’I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me.  I turned smiling to them and beckoned them to me.  They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it.  But at my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly.  I don’t know how to convey their expression to you.  Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman—­it is how she would look.  They went off as if they had received the last possible insult.  I tried a sweet-looking little chap 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 off, 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 round the neck, and began dragging him towards the sphinx.  Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.

’But I was not beaten yet.  I banged with my fist at the bronze panels.  I thought I heard something stir inside—­to be explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle—­but I must have been mistaken.  Then I got a big pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes.  The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it.  I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me.  At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place.  But I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil.  I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—­that is another matter.

’I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the hill again.  “Patience,” said I to myself.  “If you want your machine again you must leave that sphinx alone.  If they mean to take your machine away, it’s little good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don’t, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it.  To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless.  That way lies monomania.  Face this world.  Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning.  In the end you will find clues to it all.”  Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind:  the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.  I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.  Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself.  I laughed aloud.