Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the twelfth chapter of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

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Welcome to Byte At A Time Books, where we read you your favorite classics one Byte At a Time.

My name is Brie Carlyle and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

If you enjoy our show, be sure to follow us so you get all the new episodes.

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We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform and share our show with your friends.

You can catch us on all the social medias at Byte At A Time Books.

We are now part of the Bike At A Time Books Productions Network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world at the time, check out Byte At A Time Books Behind the Story.

Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we will be continuing the Time Machine by HG Wells Twelve In the Darkness we emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above the horizon.

I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning and air the dusk.

I proposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me on the previous journey.

My plan was to go as far as possible that night and then building a fire to sleep in the protection of its glare.

Accordingly.

As we went along, I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my arms full of such litter thus loaded.

Our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and Besides, Huana was tired, and I also began to suffer from sleepiness, too, so that it was full night before we reached the wood upon the shrubby Hill of its edge.

Wina would have stopped, fearing the darkness before us, but a singular sense of impending calamity that should indeed have served me as a warning drove me onward.

I had been without sleep for a night in two days, and I was feverish and irritable.

I felt sleep coming upon me, and the more locks with it.

While we hesitated among the black bushes behind us and dimmed against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures.

There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach.

The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across if we could get through it to the bare hillside.

There, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting place.

I thought that with my matches and my camper, I could contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods.

Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands, I should have to abandon my firewood.

So rather reluctantly I put it down, and then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting it.

I was to discover the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our retreat.

I don't know if you've ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man, and in a temperate climate the Sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by Dew drops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts.

Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire.

Decaying vegetation may occasionally smolder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame.

In this decadence, too, the art of fire making had been forgotten on the Earth.

The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to witness.

She wanted to run to it and play with it.

I believe she would have cast herself into it had I not restrained her.

But I caught her up, and, in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood.

For a little way the glare of my fire lit the path.

Looking back presently I could see through the crowded stems that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of the Hill.

I laughed at that, and turning again to the dark trees before me.

It was very black, and Wiener clung to me convulsion, but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems overhead.

It was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us.

Here and there I lit none of my matches because I had no hand free upon my left arm.

I carried my little one in my right hand.

I had my iron bar.

For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing, and the throb of the blood vessels in my ears.

Then I seemed to know of a pattering behind me.

I pushed on grimly.

The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the underworld.

There were evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me.

Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm, and WINA shivered violently and became quite still.

It was time for a match, but to get one I must put her down.

I did so, and as I fumbled with my pocket a struggle began in the darkness about my knees, perfectly silent on her part, and with the same peculiar cooing sounds from the Morlocks.

Soft little hands, too, were creeping over my coat and back, touching even my neck.

Then the match scratched and fizzed.

I held it flaring and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in flight amid the trees.

I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket and prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane.

Then I looked at WINA.

She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless with her face to the ground.

With the sudden fright I stooped to her.

She seemed scarcely to breathe.

I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the ground, and as it split and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her.

The wood behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of a great company.

She seemed to have fainted.

I put her carefully upon my shoulder and rose to push on.

And then there came a horrible realization.

In maneuvering with my matches and Wiener.

I had turned myself about several times, and now I had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my path.

For all I knew I might be facing back towards the palace of Green Porcelain.

I found myself in a cold sweat.

I had to think rapidly what to do.

I determined to build a fire and encamp where we were.

I put Wiena, still motionless, down upon a Turkey Bowl, and very hastily, as my first lump of camp for waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves.

Here and there, out of the darkness around me, the Morlock's eyes shone like carbuncles.

The camper flickered and went out.

I lit a match, and as I did so, two white forms that had been approaching WINA dashed hastily away.

One was so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his bones grind under the blow of my fist.

He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a little way, and fell down.

I lit another piece of camphor and went on gathering my bonfire.

Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage above me, for since my arrival on the time machine a matter of a week no rain had fallen, so instead of casting about among the trees for fallen twigs, I began leaving up and dragging down branches.

Very soon I had a choking, smoky fire of green wood and dry sticks.

I could economize my camphor.

Then I turned to where we need to lay beside my iron Mace.

I tried what I could to revive her, but she lay like one dead.

I could not even satisfy myself whether or not she breathed.

Now the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made me heavy all of a sudden.

Moreover, the vapor of camphor was in the air.

My fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so.

I felt very weary after my exertion and sat down.

The wood, too, was full of a slumberous murmur that I did not understand.

I seemed just to nod and open my eyes.

But hall was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me.

Flinging off their clinging fingers, I hastily felt in my pocket for the Matchbox, and it had gone.

Then they gripped and closed with me again.

In a moment I knew what had happened.

I had slept and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul.

The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood.

I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down.

It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me.

I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider's web.

I was overpowered and went down.

I felt little teeth nipping at my neck.

I rolled over, and as I did so, my hand came against my iron lever.

It gave me strength.

I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be.

I could feel the succulent giving a flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.

The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came upon me.

I knew that both I and Wiener were lost, but I determined to make the Morlocks pay for their meat.

I stood with my back to a tree, swinging the iron bar before me.

The whole wood was full of the stir and cries of them.

A minute passed.

Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch of excitement, and their movements grew faster, yet none of them came within reach.

I stood glaring at the blackness.

Then suddenly came hope.

What if the Morlocks were afraid?

And close on the heels of that came a very strange thing.

The darkness seemed to grow luminous.

Very dimly I began to see the Morlocks about me, three battered at my feet.

And then I recognized with incredulous surprise that the others were running in an incessant stream, as it seemed from behind me and away through the wood in front, and their backs seemed no longer white but reddish.

As I stood agape, I saw little red spark go drifting across a gap of Starlight between the branches and vanish.

And at that I understood the smell of burning wood, the slumberous murmur that was growing now into a gusty roar, the red glow and the Morlock slight.

Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw through the black pillars of the nearer trees the flames of the burning forest.

It was my first fire coming after me.

With that I looked for WINA, but she was gone.

The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree burst into flame, left little time for reflection.

My iron bar still gripped, I followed in the Morlocks path.

It was a close race once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was outflanked and had to strike off to the left.

But at last I emerged upon a small open space and as I did so a Morlock came blundering towards me and past me and went on straight into the fire.

And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing I think of all that I beheld in that future age.

This whole space was as bright as day, with the reflection of the fire.

In the center was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a scorched Hawthorne.

Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with a fence of fire.

Upon the hillside were some 30 or 40 more locks, dazzled by the light and heat and blundering hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment.

At first I did not realize their blindness and struck furiously at them with my bar in a frenzy of fear as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more.

But when I had watched the gestures of one of them groping under the Hawthorne against the red sky and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them.

Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him.

At one time the flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would presently be able to see me.

I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing some of them before this should happen, but the fire burst out again brightly, and I stayed my hand.

I walked about the Hill among them and avoided them, looking for some trace of Wiena.

But WINA was gone at last.

I sat down on the summit of the Hill lock and watched this strange, incredible company of blind things, groping to and fro and making uncanny noises to each other as the glare of the fire beat on them.

The coiling up rush of smoke streamed across the sky and through the rare tatters of that red canopy, remote as though they belonged to another universe shown the little stars.

Two or three morelocks came blundering into me, and I drove them off with blows of my fists, trembling as I did so.

For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare.

I bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake.

I beat the ground with my hands and got up and sat down again and wandered here and there and again sat down.

Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to let me awake.

Thrice.

I saw morelocks put their heads down in a kind of agony and rush into the flames.

But at last, above the subsidy red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and the whitening and blackening tree stumps and the diminishing numbers of these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.

I searched again for traces of Wiener but there were none.

It was plain that they had left her poor little body in the forest.

I cannot describe how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined.

As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations about me but I contained myself.

The hillock, as I have said, was a kind of island in the forest.

From its summit I could now make out through a haze of smoke the palace of green porcelain.

And from that I could get my bearings for the White Sphinx.

And so leaving the remnant of these damned souls still going hither and thither and moaning as Sita grew clearer I tied some grass about my feet and limped on across smoking Ashes and among black stems that still pulsated internally with fire towards the hiding place of the time machine.

I walked slowly for I was almost exhausted as well as lame and I felt the intense wretchedness for the horrible death of little WINA.

It seemed an overwhelming calamity now in this old familiar room it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss but that morning it left me absolutely lonely again.

Terribly alone.

I began to think of this house of mine.

Of this fireside of some of you.

And with such thoughts came along that was pain.

But as I walked over the smoking Ashes under the bright morning Sky I made a discovery.

In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches the box must have leaked before it was lost.

Thank you for joining Byte edit Time Books Today while we read A Bite of One of your favorite classics.

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We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform and share our show with your friends.

You can catch us on all the social medias at Byteimebooks.

Also, be sure to check us on our website, www.bietaditimebooks.com.

We are now part of the Bite At A Time Books Productions Network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world at the time, check out Bite at a Time Books behind the Story Tuesdays wherever you listen to podcasts again.