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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-The Time Machine by H.G. Wells


73

CHAPTER 12

‘SO I CAME back. For a long time I must have been insensible
upon the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights
was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed
with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed
and flowed. The hands spun backward upon the dials. At last I
saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent
humanity.

These, too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when
the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize
our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran
back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and
slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very
gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.

‘I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told
you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs.
Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to
me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute
when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion
appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door
at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory,
back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had
previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a
moment; but he passed like a flash.

‘Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old
familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them.
I got off the thing very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For
several minutes I trembled violently. Then I became calmer.
Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been.

I might have slept there, and the whole thing have been a dream.
‘And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the southeast
corner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the northwest,
against the wall where you saw it. That gives you the exact
distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx,
into which the Morlocks had carried my machine.

‘For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came
through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still
painful, and feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the Pall Mall Gazette
on the table by the door. I found the date was indeed to-day, and
looking at the timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight o’clock. I
heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated-I felt so sick
and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the
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