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

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Welcome to Bite 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.

If you want to see exclusive behind the scenes of our show, join our Patreon.

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 Bite At A Time Books.

We are now part of the Buy 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 14 the Further Vision I've already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time traveling, and this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion.

For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again, I was amazed to find where I had arrived.

One dial records days and another thousands of days, another millions of days and another thousands of millions.

Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them.

And when I came to look at these indicators, I found that the thousands hand was sweeping around as fast as the seconds hand of a watch and Futurity.

As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things.

The palpitating grayness grew darker then, though I was still traveling with prestigious velocity.

The blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned and grew more and more marked.

This puzzled me very much.

At first.

The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky until they seemed to stretch through centuries.

At last a steady Twilight brooded over the Earth, a Twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the dark, cooling sky.

The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared, for the sun had ceased to set.

It simply rose and fell in the west and grew even broader and more red.

All trace of the moon had vanished.

The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light.

At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast Dome glowing with a dull heat.

And now and then suffering a momentary extinction.

At one time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its soul and red heat.

I perceived by the slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done.

The Earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the Earth very cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall.

I began to reverse my motion, slower and slower with the circling hands, until the thousands one seemed motionless, and the daily one was no longer a mere missed upon its scale, still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.

I stopped very gently and sat upon the time Machine, looking round.

The sky was no longer blue.

Northeastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars overhead.

It was a deep Indian red and starless, and southeastward it grew brighter to a glowing Scarlet where, cut by the horizon lay the huge hole of the sun, red and motionless.

The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish color, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their southeastern face.

It was the same rich green that one sees on forest Moss or on the lichen in caves plants which, like these, grow in a perpetual Twilight.

The Machine was standing on a sloping beach.

The sea stretched away to the southwest to rise into a sharp, bright horizon against the wind sky.

There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring.

Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living, and along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick encrustation of salt pink under the lurid sky.

There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast.

The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.

Far away, up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky, encircling disappearing over some low hillocks beyond.

The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the Machine.

Looking around me again, I saw that quite near what I had taken to be a reddish, massive rock was moving slowly towards me, and I saw the thing was really a monstrous crablike creature.

Can you imagine a crab as large as Yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae like Carter's whips waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleamed at you on either side of its metallic front.

Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there.

I could see the many pouches of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.

As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me.

I felt a tickling on my cheek, as though a fly had lighted there.

I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear.

I struck at this and caught something thread, like it was drawn swiftly out of my hand.

With a frightful qualm I turned and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me.

Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast, ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon me.

In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters.

But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now.

As soon as I stopped, dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there in the somber light among the foliated sheets of intense green.

I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world.

The red Eastern Sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the Stony Beach crawling with these foul, slowstiring monsters, the uniform poisonouslooking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs all contributed to the appalling effect.

I moved on a hundred years and there was the same red sun, a little larger, a little duller, the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks.

And in the westward Sky I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.

So I traveled, stopping ever and again in great strides of 1000 years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the Earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination.

The sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old Earth EB away.

At last, more than 30 million years hence, the huge red hot Dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a 10th part of the Darkling heavens.

Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and the lichens, seemed lifeless.

And now it was flecked with white, a bitter cold assailed me.

Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down to the northeastward.

The glare of snow lay under the Starlight of the Sable Sky, and I could see an undulating crest of Hillock's pinkish white.

There were fringes of ice along the sea margin with drifting masses further out, but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset was still unfrozen.

I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained.

A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine, but I saw nothing moving in Earth or sky or sea.

The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct.

A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach.

I fancied I saw some black object flopping upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived and that the black object was merely a rock.

The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.

Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed, that a concavity, a Bay had appeared in the curve.

I saw this grow larger for a minute perhaps.

I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day.

And then I realized that an eclipse was beginning.

Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the Sun's disk.

Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near to the Earth.

The darkness grew apace.

A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number.

From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper.

Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent.

Silent.

It would be hard to convey the stillness of it all the sounds of man, the bleeding of sheep, the crying of birds, the insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives all that was over.

As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes, and the cold of the air more intense.

At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant Hills vanished into blackness.

The breeze rose to a moaning wind.

I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me.

In another moment the pale stars alone were visible.

All else was Rayless obscurity.

The sky was absolutely black.

A horror of this great darkness came upon me.

The cold that smote to my marrow and the pain I felt in breathing overcame me.

I shivered and a deadly nausea seized me.

Then, like a red hot bow in the sky, appeared the edge of the sun.

I got off the machine to recover myself.

I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey.

As I stood sick and confused, I saw again the moving thing upon the Shoal.

There was no mistake now that it was a moving thing against the red water of the sea.

It was a round thing, the size of a football, perhaps, or it may be bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it.

It seemed black against the weltering blood red water and it was hopping fitfully about then I felt I was fainting.

But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful Twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.

Thank you for joining Bite At A Time Books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

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

If you want to see exclusive behind the scenes of our show, join our Patreon.

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 Bite At A Time Books.

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

We are now part of the Byte Editing 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.