I probed at the dummy windows, and leaped up, trying to poke at the clumsy ceiling designs, but to no avail; the surface of the walls and floor was as smooth as an eggshell’s but unbreachable. I dug out some of the sand on the floor and found that it penetrated to a depth of nine inches or a foot; under it lay a mosaic of brightly colored fragments, rather after the Roman style — but, like the ceiling, the mosaic depicted no portrait or scene I could discern, but rather a fragmentary jumble of designs.
I was quite alone, and there was no sound from beyond the walls: no sound in my universe, in fact, save the rustle of my own breathing, the thump of my heart the very noises which I had welcomed back with such vigor, so recently!
After a time, certain human needs asserted themselves. I resisted these pressures as long as I could, but at last was forced to resort to digging shallow pits in the sand, for the purpose of relieving myself.
As I covered over the first of these pits I felt the most extraordinary shame. I wondered what the Starmen of this remote 1891 were making of this performance!
When I tired, I settled myself in the sand, with my back to the wall of the room. At first I kept the light-spectacles on, but I found the illumination too bright to allow me to rest; so I doffed the spectacles, and kept them wrapped around my hand while I slept.
So began my sojourn in that bizarre cage of a room. As my initial fear subsided, a restless boredom crept over me. It was an imprisonment reminiscent of my time in the Morlocks’ Cage of Light, and I had come away from that without any wish to repeat the experience. I came to feel that anything, even the intrusion of danger, would be preferable than to remain in this dull, seamless prison. My exile in the Palaeocene — fifty million years from the nearest newspaper — had cured me of my old impulse to read, I think; but still, at times I thought I should go mad for lack of someone to talk to.
The bowls of food and water were filled up each time I slept. I never determined the mechanism by which this was done. I saw no evidence of an extruding machinery like the Morlocks’; but neither did I ever witness the refilling of a bowl by any semblance of attendant. Once, as an experiment, I went to sleep with a bowl buried beneath my body. I awoke to find a soggy sensation under my ribs. When I lifted myself, I found the bowl had filled with water once more, as if by some miraculous process.
I came to the tentative conclusion that, somehow, a subtle machinery in the bowls themselves was assembling the contents either from the substance of the bowls, or from the material of the air. I thought though I had no desire to investigate! — that my buried waste was broken down by the same discreet mechanisms. It was a bizarre, and not very appetizing, prospect.
[2]
Experiments and Reflections
After three or four days I felt the need to get myself properly clean. As I have said, there was no semblance of toilet facilities here, and I grew dissatisfied with the cat-licks I was able to perform with my bowls of drinking water. I longed for a bath, or, better still, a swim in my Palaeocene Sea.
It took me some time — you may think me rather dull on this point — before I turned my attention again to that cubicle of porcelain I have described, ignored since my first tentative exploration of the chamber. I approached that cubicle now, and placed one cautious foot onto the porcelain base. Once more, steam spurted from the walls.
Suddenly I understood. With a surge of enthusiasm I stripped off my boots and garments (I retained my spectacles, though) and stepped into the little cubicle. Steam billowed all around me; the perspiration started from my skin, and moisture gathered over my spectacles. I had expected that the steam would blow out around the room, turning it all into something of a sauna. But the steam confined itself to the cubicle area, no doubt thanks to some arrangement involving differences in air pressure.
This was my bath-room, after alclass="underline" it was not kitted out like the facilities of my own day — but why should it have been? My house in the Petersham Road was lost in a different History, after all. I recalled that the Romans, for example, had known nothing of soap or detergents; they had been forced to resort to this sort of poaching to sweat the dirt out of their pores. And the steam cleansing proved quite effective in my case, although, lacking the scrapers the Romans had used, I was forced to use my finger-nails to drag the accumulated muck off my flesh.
When I stepped away from the sauna, I looked for a way to dry myself off, lacking a towel. I considered, with reluctance, using my clothes; then, with an inspiration, I turned to the sand. I found that the gritty stuff, though coarse against my skin, took away the moisture pretty well.
My experience with the sauna caused me some self-reflection. How could I have been so narrow of mind that it should take me so long to have deduced the function of so obvious a piece of equipment? There had been many parts of the world in my own time, after all, which had not known the pleasures of modern plumbing and china bath-ware — plenty of districts of London, in fact, if one was to believe the more harrowing tales in the Pall Mall Gazette.
It was clear that a great deal of effort had been taken, by the unknown Starmen of this Age, to provide me with a room to sustain me. I was in a radically different History now, after all; and perhaps the strangeness of this chamber — the lack of recognizable sanitary facilities, the unusual type of food, and so forth — were not so significant or bizarre as they seemed to me.
I had been provided with the elements of a hotel room of my own day, but they were mixed up with what seemed to be sanitary arrangements dating from the birth of Christ; and as for the food, those plates of nuts and fruit which I was expected to nibble seemed more suited to one of my remote, fruit-gathering ancestors — say, from forty thousand years before my birth.
It was a muddle, a melange of fragments from the disparate Ages of Man! But I thought I saw a sort of pattern about it.
I considered the separation between myself and the inhabitants of this world. Since the founding of First London there had been fifty million years of development — more than a hundred times the evolutionary gap between myself and the Morlock. Over such unimaginable Ages, time is compressed — it is like the squeezing of layers of sedimentary rock by the weight of deposits above — until the interval between myself and Gaius Julius Caesar, or even between myself and the first representatives of genus Homo to walk the earth — which seemed so immense to me, from my perspective — dwindles to virtually naught.
Given all that, I thought, my unseen hosts had done a pretty good job at guessing at the conditions which might make me comfortable.
In any event it appeared that my expectations, even after all my experiences, were still rooted in my own century, and in one small part of the globe! This was a chastening thought — a recognition of my own smallness of spirit — and I gave up some time, reluctantly, to inward contemplation. But I am not by nature a reflective man, and soon I found myself chafing once more at my conditions of restraint. Ungrateful as it might be, I wanted my liberty back! — though I could see no means of obtaining it.
I think I was in that cage for perhaps a fortnight. When my release came, it was as sudden as it was unexpected.
I awoke in the dark.
I sat up, without my spectacles. At first I could not determine what had disturbed me — and then I heard it: a soft sound, a gentle, remote breathing. It was the most subtle of noises — almost inaudible and I knew that, if it had come floating up from the Richmond streets in the small hours of the morning, I should not have been disturbed by it. But here my senses had been heightened in sensitivity by my lengthy isolation: here I had heard no sounds for a fortnight — save for the soft hiss of the steam-bath — not generated by myself. I jammed my glasses onto my face. Light flooded my eyes, and I blinked away tears, impatient to see.