“A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal.
For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks.
Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time Machine.
I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned.
I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.
“Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened.
The bronze panels suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang.
I was in the dark—trapped.
So the Morlocks thought.
At that I chuckled gleefully.
“I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me.
Very calmly I tried to strike the match.
I had only to fix on the levers and depart then like a ghost.
But I had overlooked one little thing.
The matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.
“You may imagine how all my calm vanished.
The little brutes were close upon me.
One touched me.
I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine.
Then came one hand upon me and then another.
Then I had simply to fight against their persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for the studs over which these fitted.
One, indeed, they almost got away from me.
As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my head—I could hear the Morlock's skull ring—to recover it.
It was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.
“But at last the lever was fitted and pulled over.
The clinging hands slipped from me.
The darkness presently fell from my eyes.
I found myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.
XI
“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.
And this time 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 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 seconds hand of a watch—into futurity.
“As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things.
The palpitating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still travelling with prodigious velocity—the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked.
This puzzled me very 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 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, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light.
At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, 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 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.
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 grew visible.
“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round.