Chapter 3 The Time Traveler's Story in His Own Words.
Last Thursday I told some of you about time travel.
And I showed you the machine I was building.
It's still in my workroom, but it's been knocked about since last week.
One of the ivory bars is cracked, a brass rail is bent, but it still works.
When I showed it to you a week ago, it wasn't finished.
I thought it would only take another day or so to complete it, but it turned out that it wasn't ready until this morning at ten o'clock.
I wrote notes inviting each of you to dinner tonight and asked my housekeeper to have them delivered.
Then I went into my workshop.
I looked over my machine one last time, climbed in, and sat in the chair.
When I'm sitting in the machine, there is a set of dials in front of me that tells me where I am in time and how fast I am traveling.
One dial shows days, another thousands of days, another millions of days, another billions of days.
Each has a hand, like the hand of a clock, that counts the days.
Beside the dials is the lever for starting the machine.
I have spent years thinking about time travel and working on my invention, but I could still only guess what was about to happen.
After all, I was trying to do something that no one had ever done before.
I took the lever in one hand and pushed it ever so slightly.
Suddenly, I felt dizzy, as if I was falling.
Right away, I pulled the lever back to its starting position.
I looked around the room.
Everything looked exactly the same.
Had anything happened?
Then I saw the clock sitting on my workbench.
I'd climbed into the machine at ten o'clock in the morning.
It was now three-thirty in the afternoon.
To me it felt as if only seconds had passed, but to the outside world, five and a half hours had gone by.
I took a deep breath and pushed the lever forward again. was a thud and the room became blurry.
It was as if I were looking at everything through water.
I saw my housekeeper come in and walk to the garden door.
She didn't even look at me.
It was as if I was invisible.
But the strangest sight was how swiftly she was crossing the floor.
It took her only a second or two to enter, walk to the other side of the workshop, and leave again.
My time machine worked.
I was thrilled and pressed the lever as far forward as it would go.
Suddenly it was night.
Then, just as quickly, the light coming through the windows returned, and it was tomorrow.
The room grew faint and blurry.
Tomorrow night came, then day again, night again, day again.
As the days and nights came faster and faster, a humming sound filled my ears.
I looked at the dial that measured days.
The hand was counting them off like the second hand of a clock counts off seconds.
It's hard to describe time travel.
I felt as if I was in a runaway carriage being tossed back and forth.
I was dizzy and felt as if I was about to crash into something.
Days and nights passed in the blink of an eye.
At one point the walls of the workshop disappeared and I could see outside.
The house must have been torn down.
I could now see the sun flashing across the sky during the day, followed by the moon at night.
I saw the moon go from full to new to full in only seconds.
That was how quickly a month raced by.
I also caught a glimpse of the stars as they whirled overhead.
I was traveling faster and faster into the future.
Night and day blurred into a deep blue, like the color of the sky at sunset.
The sun was flashing by so quickly it looked like a streak of light across the sky.
The moon looked like a fainter streak.
Inside my machine, the dials were spinning around faster and faster.
I saw the streak of the sun's path move from low in the sky to high in the sky and back in less than a minute.
When the path of the sun was high in the sky, it was summer.
When it was low in the sky, it was winter.
So a single year was passing by in less than a minute.
A whole decade was speeding by in less than ten minutes.
As summer and winter came and went, I saw the world go from green to white and back again.
I saw trees sprout, grow and die.
I saw huge buildings rise up, then suddenly disappear.
The city grew and changed shape like some great garden.
It was as if London were a living thing.
I began to wonder what I would find when I stopped.
What would the city be like?
What would people be like?
Would they be gentle or savage?
And so I began to think about stopping the machine, but then I wondered.
What would happen when I came to a halt?
I had started my journey in an empty room and as long as I was moving quickly through time, I wasn't going to hit anything.
But what would happen if I stopped in the middle of a large building or a tree?
I told myself I would have to stop sooner or later, so I made up my mind.
I grabbed the lever with both hands and pulled hard.
I must have done it too quickly because there was a loud crashing sound.
The time machine went flying and I was thrown through the air.
I landed on the soft ground and tumbled to a stop.
The machine lay behind me on its side.
It was raining.
I very quickly became wet.
When I caught my breath I thought it was funny that I had traveled all this way through time and here I was getting soaked in the rain.
I looked around.
It seemed to be on a grass lawn in a garden.
There were bushes all around me with bright purple flowers.
I saw tall plants with strange white flowers that were a foot wide.
Other plants were filled with fruit.
I also saw a white stone statue nearby.
It reminded me of an Egyptian sphinx.
The statue was part man and part lion, great wings stretched from the creature's back.
It stood on a large base that appeared to me made of bronze.
The statue and the base looked very old.
The rain was letting up.
The clouds were parting and I could see blue sky.
Sunlight shone through and lit up the countryside.
As the mist cleared, huge white buildings with tall towers appeared in the distance.
I hadn't moved from the site of my workshop, but it was as if I was in a strange new land.
I didn't recognize anything and suddenly felt very far from home.
I became afraid and began to panic.
From where I sat, I could see into my time machine as it lay on the ground.
I looked at the dials of the machine and couldn't believe my eyes.
It was the year 802,701.
I had traveled more than 800,000 years into the future.
The thought of this made me even more afraid.
I quickly got to my feet and tried to turn my machine right side up.
It was a struggle, but I pushed hard and finally turned it over.
Now that the machine was upright and I could escape quickly, my fear began to disappear.
As I calmed down, I became more curious.
I wanted to know more about the world around me.
After all, my machine had worked.
I was in the future.
I noticed a building nearby, and in one of the windows I saw people.
They were wearing flowing robes and looking at me.
Then I heard voices and saw other people coming toward me through the bushes.
A small man stepped onto the grass and walked up to me.
He was only four feet tall.
He wore a purple robe and had a belt around his waist.
His legs were bare and he wore sandals on his feet.
His face was childlike and he moved gracefully, but he looked very thin and I could tell he wasn't very strong.
I left my machine and walked toward this man of the future.
