The Time Ships Read Online Free Page A

were towers upthrust into the flickering sky, bearing immense masses at their slender throats. I thought of taking up my Kodak and attempting to photograph these phantasms, but I knew that the spectres would be too light-starved to enable any image to be recorded, diluted by time travel as they were. The architectural technologies I made out here seemed to me as far beyond the capabilities of the nineteenth century as had been the great Gothic cathedrals from the Romans or Greeks. Surely, I mused, in this future era man had gained some freedom from the relentless tugging of gravity; for how else could these great structures have been raised against the sky?
    But before long the great Thames arch grew stained with brown and green, the colours of irreverent, destructive life, and – in a twinkling, it seemed to me – the arch crumbled from its centre, collapsing to two bare stumps on the banks. Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.
    I felt an extraordinary detachment from the world, an aloofness brought about by my time travelling. I remembered the curiosity and exhilaration I had felt when I had first soared through these dreams of future architecture; I remembered my brief, feverish speculation as to the accomplishments of these future races of men. Now, I knew different; now I knew that regardless of these great accomplishments, Humanity would inevitably fall backwards, under the inexorable pressure of evolution, into the decadence and degradation of Eloi and Morlock.
    I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are! – and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution – forces which move inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!

2

A NEW VISION
    I soon passed beyond the Age of Great Buildings. New houses and halls, less ambitious but still huge, shimmered into existence around me, all about the vale of the Thames, and assumed a certain opacity, in the eyes of a Time Traveller, that comes with longevity. The arch of the sun, dipping across the deep blue sky between its solstice extremes, seemed to me to grow brighter, and a green flow spread across Richmond Hill and took possession of the land, banishing the browns and whites of winter. Once more, I had entered that era in which the climate of the earth had been adjusted in favour of Humanity.
    I looked out over a landscape reduced by my velocity to the static; only the longest-lived phenomena clung to time long enough to register on my fleeting eye. I saw no people, no animals, not even the passage of a cloud. I was suspended in an eerie stillness. If it had not been for the oscillating sun-band, and the deep, unnatural day-night blue of the sky, I might have been sitting alone in some late summer park.
    According to my dials, I was less than a third of the way through my great journey – although a quarter of a million years had already worn away since my own familiar century – and yet, it seemed, the age in which man built upon the earth was already done.The planet had been rendered into that garden within which the folk who would become the Eloi would live out their futile, petty lives; and already, I knew, proto-Morlocks must have been imprisoned beneath the earth, and must even now be tunnelling out their immense, machinery-choked caverns. Little would change over the half-million-year interval I had yet to cross, save for the further degradation of Humanity, and the identity of the victims in the millions of tiny, fearful tragedies which would from now on comprise the condition of man …
    But – I observed, rousing myself from these morbid