XI.
The Palace of Green Porcelain
"I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about
noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass
remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had
fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon
a turfy down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was
surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged
Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I thought then--though I
never followed up the thought--of what might have happened, or might be
happening, to the living things in the sea.
"The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed
porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some
unknown character. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help
me to interpret this, but I only learnt that the bare idea of writing
had never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more
human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
"Within the big valves of the door--which were open and broken--we found,
instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows.
At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was
thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was
shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange
and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of
a huge skeleton. I recognised by the oblique feet that it was some
extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and
the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place,
where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing
itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton
barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going
towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and
clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of
our own time. But they must have been air-tight to judge from the fair
preservation of some of their contents.
"Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!
Here, apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid
array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of
decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the
extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its
force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness
at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of
the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or
threaded in strings upon reeds. And the cases had in some instances
been bodily removed--by the Morlocks, as I judged. The place was very
silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been
rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came,
as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside
me.
"And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an
intellectual age that I gave no thought to the possibilities it
presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a
little from my mind.
"To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain
had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly
historical galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least in
my present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than
this spectacle of old-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another
short gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be
devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind
running on gunpowder. But I could find no saltpetre; indeed, no
nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the
sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for the
rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they were the
best preserved of all I saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist
in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel
to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had been
devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of
recognition. A few shrivelled and blackened vestiges of what had once
been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held
spirit, a brown dust of departed plants: that was all! I was sorry for
that, because I should have been glad to trace the patient
readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been
attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but
singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle
from the end at which I entered. At intervals white globes hung from
the ceiling--many of them cracked and smashed--which suggested that
originally the place had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my
element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big
machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still
fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and
I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part
they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest
guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their
puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of
use against the Morlocks.
"Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she
startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have
noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may
be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was
built into the side of a hill.--ED.] The end I had come in at was quite
above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As you went down
the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last
there was a pit like the 'area' of a London house before each, and only
a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling
about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the
gradual diminution of the light, until Weena's increasing apprehensions
drew my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a
thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that
the dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further away
towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small
narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks
revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic
examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far
advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge,
and no means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of
the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had
heard down the well.
"I took Weena's hand. Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and
turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a
signal-box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my
hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted
in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength of
the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute's strain, and
I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient, I judged,
for any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill
a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing
one's own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any
humanity in the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a
persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time
Machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the
gallery and killing the brutes I heard.
"Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that
gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first
glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The
brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently
recognised as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since
dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here
and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the
tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have
moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing
that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to
which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I
will confess that I thought chiefly of the _Philosophical Transactions_
and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.
"Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a
gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of
useful discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed,
this gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case.
And at last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of
matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were
not even damp. I turned to Weena. 'Dance,' I cried to her in her own
tongue. For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we
feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting
of dust, to Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of
composite dance, whistling _The Land of the Leal_ as cheerfully as I
could. In part it was a modest _cancan_, in part a step dance, in part
a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original.
For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
"Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the
wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was
a most fortunate, thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier
substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by
chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at
first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But
the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this
volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many
thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once
seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished
and become fossilised millions of years ago. I was about to throw it
away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burnt with a good
bright flame--was, in fact, an excellent candle--and I put it in my
pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down
the bronze doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I
had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
"I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would
require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all
the proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms,
and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I
could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against
the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The
most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still
fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had
rotted into dust. One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps,
I thought, by an explosion among the specimens. In another place was a
vast array of idols--Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every
country on earth, I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible
impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South
America that particularly took my fancy.
"As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery
after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes
mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I
suddenly found myself near the model of a tin mine, and then by the
merest accident I discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite
cartridges! I shouted 'Eureka!' and smashed the case with joy. Then
came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I
made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting
five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course
the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I
really believe that had they not been so, I should have rushed off
incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my
chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into non-existence.
"It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within
the palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and
refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position.
Night was creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still
to be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my
possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defences against
the Morlocks--I had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a
blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do
would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the
morning there was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards that, as
yet, I had only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I
felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had
refrained from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the
other side. They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I
hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the work.
[ END OF CHAPTER, MOVE TO CHAPTER XII ]