The Time Traveller stopped. "That is the story," he said. "I know it is impossible. Take it as a lie — or as a prophecy. Say that I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider that I have been thinking about the fate of our race until I have hatched this thing." He took two strange white flowers out of his pocket and put them on the table. They were withered and flattened and brown, but nobody in the room could name the plant. Weena had given them to him in the far garden of that dead world, and they were proof that his story was true. The next morning he went into his laboratory to fetch a camera and a bag. I heard a strange sound behind the door, and when I opened it the machine was gone. That was three years ago. He has never come back.