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|
 One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? |
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| It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among |
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| the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished |
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| Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the |
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| grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic |
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|
| times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be |
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| wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, |
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| or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did |
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| he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are |
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| still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered |
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| and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the |
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| race: for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter |
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| days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual |
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| discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own |
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| part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among |
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| us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but |
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| cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the |
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| growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must |
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| inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. |
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| If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not |
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| so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast |
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| ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. |
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| And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers |
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| —shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness |
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| that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and |
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| a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man. |
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|
