Everywhere I went, I saw round wells, and some of them seemed very deep. When I looked down into them, I could see no water, even with a lighted match. But from all of them came a sound, thud, thud, thud, like a big engine. The flame of my match showed me that air was going down into them. There were tall towers on the hillsides too, and above them the air shimmered, as it does above a beach on a hot day.
There were other puzzles. I saw no machines, no workshops and no shops. Yet somebody had to make the people’s clothes and sandals, and the little people did nothing but play, bathe in the river, eat fruit and sleep. And who had taken my machine into the White Sphinx, and why?
On the third day I made a friend. I was watching some of the little people bathing in the river when one of them got a cramp and began to float away. The current was not very strong, but none of the others tried to save her. She was drowning in front of their eyes. I quickly took off my clothes, went into the water and pulled the poor little thing out. Soon she was all right.
In the afternoon she ran to me with cries of joy and gave me a big chain of flowers, made for me alone. It touched my heart. We sat together and talked, mostly with smiles, and I learnt that her name was Weena. That was the beginning of a strange friendship, which lasted a week and ended sadly, as I will tell you later.
She was exactly like a child and followed me everywhere, and she was a great comfort to me. Soon, coming back to the White Sphinx felt almost like coming home, and as soon as I came over the hill, I looked for her little figure in white and gold.
It was from her that I learnt that fear had not left the world. In the daytime she trusted me completely and was afraid of nothing. But she was terribly afraid of the dark. I noticed that after dark the little people always went into the great buildings and slept together in large groups. I never saw one of them outside at night. Yet I was so stupid that I did not understand what their fear meant. I slept away from the crowds, and although it worried Weena, she came with me and slept with her head on my arm.
On the morning of the day I saved Weena, I had woken before dawn. In the grey half-light I went out in front of the building to watch the sun rise. And up the hill I thought I saw ghosts: white figures like apes, running quickly. Once, near the ruins, I saw several of them carrying a dark body. Then they disappeared among the bushes. When the sun was up, I looked again, but I saw nothing. “They must have been ghosts,” I said, half as a joke.
On my fourth morning, I went into a huge ruin to get out of the heat. Inside a narrow passage, after the bright sunlight, it seemed completely dark. Suddenly I stopped. A pair of eyes, shining in the light from outside, was watching me out of the darkness.
I stepped forward and put out my hand, and I touched something soft. At once something white ran past me. I turned and saw a strange little figure like an ape, with dull white skin and pale hair, running across the sunny space behind me. It disappeared into another heap of ruins.
I followed it, and in the darkness I came to one of those round wells. I lit a match and looked down. A small white creature was climbing down the wall, and its large bright eyes looked up at me as it went. It was like a human spider! Now I saw that there were metal steps for the hands and feet, like a ladder, going down the well. Then the match burned my fingers and fell, and when I lit another, the little monster was gone.
Slowly I understood that the creature was human. Man had not stayed one kind of creature. He had become two. My graceful children of the Upper World were not the only people of the future. This pale creature of the night was human too.
Now I began to see the answers. The creature’s white skin, its large eyes and the way it ran from the sunlight showed that this second kind of people lived under the ground. Under my feet there must be tunnels everywhere, and the wells and towers brought air down into them. Down there, surely, the work was done: the people below made everything that the people above needed.
How had this happened? Even in our own time the rich and the poor live more and more apart. Perhaps, over thousands of years, the gap had grown until the rich lived above in the sunlight and the workers lived below in the dark. That was my theory then. It may be completely wrong.
The creatures under the ground, I learnt, were called the Morlocks, and the beautiful people I already knew were the Eloi. But new questions came. Why had the Morlocks taken my machine? And why were the Eloi so afraid of the dark?
I tried to ask Weena about the world under the ground, but she would not answer. When I asked again and insisted on an answer, she began to cry. Those were the only tears, except my own, that I ever saw in that Golden Age. I stopped asking at once, and soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I very seriously lit a match for her.