’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.
’Within the big valves of the
door which were open and broken we
found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery
lit by many side windows. At the first glance
I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was
thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous
objects was shrouded in the same grey covering.
Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the
centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part
of a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique
feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion
of the Mégathérium. The skull and the upper
bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one
place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak
in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away.
Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel
of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed.
Going towards the side I found what appeared to be
sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust,
I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time.
But they must have been air-tight to judge from the
fair preservation of some of their contents.
’Clearly we stood among the
ruins of some latter-day South Kensington! Here,
apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and
a very splendid array of fossils it must have been,
though the inevitable process of decay that had been
staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction
of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths
of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness
if with extreme slowness at work again upon all its
treasures. Here and there I found traces of the
little people in the shape of rare fossils broken
to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds. And
the cases had in some instances been bodily removed by
the Morlocks as I judged. The place was very
silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps.
Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping
glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about
me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside
me.
’And at first I was so much
surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual
age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it
presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time
Machine receded a little from my mind.
’To judge from the size of the
place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great
deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly
historical galleries; it might be, even a library!
To me, at least in my present circumstances, these
would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle
of oldtime geology in decay. Exploring, I found
another short gallery running transversely to the
first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals,
and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running
on gunpowder. But I could find no saltpeter;
indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they
had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung
in my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As
for the rest of the contents of that gallery, though
on the whole they were the best preserved of all I
saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist
in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle
running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
Apparently this section had been devoted to natural
history, but everything had long since passed out of
recognition. A few shrivelled and blackened vestiges
of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated
mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown
dust of departed plants: that was all! I
was sorry for that, because I should have been glad
to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest
of animated nature had been attained. Then we
came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but
singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward
at a slight angle from the end at which I entered.
At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling many
of them cracked and smashed which suggested
that originally the place had been artificially lit.
Here I was more in my element, for rising on either
side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all
greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still
fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness
for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among
these; the more so as for the most part they had the
interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest
guesses at what they were for. I fancied that
if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself
in possession of powers that might be of use against
the Morlocks.
’Suddenly Weena came very close
to my side. So suddenly that she startled me.
Had it not been for her I do not think I should have
noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. The end I had come
in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare
slit-like windows. As you went down the length,
the ground came up against these windows, until at
last there was a pit like the “area” of
a London house before each, and only a narrow line
of daylight at the top. I went slowly along,
puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent
upon them to notice the gradual diminution of the light,
until Weena’s increasing apprehensions drew
my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran
down at last into a thick darkness. I hesitated,
and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust
was less abundant and its surface less even.
Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be
broken by a number of small narrow footprints.
My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks
revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my
time in the academic examination of machinery.
I called to mind that it was already far advanced in
the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no
refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then
down in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard
a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had
heard down the well.
’I took Weena’s hand.
Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned
to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike
those in a signal-box. Clambering upon the stand,
and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my
weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted
in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had
judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly,
for it snapped after a minute’s strain, and
I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient,
I judged, for any Morlock skull I might encounter.
And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so.
Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing
one’s own descendants! But it was impossible,
somehow, to feel any humanity in the things. Only
my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion
that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time
Machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight
down the gallery and killing the brutes I heard.
’Well, mace in one hand and
Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery and
into another and still larger one, which at the first
glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered
flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from
the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying
vestiges of books. They had long since dropped
to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them.
But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic
clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been
a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon
the futility of all ambition. But as it was,
the thing that struck me with keenest force was the
enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness
of rotting paper testified. At the time I will
confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical
Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon
physical optics.
’Then, going up a broad staircase,
we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical
chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of
useful discoveries. Except at one end where the
roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved.
I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at
last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found
a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them.
They were perfectly good. They were not even
damp. I turned to Weena. “Dance,”
I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had
a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we
feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon
the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weena’s
huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite
dance, whistling The Land of the Leal as cheerfully
as I could. In part it was a modest cancan,
in part a step dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far
as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original.
For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
’Now, I still think that for
this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time
for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me
it was a most fortunate thing. Yet, oddly enough,
I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor.
I found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose,
had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied
at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the
glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was
unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile
substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through
many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of
a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink
of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and
become fossilized millions of years ago. I was
about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was
inflammable and burned with a good bright flame was,
in fact, an excellent candle and I put
it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however,
nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors.
As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I
had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery
greatly elated.
’I cannot tell you all the story
of that long afternoon. It would require a great
effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all
the proper order. I remember a long gallery of
rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between
my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could
not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised
best against the bronze gates. There were numbers
of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses
of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still
fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder there
may once have been had rotted into dust. One corner
I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought,
by an explosion among the specimens. In another
place was a vast array of idols Polynesian,
Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth
I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible
impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite
monster from South America that particularly took
my fancy.
’As the evening drew on, my
interest waned. I went through gallery after
gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits
sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes
fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself
near the model of a tin-mine, and then by the merest
accident I discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite
cartridges! I shouted “Eureka!” and
smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt.
I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery,
I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment
as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for
an explosion that never came. Of course the things
were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence.
I really believe that had they not been so, I should
have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze
doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the
Time Machine, all together into non-existence.
’It was after that, I think,
that we came to a little open court within the palace.
It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we
rested and refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset
I began to consider our position. Night was creeping
upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still
to be found. But that troubled me very little
now. I had in my possession a thing that was,
perhaps, the best of all defences against the Morlocks I
had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket,
too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to me that
the best thing we could do would be to pass the night
in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning
there was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards
that, as yet, I had only my iron mace. But now,
with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently
towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had
refrained from forcing them, largely because of the
mystery on the other side. They had never impressed
me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar
of iron not altogether inadequate for the work.