The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma

a date chosen at random, and sufficiently far off in the future for Wells to be able to verify his predictions in situ. By the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, terrorised by the landlady’s threats, Wells related, in fits and starts, his inventor’s foray into a world that resembled a huge enchanted garden. To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had rid it of ugliness, coarseness and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveller was able to observe, the delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, free from ill-health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Neither did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost Utopian society, which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilisation.

      Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around after he had saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which, although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to his ear.

      Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveller to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simple-mindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was no change, and no necessity for it. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape.

      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.