’Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.  Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.  I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay.  But this attitude of mind was impossible.  However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.

’I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue.  My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive.  That necessity was immediate.  In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient against these Morlocks.  Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx.  I had in mind a battering ram.  I had a persuasion that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the Time Machine and escape.  I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away.  Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time.  And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.

VIII

’I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.  Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework.  It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been.  I thought then—­though I never followed up the thought—­of what might have happened, or might be happening, to the living things in the sea.

’The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character.  I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head.  She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.