VII

'Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto,

except during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine,

I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was

staggered by these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought

myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and

by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome;

but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of

the Morlocks--a something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I

loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen

into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it.

Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him

soon.

'The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the

new moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first

incomprehensible remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now

such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights

might mean. The moon was on the wane: each night there was a longer

interval of darkness. And I now understood to some slight degree at

least the reason of the fear of the little Upper-world people for

the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that

the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now that

my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upper-world people might

The Time Machine