risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.

The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything,

the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the

feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told

myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I

resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over

the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was

flung headlong through the air.

'There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have

been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me,

and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine.

Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the

confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on what

seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron

bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were

dropping in a shower under the beating of the hail-stones. The

rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the machine, and drove

along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin.

"Fine hospitality," said I, "to a man who has travelled innumerable

years to see you."

'Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and

looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white

stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy

downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.

The Time Machine