All fictitious names here. The Asteradio (‘star-transmitter’) is Hamilton’s version of H. G. Well’s ‘Time Machine’.

2. ‘Hegelian or dialectical materialist’: throughout this first chapter, Hamilton is alluding passim to the contemporary interest in dualistic scientific and philosophical thought (space/time, mind/matter, etc. — and no doubt with his own Moribundia/England ‘doubling’ also in view). Here, he refers to the Hegelian ‘dialectic’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and to the Marxist appropriation of it. See Note 26 below.

CHAPTER II

Just as I have been asked by so many people what my feelings were when the door of the Asteradio was finally closed, and my journey lay ahead, so any number of others have wanted to know my first sensations on waking in Moribundia, and knowing that the farthest journey ever taken by man was at an end. Did I know where I was?—did I know who I was?—did I remember what had happened to me?—was I afraid?—and so on and so forth.

The answer is that I felt nothing more than the ordinary sensation of waking from sleeping—combined with the knowledge that I was rather cold, and that this in fact was what was waking me. I remembered what had happened to me, who I was, and what I was doing, with the utmost clarity and incisiveness. I was not afraid, but I wanted to do some more thinking before I opened my eyes and faced facts.

Above all I was filled with a profound sense of peace—the beautiful peace of victorious endeavour, and safety after peril. I wanted to go on lying where I was, draining this sense of peace to the dregs.

I suppose part of this feeling of comfort derived from the knowledge that I was in an atmosphere in which I could breathe and live, and the assurance, imbibed eagerly through every sense, that the scene to which I must at last open my eyes, was to bear countless features similar to those in the world from which I had come.

To begin with, I had put out my hand, and had made certain that I was lying upon grass—grass, moreover, which the sun had only left a little while ago. I myself was now in shadow, but I was certain the sun was still shining in the sky. It was either dawn or evening—I could not say which—the coolness, peacefulness, and freshness suggested either.

Still keeping my eyes closed, I began to listen intently for other sounds—but at first could pick up nothing—certainly no sound of anything like ‘human’ beings. I thought once that I could hear the sound of a fountain playing, but decided it was just a fuzziness in my own ears. At last, however, I became conscious of a very slight but recurring and curiously insistent sound.

I can only convey this sound (as it thus presented itself to my mind) by writing the word ‘Pock.’ It was a sound a man can make by placing his lips tightly together, and quickly snapping them open—a hollow sound you can sometimes hear in a slowly dripping tap. I could not make out whether it was very far away or very near, but finally I discerned that it possessed a definite periodicity of its own.

This curiously irritating little explosion came upon the ear about every fifteen seconds, but after every sixth explosion (as I judged) it ceased for nearly a minute, and then began again.

But sometimes there was a ‘pock’ or two missing in the series of six, and every now and again another sound intruded. This second sound was like the sound of dried peas being slowly turned over in a hollow cylindrical box—or of a gentle wave leaping from a soft sea on to a dreamy beach about a quarter of a mile away…. But as this sound invariably succeeded, and seemed dependent upon, the ‘pock’ sound, I had to conclude that it came from no such romantic source. Occasionally, mingling with, or rising above this second sound, I thought I could hear the dim murmur and cry of distant human voices, but I presumed that this was my imagination.

I do not know how long I might have gone on listening to this sound—which had a lulling effect upon me in my peaceful state—had I not been visited with a sudden idea which made me jump.

Pock … pock … pock … and then a sinister little rattle…. A snake! What else? And within a few inches of me! I swung up into an erect position, and opened my eyes.

I was on a green clipped lawn, surrounded on all sides by the sweet and venerable cloisters of what I immediately saw must be some cathedral or abbey. The gentle evening sun, lighting the green grass to flame at the farther end, shone athwart a scene as typically and gracefully English as anything English I had ever seen. There was no snake or crawling monster near me, and the thought of such a thing was preposterous.

Looking back at it now, I am astonished by the way, in the moments that followed, I took what I saw for granted—totally ignored the stupendous implications of that to which my eyes and senses bore testimony. That blind matter, developing into mind, acting upon itself, and growing self-conscious on a world other than ours, should have proceeded along paths of evolution so astonishingly similar, so that it finally culminated in such familiar phenomena as Gothic (yes, Gothic!) arches and clipped green lawns—here indeed was evidence of a new kind over which the mechanical materialist and the subjective idealist might continue their endless wrangle! But neither this thought—nor the thought of the fame I should win when I returned with this news to our world—even crossed my mind. I suppose I was in a sort of dream.

I stood still for a few minutes—merely gratefully accepting what I saw—and then, treading softly, made my way into the shade of the cloisters themselves.

My sole desire now was to locate the source of those gentle, but peculiarly exciting and perturbing little noises I had heard when my eyes were closed, and which still beat upon my ear. I walked down a dark avenue of arches, at the end of which I had espied, as at the end of a mighty telescope, a glimmering opening, and beyond that some trees.

I found my heart beating faster as I neared the end of this, and with something more than mere wonderment as to what I was going to see. I had a strange feeling that something was happening, that something of considerable moment was ‘on,’ only a matter of a few hundred yards away—something which would also account for the electric atmosphere, the breathless hush3 in which this venerable building and its environment seemed at the moment to be steeped.

I had no sooner emerged again into the light of day than a flash of inspiration seized me. About fifty yards ahead was a long row of trees planted closely together, and glimmering beyond them I had had a glimpse of white forms on a green background which made me quiver with expectation. A few seconds later my keenest hopes were confirmed, and everything which had puzzled me had been clarified.

The white forms were the forms of boys in flannels, and the ‘pocking’ sound which, with my eyes closed, I had nervously mistaken for the advance of a reptile, was no other sound than that sweetest of all sweet and nostalgic sounds to the breast of every Englishman, the sound of bat upon ball! And the sound of the peas in the cylindrical box, of the soft wave on the nearby beach, came from nothing but the little swelling bursts of applause—the intermittent clapping of the spectators who were in the pavilion, or lying on the grass around!

I realized instantly that, as might have been expected, there was a public-school4 attached to the religious building from which I had emerged, and that the whole life of its young and grown-up inhabitants was at present absorbed by, fiercely concentrated upon, the cricket match in progress—which was no doubt a serious event against a visiting school. No wonder I had had that feeling of tension.

The pavilion, packed as I could see from here, with a crowd of relations and masters, was at the far end of the ground from where I stood, and all around, seated on benches or lying sprawled on the ground, were the boys—every member of this far-flung circle of young and old gazing at the centre of the field with the immobility of Red Indians in ambush.

It was, indeed, as though this, the very first of the strange scenes I was to witness in the land of Moribundia, had been specially prepared for me—so arranged that the members of the community were spread out before me, for my benefit, as it were, in a state of absolute naturalness and unself-consciousness, and so absorbed in their own rites that a stranger could move among them with less conspicuousness than a ghost.

I knew at once that I must seize this moment—drink in these unspoiled impressions while I could, and keeping close to the trees, I began to circle slowly but without stealth in the direction of the pavilion.

It was not until I had passed the second or third group of boys lying sprawled upon the grass that I became aware that something was ‘wrong’—had my first intimation, in other words, that this world into which I had come had certain physical characteristics and peculiarities which differed, however faintly, from those in the world from which I had come.