CHAPTER III
"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 now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory
bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it's 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 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 a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop
of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle.
I suppose a suicide who
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 round, I saw the
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, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with
both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs.
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 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 to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and
ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day
again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a
strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of
time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly
like that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the
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 it every minute, and every minute marking a
day. I supposed 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 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, still gaining velocity,
the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; 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; 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 grey
and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now
green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise
up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. 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 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 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 myself into futurity. 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 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 yet, as 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.
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