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The Time Machine
Chapter 7. A Sudden Shock
As I stood thinking about this perfect triumph of man, the yellow moon rose in a flood of silver light in the north-east.
The bright little figures stopped moving below, a silent owl flew past, and I shivered with the cold of the night.
I decided to go down and find where I could sleep.
I looked for the building I knew.
Then my eye moved to the figure of the White Sphinx on the bronze pedestal, becoming clearer as the moonlight grew brighter.
I could see the silver birch beside it.
There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, dark in the pale light, and there was the little lawn.
I looked at the lawn again, a strange doubt chilled my self-satisfaction.
"No," I said strongly to myself, "that wasn't the lawn."
But it was the lawn, For the white, sickly face of the sphinx was looking toward it.
Can you imagine what I felt as this truth came to me?
But you can't, the Time Machine was gone!
At once, like a hard blow, came the thought of losing my own time, of being left helpless in this strange new world.
The bare idea of it was a real physical feeling.
I could feel it grip my throat and stop my breathing.
In another moment I was in a state of fear and running with long, great strides down the slope.
Once I fell headlong and cut my face.
I didn't stop to bind the wound, but jumped up and ran on, with warm blood running down my cheek and chin.
All the time I ran I kept saying to myself, "They have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way."
Still, I ran with all my might.
All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with too much fear, I knew that that hope was foolish.
And I knew by instinct that the machine was taken out of my reach, My breath came with pain.
I think I covered the whole distance from the hill top to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes.
And I'm not a young man, so this running tired me greatly.
I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident foolishness in leaving the machine, wasting good breath that way.
I cried out, and no one answered.
Not a creature seemed to be moving in that moonlit world.
When I reached the lawn my worst fears were proved true.
Not a trace of the thing was to be seen.
I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes.
I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped suddenly, with my hands pulling at my hair.
Above me rose the sphinx on the bronze pedestal, white, shining, sickly, in the light of the rising moon.
It seemed to smile and mock my despair.
I might have comforted myself that the little people had put the mechanism in a shelter, but I was sure of their weakness.
That's what alarmed me, the sense of some still unknown power, by whose action my invention had vanished.
Yet for one thing I felt sure, unless some other time had made an exact copy, the machine couldn't have moved in time.
The attachment of the levers, I'll show you the method later, stopped anyone from tampering with it in that way when they were removed.
It had moved, and was hidden, only in space, but then, where could it be?
I think I must have had a kind of madness.
I remember running among the moonlit bushes around the sphinx and frightening a white animal I took for a small deer.
I remember, too, late that night, beating the bushes with my closed fist until my knuckles were cut and bleeding from the broken twigs.
Then, sobbing and raving in my pain of mind, I went down to the great stone building.
The big hall was dark, silent, and empty.
I slipped on the uneven floor and fell over one of the malachite tables, almost breaking my shin.
I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains I have told you about.
There I found a second great hall full of cushions, on which perhaps twenty or so of the little people were sleeping.
They must have found my sudden second appearance strange, coming from the dark with inarticulate noises and the match's splutter and flare.
For they had forgotten about matches, and the bright flame frightened and puzzled them.
"Where is my Time Machine?" I began, shouting like an angry child, grabbing them and shaking them together.
It must have been very strange to them.
Some laughed, most of them looked very frightened.
When I saw them standing round me, I realised I was doing as foolish a thing as possible under the circumstances.
I was trying to wake the feeling of fear.
For, judging from their daylight behavior, I thought that fear must be forgotten.
Suddenly, I put out the match, and knocking one of the people over as I went, stumbled across the big dining-hall again, out under the moonlight.
I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way and that.
I don't remember all I did as the moon moved up the sky.
I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that drove me mad.
I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind, a strange animal in an unknown world.
I must have raved and ranted, screaming and crying to God and Fate.
I have a memory of extreme tiredness as the long night of despair went on.
I remember looking in this impossible place and that.
I remember feeling my way among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows.
I lay on the ground near the sphinx and wept with wretchedness and anger at leaving the machine when my strength failed.
I had nothing left but misery, no strength, no hope, only bitter despair.
Then I slept, when I woke it was full day, and two sparrows hopped around me on the grass within arm's reach.
I sat up in the fresh morning, trying to remember how I had got there and why I felt desertion and despair.
Then things became clear in my mind.
With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my situation fairly in the face.
I saw the wild foolishness of my madness overnight, and I could talk to myself.
"Suppose the worst?" I said.
"Suppose the machine is completely lost, perhaps destroyed"?
I must be calm and patient and learn the way of the people.
I must learn how I lost it and how to get materials and tools so I can make another.
That would be my only hope, a poor hope maybe, but better than despair.
And, after all, it was a beautiful and strange world.
But probably the machine was only taken away.
Still, I must be calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and get it back by force or by cleverness.
With that I stood up and looked about me, wondering where I could wash.
I felt weary, stiff, and dirty from travel.
The fresh morning made me want the same freshness, I had used up my emotion.
Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself surprised at my intense excitement the night before.
I made a careful search of the ground around the little lawn.
I wasted some time in useless questions, shown as well as I could to such of the little people as came by.
They all failed to understand my gestures, some were simply dull, some thought it a joke and laughed at me.
I had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands from their pretty laughing faces.
It was a foolish urge, but the wild thing born of fear and blind anger proved hard to control, seeking to exploit confusion.
The turf gave better advice than my frantic mind, showing a groove and prints.
I found a groove torn in the turf about halfway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet.
Those marks showed where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine.
There were other signs of movement, with strange narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth.
This made me look more closely at the pedestal.
It was, as I think I have said, of bronze.
It wasn't a plain block, but richly decorated with deep framed panels on either side.
I went and knocked at these, the pedestal was hollow.
Looking at the panels carefully I found they didn't match the frames.
There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors as I guessed, opened from the inside.
One thing was clear to my mind.
It didn't take a great mental effort to guess that my Time Machine was inside that pedestal.
But how it got there was a different problem.
I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees toward me.
I turned smiling to them and waved them to me.
They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to show my wish to open it.
But at my first movement toward this they acted very strangely.
I don't know how to give you their look.
Suppose you used a grossly rude gesture to a delicate-minded woman, it's how she'd look.
They went away as if they had received the last possible insult.
I tried a sweet-looking little fellow in white next, with exactly the same result.
Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself.
But, as you know, I wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more.
As he turned away, like the others, my temper got the better of me.
In three strides I was after him, had him by the loose part of his robe at the neck, and began dragging him toward the sphinx.
Then I saw the horror and disgust on his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.
But I wasn't beaten yet, I struck the bronze panels with my fist.
I thought I heard something move inside, to be clear, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle.
But I must have been mistaken. I had only imagined the sound in my fear.
I took a big pebble from the river and smashed the decoration until a coil bent.
The green rust came off in powdery flakes.
The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in loud bursts a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it.
I saw a crowd of them on the slopes, looking at me secretly.
At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place.
But I was too restless to watch long.
I'm too Western for a long watch.
I can work at a problem for years, but to wait doing nothing for twenty-four hours is another matter.
I got up after a time, and began walking without aim through the bushes toward the hill again.
"Patience," I said to myself.
"If you want your machine again you must leave that sphinx alone."
If they mean to take the machine away, wrecking their bronze panels is useless, if they don't, you'll get it back when you can ask for it.
"To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that's hopeless."
"That road leads to single-minded madness."
"Face this world."
"Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too quick guesses about its meaning."
"In the end you'll find clues to it all." Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind.
I thought of the years spent studying and working to reach the future, and now my panic to escape it.
I had made for myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap a man could make.
Although it was my own fault, I couldn't help myself, I laughed aloud.
Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me.
It may have been my imagination, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the bronze gates.
Yet I felt fairly sure of the avoidance.
I was careful to show no concern and avoid chasing them, and after a day or two things returned to the old way.
I made what progress I could in the language, and I also pushed my explorations here and there.
Either I missed some subtle point or their language was very simple, almost entirely made of concrete nouns and verbs.
There seemed to be few, if any, abstract words, or little use of figurative language.
Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to teach or learn any but the simplest ideas.
I decided to put the thought of my Time Machine and the bronze doors under the sphinx in a corner of my memory.
I waited until my growing knowledge would lead me back to them in a natural way.
Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, kept me close in a circle of a few miles around the point of my arrival.