wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a
trophy.
That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty
feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty
in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against
this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the
sensations of falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth
somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I
fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember
Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the
Eloi. Then, for a time, I was insensible.
X.
When Night Came
Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except
during my night s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a
sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by
these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by
the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown
forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an
altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks a
something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I
had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was
with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a
trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.
The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new
moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult
problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was
on the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I
now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of
the little Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul
villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt
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