March 6, 2025 • 14 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 three of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Time Machine,
Chapter three. I told some of you last Thursday of
the principles of the time machine, and showed you the
actual thing itself incomplete in the workshop. There. It is
(00:23):
now a little travel worn truly, and one of the
ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent, but
the rest of it sound enough. I expected to finish
it on Friday. But on Friday, when the putting together
was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel
bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I
(00:44):
had to get remade, so that the thing was not
complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to
day that the first of all time machines began its career.
I gave it at last tap, tried all the screws again,
put one more dry oiled on the quartz rod, and
sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who
(01:07):
holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same
wonder at what will come next as I felt. Then
I took the starting lever in one hand and the
stopping one in the other pressed the first, and almost
immediately the second, I seemed to reel. I felt a
nightmare sensation of falling, and looking around, I saw the
(01:29):
laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened. For a moment
I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I
noted the clock a moment before, as it seemed it
had stood at a minute or so past ten. Now
it was nearly half past three. I drew a breath,
(01:51):
set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy
and went dark. Missus Watchett came in and walked, apparently
without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it
took her a minute or so to traverse the place,
but to me, she seemed to shoot across the room
(02:12):
like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its
extreme position. The night came like the turning out of
a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory
grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. Tomorrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
(02:34):
faster and faster. Still and Eddie murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb, confusedness descended on my mind. I
am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like
that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.
(02:59):
I felt that same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent
smash as I put on pace. Night followed day, like
the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of
the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and
I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping
(03:19):
it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I
suppose the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come
into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding,
but I was already going too fast to be conscious
of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled
(03:40):
dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of
darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then,
in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly
through her quarters from new to full, and had a
faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on,
(04:00):
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged
into one continuous grayness. The sky took on a wonderful
deepness of blue, a splendid, luminous color like that of
early twilight. The jerking sun became a streak of fire,
a brilliant arch in space, the moon a fainter, fluctuating band,
(04:25):
and I could see nothing of the stars, save now
and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The
landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the
hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder
rose above me, gray and dim. I saw trees growing
and changing, like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green.
(04:49):
They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge
buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dream.
The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and
flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials
that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently,
(05:14):
I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down
from solstice to solstice in a minute or less and
that consequently my pace was over a year a minute,
and minute by minute, the white snow flashed across the
world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief
green of spring. The unpleasant sensations of the start were
(05:38):
less poignant now they merged at last into a kind
of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of
the machine for which I was unable to account, But
my mind was too confused to attend to it. So,
with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung
(05:59):
myself into fewtrey. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently
a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind,
a certain curiosity, and therewith a certain dread, until at
last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments
(06:24):
of humanity, What wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I
thought might not appear. When I came to look nearly
into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before
my eyes, I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me,
more massive than any buildings of our own time, and
(06:45):
yet it seemed built of glimmer and mist. I saw
a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there
without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion,
the earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came
round to the business of stopping. The peculiar risk lay
(07:08):
in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I or the machine occupied. So long as
I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.
I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a
vapor through the interstices of intervening substances. But to come
(07:28):
to a stop involve the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule,
into whatever lay in my way. Meant bringing my atoms
into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that
a profound chemical reaction, possibly a far reaching explosion, would
result and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
(07:50):
possible dimensions into the unknown. This possibility had occurred to
me again and again while I was making the machine,
but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk.
One of the risks a man has got to take now.
The risk was inevitable. I no longer saw it in
(08:11):
the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the
absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of
the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could
never stop, and with a gust of petulance, I resolved
(08:33):
to stop forthwith, like an impatient fool, I lugged over
the lever, and incontinently, the thing went wreathing over, and
I was flung headlong through the air. There was the
sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I
may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail
was hissing round me, and I was sitting on a
(08:55):
soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seen deemed gray, But presently I remarked that the confusion
in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I
was on what seemed to be a little lawn in
a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that
(09:15):
their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower.
Under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail
hung in a cloud over the machine and drove along
the ground like smoke. In a moment, I was wet
to the skin. Fine hospitality, said I to a man
(09:35):
who has traveled innumerable years to see you. Presently, I
thought what a fool I was to get wet. I
stood up and looked round me. A colossal figure, carved
apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons
through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world
(09:57):
was invisible. My sincereations would be hard to describe. As
the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white
figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver
birch tree touched its shoulder. It was of a white
marble in shape, something like a winged sphinx, but the wings,
(10:19):
instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread
so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared
to me, was of bronze and was thick with vertigris.
It chanced that the face was towards me. The sightless
eyes seemed to watch me. There was the faint shadow
(10:39):
of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather worn,
and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood
looking at it for a little space, half a minute perhaps,
or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede,
as the hail drove before it, denser or thinner. At last,
(11:01):
I tore my eyes from it for a moment, and
saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that
the sky was lightning with the promise of the sun.
I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and
the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me.
What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?
(11:24):
What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty
had grown into a common passion? What if in this
interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed
into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful. I might seem
some old world, savage animal, only the more dreadful and
(11:46):
disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be
incontinently slain. Already I saw other vast shapes huge buildings
with intricate parapets and tall columns, with the wooded hillside
dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm, I
was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to
(12:10):
the time machine and strove hard to readjust it. As
I did so, the shafts of the sun smote through
the thunder storm. The gray downpour was swept aside and vanished,
like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me in
the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown
(12:31):
shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about
me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet
of the thunder storm, and picked out in white by
the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked
in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird
(12:52):
may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings
above and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I
took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again, grappling
fiercely wrist and knee with the machine. It gave under
my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently,
(13:14):
one hand on the saddle, the other on the lever.
I stood, panting heavily in attitude to mount again. But
with this recovery of a prompt retreat, my courage recovered.
I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world
of the remote future. In a circular opening high up
in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a
(13:36):
group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had
seen me, and their faces were directed towards me. Then
I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by
the white sphinx, were the heads and shoulders of men running.
One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to
the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine.
(13:59):
He was a slight creature, perhaps four feet high, clad
in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a
leather belt. Sandals or buskins I could not clearly distinguish
which were on his feet. His legs were bare to
the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that I
noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
(14:23):
He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature,
but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the
more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which
we used to hear so much. At the sight of him,
I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
(14:47):
End of Chapter three,
Chapter three of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Time Machine,
Chapter three. I told some of you last Thursday of
the principles of the time machine, and showed you the
actual thing itself incomplete in the workshop. There. It is
(00:23):
now a little travel worn truly, and one of the
ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent, but
the rest of it sound enough. I expected to finish
it on Friday. But on Friday, when the putting together
was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel
bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I
(00:44):
had to get remade, so that the thing was not
complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to
day that the first of all time machines began its career.
I gave it at last tap, tried all the screws again,
put one more dry oiled on the quartz rod, and
sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who
(01:07):
holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same
wonder at what will come next as I felt. Then
I took the starting lever in one hand and the
stopping one in the other pressed the first, and almost
immediately the second, I seemed to reel. I felt a
nightmare sensation of falling, and looking around, I saw the
(01:29):
laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened. For a moment
I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I
noted the clock a moment before, as it seemed it
had stood at a minute or so past ten. Now
it was nearly half past three. I drew a breath,
(01:51):
set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy
and went dark. Missus Watchett came in and walked, apparently
without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it
took her a minute or so to traverse the place,
but to me, she seemed to shoot across the room
(02:12):
like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its
extreme position. The night came like the turning out of
a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory
grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. Tomorrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
(02:34):
faster and faster. Still and Eddie murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb, confusedness descended on my mind. I
am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like
that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.
(02:59):
I felt that same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent
smash as I put on pace. Night followed day, like
the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of
the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and
I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping
(03:19):
it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I
suppose the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come
into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding,
but I was already going too fast to be conscious
of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled
(03:40):
dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of
darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then,
in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly
through her quarters from new to full, and had a
faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on,
(04:00):
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged
into one continuous grayness. The sky took on a wonderful
deepness of blue, a splendid, luminous color like that of
early twilight. The jerking sun became a streak of fire,
a brilliant arch in space, the moon a fainter, fluctuating band,
(04:25):
and I could see nothing of the stars, save now
and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The
landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the
hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder
rose above me, gray and dim. I saw trees growing
and changing, like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green.
(04:49):
They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge
buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dream.
The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and
flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials
that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently,
(05:14):
I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down
from solstice to solstice in a minute or less and
that consequently my pace was over a year a minute,
and minute by minute, the white snow flashed across the
world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief
green of spring. The unpleasant sensations of the start were
(05:38):
less poignant now they merged at last into a kind
of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of
the machine for which I was unable to account, But
my mind was too confused to attend to it. So,
with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung
(05:59):
myself into fewtrey. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently
a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind,
a certain curiosity, and therewith a certain dread, until at
last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments
(06:24):
of humanity, What wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I
thought might not appear. When I came to look nearly
into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before
my eyes, I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me,
more massive than any buildings of our own time, and
(06:45):
yet it seemed built of glimmer and mist. I saw
a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there
without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion,
the earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came
round to the business of stopping. The peculiar risk lay
(07:08):
in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I or the machine occupied. So long as
I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.
I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a
vapor through the interstices of intervening substances. But to come
(07:28):
to a stop involve the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule,
into whatever lay in my way. Meant bringing my atoms
into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that
a profound chemical reaction, possibly a far reaching explosion, would
result and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
(07:50):
possible dimensions into the unknown. This possibility had occurred to
me again and again while I was making the machine,
but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk.
One of the risks a man has got to take now.
The risk was inevitable. I no longer saw it in
(08:11):
the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the
absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of
the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could
never stop, and with a gust of petulance, I resolved
(08:33):
to stop forthwith, like an impatient fool, I lugged over
the lever, and incontinently, the thing went wreathing over, and
I was flung headlong through the air. There was the
sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I
may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail
was hissing round me, and I was sitting on a
(08:55):
soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seen deemed gray, But presently I remarked that the confusion
in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I
was on what seemed to be a little lawn in
a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that
(09:15):
their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower.
Under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail
hung in a cloud over the machine and drove along
the ground like smoke. In a moment, I was wet
to the skin. Fine hospitality, said I to a man
(09:35):
who has traveled innumerable years to see you. Presently, I
thought what a fool I was to get wet. I
stood up and looked round me. A colossal figure, carved
apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons
through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world
(09:57):
was invisible. My sincereations would be hard to describe. As
the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white
figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver
birch tree touched its shoulder. It was of a white
marble in shape, something like a winged sphinx, but the wings,
(10:19):
instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread
so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared
to me, was of bronze and was thick with vertigris.
It chanced that the face was towards me. The sightless
eyes seemed to watch me. There was the faint shadow
(10:39):
of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather worn,
and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood
looking at it for a little space, half a minute perhaps,
or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede,
as the hail drove before it, denser or thinner. At last,
(11:01):
I tore my eyes from it for a moment, and
saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that
the sky was lightning with the promise of the sun.
I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and
the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me.
What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?
(11:24):
What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty
had grown into a common passion? What if in this
interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed
into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful. I might seem
some old world, savage animal, only the more dreadful and
(11:46):
disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be
incontinently slain. Already I saw other vast shapes huge buildings
with intricate parapets and tall columns, with the wooded hillside
dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm, I
was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to
(12:10):
the time machine and strove hard to readjust it. As
I did so, the shafts of the sun smote through
the thunder storm. The gray downpour was swept aside and vanished,
like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me in
the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown
(12:31):
shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about
me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet
of the thunder storm, and picked out in white by
the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked
in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird
(12:52):
may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings
above and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I
took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again, grappling
fiercely wrist and knee with the machine. It gave under
my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently,
(13:14):
one hand on the saddle, the other on the lever.
I stood, panting heavily in attitude to mount again. But
with this recovery of a prompt retreat, my courage recovered.
I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world
of the remote future. In a circular opening high up
in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a
(13:36):
group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had
seen me, and their faces were directed towards me. Then
I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by
the white sphinx, were the heads and shoulders of men running.
One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to
the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine.
(13:59):
He was a slight creature, perhaps four feet high, clad
in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a
leather belt. Sandals or buskins I could not clearly distinguish
which were on his feet. His legs were bare to
the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that I
noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
(14:23):
He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature,
but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the
more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which
we used to hear so much. At the sight of him,
I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
(14:47):
End of Chapter three,
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