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.

The glasses showed me a gentle glow, moonlight-pale, seeping into my room. A door was open, in the wall of my cell. It was lozenge-shaped, with a sill perhaps six inches from the floor, and it cut through a fake window frame.

I got to my feet, pulled on my shirt — for I had become accustomed to sleeping with the shirt as a rough pillow — and stepped towards the door-frame. That soft breathing increased in volume, and — overlaid on it, like the whisper of a brook over a breeze — I heard the liquid gurgle of a voice: an almost-human sound, a voice I recognized instantly!

The door-way led to another chamber, about the size and shape of my own. But here there were no false window-frames, no clumsy attempts at decoration, no sand on the floor; instead the walls were bare, a plain metallic gray, and there were several windows, covered by screens, and a door with a simple handle. There was no furniture here, and the room was dominated by a single, immense artifact: it was the pyramid-machine (or one identical to it) which I had last seen as it began its slow, painful crawl over my body. I have said that it was the height of a man, and was correspondingly broad at the base; its surface was metallic, by and large, but of a complex, shifting texture. If you will picture a great pyramidal frame, six feet tall, and covered with a blur of busy, metallic soldier-ants, then you will have the essence of it.

But this monstrosity barely attracted my attention; for — standing primly before it, and apparently peering into the pyramid’s hide with some kind of eye-scope device — there was Nebogipfel.

I stumbled forward, and I held out my arms with pleasure. But the Morlock merely stood, patiently, and did not react to my presence.

“Nebogipfel,” I said, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have found you. I think I was going crazy in there — crazy with isolation!”

I saw now that one of his eyes — the wounded right was covered by the eye-scope device; this tube extended to the pyramid, merging with the body of that object, and the whole affair crawled with the miniature ant-motion that plastered the pyramid. I looked at this with some revulsion, for I should not have liked to have inserted such a device into my eye-socket.

Nebogipfel’s other, naked eye swiveled towards me, huge and gray-red. “Actually it was I who found you, and asked to see you. And whatever your mental state, I see you are healthy, at least,” he said. “How is your frostbite?”

I was confused by this. “What frost-bite?” I pawed at my skin, but I knew well enough that it was unmarked.

“Then they have done a good job,” Nebogipfel said.

“Who?”

“The Universal Constructors.” By this I took it he meant the pyramid-machine and its cousins.

I noticed how straight was his bearing, how neat and well-groomed his pelt of hair. I realized that in this moonlight glow he needed no goggles here, as I did, to aid his vision; evidently these chambers of ours had been designed more with his needs in mind than mine. “You’re looking fine, Morlock,” I said warmly. “Your leg’s been straightened out — and that bad arm too.”

“The Constructors have managed to repair my most ancient of injuries — frankly, I am now as healthy as when I first climbed aboard your Time Machine.”

“All save that eye of yours,” I said with some regret, for I referred to the eye I had all but destroyed in my fear and rage. “I take it they — these Constructors of yours — were unable to save it.

“My eye?” He sounded puzzled. He pulled his face from the eye-scope; the tube came away from his face with a soft, pulpy noise, and dangled from the pyramid-thing, retracting into its metallic hide. “Not at all,” he said. “I chose to have it rebuilt this way. It has certain conveniences, although I admit I had some difficulty explaining my wishes to the Constructors…”

He turned to me now. His socket was a bare hole. The ruin of his eye had been scooped out, and it looked as if the bone had been opened up, the hole deepened — and the socket glistened throughout with moist, squirming metal.

In contrast to my sparse cell, Nebogipfel, it turned out, had been provided with a veritable suite. There were four rooms, each as large as mine and roughly conical in form, and fitted with doors and windows, which our hosts had not thought fit to provide for me: it was evident that they had a higher view of his intellect than mine!

There was the same lack of furniture that I had suffered, although Morlocks have sample needs, and it was not such an incongruity for Nebogipfel. In one room, though, I found a bizarre object: a table-like affair perhaps twelve feet long and six wide, topped with a soft orange covering. There were pockets arranged around the rim of this table, all edged with a hard substance that glowed green. The table was an approximate rectangle, although its edges were irregularly shaped; and a single ball — white, of some dense material — sat on the table-top. When I pushed the ball across the table-top it ran well enough, although, without a covering of baize, its speed was a little free, and it caromed off cushions at the rim with a satisfying solidity.

I tried to discern some deeper meaning of this device; but, for all the world — as you will have guessed from my description — it was like nothing so much as a billiards table! I wondered at first if this was some other distorted echo of a nineteenth-century hotel room — but a rather bizarre selection if so, and, lacking anything in the way of cues, and only a single ball, it was not likely to give me much sport.

Baffled, I abandoned the table, and tested the doors and windows. The doors worked by simple handles, to be grasped and turned, but the doors led only to other rooms within the suite, or to my original chamber; there were no ways out to the world beyond. I found, though, that the panels covering the transparent windows could be lifted up, and for the first time I was able to inspect this new 1891, this White Earth.

My viewpoint was raised some thousand feet or more from the ground! we seemed to be at the apex of some immense cylindrical tower, whose flanks I could see sweeping down below me. Everything I saw reinforced the first impression I had gained when I had obtained that last glimpse over the rim of the Time-Car, just before the cold overcame me: that this was a world forever sunk into the Ice. The sky was the color of gunmetal, and the icebound land a gray-white like exposed bone, with none of that attractive blueness one sees sometimes about prettier snow-fields. Looking out now, I could see quite clearly how dreadfully stable this world-state truly was, just as Nebogipfel had described: the daylight glinted fiercely from the mantle of scarred Ice which sheathed the earth, and the whiteness of that world-wide carapace hurled the warmth of the sun back into the sink of space. The poor earth was dead, caught at the bottom of this pit of icy, climatic stability, for evermore — it was the ultimate Stability of Death.