dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing

me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to

traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room

like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The

night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment

came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter

and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night

again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled

my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

'I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time

travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling

exactly like that one has upon a switchback--of a helpless headlong

motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent

smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a

black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to

fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky,

leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed

the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air.

I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too

fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that

ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of

darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the

intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her

quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling

stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the

The Time Machine