Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the seventh 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 Bytebooks.

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.

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

G.

Wells Seven A sudden shock as I stood there musing over this two perfect triumph of man.

The full moon, yellow and Gibias, came out of an overflow of silver light in the northeast.

The bright little figure ceased to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night.

I determined to descend and find where I could sleep.

I looked for the building.

I knew then my eye travelled along to the figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze growing distinct as the light of the rising moon grew brighter.

I could see the silver Birch against it.

There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light.

And there was the little lawn.

I looked at the lawn again.

A clear doubt chilled my complacency.

No, said I stoutly to myself.

That was not the lawn, but it was the lawn, for the white leper's face of the Sphinx was towards it.

Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to me?

But you cannot.

The Time Machine was gone.

At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.

The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation.

I could feel it grit me at the throat and stop my breathing.

In another moment I was in passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope.

Once I fell headlong and cut my face, I lost no time in stenching the blood, but jumped up and ran on with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin.

All the time I ran, I was saying to myself, they have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes, out of the way.

Nevertheless, I ran with all my might, all the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread.

I knew that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach.

My breath came with pain.

I suppose I covered the whole distance from the Hillcrest to the little lawn 2 miles, perhaps in ten minutes.

And I am not a young man.

I cursed aloud as I ran at my confident folly and leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby.

I cried aloud, and none answered.

Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit world.

When I reached the lawn, my worst fears were realized.

Not a trace of the thing was to be seen.

I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes.

I ran around it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly with my hands clutching my hair.

Above me towered the Sphinx upon the bronze pedestal, white shining lepros in the light of the rising moon, it seemed to smile and mockery of my dismay.

I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanisms in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and intellectual inadequacy.

That is what dismayed me, the sense of some hitherto unsuspected power through whose intervention my intervention had vanished.

Yet for one thing, I felt assured, unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time.

The attachment of the levers, I will show you.

The method later prevented anyone from tampering with it in that way.

When they were removed, it had moved and was hid only in space.

But then, where could it be?

I think I must have had a kind of frenzy.

I remember running violently in and out among the moonlit bushes all around the Sphinx and startling some white animal that in the dim light I took for a small deer.

I remember too late that night, beating the bushes with my clinched fist until my knuckles were gnashed and bleeding from the broken twigs.

Then, sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of Stone.

The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted.

I slipped on the uneven floor and fell over one of the malachite tablets, almost breaking my Shin.

I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains of which I have told you.

There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which perhaps a score or so of the little people were sleeping.

I have no doubt they found my second appearance, strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the sputter and flare of a match, for they had forgotten about matches.

Where is my time machine?

I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together.

It must have been very queer to them.

Some laughed.

Most of them looked sorely frightened.

When I saw them standing round me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as it was possible for me to do under the circumstances, and trying to revive the sensation of fear for reasoning from their daylight behavior.

I thought that fear must be forgotten.

Abruptly I dashed down the match and, knocking one of the people over in my course, went blundering across the big dining hall again, out into the moonlight.

I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way and that.

I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky.

I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me.

I felt hopelessly, cut off from my own kind, a strange animal in an unknown world.

I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and fate.

I have a memory of horrible fatigue as the long night of despair wore way of looking in this impossible place and that of groping among moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows.

At last of lying on the ground near the Sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness, even anger at the folly of leaving the machine.

Having leaked away with my strength, I had nothing left but misery.

Then I slept, and when I woke again it was a full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping around me on the turf within reach of my arm.

I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got there and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair.

Then things came clear in my mind.

With the plain, reasonable daylight I could look my circumstances fairly in the face.

I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself.

Suppose the worst, I said.

Suppose the machine altogether lost, perhaps destroyed.

It behooves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method of my loss and the means of getting materials and tools so that in the end perhaps I may make another.

That would be my only hope.

A poor hope, perhaps, but better than despair.

And after all, it was a beautiful and curious world.

But probably the machine had only been taken away.

Still, I must be calm and patient, find its hiding place and recover it by force or cunning.

And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering where I could bathe.

I felt weary, stiff, and travel soiled.

The freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness.

I had exhausted my emotion.

Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself wandering at my intense excitement overnight.

I made a careful examination of the ground, about the little lawn.

I wasted some time in feudal questioning conveyed as well as I was able to set up the little people as came by.

They all failed to understand my gestures.

Some were simply stolen.

Some thought it was adjust and laughed at me.

I had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces.

It was a foolish impulse, but the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill.

Curbed and still eager to take advantage of my perplexity, the turf gave better counsel.

I found a groove ripped in it about midway between the pedestal of the Sphinx and the marks of my feet, where on arrival I had struggled with the overturned machine.

There were other signs of removal about with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine being made by a sloth.

This directed my closer attention to the pedestal.

It was, as I think I have said, of bronze.

It was not a mere block, but highly decorated, with deep framed panels on either side.

I went and wrapped at these.

The pedestal was hollow.

Examining the panels with care, I found them discontinuous with the frames.

There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as I supposed open from within.

One thing was clear enough to my mind.

It took no very great mental effort to infer that my time machine was inside that pedestal.

But how it got there was a different problem.

I saw the heads of two Orange clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom covered Apple trees towards me.

I turned, smiling to them, and beckoned them to me.

They came and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it.

But at my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly.

I don't know how to convey their expression to you.

Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate minded woman.

It is how she would look.

They went off as if they had received the last possible insult.

I tried a sweet looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result.

Somehow his manner made me feel ashamed of myself.

But as you know, I wanted the time machine, and I tried him once more.

As he turned off like the others, my temper got the better of me.

In three strides I was after him, had him by the loose part of his robe round the neck, and began dragging him towards the Sphinx.

Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.

But I was not beaten yet.

I banged with my fist at the bronze panels.

I thought I heard something stir inside.

To be explicit, I thought I had heard a sound, like a chuckle, but I must have been mistaken.

Then I got a big pebble from the river and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes.

The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it.

I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me.

At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place, but I was too restless to watch long.

I am too accidental for a long vigil.

I could work out a problem for years, but to wait inactive for 24 hours, that is another matter.

I got up after a time and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the Hill again.

Patient, said I to myself, if you want your machine again, you must leave that stinks alone.

If they mean to take your machine away, it's little good.

You're wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don't, you'll get it back as soon as you can ask for it.

To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless.

That way lies monomania.

Face this world.

Learn its ways.

Watch it.

Be careful of two hasty guesses at its meaning.

In the end you will find clues to it all.

Then suddenly the humor of the situation came into my mind.

The thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.

I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.

Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself.

I laughed aloud.

Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me.

It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze.

Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance.

I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them.

And in the course of a day or two, things got back to the old footing.

I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition, I pushed my explorations here and there.

Either I missed some subtle point, or their language was excessively simple, almost exclusively composed of concrete substances and verbs.

There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms or little use of figurative language.

Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.

I determined to put the thought of my time machine and the mystery of the bronze doors under the Sphinx as much as possible in a corner of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me back to them in a natural way.

Yet a certain feeling you may understand tethered me in a circle of a few miles around the point of my arrival.

Thank you for joining Bike editime 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.bytetimebooks.com.

We are now part of the Byte 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 Tuesdays wherever you listen to podcasts again.