The Time Machine - Chapters 10 and 11

Overall: Holy shit that chapter 11 though

SO I’m putting these two chapters together, because chapter 10 isn’t even two full pages of text and chapter 11 just a bit over three.

I don’t have much to say about chapter 10 actually. The traveler manages to re-enter the White Sphinx where he finds that his time machine is polished and looking sparklingly new. He figures it msut’ve been taken apart and spruced up by the Morlocks, who still have some knowledge of machinery about them. As he’s sitting in the machine, he’s set upon by YET ANOTHER group of Morlocks who try to eat him or do whatever it is they do to people. At first the traveler tries for one of his matches, but finds that the box is gone and that they’re the sort of match that requires a box for lighting (which I’m pretty sure are the standard matches nowadays).

Pushing the lever, the traveler goes forth into chapter 11, where he goes even further into the future. I was actually surprised that we were going to be seeing more of the future, I thought for sure we’d just head to the past and do some wrap-up for the final few chapters. Instead, the traveler goes forth to an unknown time which, I’ll admit, is some of the most hauntingly beautiful scenery I think of. The traveler is on a lonely beach with a distant dying sun setting in the west, and stars gleaming steadily overhead. There’s an intense sort of gravity to this moment that I think is magnificent as we can pretty easily tell that this is past the point of any sort of human descendants existing. The only animals that are described to us are giant crabs which.. well they’re horrifying, and the traveler does not linger long before going EVEN FURTHER into the future.

I remember an old computer game I had back in the 1990’s called TerraTopia. It was sort of a Myst-esque game, but built out of the New Age movement, so it was filled with airy ambient music and lots of wonderfully done scenery illustrations as you navigated this strange and somewhat mystical island devoid of people. The scenes at this beach gave me a lot of flashbacks to that game, this sort of reverence in the text for the mystery and sheer power of the unknown aspect of the natural world. The traveler happens to emerge at an eclipse coming over the beach, and he realizes that rather than the moon or Mercury or somesuch, that this is some altogether new and unknown planet that is working its way across the sun. That sort of scene alone is a really powerful moment, and I think it’s absolutely helped by the fact that the traveler witnesses it by himself.