THE TIME MACHINE

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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