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 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 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 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 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 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—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.
But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
XII
“So I came back.
For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine.
The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue.
I breathed with greater freedom.
The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed.
The hands spun backward upon the dials.
At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity.
These, too, changed and passed, and others came.
Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed.
I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower.
Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me.
Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.
“I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me.
I think I have told you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket.
As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory.
But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones.
The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered.
Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed like a flash.
“Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them.
I got off the thing very shaky, and sat down upon my bench.
For several minutes I trembled violently.
Then I became calmer.
Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been.
I might have slept there, and the whole thing have been a dream.