Chapter 11The Palace of Green Porcelain

"We found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we got close around noon, totally deserted and falling apart. Just a few broken bits of glass were left in the windows, and huge chunks of the green paint had peeled off the rusty metal frame."

It sat way up on a grassy hill, and when I looked northeast before we went inside, I was shocked to see a huge river, or maybe a creek, where I figured Wandsworth and Battersea used to be.

"I thought then - though I never really thought about it - what might have happened, or might be happening, to the creatures living in the water. "The Palace was actually made of porcelain, and I saw an inscription in some weird writing all over it.

I thought, kinda dumbly, that Weena could help me figure it out, but she just looked at me like writing had never even occurred to her. She always seemed more human than she was, I guess, maybe because she cared so much.

"Inside the big, broken doors - which were open and falling apart - we didn't find a usual hall. Instead, there was a long gallery with lots of windows. At first, it reminded me of a museum. The tiled floor was covered in thick dust, and a bunch of random stuff was hidden under the same grey stuff."

Then I spotted something standing weird and tall in the middle of the hall - it was clearly the bottom part of a huge skeleton. By the way the feet slanted, I knew it was some extinct animal, like a Megatherium.

The skull and the rest of the bones were lying next to it in the dust, and in one spot, where rainwater had leaked through a hole in the roof, the bone itself had been worn away. Further down the gallery was the huge barrel-shaped skeleton of a Brontosaurus. My museum idea totally made sense.

As I walked toward the side, I found what looked like slanted shelves, and when I cleared away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases from our own time. They must have been airtight to see how well some of the stuff inside was preserved.

"Clearly, we were standing in the ruins of a later version of South Kensington!"

This was the Paleontology Section, and it must have been an amazing collection of fossils, even though the normal process of decay, which had been slowed down for a while, and because there were no more bacteria or fungi, had lost most of its power, was slowly working on all the treasures again.

Here and there I found signs of the little people - rare fossils broken into pieces or strung on reeds. And some of the cases had been moved - probably by the Morlocks, I figured. The place was really quiet. The thick dust muffled our footsteps.

"Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin down the slanted glass of a case, came over to me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me. "At first, I was so surprised by this old monument to an intelligent time that I didn’t think about what it could mean.

"Even my worry about the Time Machine faded a little from my mind."

"Judging by how big the place was, this Palace of Green Porcelain had way more than just a museum of old fossils; maybe historical exhibits, even a library! To me, especially where I was at, that would've been way more interesting than looking at this display of ancient geology falling apart."

Exploring, I found another short hallway running across from the first one. This seemed to be all about minerals, and seeing a chunk of sulfur got me thinking about gunpowder. But I couldn't find any saltpeter; actually, no nitrates at all. Probably they just crumbled away a long time ago.

Still, the sulfur stuck in my head and got me thinking. As for the rest of the stuff in that hallway, even though it was the best preserved of everything I saw, I wasn't really interested.

I'm no expert on rocks and minerals, and I went down a really wrecked aisle running parallel to the first hall I'd entered. Apparently, this section had been about natural history, but everything had long since become unrecognizable.

A few shriveled and blackened bits of what used to be stuffed animals, dried-out mummies in jars that once held alcohol, a brown dust of dead plants: that was it! I felt bad about that, because I would've loved to see how people figured out how to control nature.

Then we came to a hallway that was seriously huge, but really dim, with the floor sloping down a little bit from where I came in. At intervals, cracked and smashed white globes hung from the ceiling - suggesting that the place had originally been lit with electric lights.

This was more my thing, because rising up on either side of me were these massive machines, all super corroded and many broken down, but some still pretty complete.

You know I'm a sucker for mechanics, and I wanted to hang around these; especially because they were like puzzles, and I could only guess what they were for. I thought that if I could figure them out, I’d have powers that could help me against the Morlocks.

"Suddenly Weena came really close to my side. She startled me so much! If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t think I would’ve even noticed that the floor sloped at all. [Footnote: It's possible, of course, that the floor didn’t slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill. - ED. ]"

The end I came in at was above ground and had these tiny slits for windows. As you went down the length of the hallway, the ground blocked out these windows, until finally there was a pit like the 'garden' of a London house, with just a thin line of daylight at the top.

I walked slowly, trying to figure out the machines, and I was so focused on them that I didn’t notice how the light was fading, until Weena started getting worried. Then I saw that the hallway led down into thick darkness.

I hesitated, and when I looked around, I noticed that there wasn’t as much dust, and the surface wasn’t as uneven. Further away, towards the dimness, it looked like it was broken up by a bunch of small, narrow footprints. That reminded me how close the Morlocks were.

I felt like I was wasting time looking at machines. I remembered that it was already pretty far into the afternoon, and I still didn’t have a weapon, a safe place, or a way to make a fire.

And then, down in the deep blackness of the hallway, I heard this weird pattering, and the same odd noises I’d heard down the well.

"I took Weena’s hand. Then, a sudden idea hit me, so I left her and turned to a machine with a lever sticking out, kind of like what you’d see at a train signal. I climbed onto the stand and grabbed the lever, putting all my weight on it to the side."

Suddenly, Weena, left alone in the middle of the room, started to whimper. I’d pretty much guessed the lever’s strength right - it snapped after about a minute of pressure. I went back to her, holding a mace that looked more than enough to crack any Morlock skull.

And honestly, I really wanted to take out a few Morlocks. Super messed up, I know, wanting to kill my own descendants! But I just couldn't feel any humanity towards those things.

Only my worry about leaving Weena and the feeling that going on a killing spree would mess up my Time Machine stopped me from heading straight down the gallery and taking out the brutes I could hear.

"Okay, so, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, we went out of that gallery and into another, even bigger one. It instantly reminded me of an old military chapel, all draped with torn flags. I soon realized the brown, charred rags hanging from the walls were actually the remains of books."

They’d completely fallen apart, and all the print was gone. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metal clasps that told the story well enough. If I’d been a writer, I might have had a moment to think about how pointless everything is.

But I was just struck by how much work went into this gloomy mess of rotting paper. At the time, I’ll admit, I mostly thought about the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers on physical optics.

"Then, we climbed a wide staircase and ended up in what might have once been a chemistry lab. And here, I had a real hope of finding something useful. Except for one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was pretty well preserved."

I checked every unbroken case, and finally, in one of the really airtight ones, I found a box of matches. I tried them out right away - they worked perfectly! Not even damp. I turned to Weena. ‘Dance!’ I shouted to her in her own language.

Because now I had a real weapon against the creepy creatures we were afraid of. So, in that abandoned museum, on the thick, soft carpet of dust, to Weena’s huge excitement, I did a kind of crazy dance, whistling The Land of the Leal as cheerfully as I could.

"It was a little bit of a cancan, a bit of a tap dance, a bit of a skirt dance (as much as my suit allowed), and totally original. I'm naturally creative, you know. "I still think it’s super weird that a box of matches managed to survive for so long.

But, oddly enough, I found something even more unlikely: camphor. It was in a sealed jar, which, I guess, had been really airtight. At first, I thought it was paraffin wax, so I smashed the glass. But the smell of camphor was unmistakable.

This volatile substance had somehow survived in all that decay, maybe for thousands of years. It reminded me of a sepia painting I’d once seen, made from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that had died and turned to stone millions of years ago.

I was about to throw it away, but then I remembered it was flammable and burned with a good, bright flame - basically, an excellent candle - so I put it in my pocket. I didn’t find any explosives, though, or anything to break down the bronze doors.

My iron crowbar was still the most helpful thing I’d found. Still, I left that gallery feeling really pumped.

"I can’t even begin to tell you the whole story of that long afternoon. It would take a ton of effort to remember everything in the right order. I remember a long hallway filled with rusty weapon stands, and I was stuck deciding between my crowbar, a hatchet, or a sword."

I couldn’t carry all of them, though, and my iron bar seemed like the best bet against the bronze gates. There were tons of guns, pistols, and rifles. Most were covered in rust, but a bunch were made of some new metal and still pretty solid.

But any bullets or gunpowder they might have had had just rotted away to dust. One corner was all charred and broken; I figured maybe there had been an explosion among the exhibits.

In another place, there was a huge collection of idols - Polynesian, Mexican, Greek, Phoenician, pretty much every country on earth, I think. And right there, I just had to write my name on the nose of a steatite monster from South America that I really liked.

"As the evening came around, I started losing interest. I walked through gallery after gallery - dusty, quiet, often falling apart, with exhibits sometimes just piles of rust and coal, sometimes looking fresher."

In one spot, I suddenly found myself near a model of a tin mine, and then, totally by accident, I discovered, in a sealed case, two dynamite cartridges! I yelled ‘Eureka!’ and smashed the case with excitement. Then, I got a second thought. I hesitated.

Then, picking out a small side room, I decided to give it a shot. I’d never felt such disappointment as I did waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never happened. Of course, they were dummies, like I should have realized from seeing them there.

"I really think that if they had been real, I would have bolted out of there and blown up the Sphinx, the bronze doors, and (as it turned out) my chance of finding the Time Machine, all at once! " It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open courtyard inside the palace.

It had grass and three fruit trees. So we rested and felt better. As the sun started to go down, I started thinking about where we were. Night was creeping in, and I still hadn’t found my secret hiding spot. But that didn't bother me much.

I had something that was, maybe, the best defense against the Morlocks - I had matches! I also had camphor in my pocket, too, if I needed a big fire. It seemed like the best thing to do was spend the night outside, protected by a fire. In the morning, there was the Time Machine to get.

So far, all I had was my iron mace. But now, with everything I was learning, I felt totally different about those bronze doors. Until now, I hadn't tried to force them open, mostly because I was curious about what was on the other side.

They never seemed super strong, and I hoped my iron bar would be enough to do the job.