swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy
savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the
Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian
brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now if I may use the
phrase be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or
beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he go
forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but
with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems
solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot
think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory,
and mutual discord are indeed man s culminating time! I say, for my own
part. He, I know for the question had been discussed among us long
before the Time Machine was made thought but cheerlessly of the
Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation
only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy
its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as
though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank is
a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his
story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white
flowers shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle to witness that
even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness
still lived on in the heart of man.
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