Amazing Stories, Vol. 2, No. 2 — page 51: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE TIME MACHINE of vapor, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, fluctuated, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changing—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring. 6 Bes unpleasant sensations of the start were 4 less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, in- deed, a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But pres- ently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind,—a certain curiosity, and therewith a cer- tain dread,—until they at last took complete pos- session of me. What strange developments of hu- manity, what wonderful advances upon our rudi- mentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim, elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architectures rising about me, More massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping. “The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: IT was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way, meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the ob- stacle that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of the Rigid Uni- verse—out of all possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an un- avoidable risk—one of the risks 2a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all the the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing 155 went reeling over, and £ was flung headlong through the air. “There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail. was hissing round me, and I was Sitting on soft turf in front of the overset ma- chine. Everything still seemed gray, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked around me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rho- dodendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower un- der the beating of hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the ma- chine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. ‘Fine hospitality to a man,’ said I, ‘who has traveled innumerable years to see you!’ “Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked around me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible. “My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a a silver birch tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was toward me; the sight- less eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint | shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weatherworn, and that imparted an unpleasant Suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun. “T looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy cur- tain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dread- ful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain. “Already I saw other vast shapes—huge build- ings with intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. JI turned frantically to the Time Ma- chine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thun- derstorm. The gray downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue nf tho summer Gomi