hill I thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned
the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white,
ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the
ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body. They moved
hastily. I did not see what became of them. It seemed that they
vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must
understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling
you may have known. I doubted my eyes.
As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and
its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the
view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere
creatures of the half-light. They must have been ghosts, I said; I
wonder whence they dated. For a queer notion of Grant Allen s came
into my head, and amused me. If each generation die and leave ghosts,
he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that
theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand
Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the
jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the
morning, until Weena s rescue drove them out of my head. I associated
them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my
first passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was a pleasant
substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far
deadlier possession of my mind.
I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of
this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was
hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun
will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with
such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the
planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As
these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and
it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the
reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know
it.
Well, one very hot morning my fourth, I think as I was seeking shelter
from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house where I
slept and fed, there happened this strange thing. Clambering among
these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and side
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