pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld
people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks
their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two
species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down
towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The
Eloi, like the Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful
futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the
Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to
find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their
garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,
perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as
a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals
in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on
the organism. But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed.
The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago,
thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the
ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back changed!
Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were
becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head
the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld. It seemed odd how
it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of my
meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried
to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar,
but I could not tell what it was at the time.
Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their
mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age
of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse
and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself.
Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness
where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this
strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realising to
what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep
again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to
think how they must already have examined me.
I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but
found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous
climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the
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