We reached the Palace of Green Porcelain at about midday. It was empty and falling into ruin. Over the door there was writing in an unknown alphabet. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to read it, but she had never even heard of writing. She always seemed more human to me than she really was, perhaps because her love was so human.
Inside was a long hall, and at once it reminded me of a museum. The floor was thick with dust. In the middle stood the bones of a huge animal that had died out long ago, and along the sides were glass cases, like the ones in our own museums. Then we came to a gallery full of great machines, most of them rusty and broken. You know I love machines, and I wanted to stay among them. If I could understand them, I thought, they might give me power against the Morlocks.
Suddenly Weena came very close to me. Then I noticed that the floor sloped down into the hill, and the far end of the gallery was in thick darkness. In the dust in front of me were many small, narrow footprints. It was already late in the afternoon, and I still had no weapon, no safe place and no fire. Then, far down in the darkness, I heard the same pattering and the same strange noises that I had heard down the well.
I took Weena’s hand. Then I had an idea. I left her and climbed up on a machine with a long iron lever. I put all my weight on the lever, while Weena, alone in the middle of the gallery, began to cry softly. After a minute it broke off, and I came back to her with an iron bar in my hand, strong enough, I thought, for any Morlock’s head. I wanted very much to kill a Morlock or two. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to kill your own descendants! But I could not feel anything human in those things. Only my fear of leaving Weena stopped me from going down into the dark after them.
In the next hall, brown rags hung from the walls. They were the remains of books. Up a wide staircase we found a gallery with old chemistry equipment, and here, at last, in a case that was still sealed tight, I found a box of matches. I tried them, and they were perfectly good. “Dance!” I cried to Weena in her own language. Now I had a real weapon against the creatures we feared. And there in the dusty old museum, to Weena’s great delight, I did a funny little dance of my own, whistling as cheerfully as I could.
In a sealed glass jar I found camphor. It burns with a good bright flame, like a candle, so I put it in my pocket. But I found nothing to break down the bronze doors, and my iron bar was still the most useful thing I had. In one glass case I found two sticks of dynamite and shouted with joy. I lit them in a side gallery and waited five, ten, fifteen minutes. Nothing happened. Of course, they were only models.
Towards sunset we rested in a little garden inside the palace. Night was coming, but that did not worry me much now. I had the best of all weapons against the Morlocks: I had matches! We would spend the night in the open, beside a fire. In the morning I would open the bronze doors with my iron bar and get the Time Machine back.