The Time Machine eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 118 pages of information about The Time Machine.

The Time Machine eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 118 pages of information about The Time Machine.
examining me was indescribably unpleasant.  The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness.  I shouted at them as loudly as I could.  They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again.  They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other.  I shivered violently, and shouted again—­rather discordantly.  This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me.  I will confess I was horribly frightened.  I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare.  I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.  But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.

’In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.  I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.  You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked—­those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—­as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.  But I did not stay to look, I promise you:  I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third.  It had almost burned through when I reached the opening into the shaft.  I lay down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.  Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward.  I lit my last match ... and it incontinently went out.  But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me:  all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.

’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.

VII

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Project Gutenberg
The Time Machine from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.