The Map of Time

Convinced that in the distant future mankind would have succeeded in evolving fully on a scientific as well as a spiritual level, the time traveller rode across the plains of time on his machine until he reached the year 802,701, a date chosen at random, and sufficiently far off in the future for Wells to be able to verify his predictions in situ. By the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, terrorised by the landlady’s threats, Wells related, in fits and starts, his inventor’s foray into a world that resembled a huge enchanted garden. To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had rid it of ugliness, coarseness and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveller was able to observe, the delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, free from ill-health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Neither did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost Utopian society, which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilisation.

Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around after he had saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which, although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to his ear.

Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveller to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simple-mindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was no change, and no necessity for it. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape.

He was not mistaken: beneath the make-believe paradise dwelled the Morlocks, a simian race afraid of daylight, who, he would soon discover to his horror, had regressed to a state of savage cannibalism. It was the Morlocks who fed the Eloi, fattening their neighbours who lived above ground before gorging on them in their subterranean world.

Their reprehensible eating habits notwithstanding, the traveller was forced to acknowledge that the last vestiges of human intelligence and reason survived in that brutal race, which their need to operate the network of machinery in their underground tunnels had helped preserve.

Afraid of remaining trapped in the future, with no means of travelling back to his own time, the inventor had no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, Orpheus and Hercules and descend into the underworld, into the realm of the Morlocks, to retrieve his machine. Having done so, he made a frenzied escape through time, travelling deep into the future, until he arrived at a strange beach stretching out beneath a shadowy sky. He could see from a swift glance at this new future, whose rarefied air made his lungs smart, that life had divided into two species: a variety of giant screeching white butterfly, and a terrifying crab with enormous pincers, which he was glad to get away from.

No longer curious about what had befallen mankind, which had apparently become extinct, but about the Earth itself, the inventor continued his journey in great strides of a thousand years. At his next stop, more than thirty million years from his own time, he discovered a desolate planet, an orb that had almost stopped rotating, feebly illuminated by a dying sun. A scant snowfall struggled to spread its white veil over a place where there was no sound. The twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the buzz of insects and the barking of dogs that made up the music of life were no more than a nicker in the traveller’s memory.

Then he noticed a bizarre creature with tentacles splashing around in the reddish sea before him, and his profound grief gave way to a nameless dread that compelled him to clamber back onto his machine. Back in the seat, at the helm of time, he felt a dreadful emptiness. He felt no curiosity about the ominous landscapes awaiting him further into the future. Neither did he wish to go back in time, now he knew that all men’s achievements had been futile. He decided the moment had come for him to go back to his own time, to where he truly belonged. On the way back he ended by closing his eyes, for now that the journey in reverse made extinction into a false resurrection, he could not bear to see the world around him grow verdant, the sun recover its stifled splendour, the houses and buildings spring up again, testaments to the progress and trends in human architecture. He only opened his eyes when he felt himself surrounded by the familiar four walls of his laboratory. Then he pulled the lever and the world stopped being a nebulous cloud and took on its old consistency.

Once he had arrived back in his own time, he heard voices and the noise of plates in the dining room, and discovered he had stopped his machine on the Thursday after his departure. After pausing for a few moments to catch his breath, the inventor appeared before his guests, not so much out of a desire to share his experiences with them but because he was attracted by the delicious smell of roast meat, which, after the diet of fruit he had been forced to live on in the future, was an irresistible temptation. After sating his appetite voraciously – in front of his astonished guests, who gaped in awe at his ghastly pallor, his scratched face and the peculiar stains on his jacket – the traveller finally recounted his adventure. Naturally, no one believed in his fantastic voyage, even though he showed them the strange blossoms from his pockets and the sorry state of his time machine.

In the novel’s epilogue, Wells had the narrator, who was one of the traveller’s guests, finger the exotic flowers, reflecting with optimism that even when physical strength and intelligence has died out, gratitude will live on in men’s hearts.

When the novel finally came out under the title The Time Machine, it caused a sensation. By August, Heinemann had already printed six thousand paperbacks and fifteen hundred hardbacks. Everyone was talking about it, though not because of its shocking content. Wells had been at pains to present a metaphorical but devastating vision of the ultimate price of a rigidly capitalistic society. Who would not see in the Morlocks the evolutionary result of the working class, brutalised by appalling conditions and exhausting hours, working from dawn until dusk, a class that society had slowly and discreetly begun to move below ground, while the surface of the Earth was reserved for the wealthy classes? With the aim of stirring his readers’ consciences, Wells had even inverted the social roles: the Eloi – futile and decorative as the Carolingian kings – were fodder for the Morlocks, who, despite their ugliness and barbarism, were at the top of the food chain.

However, to Wells’s astonishment, all his attempts to raise society’s awareness paled before the excitement his notion of time travel stirred. One thing was clear: whatever the reasons, this novel, written under such adverse conditions, and which, at little more than forty thousand words, had even required padding with a publicity booklet, had secured him a place in the hall of fame, or had at least brought him to its threshold. And this was far more than he had ever expected when he had penned the first of those forty thousand words.

Like a murderer removing all trace of his crime, the first thing Wells did on becoming a successful author was to burn as many copies as he could find of that childish drivel The Chronic Argonauts. He did not want anyone to discover that the excellence they attributed to The Time Machine was the end result of such lengthy fumbling and had not emerged in its finished state from his apparently brilliant mind. After that, he tried to enjoy his fame, although this did not prove easy.