Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the eighth 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.

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You can catch us on all the social medias at Bite At A Time Books.

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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 eight Explanation So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant richness as the themes Valley.

From every Hill I climbed I saw the same abundance of splendid buildings and lessly varied in material and style the same clustering thickets of evergreens, the same blossom laden trees and tree Ferns.

Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond the land rose into blue, undulating Hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky.

A peculiar feature which presently attracted my attention was the presence of certain circular Wells several, as it seemed to me, of a very great depth.

One lay in the path up the Hill which I had followed during my first walk.

Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously wrought and protected by a little Cupula from the rain.

Sitting by the side of these Wells and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted match.

But in all of them I heard a certain sound, a thud, thud, thud, like the beating of some big engine, and I discovered from the flaring of my matches that a steady current of air set down the shafts.

Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of one, and instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked swiftly out of sight.

After a time, too, I came to connect these Wells with tall towers standing here and thereupon the slopes, for above them there was often just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun scorched beach.

Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation whose true import it was difficult to imagine.

I was at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people.

It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong, and here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance and the like conveniences during my time in this real future.

In some of these visions of utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building and social arrangements and so forth.

But while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole world is contained in one's imagination, they are all together inaccessible to a real traveller.

Amid such realities, as I found here conceive the tale of London, which a Negro fresh from central Africa, would take back to his tribe.

What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and Telegraph wires, of the parcels delivery company and postal orders and the like?

Yet we at least should be willing enough to explain these things to him, and even of what he knew.

How much could he make his untraveled friend either apprehend or believe?

Then think how narrow the gap between a Negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age.

I was sensible of much which was unseen and which contributed to my comfort.

But save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.

In the matter of Sepula, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs, but it occurred to me that possibly there might be cemeteries or crematoria somewhere beyond the range of my Explorings.

This again was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point.

The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark which puzzled me still more, that aged and infirm among this people there were none.

I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure.

Yet I could think of no other.

Let me put my difficulties.

The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining halls and sleeping apartments.

I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind.

Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metal work.

Somehow such things must be made, and the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency.

There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them.

They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping.

I could not see how things were kept going.

Then again, about the time machine, something I knew not what, had taken it into the hollow pedestal of white Sphinx.

Why, for the life of me, I could not imagine those waterless Wells too, those flickering pillars.

I felt I lacked a clue.

I felt.

How shall I put it?

Suppose you found an inscription with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith others made up of words, letters even absolutely unknown to you.

Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of 802 701 presented itself to me.

That day, too, I made a friend of a sort.

It happened that as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream.

The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly, for even a moderate slimmer.

It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weekly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.

When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes and waiting in at the point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to land.

A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her around, and I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her.

I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any gratitude from her, and that, however, I was wrong.

This happened in the morning.

In the afternoon I met my little woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my center from an exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big Garland of flowers, evidently made for me and me alone.

The thing took my imagination.

Very possibly I had been feeling desolate.

At any rate, I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift.

We were soon seated together in a little stone Arbor, engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles.

The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a child might have done.

We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands.

I did the same to hers.

Then I tried to talk and found that her name was WINA, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough.

That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week and ended, as I will tell you.

She was exactly like a child.

She wanted to be with me always.

She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down and leave her at last exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively.

But the problems of the world had to be mastered.

I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.

Yet her distress when I left her was very great.

Her exposulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think altogether I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion.

Nevertheless, she was somehow a very great comfort.

I thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me until it was too late.

I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her.

Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me.

For by merely seeming fond of me and showing in her weak, feudal way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighborhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home, and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold as soon as I came over the Hill.

It was from her, too, that I learned that fear had not yet left the world.

She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me.

For once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them.

But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things.

Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful.

It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing.

I discovered then, among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark and slept in droves.

To enter upon them without a light was to put them into tumult of apprehension.

I never found one outdoors or one sleeping alone with indoors after dark.

Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the lesson of that fear.

And in spite of Wienna's distress, I insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.

It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm.

But my story slips away from me as I speak of her.

It must have been the night before her rescue that I was awakened about dawn.

I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned and that sea anemones were feeling over my face with their soft pals.

I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some grayish animal had just rushed out of the Chamber.

I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable.

It was that dim Gray hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colorless and clear cut and yet unreal.

I got up and went down into the great hall and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace.

I thought I would make a virtue of necessity and see the sunrise.

The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of dawn were mingled in a ghastly half light.

The bushes were inky black, the ground a somber Gray, the sky colorless and cheerless, and up the Hill I thought I could see ghosts.

Three, several times as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures.

Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white apelike creature running rather quickly up the Hill, and once near their ruins, I saw a leash of them carry some dark body.

They moved hastily.

I did not see what became of them.

It seemed that they vanished among the bushes.

The dawn was still indistinct.

You must understand, I was feeling that chill, uncertain early morning feeling.

You may have known.

I doubted my eyes as the Eastern Sky grew brighter and the light of the day came on and its vivid coloring returned upon the world once more.

I scanned the view keenly, but I saw no vestige of my white figures.

They were mere creatures of the half light.

They must have been ghosts, I said.

I wonder once they dated, for a queer notion of Grant Allen's came into my head and amused me.

If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them.

On that theory they would have grown innumerable some 8000 years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once.

But the chest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning until Wiener's rescue drove them out of my head.

I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the time machine.

But Wiener was a pleasant substitute.

Yet all the same they were soon destined to take far deadlier possession of my mind.

I think, I've said, how much hotter than our own was the weather of this golden age?

I cannot account for it.

It may be that the sun was hotter, or the Earth nearer the sun.

It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future.

But people unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back, one by one into the parent body.

As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy, and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.

Well, one very hot morning, my fourth, I think.

As I was seeking shelter from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house where I slept and fed, there happened this strange thing.

Clamoring among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow Gallery whose end inside windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone.

By contrast with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me.

I entered it groping for the change from light to blackness made spots of color swim before me.

Suddenly I halted spellbound a pair of eyes luminous by reflection against the daylight.

Without was watching me out of the darkness.

The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me.

I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs.

I was afraid to turn.

Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be living came to mind.

And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark overcoming my fear to some extent.

I advanced a step and spoke.

I will admit that my voice was harsh and illcontrolled.

I put out my hand and touched something soft.

At once the eyes darted sideways and something white ran past me.

I turned with my heart in my mouth and I saw a queer little apelike figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me.

It blundered against a block of granite, staggering aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry.

My impression of it is of course imperfect, but I know it was a dull white and had strange large grayish red eyes.

Also that there was flax and hair on its head and down its back.

But as I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly.

I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours or only with its forearms held very low.

After an instant pause I followed it into the second heap of ruins.

I could not find it at first, but after a time in the profound obscurity, I came upon one of those round, well like openings of which I have told you, half closed by a fallen pillar.

A sudden thought came to me.

Could this thing have vanished down the shaft?

I lit a match, and looking down I saw a small, white moving creature with large, bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated.

It made me shudder.

It was so like a human Spider.

It was clamoring down the wall.

And now I saw for the first time a number of metal foot and handrests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft.

Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped.

And when I had lit another, the little monster had disappeared.

I do not know how long I sat peering down that well.

It was not for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was human.

But gradually the truth dawned on me that man had not remained one species but had differentiated into two distinct animals, that my graceful children of the upper world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene nocturnal thing which had flashed before me was also heir to all the ages.

I thought of the flickering pillars and of how my theory of an underground ventilation.

I began to suspect their true import.

And what, I wondered, was this lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization?

How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful overworlders and what was hidden down there at foot of that shaft?

I sat upon the edge of the well, telling myself that at any rate there was nothing to fear and that there I must descend for the solution of my difficulties.

And withal I was absolutely afraid to go.

As I hesitated, two of the beautiful upworld people came running in their amorous sport across the daylight in the shadow.

The male pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.

They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned pillar, peering down the well.

Apparently it was considered bad form to remark these apertures, for when I pointed to this one and tried to frame a question around it in their tongue, they were still more visibly distressed and turned away.

But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse them.

I tried them again about the well, and again I failed.

So presently I left them, meaning to go back to WNA and see what I could get from her.

But my mind was already in revolution.

My guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment.

I had now a clue to the import of these Wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts, to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the time machine.

And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.

Here was the new view.

Plainly, this second species of man was subterranean.

There were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long continued underground habit.

In the first place there was the bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the dark.

The white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance.

Then those large eyes with that capacity for reflecting light are common features of nocturnal things.

Witness the owl and the cat.

And last of all that evident confusion in the Sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the light all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the retina beneath my feet, then the Earth must be tunneled enormously.

And these tunneling were the habitat of the new race.

The presence of ventilating shafts and Wells along the Hill slopes, everywhere, in fact, except along the River Valley, showed how universal were its ramifications.

What's so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this artificial underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was done?

The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human species.

I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory, though for myself I very soon felt that I fell far short of the truth at first.

Proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the capitalist and the laborer was the key to the whole position.

No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you and wildly incredible.

And yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way.

There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization.

There's the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance.

There are new electric Railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.

Evidently I thought this tendency had increased till industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky.

I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and even larger underground factories, spending a still increasing amount of its time therein.

Till in the end, even now, does not an East End worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the Earth?

Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people, due no doubt to the increasing refinement of their education and the widening Gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor, is already leading to the closing in their interest of considerable portions of the surface of the land.

About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against the intrusion.

And the same widening Gulf which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for antimptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich, will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification less and less frequent.

So in the end, above ground you must have the haves pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the have nots.

The workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labor.

Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent and not a little of it for the ventilation of their caverns.

And if they refuse, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears.

Much of them, as were constituted as to be miserable and rebellious, would die.

And in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life.

And as happy in their way as the overworld people were to theirs.

As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the idiot powder followed.

Naturally enough, the great triumph of humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind.

It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I had imagined.

Instead, I saw a real aristocracy armed with a perfect science and working to a logical conclusion.

The industrial system of today.

Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow man.

This I must warn you with my theory.

At the time I had no convenient Cicerone in the patterns of the Utopian books.

My explanation may be absolutely wrong.

I still think it is the most plausible one.

But even on this supposition, the balance civilization that was at last attained Must have long since passed its Zenith And was now far fallen into decay.

The two perfect security of the overworlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration to a general dwindling in size, strength and intelligence that I could see clearly enough already.

What had happened to the undergrounders I did not yet suspect.

But from what I had seen of the Morlocks that by the by was the name by which these creatures were called, I could imagine that the modification of the human type Was even far more profound Than among the loi, the beautiful race that I already knew.

Then came troublesome doubts.

I had the more locks taken my time machine.

For I felt sure it was they who had taken it.

Why, too, if the loi were Masters, could they not restore the machine to me?

And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark?

I proceeded, as I have said, to question WINA about this underworld.

But here again, I was disappointed.

At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them.

She shivered as though the topic was unendurable.

And when I pressed her, Perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears.

They were the only tears except my own I ever saw in that golden age.

When I saw them, I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks And was only concerned in banishing those signs of her human inheritance from WINA's eyes and very stone.

She was smiling and clapping her hands While I solemnly burnt a match.

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