ogether inadequate for the work.

IX

'We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above
the horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the
next morning, and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods
that had stopped me on the previous journey. My plan was to go as
far as possible that night, and then, building a fire, to sleep
in the protection of its glare. Accordingly, as we went along I
gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my arms
full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had
anticipated, and besides Weena was tired. And I began to suffer from
sleepiness too; so that it was full night before we reached the
wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge Weena would have stopped,
fearing the darkness before us; but a singular sense of impending
calamity, that should indeed have served me as a warning, drove me
onward. I had been without sleep for a night and two days, and I was
feverish and irritable. I felt sleep coming upon me, and the
Morlocks with it.

'While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim
against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was
scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from
their insidious approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather
less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the bare
hill-side, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer
resting-place; I thought that with my matches and my camphor I could
contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was
evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should
have to abandon my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put it down.
And then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind
by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this
proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering
our retreat.

'I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must
be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's
heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by
dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts.
Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to
widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with
the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In
this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on
the earth. The