The Time Machine: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Darkness descends and the Time Traveller returns from the hills to find a place to sleep. As he approaches the garden with the Sphinx statue, he realizes that his time machine is gone. Panicking that he is stranded in this strange future, the Time Traveller runs around looking for the machine, all the while knowing intuitively that it has been hidden somewhere.

The most unsettling aspect of the time machine being hidden is that the Time Traveller knows that the beings he met do not have the physical strength or intellectual curiosity to move the machine, so some unknown power must have done it. In a frenzy, the Time Traveller runs through the bushes, catches a glimpse of a small white being that looks like a deer, and then storms into the large building where the beings sleep. He wakes the beings up and some of them laugh while others seem frightened. Not wanting to revive the feeling of fear, which the Time Traveller assumes has been long forgotten among these people, he leaves the building and has his tantrum outdoors, where he feels himself touching strange beings while he cries in the darkness.

When day breaks, the Time Traveller feels more rational, and he decides to find the hiding place of the time machine. He uselessly questions the beings, and when they cannot answer him he has the impulse to hurt them, though he acknowledges that this is foolish. Some grooves in the grass where the time machine had landed direct the Time Traveller to the Sphinx statue, and he becomes convinced that the time machine has been hidden behind a hollow panel in the pedestal, though he cannot open the panel to retrieve it.

Two of the beings approach him and he gestures to the panel to see if they can open it, but they behave oddly, as though the Time Traveller is being rude. He asks several more beings, who give the same response, and in anger he grabs one of them and drags him back to the pedestal. The being seems terrified and disgusted. Then the Time Traveller beats on the panel and thinks he hears a chuckle come from inside. After hammering the panel with a rock, the Time Traveller finally gives up and decides that the better strategy is to figure out how to retrieve the time machine by learning the ways of the society in which he has found himself.

The Time Traveller returns to the large building and feels that the beings are avoiding him, though after a few days they returned to normal. The Time Traveller begins to pass his days learning the language, which he realizes is extraordinarily simple, and exploring the landscape. In the course of his explorations he discovers that the landscape is dotted with what look like wells, though there is no sign of water in them. The wells, the Time Traveller realizes, are connected to the tall towers that appear here and there on the hills, which leads him to surmise that the wells and towers are an elaborate ventilation system for something underground.

The Time Traveller begins to realize that his explanation that this society has all its needs automatically met was unsatisfactory (for example, their clothes always looked fresh but there was no sign that anyone would mend them if they tore). There was no machinery, appliances, or workshops, but the Time Traveller remarks that their sandals must have been made by someone. The Time Traveller wonders, once again, who could have taken his time machine and why.

The same day, while watching the beings bathe in the river, The Time Traveller notices one of them drowning. He rescues her, and afterwards she attaches herself to him, adorning him with flowers to express her gratitude. Her name, he learns, is Weena, and she seems to him childlike but benevolent. She follows him everywhere from then on, except when she is too tired to continue walking with him. She cries in despair every time he leaves her, and her love for him, he observes, begins to make this new world feel like home.

Weena’s behavior makes the Time Traveller understand that fear is still a presence in this society. Weena is afraid, in particular, of all kinds of darkness, and this leads the Time Traveller to observe that all of the beings seem to be afraid of the dark. The Time Traveller remarks that he did not learn the lesson of this fear yet—while the beings all gather together to sleep, the Time Traveller continues to sleep outdoors by himself, even though he had awakened once with the feeling that something was touching him.

The morning that he awakened with something touching him, the Time Traveller recalls, was before he met Weena. He had seen a grey being dash away, and he looked towards the hills and thought he saw ghosts, or something that looked like a white ape. He pushed this from his mind for a while, until he could no longer.

One morning the Time Traveller is seeking shelter from the heat, and he finds in a ruin a chamber that is dark and cool. When he enters, he sees a pair of eyes watching him. The Time Traveller immediately connects this with the pervasive fear of the dark in this society, but he moves towards the being anyway. As it runs away he notices that it looks like a small white ape.

The Time Traveller follows the ape into the darkness and feels around until he finds one of the wells he had observed before. He lights a match to see if the ape had descended the shaft, and he sees it moving deeper into the darkness. The sight of it makes him shudder, and, for this reason, he resists the conclusion that he must ultimately make: these apes are human.

From this experience, the Time Traveller concludes that the human race has evolved into two separate species: the beings he knows, and these underground creatures. This leads him to wonder what the interconnection is between the two species. He knows that in order to understand he must descend into the well.

The Time Traveller returns to Weena without entering the well that day, but he continues to puzzle over the creatures until he realizes their economic significance. Before revealing it, the Time Traveller backtracks to explain that the appearance of the creatures, particularly their large eyes, makes him think they are unable to see in the light—they have evolved to be solely subterranean. This leads to the conclusion that there is a whole society underground, one that does all the work to make the above-ground beings’ lives so comfortable.

The connection is then made to the Time Traveller’s own era—the above-ground beings are the descendants of the ruling class of the Time Traveller’s society, and the underground beings are the working class. A difference that was once purely social, the Time Traveller surmises, has now caused the species to diverge in two. The Time Traveller reflects on the fact that many laborers in his era work in shadowed spaces and live without much natural light, while the rich seek estates that are more and more remote from others—the divergence along class lines makes sense in a way that is horrifying.

This changes the way the Time Traveller thinks of the society he has encountered. While he once referred to it as a Golden Age because of its peace and prosperity, he now understands that the above-ground beings live as well as they do through exploitation of those living underground. The Time Traveller warns that this explanation could still be wrong, but it is the most plausible one he found. He then reveals the names of the two species: the Morlocks live below ground, and the Eloi above.