Epilogue
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be
that he swept back into the past, and fell among the
blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone;
into
the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque
saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He
may
even now — if I may use the phrase — be wandering on some
plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely
saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one
of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the
riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems
solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part,
cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment,
fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's
culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know — for the
question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine
was made — thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind,
and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping
that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the
end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were
not so. But to me the future is still black and blank — is a
vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his
story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white
flowers — shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle — to
witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and
a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
