Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (35 page)
Read Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) Online
Authors: Travelers In Time
"That
climb
seemed
interminable
to
me.
With
the
last
twenty
or thirty
feet
of
it
a
deadly
nausea
came
upon
me.
I
had
the
greatest difficulty
in
keeping
my
hold.
The
last
few
yards
was
a
frightful struggle
against
this
faintness.
Several
times
my
head
swam,
and
I felt
all
the
sensations
of
falling.
At
last,
however,
I
got
over
the
well-mouth
somehow,
and
staggered
out
of
the
ruin
into
the
blinding sunlight.
I
fell
upon
my
face.
Even
the
soil
smelt
sweet
and
clean. Then
I
remember
Weena
kissing
my
hands
and
ears,
and
the
voices of
others
among
the
Eloi.
Then,
for
a
time,
I
was
insensible.
7
"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
Carlovingian
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
leam
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
Under-world. 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.
