black in the pale light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the
lawn again. A queer doubt chilled my complacency. No, said I stoutly
to myself, that was not the lawn.
But it _was_ the lawn. For the white leprous face of the sphinx was
towards it. Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to
me? But you cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing
my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare
thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me
at the throat and stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a
passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope.
Once I fell headlong and cut my face; I lost no time in stanching the
blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and
chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself: They have moved it a
little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way. Nevertheless, I ran
with all my might. All the time, with the certainty that sometimes
comes with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew
instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath
came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hill
crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am
not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly in
leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and
none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit
world.
When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realised. Not a trace of
the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty
space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if
the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with
my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the
bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising
moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.
I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put
the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their
physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the
sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my
invention had vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt assured: unless some
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