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The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.
Just as the hunting party prepares to leave the machine, Bradbury offers this description of the jungle, which metaphorically extends “forever and forever,” as if it were time itself. The description captures the wildness and unfamiliarity of the setting in profound and simple imagery.
The world is grand and alien to the travelers who are awed by it, as yet unaware of its dangers. It has not been shaped by any human contact, reflecting the raw forces of nature all around. Still, the sounds are “like music,” reflecting human understanding. The trees and animals are larger than anything the travelers have ever seen, and the pterodactyls are so gigantic that they do not seem real. To the time travelers, they seem like hallucinations produced by a delirium of night fevers.
The grandness of the jungle, although beautiful, also reflects contradictions with which the travelers struggle. The jungle is vast, and its inhabitants overload the senses of onlookers. It is a world teeming with wonders and potential terrors. The ethereal and musical sound contrasts with the incomprehensibly huge pterodactyls, creating a sense that nothing is real, that the setting is a product of a “night fever.” The travelers, well before they set foot into the setting, are both overwhelmed and alien to it.
The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.
Following their return to the time machine, Bradbury offers this vivid description of the Tyrannosaurus’s dying form, provoking feelings of disgust and pity by offering a slow-motion view of its ghastly death. Only minutes before, it had been charging the group of terrified travelers, intimidated by its gigantic size and thunderous scream. Now, its organs are “malfunctioning,” its bones crack, and its “delicate forearms” snap. Quivering, it lies on the ground, a mound of flesh and blood breathing its last. The mighty creature is reduced to a pitiable state. The roaring sound of the Tyrannosaurus has been replaced with the “sighs and murmurs” of its final breath, inspiring sympathy for the creature.
By comparing the animal’s dying body with a “wrecked locomotive” or “steam shovel,” Bradbury also invokes connections to the Industrial Revolution, a time that spurred the growth of technology. That technological growth altered Earth’s ecosystem in profound ways, just as time-traveling technology is about to alter history, bringing the world down as the dinosaur has been felled.
Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear.
On their return, still uncertain as to the effects of the journey, the travelers step into a new setting, one familiar yet somehow changed. Eckels perceives an eerie and uncertain feeling in the office, captured in the sensory descriptions Bradbury provides. He notices slight changes in the colors and sounds around him, vague and without definition. He knows there is a change, but he cannot describe exactly what the change may be.
The air has a subtle chemical taint, which could indicate anything from a rise in levels of pollution to some after-effect of warfare or political struggle. Whatever the case, the change, a “taint,” is subtle. Eckels’s flesh and hands twitch, accentuating and emphasizing the psychological distress the new setting creates. His feeling of discomfort is amplified by a whistling sound, nearly imperceptible, yet irritating. The changes reflected in the new setting seem beyond human comprehension, yet set the stage for the final, concrete revelations.
