<h2><SPAN name="chap10"></SPAN>X.<br/> When Night Came</h2>
<p>“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto,
except during my night’s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I
had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered
by these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by
the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces
which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new
element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman
and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might
feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get
out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon
him soon.</p>
<p>“The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the
new moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem
to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on the wane:
each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now understood to
some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little
Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it
might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now
that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld people might once
have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical
servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had
resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had
already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the
Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still
possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for
innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface
intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and
maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an
old habit of service. They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot,
or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed
necessities had impressed it on the organism. But, clearly, the old order
was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping
on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his
brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was
coming back—changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson
anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came
into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld. It
seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the
current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from
outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something
familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.</p>
<p>“Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of
their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this
age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse
and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without
further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might
sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with
some of that confidence I had lost in realising to what creatures night by
night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was
secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must already
have examined me.</p>
<p>“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames,
but found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as
the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall pinnacles of
the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back
to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my
shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The distance, I had
reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen.
I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are
deceptively diminished. In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose,
and a nail was working through the sole—they were comfortable old
shoes I wore about indoors—so that I was lame. And it was already
long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black
against the pale yellow of the sky.</p>
<p>“Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but
after a while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of
me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my
pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral decoration.
At least she utilised them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In
changing my jacket I found…”</p>
<p><i>The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently
placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the
little table. Then he resumed his narrative.</i></p>
<p>“As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over
the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to
the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the
Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand that
we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great pause
that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees.
To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.
The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far
down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my
fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I
fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet:
could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going
hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied
that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of
war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?</p>
<p>“So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night.
The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.
The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her
fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed
her. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck,
and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we
went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost
walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the opposite side of
the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue—a Faun,
or some such figure, <i>minus</i> the head. Here too were acacias. So far I
had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and
the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.</p>
<p>“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to
the right or the left. Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were
very sore—I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and
sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green
Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction. I looked into the thickness
of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of
branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were there no other
lurking danger—a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose
upon—there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the
tree-boles to strike against. I was very tired, too, after the excitements
of the day; so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night
upon the open hill.</p>
<p>“Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped
her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The
hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came
now and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the
night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their
twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that
slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long
since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed
to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore.
Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me;
it was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these
scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily
like the face of an old friend.</p>
<p>“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all
the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable
distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the
unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional
cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that
silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And
during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the
complex organisations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations,
even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.
Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry,
and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great
Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a
sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might
be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me,
her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the
thought.</p>
<p>“Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well
as I could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs
of the old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear,
except for a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil
wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some
colourless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And
close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at
first, and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us.
Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of
renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I
stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and
painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung
them away.</p>
<p>“I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and
pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to
break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing
in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night.
And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured
now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last
feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some time in the
Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks’ food had run short. Possibly
they had lived on rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less
discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than
any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct.
And so these inhuman sons of men——! I tried to look at the
thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more
remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And
the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had
gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle,
which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to
the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!</p>
<p>“Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming
upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man
had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his
fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the
fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a
Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude
of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the
Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to
make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.</p>
<p>“I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should
pursue. My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make
myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was
immediate. In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so
that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew,
would be more efficient against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to arrange
some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx.
I had in mind a battering ram. I had a persuasion that if I could enter
those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the Time
Machine and escape. I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to
move it far away. Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time.
And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the
building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.</p>
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