One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!.

The Door in the Wall

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 "In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back .

The Time Machine

H. - G. Wells (1866-1946) 

"Avant l'extraordinaire affaire de Sidmouth, l'espèce particulière : Haploteuthis ferox, n'était connue de la science que génériquement, d'après un tentacule à demi digéré, trouvé près des îles Açores, et d'un cadavre en décomposition rencontré, au commencement de 1896, par M. Jennings, près de Land's End. 

Aucune partie de la science zoologique n'est restée aussi obscure que celle qui s'occupe des céphalopodes qui vivent aux grandes profondeurs de la mer. C'est un pur hasard, par exemple, qui amena la découverte que fit le prince de Monaco, pendant l'été de 1895, d'une douzaine environ de formes nouvelles, parmi lesquelles se trouvait le tentacule mentionné plus haut. Il arriva qu'un cachalot fut tué, au large de Terceira, par des baleiniers, et, dans ses derniers efforts, il se précipita contre le yacht du prince, le manqua, roula par-dessous et mourut à vingt mètres du gouvernail. 

Dans son agonie, il rejeta un certain nombre de gros objets. Le prince, se rendant vaguement compte de leur étrangeté et de leur importance, put, par un heureux expédient, s'en emparer avant qu'ils n'eussent coulé à fond. Il mit ses hélices en mouvement, et ces objets bizarres demeurèrent dans les tourbillons ainsi formés jusqu'à ce qu'une chaloupe fût mise à la mer. C'étaient des céphalopodes entiers, et des fragments de céphalopodes, quelques-uns de proportions gigantesques et presque tous inconnus de la science." 

Recueil de 12 nouvelles : 

"Les pirates de la mer" - "L'homme qui pouvait faire des miracles" - "L'oeuf de cristal" - "L'étoile" - "Un étrange phénomène" - "Dans l'abîme" - "Les argonautes de l'air" - "La chambre rouge" - "L'homme volant" - "Les triomphes d'un taxidermiste" - "La tentation d'Harringay" - "La pomme".

Les pirates de la mer - et autres nouvelles

One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist lodging at Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque cove of Pentargen, desiring to examine the caves there. Halfway down the precipitous path to the Pentargen beach he came suddenly upon a man sitting in an attitude of profound distress beneath a projecting mass of rock. The hands of this man hung limply over his knees, his eyes were red and staring before him, and his face was wet with tears.

He glanced round at Isbister's footfall. Both men were disconcerted, Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness of his involuntary pause, he remarked, with an air of mature conviction, that the weather was hot for the time of year.

"Very, " answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second, and added in a colourless tone, "I can't sleep."

Isbister stopped abruptly. "No?" was all he said, but his bearing conveyed his helpful impulse.

"It may sound incredible, " said the stranger, turning weary eyes to Isbister's face and emphasizing his words with a languid hand, "but I have had no sleep-no sleep at all for six nights."

When the Sleeper Wakes

Two eternal beings, magnificently enhaloed, the one in a blinding excess of white radiance and the other in a bewildering extravagance of colours, converse amidst stupendous surroundings. These surroundings are by tradition palatial, but there is now also a marked cosmic tendency about them. They have no definite locality; they are above and comprehensive of the material universe.

There is a quality in the scene as if a futurist with a considerable knowledge of modern chemical and physical speculation and some obscure theological animus had repainted the designs of a pre-Raphaelite. The vast pillars vanish into unfathomable darknesses, and the complicated curves and whorls of the decorations seem to have been traced by the flight of elemental particles. Suns and planets spin and glitter through the avanturine depths of a floor of crystalline ether. Great winged shapes are in attendance, wrought of iridescences and bearing globes, stars, rolls of the law, flaming swords, and similar symbols. The voices of the Cherubim and Seraphim can be heard crying continually, "Holy, Holy, Holy."

The Undying Fire

H.-G. Wells (1866-1946) 

"Un après-midi, à marée basse, M. Isbister, jeune peintre, en villégiature au village de Boscastle, partit avec l'intention de faire un tour à la baie pittoresque de Pentargen. À mi-chemin du sentier abrupt qui mène aux grottes, il se trouva soudain en face d'un homme assis, en une attitude de profonde détresse, sur un rocher qui surplombait. L'inconnu avait mollement laissé tomber ses mains sur ses genoux ; ses yeux étaient rouges et fixes et son visage baigné de larmes. Il détourna la tête en entendant marcher. 

Les deux hommes parurent décontenancés, et Isbister, le plus embarrassé des deux, pour dissiper la gêne causée par son arrêt involontaire, déclara, sur un ton de conviction expérimentée, que le temps était chaud pour la saison. 

- Très chaud, répondit brièvement l'inconnu. Puis, après une seconde d'hésitation, il prononça d'une voix sans timbre : - Je ne puis pas dormir. 

La physionomie d'Isbister prit une expression compatissante. 

- Vraiment ? dit-il. 

- Cela semble incroyable, reprit l'inconnu en tournant son regard baissé vers Isbister et en soulignant chaque mot d'un geste de sa main languissante, mais voilà six nuits... oui, six nuits que je ne dors pas ! 

- Vous avez demandé conseil à votre médecin ? 

- Oh ! oui, de mauvais conseils les trois quarts du temps, des drogues... Les médicaments, c'est bon pour le commun des mortels... Mon système nerveux... Mon cas est difficile à expliquer. Je n'ose pas prendre... des drogues assez puissantes..." 

A la fin du XIXe siècle, Graham tombe en catalepsie... Il se réveille deux cents ans plus tard et apprend qu'il est l'homme le plus riche de la Terre. Son nom est devenu synonyme de dictature mais aussi symbole d'espoir pour le peuple : "Quand le dormeur s'éveillera"...

Quand le dormeur s'éveillera

A Victorian scientist develops a time machine and travels to the year 802,171 AD. There he finds the meek, child-like Eloi who live in fear of the underground-dwelling Morlocks. When his time machine goes missing, the Traveller faces a fight to enter the Morlocks' domain and return to his own time.
THE TIME MACHINE remains one of the cornerstones of science-fiction literature and has proved hugely influential.

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells.

Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year.

The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible.

He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. 

(from wikipedia.org)

The Invisible Man - A grotesque Romance

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men-this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. And surely of all honoured names none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's, the timid, intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the world had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations, the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare and well-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never has that recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face of the greatness of his science found such an amazing exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure-Filmers attract no Boswells-but the essential facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there are letters, and notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with that, of Filmer's life and death.

The Door in the Wall

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