The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw

He was not mistaken: beneath the make-believe paradise dwelled the Morlocks, a simian race afraid of daylight, who, he would soon discover to his horror, had regressed to a state of savage cannibalism. It was the Morlocks who fed the Eloi, fattening their neighbours who lived above ground before gorging on them in their subterranean world.

Their reprehensible eating habits notwithstanding, the traveller was forced to acknowledge that the last vestiges of human intelligence and reason survived in that brutal race, which their need to operate the network of machinery in their underground tunnels had helped preserve.

Afraid of remaining trapped in the future, with no means of travelling back to his own time, the inventor had no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, Orpheus and Hercules and descend into the underworld, into the realm of the Morlocks, to retrieve his machine. Having done so, he made a frenzied escape through time, travelling deep into the future, until he arrived at a strange beach stretching out beneath a shadowy sky. He could see from a swift glance at this new future, whose rarefied air made his lungs smart, that life had divided into two species: a variety of giant screeching white butterfly, and a terrifying crab with enormous pincers, which he was glad to get away from.

No longer curious about what had befallen mankind, which had apparently become extinct, but about the Earth itself, the inventor continued his journey in great strides of a thousand years. At his next stop, more than thirty million years from his own time, he discovered a desolate planet, an orb that had almost stopped rotating, feebly illuminated by a dying sun. A scant snowfall struggled to spread its white veil over a place where there was no sound. The twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the buzz of insects and the barking of dogs that made up the music of life were no more than a nicker in the traveller’s memory.

Then he noticed a bizarre creature with tentacles splashing around in the reddish sea before him, and his profound grief gave way to a nameless dread that compelled him to clamber back onto his machine. Back in the seat, at the helm of time, he felt a dreadful emptiness. He felt no curiosity about the ominous landscapes awaiting him further into the future. Neither did he wish to go back in time, now he knew that all men’s achievements had been futile. He decided the moment had come for him to go back to his own time, to where he truly belonged. On the way back he ended by closing his eyes, for now that the journey in reverse made extinction into a false resurrection, he could not bear to see the world around him grow verdant, the sun recover its stifled splendour, the houses and buildings spring up again, testaments to the progress and trends in human architecture. He only opened his eyes when he felt himself surrounded by the familiar four walls of his laboratory. Then he pulled the lever and the world stopped being a nebulous cloud and took on its old consistency.