“And he didn’t return,” I added, “so the things he took don’t seem to have been sufficiently useful. As I said before, if I go, I shall take an axe; for one reason, because I spend half my leisure in tree-felling, and I know how to use it. For another, it’s a useful tool, and not only intended for the destruction of your fellow-men. Whether I shall find any fellow-men, I don’t know, but, if I go into a strange world, I don’t propose to equip myself as though I intended to engage it in single combat. It seems tactless to me.--But did he say nothing about temperature? I don’t want to stumble into a glacial epoch, without even a fur collar in which to face it.” “You need have no fear of that,” said the Professor, “you will be at least thirty-thousand years away from the nearest glacial epoch, and Templeton didn’t seem to have suffered either from change of air or an excessively high temperature.” “He took plenty of clothes when he went back,” young Danby added, “but he said it was much easier to throw off clothes you didn’t want than to put on those you hadn’t got, and he didn’t know where he would be going, ‘it might be up, or it might be down!’--whatever that meant.” “It doesn’t sound as though he had much confidence in the resources of the future world,” I said doubtfully, “and there are about fifty questions I should like to ask, but they wouldn’t make much difference, even if you knew the answers, which you probably don’t. “I’ve got to-morrow to make any preparations that seem worth while. I’ll take the cheque now, Professor, if you will be so kind as to draw it,--and I’ll give you a note to-morrow which will clear you with Clara, if I follow Templeton’s example.” CHAPTER II THE EMPTY DAWN The room which the Professor had constructed for his experiments was circular, walled in an iron-grey metallic substance, empty, and, when the door closed upon me, it was in absolute darkness. Waiting there, I had a curious and disquieting consciousness, as of absolute vacancy, such as a disembodied spirit might feel before its next incarnation, but nothing happened, neither did the Professor return as he promised. I knew that the two minutes were long past, but there was no movement in the room, and no break in the darkness. Had he misled me, I wondered, and was I the victim of some quite different experiment,--perhaps of how much strain the human mind could endure, and yet retain its sanity? And why was the room so much colder?--and the air against my face was damp, as though a mist were rising. I looked round, and saw nothing,--upward, and the three great stars of Orion’s belt showed through the fog, and the upper part of the constellation; and other stars were in the central heavens, but lower down the mist hid them. If I were indeed transported to some remote and future time, at least the same stars were there, with little change, even of their positions in the heavens.