The Time Machine - International World History Project

The Time MachineeBook brought to you byCreate, view, and edit PDF. Download the free trial version.‘So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great stridesof a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery ofthe earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sungrow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life ofthe old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty millionyears hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had cometo obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude ofcrabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its lividgreen liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now itwas flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rarewhite flakes ever and again came eddying down. To thenorth-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight ofthe sable sky and I could see an undulating crest of hillockspinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the seamargin, with drifting masses further out; but the mainexpanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternalsunset, was still unfrozen.‘I looked about me to see if any traces of animal liferemained. A certain indefinable apprehension still kept mein the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving,in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alonetestified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank hadappeared in the sea and the water had receded from the135 of 148