Temporal fossa

“ According to theory, the increased speed of the revolutions would cause a rift in the time continuum, or in other words, would change the proportion between your existence in the temporal and material realms and change your location in time, thereby propelling you into the past or the future, depending upon which was chosen, electron or proton, past or future. ”

“ Hence, in consequence of the combination of these two factors—e.g., in a syncopated measure of unusual emphasis—the characteristic time-values may be inverted, and the briefer duration attach to that unit which comprises the greater number of elements. Intensive values cannot take the place of temporal values in rhythm; the time form is fundamental. Through all variations its equivalences must be adhered to. Stress makes rhythm only when its recurrence is at regular intervals. The number of subordinate factors which combine with the accented element to make the group is quite indifferent. ”

“ Many of them, of course, are simply illusions produced by complex refractions of light and sound waves: others are very real. The time axis itself is subject to certain transformations which produce the temporal mirages. ”

“ As might be suspected in such forms, the number of presacral vertebrae is reduced.
The temporal vacuity is bounded as in the plesiosaurs, and also in some theriodonts. The maxillae are large, the nares situated rather far back, perhaps an adaptation for grubbing in the mud after invertebrates. Possibly there was a moderate adaptation in Placodus for life in shallow water.
The placodonts were reptiles of considerable size, perhaps eight or ten feet in length, undoubtedly slow in movement, and with a heavy skull, as have all shell-eating reptiles. ”

“ I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time-traveling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! ”

“ Slower and slower went the circling hands, until the thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the gray haze around me became distincter, and dim outlines of a low hill and a sea became visible.
"But as my motion became slower there was, I found, no blinking change of day and night. A steady twilight brooded over the earth. And the band of light that had indicated the sun had, I now noticed, become fainter, had faded indeed to invisibility in the east, and in the west was increasingly broader and redder. ”

“ Already I saw other vast shapes—huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The gray downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of clouds whirled into nothingness. ”

“ The single large temporal opening is bounded below by the postorbitals and squamosal, above by the parietals, which are more or less elevated in the middle in a crest. There is a pineal foramen. The squamosals, in some at least, join each other back of the parietals on the upper surface of the skull. There are no interparietals, tabulars, or supratemporals.
On the occipital surface the supraoccipital is excavated more or less by the foramen magnum, which may extend to the roof, dividing the bone. The paroccipitals are always fused with the exoccipitals. ”

“ Between the tropics the hour of the day may be known by the direction of the needle as well as by the oscillations of the barometer. It is affected instantly, but transiently, by the northern light.
When the uniform horary motion of the needle is disturbed by a magnetic storm, the perturbation manifests itself simultaneously, in the strictest sense of the word, over hundreds and thousands of miles of sea and land, or propagates itself by degrees in short intervals every where over the earth’s surface. ”

“ A priori, indeed, we might venture to state that a system is always based upon previous data: unsystematic indications of time precede the system of time-reckoning. These modest beginnings have been obscured from view by the prejudice in favour of the systematic technical and astronomical chronology. The only absolutely necessary thing is a clear idea of the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies, i. e. the sun, the moon, and the most important of the fixed stars, and of the phases of the climate and the life of animals and plants, which give the units of the time-reckoning. ”

“ But all these indications of periods of time are found among more developed peoples: the primitive peoples pay little or no attention to them.
Both in the case of the day and in that of the other time-units this clinging to a natural basis long proved a hindrance to a rational system of time-reckoning, which could only be achieved by breaking away from natural phenomena. For there are no fixed natural limits of day, but if morning and evening, or still more clearly sunrise and sunset, are chosen as the limits, these must change every day and the days will vary in length. ”

“ CHAPTER X. MATTIE IN SEARCH.
How does the time contrive to steal away from us when we are sitting up, feverish with fear for him, or her, who returns not? The dial that we stare at so often, marks fresh hours, and still further alarms us; but the night is long and tedious, and there's a stab in every tick of that sepulchral clock on the landing. We disguise our alarm from the servants, even from ourselves, and sit down patiently for the coming one—nervous at the footfalls in the streets without, and feeling heart-sick as they pass our door, and die away in the distance. ”

“ Highly disturbed days are more than usually common in some years, and in some months of the year, thus their omission may produce effects other than that intended. Even on days of lesser disturbance difficulties present themselves. There may be to and fro movements of considerable amplitude occupying under an hour, and the hour may come exactly at the crest or at the very lowest part of the trough. ”

“ I waited anxiously a long time, but heard no sign of her return, nor any sound save the first dull clicks of an old clock, and the splashing of the rain outside. At length I was seized with a desire to inspect the premises, and after a slight hesitation I ventured into the other end. It was the most dreary position in which I had ever found myself, the solemn stillness imparting a feeling as much akin to terror as the greatest fear of real danger could ever instil within me; but my survey was almost immediately interrupted by a rustling movement in the direction where the dead man lay. ”

“ A change in the time of her diurnal rotation, as affecting the length of the day and night, must at once be followed by a corresponding modification of the periodicities of the nervous system of animals; a change in her orbitual translation round the sun, as determining the duration of the year, would, in like manner, give rise to a marked effect. If the year were shorter, we should live faster and die sooner. ”

“ I asked hurriedly:
"What is wrong with Summer, Wyn?"
"She lives backwards," he said. "Time is reversed for her. It isn't only a physiological reversal. Everything goes backwards in time for her. The future is the past to Summer, and the past is the unknown future. She remembers the future, Don—she remembers it, because she has seen it happen." ”

“ By millions of millions the creatures of earth slow and drop when their time-sense is mysteriously paralyzed.
"There is no doubt of it!" The little chemist pushed steel-bowed spectacles up on his high forehead and peered at his dinner guest with excited blue eyes. "Time will come to an end at six o'clock this morning."
Jack Baron, young radio engineer at the Rothafel Radio laboratories, and protégé of Dr. Manthis, his host, laughed heartily.
"What a yarn you spin, Doctor," he said. "Write it for the movies."
"But it's true," insisted the older man. "Something is paralyzing our time-sense. ”

“ I fear greatly that the wailing cries heard constantly from the outskirts of the city are the death cries of the inhabitants. They are constantly increasing in volume and are approaching the center of the city.
“The fog yet hangs over everything. If possible, it is even heavier than before. But the conditions have changed. Instead of an opaque, impenetrable wall of odorous vapor, now swirls and writhes a shapeless mass in contortions of almost human agony. Now and again the mass parts and I catch a brief glimpse of the streets below.
“People are running to and fro, screaming in despair. ”

“ Our task is now to make clear the nature of these discontinuous and pars pro toto time-indications, since from them proceeds, as order is ever evolved out of chaos, the continuous time-reckoning, the calendar.
[11]
CHAPTER I.
THE DAY. For primitive man the day is the simplest and most obvious unit of time. The variations of day and night, light and darkness, sleeping and waking penetrate at least as deeply into life as the changes following upon the course of the year, such as heat and cold, drought and rainy seasons, periods of famine and plenty. ”

“ It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in lifelike attitudes. And it was only by watching them for a very long time that I [116] perceived that they did indeed have motion. One car I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. ”

“ The observation of the moon is often said to be the oldest form of time-reckoning. This statement involves a certain danger, viz. the overlooking of the fact that the time-indications from natural phases and from the stars—as I hope has been shewn above—are just as primitive and must be just as old. But if by time-reckoning the continuous principle and measure of time are implied the statement is in that sense true. The moon is indeed the first chronometer, and this fact is due to the nature of its concrete appearance, which draws attention to the duration, and not to the point, of time. ”

“ Such also is our shifting seven-day week, which, chiefly through the agency of Mohammedanism, has also been widely extended among peoples of a lower stage of development. These artificial periods, arising often from a natural period which for purposes of the calendar has been detached from its natural basis, belong to a highly developed stage of time-reckoning. Only among certain comparatively far-advanced, semi-primitive peoples does an artificial period of the simplest kind first appear, and then only one, the market-week, the origin of which it is very easy to understand. ”

“ The difficulty of reconciling lunar with solar time is one of the standing puzzles which has taxed the ingenuity of men who are emerging from barbarism. Now an octennial cycle is the shortest period at the end of which sun and moon really mark time together after overlapping, so to say, throughout the whole of the interval. ”

“ Again Mark nodded, this time more slowly.
"You mean that the wave of energy really must be like a sword, stabbing one small hole through the barrier?"
"Exactly." A pause. "The time mirror represented just such a hole through the barrier. What appeared to us to be waves in the glass actually were frozen ripples in the space-time continuum—just as if you had dropped a stone in water, and the hole and ripples had frozen." ”

“ FEKLUSHA. Hard times they are, Marfa Ignatievna, ma'am, very hard. Already the time has begun diminishing.
MME. KABANOVA. How is that? diminishing, my dear?
FEKLUSHA. We, of course—how should we observe it in our blindness and vanity? but wise people have observed that time has grown shorter with us. Once the summer and the winter dragged on endlessly, you got tired of looking for the end of them, but now, before one's time to look about one, they've flown. The days and the hours still seem the same, of course; but the time keeps growing shorter and shorter, for our sins. ”

“ We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. ”

“ The Houses looked like Skeletons, and an universal Air of Horror seem'd to sit on the Countenances of the People; all Business seem'd to be laid aside for the Time, and People were generally intent upon getting Help to repair their Habitations.
It pleased God so to direct things, that there fell no Rain in any considerable Quantity, except what fell the same Night or the ensuing Day, for near Three Weeks after the Storm, though it was a Time of the Year that is generally dripping. ”