Page 73 - The Time Machine

now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted

Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age. Or did he
go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the
riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the
manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of
weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s
culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been
discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but
cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of
civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and
destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it
were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit
at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my
comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and
brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a
mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

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