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It provoked pitying laughter to see the little peddling rules of prudence and policy which the world adorns with the name of morality, while it pretends to inclose all life within them. A preposterous mole-hill, an ant-like people! Life sees to it that they are brought to reason. Life does but pass, and all is swept away....
Slowly, fighting, every inch of the way, Nodwengo was pushed back, and slowly the long ant-like line of women and sick and cattle crept through the opening in the rock, till at length all of them were gone. "It is time," said Nodwengo, glancing behind him, "for our arms grow weary."
He walked for miles, creeping ant-like between the immensities of the brown plain and the tumbled sky. Had he been less implacable, less intent, he might have noticed many things, the changing conformation of the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him by surprise.
Accordingly, on reaching the further end of the village, he hailed the first peasant whom he saw a man who was in the act of hoisting a ponderous beam on to his shoulder before setting off with it, ant-like, to his hut. "Hi!" shouted Chichikov. "How can I reach landowner Plushkin's place without first going past the mansion here?" The peasant seemed nonplussed by the question.
In contrast, the world today seemed pitifully arid. Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like.
After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men, in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but otherwise in quite good health in better health, he distinctly said, than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left no bad effects.
The mathematical reality of higher space is never in question: the higher dimensions are as valid as the lower, but the hyper-dimensionality of matter is still unproven. Man's ant-like efforts to establish this as a truth have thus far been vain. Lest this statement discourage the reader at the very outset, he should understand the reason for such failure.
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