towards the hill again. Patience, said I to myself. If you want your
machine again you must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take
your machine away, it s little good your wrecking their bronze panels,
and if they don t, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it.
To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is
hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways,
watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end
you will find clues to it all. Then suddenly the humour of the
situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in
study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of
anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and
the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my
own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.
Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people
avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to
do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure
of the avoidance. I was careful, however, to show no concern and to
abstain from any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two
things got back to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the
language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there.
Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively
simple almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs.
There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of
figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two
words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest
propositions. I determined to put the thought of my Time Machine and
the mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx, as much as possible
in a corner of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me back to
them in a natural way. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand,
tethered me in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.
VIII.
Explanation
So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant
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