man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly in leaving the

machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and none

answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit

world.

'When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized. Not a trace

of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the

empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it

furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then

stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered

the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in

the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my

dismay.

'I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put

the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of

their physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed

me: the sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose

intervention my invention had vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt

assured: unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate,

the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the

levers--I will show you the method later--prevented any one from

tampering with it in that way when they were removed. It had moved,

and was hid, only in space. But then, where could it be?

'I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running

The Time Machine