EPILOGUE

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he

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 lakes 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 civilization 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.

128

The Time Machine