"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.
"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
Upper-world 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 Upper-world 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 Carolvingian 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.
"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 realizing 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.
"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.
"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 vase for floral decoration. At
least she utilized them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In changing my
jacket I found . . ."
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