номер 3, страница 146 - гдз по английскому языку 10 класс (spotlight) учебник Афанасьева, Дули

Unit 8D. Literature. Exercise 3, page 146.

The Time Machine

I told some of you last Thursday about the principles of the time machine and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly, and one of the ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent, but the rest of it is sound enough.

I expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade so that it was not complete until this morning.

It was at ten o'clock today that the first time machine ever began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second.

I felt unsteady, then a nightmare sensation of falling, but looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had been a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory went hazy and then dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to cross the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket.

I pushed the lever to full power. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, still faster and faster. A whirling murmur filled my ears, and a strange confusedness descended on my mind.

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback, of a helpless headlong motion. I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.

As I increased speed, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim outline of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day.

I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.

Then, in the darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. As I went on, still gaining speed, the appearance of night and day merged into one continuous greyness. The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight.

The sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space; the moon, a fainter changing band; and I could see nothing of the stars except a brighter circle flickering in the blue now and then.