<h2><SPAN name="chap17"></SPAN>Epilogue</h2>
<p>One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he
swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages
of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or
among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic
times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on
some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline
seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer
ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time
answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race:
for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak
experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s
culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question
had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was
made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw
in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must
inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so,
it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is
still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places
by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange
white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to
witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual
tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.</p>
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