Chapter 11
`I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch--into futurity.
`As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating
greyness grew darker; then--though I was still travel ing with prodigious velocity--the
blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,
returned, and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The
alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the
sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady
twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet
glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long
since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set--it simply rose and fell in the west,
and grew ever broader and more red. Al trace of the moon had vanished. The circling
of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At
last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon
the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a
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momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more bril iantly again,
but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its
rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest
with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth. Very
cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse my motion.
Slower and slower went the circling hands until the thousands one seemed motionless
and the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Stil slower, until the dim
outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.
`I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no
longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly
and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and
south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the
huge hul of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish
colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green
vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the
same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which
like these grow in a perpetual twilight.
`The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-
west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers
and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and
fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living.
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And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of
salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I
noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only
experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than
it is now.
`Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a huge
white butterfly go slanting and flittering up into the sky and, circling, disappear over
some low hil ocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and
seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that,
quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards
me. Then I saw the thing was real y a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine
a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its
big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its
stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metal ic front? Its back was
corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation
blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth
flickering and feeling as it moved.
`As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek
as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a
moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this,
and caught something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful
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qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab
that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all
alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were
descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a
month between myself and these monsters. But I was stil on the same beach, and I
saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling
here and there, in the sombre light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.
`I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The
red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach
crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green
of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to an
appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun--a little
larger, a little duller--the same dying sea, the same chil air, and the same crowd of
earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in
the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.
`So I travel ed, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more,
drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the
sun grow larger and dul er in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away.
At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had
come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once
more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save
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for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with
white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying
down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky
and I could see an undulating crest of hil ocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice
along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that
salt ocean, al bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.
`I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable
apprehension stil kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving, in
earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not
extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from
the beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it
became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and
that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and
seemed to me to twinkle very little.
`Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed; that a
concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a minute
perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then I
realized that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was
passing across the sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is
much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet
passing very near to the earth.
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`The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the
east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of
the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent.
Silent? It would be hard to convey the stil ness of it. All the sounds of man, the
bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the
background of our lives--al that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying
flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more
intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant
hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black
central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars
alone were visible. Al else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
`A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and
the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.
Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine
to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood
sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal--there was no mistake
now that it was a moving thing--against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing,
the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it;
it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully
about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote
and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
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