there in that box rests the result of two years' labor.
imagine that this cigar is the time traveller. now, this lever in front of him controls movement. forward pressure sends the machine into the future, backward pressure into the past. and the harder the pressure the faster the machine travels.
you needn't have troubled yourself. i'm all right.
i started. and the laboratory grew faint around me.
i stopped.
no change; everything exactly as it bad been before. - but no!
and yet by my watch which was in the machine with me, only a few seconds had passed.
it was disconcerting to see the sun.
arc in less than a minute.
to see flowers closing their eyes for the night, changes that normally took hours, occuring in seconds, was beautiful.
and as yet i was travelling very slowly! what if i went faster?!
it became intoxicating. to see an entire storm in a few seconds. - so i pushed the lever on toward even greater speed.
thirteen years had passed. fourteen.  fifteen. sixteen. and then.
in the year nineteen hundred seventeen.  i stopped.
as i went along, i gained experience in handling the machine. i found that i could stop for a day, an hour, or even for a second to observe, then go ahead for a year or two. - thus i was able to see the changing world in a series of glimpses.
this was intriguing. i wondered just how far women would permit this to go.
i began to grow fond of that mannequin. maybe because, like me, she didn't age.
suddenly, in nineteen forty i began to be buffeted from side to side. my first thought was that the machine had a mechanical defect or a part had worn out.
the last time i had stopped was in nineteen seventeen, twenty three years ago. and the war with germany was still waging - now in the air with flying machines. it didn't seem possible they could go on fighting all these years and still have the means of fighting. then i realized the truth of the matter. this was a new war. there must have been an interval of peace in between these wars. yet they had learned nothing but to prepare even more effective means of destroying one another. i decided to push on into time and see the outcome.
the fighting in the sky lasted only a few moments. by nineteen forty five it was over, but i continued on a few more years before pausing for another glimpse of my silent, never aging friend.
it vas reassuring to find that she hadn't changed. only her costume. provocative to say the least. i wondered what she would look like ten years hence.
at first i wondered if my machine and i were the cause of the panic. i was to soon find out we weren't.
the labor of centuries gone in an instant.
but then mother earth, aroused by man's violence, responded with volcanic violence or her own!
then i saw my own danger. i too was to be engulfed!
but to go back was unthinkable.
only my speed through time saved me from being roasted alive and encased in stone forever.
the molten rock cooled. i prayed. wondering how many centuries, how many eons must pass before the wind and rain could wear away the mountain that enclosed me.
darkness. darkness for centuries.
i wondered if there was still war being waged on the ground above me.  if man would still exist on earth, when i saw the sun again.
the centuries rolled by. - i put my trust in time and waited for the rock to wear down around me.
i was free again!
thousands of centuries passed, but the earth stayed green! there was no winter! no wars! - had man finally learned to control both the elements and themselves? - i had to stop and find out.
nature tamed completely and more bountiful than ever before.
flowers everywhere. the whole landscape one vast garden with no sign of weeds or briars.
unrepaired for centuries! maybe unlived in for as long. it would be no paradise if it belonged to me alone.
i hoped to learn a great deal. i hoped to take back the knowledge, the advancement, mankind made.  instead what do i find? vegetables!
my efforts next morning to open the panel were fruitless. i had to find another way to retrieve my machine.
from the talking rings i learned how the human race divided itself and how the world of the eloi and morlocks began.
by some quirk of fate the morlocks had become the masters and the eloi their servants. the morlocks main- tained them and bred them like cattle only to take them below when they reached maturity, which explained why there were no older people along them.
now i knew i must go below. it was the only means of finding a way up into the sphinx to reach my machine and to find out what happened to the little people when they went below.
the underworld of the morlocks was gone. and so was the life of leisure for the eloi.
from now on they would have to work to survive. and looking at their faces, i somehow knew that they could start over again.
another night was coming, but this night no eloi needed to fear.
but what of me? - i was imprisoned in a world in which i did not belong.