The Time Machine And There Will Be Time II

In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), Chapter XV, a group of time travelers makes the long journey from their base in the middle Pleistocene back to their century of origin, the twentieth, then to its immediate future. Like Wells' Time Traveler, they endure reduced or dilated duration while perceiving their apparently accelerated environment. Anderson conveys the experience of a very long temporal journey in a page of condensed prose.

Often I summarize Anderson's texts hoping thus to communicate their richness but, in this case, the text that I would summarize is already a summary and can only be quoted. First, Anderson reminds us of the time travel process already described:

"The shadows which were time reeled past. They had form and color, weight and distances, only when one emerged for food or sleep or a hurried gulp of air." (p.158)

Next, one single long sentence punctuated by semi-colons and commas summarizes the prehistory and history traversed and glimpsed by the travelers. I will rearrange this sentence as a list, thus making it easier to notice the successive stages involved. However, in the original, the long sentence, filling most of a page, is presented so as to be read without any pause for breath. The reader must comprehend what is happening as it is happening:

"Season after season blew across the hills;

"glaciers from the north ground heights to plains and withdrew in a fury of snow-storms, leaving lakes where mastodons drank;

"the lakes thickened to swamps and finally to soil on whose grass fed horses and camels, whose treetops were grazed by giant sloths, until the glaziers returned;

"mild weather renewed saw those earlier beasts no more, but instead herds of bison which darkened the prairie and filled it with an earthquake drumroll of hoofs;

"the pioneers entered, coppery-skinned men who wielded flint-tipped spears;

"again was a Great Winter, again a Great Springtime,

"and now the hunters had bows, and in this cycle forest claimed the moraines, first willow and larch and scrub oak, later an endless cathedral magnificence

"- and suddenly that was gone, in a blink, the conquerors were there, grubbing out a million stumps which the axes had left, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, laying down trails of iron from which at night could be heard a rush and a long-drawn wail strangely like mastodon passing by." (ibid.)

Splitting up the sentence like that has made me more aware of the geological ages traversed. There are several stages even between semi-colons. Commas replace semi-colons as the pace increases. I count three Ice Ages:

glaciers;
glaciers returned;
a Great Winter.

There are seasonal changes, then geological changes:

ice;
water;
swamp;
soil;
grass;
trees;
different animal species;
men arriving (we saw the men crossing Beringia in the Time Patrol series);
spears;
bows;
railways.

And it passes like a dream. But at last there is a stop:

"Havig's group stopped for a last rest in the house of a young farmer who was no traveler but could be trusted. They needed it for a depot, too. It would have been impossible to go this far through time on this point of Earth's surface without miniature oxygen tanks. Otherwise, they'd more than once have had to stop for air when the country lay drowned, or been unable to because they were under a mile of ice. Those were strong barriers which guarded the secret of their main base from the Eyrie." (pp. 158-159)

I have now quoted an entire page but this has been the only way to discuss it appropriately.