Read “Excerpt from The Time Machine” and answer the questions that follow.
Excerpt from The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
In this excerpt, the Time Traveler describes the experience of traveling through time using
the machine he has built. In this machine, he watches time pass very swiftly all around
him. He starts out sitting in his machine in the laboratory in his home.
1) “I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are
excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switch
back—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too,
of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of
a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away
from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute,
and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed
and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was
already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that
ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and
light was excessively painful to the eye.”
