(continued)

'In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.  I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.  You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.  But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third.  It had almost burned through when I reached the opening into the shaft.  I lay down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.  Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward.  I lit my last match . . .   and it incontinently went out.  But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.

'That climb seemed interminable to me.  With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me.  I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold.  The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness.  Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling.  At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.  I fell upon my face.  Even the soil smelt sweet and clean.  Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi.  Then, for a time, I was insensible.

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