these new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions
grew up in my mind--a certain curiosity and therewith a certain
dread--until at last they took complete possession of me. What
strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our
rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to
look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated
before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising about
me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it
seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the
hill-side, and remain there, without any wintry intermission. Even
through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so
my mind came round to the business of stopping.

'The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some
substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long
as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely
mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping like a vapour
through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to
a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into
whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate
contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical
reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion--would result, and blow
myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions--into the
Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I
was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an
unavoidable risk--one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the
risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.
The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything,
the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the
feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told