, I might perhaps have
moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was,
the thing that struck me with the keenest force was
the enormous waste of labor to which this somber wilderness
of rotting paper testified at the time, I will confess
that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my

(10:30):
own seventeen papers upon physical optics. Then, going up a
broad staircase, we came to what may once have been
a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not
a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at one end,
where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved.

(10:52):
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
were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned
to Weena dance. I cried to her in her own tongue,
for now I had a weapon, indeed, against the horrible

(11:15):
creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon
the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge delight,
I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling the
land of the leal as cheerfully as I could. In
part it was a modest can can, in part a

(11:35):
step dance, in part a skirt dance. So far as
my tail coat permitted and in part original, for I
am naturally inventive, as you know now, I still think
that for this box of matches to have escaped the
wear of time for immemorial years was most strange. As
for me it was a most fortunate thing. Yet oddly

(11:59):
enough I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor.
I found it in a sealed jar that, by chance,
I suppose had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at
first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly,
But the odor of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay,

(12:23):
this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many
thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a Sepia painting
I had once seen, done from the ink of a
fossil bellumnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions
of years ago. I was about to throw it away,
but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with

(12:45):
a good bright flame, was in fact an excellent candle,
and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however,
nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As
yet my iron robar was the most helpful thing I
had chanced upon. Nevertheless, I left that gallery greatly elated.

(13:08):
I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon.
It would require a great effort of memory to recall
my explorations in at all the proper order. I remember
a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how
I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword.
I could not carry both, however, and my bar of

(13:30):
iron promised best against the bronze gates. There were numbers
of guns, pistols, and rifles, and most were masses of rust.
But many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.
But any cartridges or powder there may once have been
had rotted into dust. One corner I saw was charred

(13:53):
and shattered, perhaps, I thought, by an explosion. Among the specimens.
In another place was a vast array of idols, Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician,
every country on Earth, I should think, And here, yielding
to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the
nose of a stea tight monster from South America that

(14:17):
particularly took my fancy as the evening drew on my
interest Waned. I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent,
often ruinous, the exhibit sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite,
sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself near

(14:37):
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 little
side gallery, I made my essay. I I never felt

(15:00):
such a disappointment as I did in waiting five ten,
fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course,
the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from
their presence. I really believed that had they not been so,
I should have rushed off incontinently and blown sphinx bronze doors,

(15:22):
and as it proved my chances of finding the time
machine altogether into non existence. It was after that I
think that we came to a little open court within
the palace. It was turfed and had three fruit trees.
So we rested and refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset. I began

(15:44):
to consider our position. Night was creeping upon us, and
my inaccessible hiding place had still to be found, But
that troubled me very little. Now I had in my
possession a thing that was perhaps the best of all defenses.
Again against the morlocks, I had matches. I had the

(16:04):
camphor in my pocket too. If a blaze were needed.
It seemed to me that the best thing we could
do would be to pass the night in the open,
protected by 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,

(16:25):
I felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up to
this I had refrained from forcing them, largely because of
the mystery on 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.

(16:46):
End of Chapter eight
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