Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the eleventh 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 can at 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 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 Byte At A Time Books Behind the Story.

Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we will be continuing the Time Machine by HG Wells eleven the palace of Green Porcelain 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 Turkey down and looking northeastward.

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 Wiener 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 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 Gray covering.

Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the center of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton.

I recognized by the oblique feat that it was some extinct creature, after the fashion of the Megatherium.

The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, all in one place where rainwater 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 airtight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.

Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latterday South Kensington.

Here, apparently, was the paleontological 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 99 hundredths of its force, was nevertheless with extreme shortness, 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.

Wiener, 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 this place.

This palace of green porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of paleontology, 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 old time geology and decay.

Exploring, I found another short Gallery running transversely to the first.

This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the side of a block of sulfur set my mind running on gunpowder, but I could find no salt, Peter.

Indeed no nitrates of any kind.

Doubtless they had been delinquent ages ago, yet the sulfur 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 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 shriveled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies and 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 patient 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 it's.

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 WINA 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 footnote.

It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the Museum was built into the side of a Hill.

The end I had come in at was quite above ground and was lit by rare slit like windows.

As he 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 the Gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.

I hesitated, and then, as I looked around 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 in the same odd noises I had heard down the well.

I took Wiener'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, clamoring upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways.

Suddenly Wiener, deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper.

I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute 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 Wiena and 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 Wiena in the other.

I went out of that Gallery and into another, and still a 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 labor 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 17 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 wellpreserved, I went eagerly to every unbroken case, and at last, in one of the really airtight cases, I found a box of matches.

Very eagerly I tried them.

They were perfectly good.

They were not even damp.

I turned to WNA 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 weana's huge delight I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling the Land of the Leo as cheerfully as I could.

In part it was a modest can can, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance, so far as my tailcoat 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 Ware of time for immemorial years was the most strange.

As for me, it was the 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 odor 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 steepea painting I had once seen, done from the ink of a fossil belumnite 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 burnt 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 great effort of memory to recall my explorations in all that 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 worth 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, with 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 statue of 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, that exhibits, sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.

In one place I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin vine, and then, by the merest accident, I discovered in an airtight 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 510 15 minutes for an explosion that never came.

Of course, the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence.

I really believed that they had 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 altogether into nonexistence.

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 defenses against the Morlocks.

I had matches.

I had the camper in my pocket too.

If Ablaze 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 bronzy 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.

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 Buytedtime Books.

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