Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the third 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 Byteimebooks.

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 four Time Traveling I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop.

There it is now, a little travel worn, truly, and one of the Ivory bars is cracked and a brass railbent, but the rest of it sound enough.

I expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade so that the thing was not complete until this morning.

It was at 10:00 today that the first of all Time machines began its career.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz Rod, and sat myself in the saddle.

I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next.

As I felt then I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second, I seemed to reel.

I felt a nightmare sensation of falling and looking round I saw the laboratory exactly as before.

Had anything happened?

For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me.

Then I noted the clock a moment before, as it seemed it had stood at a minute or so past ten.

Now it was nearly 03:30.

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

The laboratory got hazy and went dark.

Mrs.

Watchet came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door.

I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket.

I pressed the lever over to its extreme position.

The night came like the turning out of a lamp and in another moment came tomorrow.

The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.

Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.

An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb, confusedness descended on my mind.

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling.

They are excessively unpleasant.

There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.

I felt the same horrible anticipation too, of an imminent smash.

As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing.

The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping at every minute and every minute, marking a day.

I suppose the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air.

I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things.

The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.

Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars.

Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grayness.

The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early Twilight.

The jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band, and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

The landscape was misty and vague.

I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me, Gray and dim.

I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now Brown, now green.

They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away.

I saw huge buildings rise up, faint and fair and pass like dreams.

The whole surface of the Earth seemed changed, melting and flowing under my eyes.

The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.

Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down from solstice to solstice in a minute or less, and that Consequently my pace was over a year.

A minute and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.

The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now.

They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration.

I remarked indeed a clumsy swaying of the machine for which I was unable to account, but my mind was too confused to attend to it.

So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into Futurity.

At first I scarce thought of stopping scarce thought of anything but these new sensations.

But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind a certain curiosity, and therewith a certain dread, until at last they took complete possession of me.

What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim, elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes.

I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time.

And yet, as it seemed built of glimmer and mist, I saw a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there without any wintry intermission.

Even through the veil of my confusion, the Earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came round to the business of stopping.

The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I or the machine occupied.

So long as I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.

I was, so to speak, attenuated was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances.

But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way Mint, bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction, possibly a farreaching explosion, would result and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions into the unknown.

This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine.

But then I had cheerfully accepted as an unavoidable risk one of the risks a man has got to take now.

The risk was inevitable.

I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.

The fact is that insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine above all, the feeling of prolonged falling had absolutely upset my nerves.

I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith.

Like an impatient Fool, I lugged over the lever and inconsciently.

The thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.

There was a sound of a clap of Thunder in my ears.

I may have been stunned for a moment.

A pitiless hail was hissing around me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine.

Everything still seemed Gray, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone.

I looked around me.

I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones.

The rebounding dancing hall hung in a little cloud over the machine and drove along the ground like smoke.

In a moment I was wet to the skin.

Fine hospitality, said I, to a man who has traveled innumerable years to see you presently.

I thought what a Fool I was to get wet.

I stood up and looked round me.

A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour, but all else of the world was invisible.

My sensations would be hard to describe.

As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly.

It was very large, for a silver Birch tree touched its shoulder.

It was a white marble in shape, something like a winged Sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to Hover.

The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze and was thick with verdigree.

It changed that the face was towards me.

The sightless eyes seemed to watch me.

There was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.

It was greatly weather worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease.

I stood looking at it for a little space.

Half a minute perhaps, or half an hour.

It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it, denser or thinner at last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare and that the sky was lightning with the promise of the sun.

I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full timidity of the voyage came suddenly upon me.

What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn?

What might not have happened to men?

What if cruelty had grown into a common passion?

What if, in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?

I might seem some old world Savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.

Already I saw other vast shapes, huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm I was seized with a panic fear.

I turned frantically to the time machine and strove hard to readjust it.

As I did so, the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm.

The Gray downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost.

Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint Brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness.

The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses.

I felt naked in a strange world.

I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the Hawk wings above and will swoop.

My fear grew to frenzy.

I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely wrist and knee with the machine.

It gave under my desperate onset and turned over.

It struck my chin violently, one hand on the saddle, the other on the lever.

I stood panting heavily in attitude to Mount again.

But with this recovery of a prompt retreat, my courage recovered.

I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future.

In a circular opening high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in rich, soft robes.

They had seen me and their faces were directed towards me.

Then I heard voices approaching me.

Coming through the bushes by the White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running.

One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine.

He was a slight creature, perhaps 4ft high, clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt, sandals or Buskins.

I could not clearly distinguish which were on his feet.

His legs were bare to the knees and his head was bare.

Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.

He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail.

His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much.

At the sight of him, I suddenly regained confidence.

I took my hands from the machine.

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

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Dot Bite At A Time Books.com.

We are now part of the Byte At A Time Books Production 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 Tuesdays wherever listen to podcasts again.