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futurities exclusive of each other.
    I reached over the bars of the Time Machine, unscrewed the little levers that would launch me into time, and stored them safe in my pocket. Then I felt about until I found the sturdy form of my poker, still lodged where I had left it in the structure of the machine. I grasped its thick handle and hefted it in my hand. My confidence grew as I imagined cracking a few of the Morlocks’ soft skulls with this piece of primitive engineering. I stuck the poker in a loop of my belt. It hung there a little awkward but hugely reassuring, with its weight and solidity, and its resonance of home, and my own fireside.
    I raised my candle into the air. The spectral statue, orbuilding, which I had noticed close by the machine, came into shadowy illumination. It was indeed a monument of some kind – a colossal figure carved of some white stone, its form difficult to discern in the flickering candlelight.
    I walked towards the monument. As I did so, on the edge of my vision, I fancied I saw a pair of grey-red eyes widen, and a white back which shivered away across the sandy surface with a shushing of bare feet. I rested my hand on the club of brass tucked in my belt, and continued.
    The statue was set on a pedestal which appeared to be of bronze, and decorated with deep-framed, filigreed panels. The pedestal was stained, as if it had once been attacked by verdigris, now long dried out. The statue itself was of white marble, and from a leonine body great wings were spread, so that they seemed to hover over me. I wondered how those great sheets of stone were supported, for I could see no struts. Perhaps there was some metal frame, I mused – or perhaps some elements of that mastery of gravity, which I had hypothesized in my latest jaunt through the Age of Great Buildings, lingered on in this desolate era. The face of the marble beast was human, and was turned towards me; I felt as if those blank stone eyes were watching me, and there was a smile, sardonic and cruel, on the weather-beaten lips …
    And with a jolt I recognized this construction; if not for fear of Morlocks I would have whooped with the joy of familiarity! This was the monument I had come to call the White Sphinx – a structure I had become familiar with, in this very spot, during my first flight to the future. It was almost like greeting an old friend!
    I paced around the sandy hill-side, back and forth past the machine, remembering how it had been.This spot had been a lawn, surrounded by mauve and purple rhododendrons – bushes which had dropped their blossoms over me in a hail storm on my first arrival. And, looming over it all, indistinct at first in that hail, had been the imposing form of this Sphinx.
    Well, here I was again, a hundred and fifty thousand years before that date. The bushes and lawn were gone – and would never come to be , I suspected. That sunlit garden had been replaced by this bleak, darkened desert, and now existed only in the recesses of my own mind. But the Sphinx was here, solid as life and almost indestructible, it seemed.
    I patted the bronze panels of the Sphinx’s pedestal with something resembling affection. Somehow the existence of the Sphinx, lingering from my previous visit, reassured me that I was not imagining all of this, that I was not going mad in some dim recess of my house in 1891! All of this was objectively real, and – no doubt, like the rest of Creation – it all conformed to some logical pattern. The White Sphinx was a part of that pattern, and it was only my ignorance and limitation of mind that prevented me from seeing the rest of it. I was bolstered up, and felt filled with a new determination to continue with my explorations.
    On impulse, I walked around to the side of the pedestal closest to the Time Machine, and, by candlelight, I inspected the decorated bronze panel there. It was here, I recalled, that the Morlocks – in that other History – had opened up the hollow base of the