After three or four days I felt the need to get myself properly clean. As I have said, there was no semblance of toilet facilities here, and I grew dissatisfied with the cat-licks I was able to perform with my bowls of drinking water. I longed for a bath, or, better still, a swim in my Palaeocene Sea.
It took me some time – you may think me rather dull on this point – before I turned my attention again to that cubicle of porcelain I have described, ignored since my first tentative exploration of the chamber. I approached that cubicle now, and placed one cautious foot onto the porcelain base. Once more, steam spurted from the walls.
Suddenly I understood. With a surge of enthusiasm I stripped off my boots and garments (I retained my spectacles, though) and stepped into the little cubicle. Steam billowed all around me; the perspiration started from my skin, and moisture gathered over my spectacles. I had expected that the steam would blow out around the room, turning it all into something of a sauna. But the steam confined itself to the cubicle area, no doubt thanks to some arrangement involving differences in air pressure.
This was my bath-room, after all: it was not kitted out like the facilities of my own day – but why should it have been? My house in the Petersham Road was lost in a different History, after all. I recalled that the Romans, for example, had known nothing of soap or detergents; they had been forced to resort to this sort of poaching to sweat the dirt out of their pores. And the steam cleansing proved quite effective in my case, although, lacking the scrapers the Romans had used, I was forced to use my finger-nails to drag the accumulated muck off my flesh.
When I stepped away from the sauna, I looked for a way to dry myself off, lacking a towel. I considered, with reluctance, using my clothes; then, with an inspiration, I turned to the sand. I found that the gritty stuff, though coarse against my skin, took away the moisture pretty well.
My experience with the sauna caused me some self-reflection. How could I have been so narrow of mind that it should take me so long to have deduced the function of so obvious a piece of equipment? There had been many parts of the world in my own time, after all, which had not known the pleasures of modern plumbing and china bath-ware – plenty of districts of London, in fact, if one was to believe the more harrowing tales in the Pall Mall Gazette.
It was clear that a great deal of effort had been taken, by the unknown Star-men of this Age, to provide me with a room to sustain me. I was in a radically different History now, after all; and perhaps the strangeness of this chamber – the lack of recognizable sanitary facilities, the unusual type of food, and so forth – were not so significant or bizarre as they seemed to me.
I had been provided with the elements of a hotel room of my own day, but they were mixed up with what seemed to be sanitary arrangements dating from the birth of Christ; and as for the food, those plates of nuts and fruit which I was expected to nibble seemed more suited to one of my remote, fruit-gathering ancestors – say, from forty thousand years before my birth.
It was a muddle, a melange of fragments from the disparate Ages of man! But I thought I saw a sort of pattern about it.
I considered the separation between myself and the inhabitants of this world. Since the founding of First London there had been fifty million years of development – more than a hundred times the evolutionary gap between myself and the Morlock. Over such unimaginable Ages, time is compressed – it is like the squeezing of layers of sedimentary rock by the weight of deposits above – until the interval between myself and Gaius Julius Caesar, or even between myself and the first representatives of genus Homo to walk the earth – which seemed so immense to me, from my perspective – dwindles to virtually naught.
Given all that, I thought, my unseen hosts had done a pretty good job at guessing at the conditions which might make me comfortable.
In any event it appeared that my expectations, even after all my experiences, were still rooted in my own century, and in one small part of the globe! This was a chastening thought – a recognition of my own smallness of spirit – and I gave up some time, reluctantly, to inward contemplation. But I am not by nature a reflective man, and soon I found myself chafing once more at my conditions of restraint. Ungrateful as it might be, I wanted my liberty back! – though I could see no means of obtaining it.
I think I was in that cage for perhaps a fortnight. When my release came, it was as sudden as it was unexpected.
I awoke in the dark.
I sat up, without my spectacles. At first I could not determine what had disturbed me – and then I heard it: a soft sound, a gentle, remote breathing. It was the most subtle of noises – almost inaudible – and I knew that, if it had come floating up from the Richmond streets in the small hours of the morning, I should not have been disturbed by it. But here my senses had been heightened in sensitivity by my lengthy isolation: here I had heard no sounds for a fortnight – save for the soft hiss of the steam-bath – not generated by myself. I jammed my glasses onto my face. Light flooded my eyes, and I blinked away tears, impatient to see.
The glasses showed me a gentle glow, moonlight-pale, seeping into my room. A door was open, in the wall of my cell. It was lozenge-shaped, with a sill perhaps six inches from the floor, and it cut through a fake window-frame.
I got to my feet, pulled on my shirt – for I had become accustomed to sleeping with the shirt as a rough pillow – and stepped towards the door-frame. That soft breathing increased in volume, and – over-laid on it, like the whisper of a brook over a breeze – I heard the liquid gurgle of a voice: an almost-human sound, a voice I recognized instantly!
The door-way led to another chamber, about the size and shape of my own. But here there were no false window-frames, no clumsy attempts at decoration, no sand on the floor; instead the walls were bare, a plain metallic grey, and there were several windows, covered by screens, and a door with a simple handle. There was no furniture here, and the room was dominated by a single, immense artefact: it was the pyramid-machine (or one identical to it) which I had last seen as it began its slow, painful crawl over my body. I have said that it was the height of a man, and was correspondingly broad at the base; its surface was metallic, by and large, but of a complex, shifting texture. If you will picture a great pyramidal frame, six feet tall, and covered with a blur of busy, metallic soldier-ants, then you will have the essence of it.
But this monstrosity barely attracted my attention; for – standing primly before it, and apparently peering into the pyramid’s hide with some kind of eye-scope device – there was Nebogipfel.
I stumbled forward, and I held out my arms with pleasure. But the Morlock merely stood, patiently, and did not react to my presence.
‘Nebogipfel,’ I said, ‘I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have found you. I think I was going crazy in there – crazy with isolation!’
I saw now that one of his eyes – the wounded right – was covered by the eye-scope device; this tube extended to the pyramid, merging with the body of that object, and the whole affair crawled with the miniature ant-motion that plastered the pyramid. I looked at this with some revulsion, for I should not have liked to have inserted such a device into my eye-socket
Nebogipfel’s other, naked eye swivelled towards me, huge and grey-red. ‘Actually it was I who found you, and asked to see you. And whatever your mental state, I see you are healthy, at least,’ he said. ‘How is your frost-bite?’
I was confused by this. ‘What frost-bite?’ I pawed at my skin, but I knew well enough that it was unmarked.
‘Then they have done a good job,’ Nebogipfel said.
‘Who?’
‘The Universal Constructors.’ By this I took it he meant the pyramid-machine and its cousins.
I noticed how straight was his bearing, how neat and well-groomed his pelt of hair. I realized that in this moonlight glow he needed no goggles here, as I did, to aid his vision; evidently these chambers of ours had been designed more with his needs in mind than mine. ‘You’re looking fine, Morlock,’ I said warmly. ‘Your leg’s been straightened out – and that bad arm too.’
‘The Constructors have managed to repair my most ancient of injuries – frankly, I am now as healthy as when I first climbed aboard your Time Machine.’
‘All save that eye of yours,’ I said with some regret, for I referred to the eye I had all but destroyed in my fear and rage. ‘I take it they – these Constructors of yours – were unable to save it.’
‘My eye?’ He sounded puzzled. He pulled his face from the eye-scope; the tube came away from his face with a soft, pulpy noise, and dangled from the pyramid-thing, retracting into its metallic hide. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I chose to have it rebuilt this way. It has certain conveniences, although I admit I had some difficulty explaining my wishes to the Constructors …’
He turned to me now. His socket was a bare hole. The ruin of his eye had been scooped out, and it looked as if the bone had been opened up, the hole deepened – and the socket glistened throughout with moist, squirming metal.