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

Come with us as we release one bite a day of one of your favorite classic novels, plays & short stories. Bree reads these classics like she reads to her daughter, one chapter a day. If you love books or audiobooks and want something to listen to as you're getting ready, driving to work, or as you're getting ready for bed, check out Bite at a Time Books!

Follow, rate, and review Bite at a Time Books where we read you your favorite classics, one bite at a time. Available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get exclusive Behind the Scenes content on our Patreon

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.

Follow us on all the socials: Instagram - Twitter - Facebook - TikTok

Follow Bree at: Instagram - Twitter - Facebook

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.

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 the 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.

Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we'll be continuing the Time Machine by H.

G.

Wells ten when Night Came Now indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before hitherto.

Except during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time machine, I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape.

But that hope was staggered by these new discoveries hitherto.

I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome.

But there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks, of something inhuman and malign.

Instinctively, I loathed them.

Before, I had felt, as a man might feel, who had fallen into a pit.

My concern was with the pit and how to get out of it.

Now I felt like a beast in a trap whose enemy would come upon him soon.

The enemy I dreaded may surprise you.

It was the darkness of the new Moon.

Wina had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the Dark Knights.

It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark Knights might mean.

The moon was on the wane.

Each night there was a longer interval of darkness, and I now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little upper world people for the dark.

I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon.

I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong.

The upper world people might once have been the favorite aristocracy, and the more locks their mechanical servants, but that had long since passed away.

The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at an altogether new relationship.

The Loi, like the Carlovinian Knights, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.

They still possessed the Earth on sufferance since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable, and the Morlocks made their garments I inferred and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.

They did it as a standing horse paused with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport because ancient and departed necessities had impressed upon the organism.

But clearly the old order was already in part reversed.

The nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on a pace.

Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the Sunshine, and now that brother was coming back changed.

Already the loi had begun to learn one old lesson anew they were becoming reacquainted with fear, and suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the underworld.

It seemed odd how it floated into my mind, not stirred up, as it were, by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from the outside.

I tried to recall the form of it.

I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.

Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious fear, I was differently constituted.

I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race.

When fear does not paralyze and mystery has lost its terrors, I at least would defend myself without further delay, I determined to make myself arms in a fastness where I might sleep.

With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost and realizing to what creatures.

Night by night, I lay exposed.

I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them.

I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.

I wandered during the afternoon along the Valley of the Themes, but found nothing that commended itself to my mind is inaccessible.

All of the buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their Wells must be.

Then the tall pinnacles of the palace of green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to my memory.

And in the evening, taking WINA like a child upon my shoulder, I went up the Hills toward the southwest.

The distance, I had reckoned was seven or 8 miles, but it must have been near 18.

I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished.

In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose and a nail was working through the sole.

They were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors so that I was lame.

And it was already long past sunset when I came inside of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.

Wina had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a while she desired me to let her down and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets.

My pockets had always puzzled WINA, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of basis for floral decoration.

At least she utilized them for that purpose.

And that reminds me, in changing my jacket I found the time traveler paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mollows upon a little table.

Then he resumed his narrative as the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the Hillcrest towards Wimbledon.

Wienuk grew tired and wanted to return to the House of Gray Stone, but I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the palace of Green Porcelain to her and contrived to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge there from her fear.

You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk?

Even the breeze stops in the trees.

To me there was always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.

The sky was clear, remote, and empty, saved for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset.

Well, that night the expectation took the color of my fears.

In that Darkling calm my senses seemed pretty naturally sharpened.

I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet, could indeed almost see through it, the more locks on their Anthill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark.

In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their Burrows as a declaration of war.

And why had they taken my time machine?

So we went on in the quiet and the Twilight deepened into nights.

The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.

The ground grew dim and the trees black.

Lena's fears and her fatigue grew upon her.

I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her.

Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms around my neck and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder.

So we went down a long slope into a Valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked into a little river.

This I waited and went up the opposite side of the Valley, past a number of sleeping houses and by a statue, a fawn or some such figure minus the head.

Here, too, were acacias.

So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.

From the brow of the next Hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black before me.

I hesitated at this.

I could see no end to it, either to the right or the left.

Feeling tired, my feet in particular, were very sore.

I carefully lowered WINA from my shoulder.

As I halted and sat down upon the turf.

I could no longer see the palace of green porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction.

I looked into the thickness of the wood and thought of what it might hide under that dense tangle of branches.

One would be out of sight of the stars, even.

Were there no other lurking danger, a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose upon, there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the tree balls to strike against.

I was very tired, too, after the excitement of the day, so I decided that I would not face it.

But what passed the night upon the open Hill?

Wina, I was glad to find, was fast asleep.

I carefully wrapped her in my jacket and sat down beside her to wait for the Moonrise.

The hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the back of the wood there came now and then a stir of living things above me shown the stars, for the night was very clear.

I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling.

All the old constellations had gone from the Sky, however, that slow movement, which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings.

But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of Stardust as of York southward as I judged.

It was a very bright red star that was new to me.

It was even more splendid than our own green Cereus, and amid all these scintillating points of light, one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life, I thought of their unfathomable distance and the slow, inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

I thought of the great processional cycle that the Pole of the Earth describes.

Only 40 times had that silent revolution occurred.

During all the years that I had traversed, and during these few revolutions, all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.

Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry and the white things of which I went in terror.

Then I thought of the great fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be.

Yet it was too horrible.

I looked at little WINA sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars and forthwith dismissed the thoughts.

Through that long night.

I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I could, and wild away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations in the new confusion.

The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy cloud or so.

No doubt I dozed at times.

Then, as my vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colorless fire, and the old moon rose thin and peaked and white, and close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it the dawn came, pale at first, and then growing pink and warm.

No more locks had approached us.

Indeed, I had seen none upon the Hill that night, and in the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable.

I stood up and found my foot, with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel.

So I sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung them away.

I awakened WINA, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and forbidding.

We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast.

We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight, as though there was no such thing in nature as the night.

And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen.

I felt assured now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble drill from the great flood of humanity.

Clearly, at some time in the long ago of human decay, the Morlocks food had run short.

Possibly they had lived on rats and such like vermin.

Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was far less than any monkey.

His prejudice against human flesh is no deep seated instinct.

And so these inhuman sons of men.

I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.

After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three and 40 years ago.

And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone.

Why should I trouble myself?

These loi were mere faded cattle, which the antlike Morlocks preserved and preyed upon probably saw to the breeding of, and there was WNA dancing at my side.

Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.

Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labors of his fellow man had taken necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time necessity had come home to him.

I even tried a Carlisle like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay.

But this attitude of mind was impossible.

However great their intellectual degradation, the loi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their fear.

I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue.

My first was to secure some safe place of refuge and to make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive that necessity was immediate.

In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire So that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand for nothing I knew would be more efficient against these Morlocks.

Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx.

I had in mind a battering Ram I had a persuasion that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the time machine and escape I could not imagine the Warlocks are strong enough to move it far away.

Wiener I had resolved to bring with me to our own time and turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.

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.btedtimebooks.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.

My name is Brie Carlyle.