The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(51)

To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the extremely beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had taken the opportunity of ridding it along the way of ugliness, coarseness, and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveler was able to observe once he was amongst them, these delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, and free from ill health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Nor did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost utopic society which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilization. Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around everywhere after he saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned, Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to the inventor’s ear.

Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveler to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simplemindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was no change and no necessity for change. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape. He was not mistaken: beneath the make-believe paradise dwelled the Morlocks, a simian race afraid of daylight, who he would soon discover to his horror had regressed to a state of savage cannibalism. It was the Morlocks who fed the Eloi, fattening their neighbors who lived above ground before gorging on them in their subterranean world.

Their reprehensible eating habits notwithstanding, the traveler was forced to acknowledge that the last vestiges of human intelligence and reason survived in that brutal race, which their need to be able to operate the network of machinery in their underground tunnels helped preserve.

Afraid of remaining trapped in the future, with no means of traveling back to his own time, the inventor had no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, Orpheus, and Hercules and descend into the underworld, into the realm of the Morlocks, to retrieve his machine. Having done so, he made a frenzied escape through time, traveling deep into the future, until he arrived at a strange beach stretching out beneath a shadowy sky. He could see from a swift glance at this new future, whose rarefied air made his lungs smart, that life had divided into two species: a variety of giant, screeching white butterfly, and a terrifying crab with enormous pincers which he was glad to get away from. No longer curious about what had befallen mankind, which had apparently become completely extinct, but about the Earth itself, the inventor continued his journey in great strides of a thousand years. At his next stop, more than thirty million years from his own time, he discovered a desolate planet, an orb that had almost stopped rotating, like a tired spinning top feebly illuminated by a dying sun. A scant snowfall struggled to spread its white veil over a place where there was no sound of life. The twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the buzz of insects, and the barking of dogs that made up the music of life were no more than a flicker in the traveler’s memory. Then he noticed a bizarre creature with tentacles splashing around in the reddish sea before him, and his profound grief gave way to a nameless dread that compelled him to clamber back onto his machine. Back in the seat, at the helm of time, he felt a dreadful emptiness. He felt no curiosity about the ominous landscapes awaiting him further into the future, nor did he wish to go back in time, now he knew that all men’s achievements had been futile endeavors. He decided the moment had come for him to go back to his own time, to where he truly belonged. On the way back he ended by closing his eyes, for now that the journey in reverse made extinction into a false resurrection, he could not bear to see the world around him grow verdant, the sun recover its stifled splendor, the houses and buildings spring up again, testaments to the progress and trends in human architecture. He only opened his eyes again when he felt himself surrounded by the familiar four walls of his laboratory. Then he pulled the lever and the world stopped being a nebulous cloud and took on its old consistency again.

Once he had arrived back in his own time, he heard voices and the noise of plates in the dining room, and discovered he had stopped his machine the Thursday after his departure. After pausing for a few moments to catch his breath, the inventor appeared before his guests, not so much out of a desire to share his experiences with them, but because he was attracted by the delicious smell of roast meat, which, after the diet of fruit he had been forced to live on in the future, was an irresistible temptation. After sating his appetite voraciously in front of his astonished guests, who gaped in awe at his ghastly pallor, his scratched face, and the peculiar stains on his jacket, the traveler finally recounted his adventure. Naturally, no one believed his fantastic voyage, even though he showed them his pockets still filled with strange blossoms or the sorry state of his time machine. In the novel’s epilogue, Wells had the narrator, who was one of the traveler’s guests, finger the exotic flowers, reflecting with optimism that even when physical strength and intelligence has died out, gratitude will live on in men’s hearts.