[citation needed] Two digital versions of the text, available online April 2020, both show four subheadings:[citation needed] "The Chronic Argonauts" was the second story to use an inventor-built machine to travel in time, a year after the publication of Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's El anacronópete.
"The Chronic Argonauts" later developed into the famous final version of The Time Machine (1895), with the bulk of the re-writing and new writing being done in 1894.
A third-person narrator describes the arrival of a mysterious inventor in the inward-looking Welsh town of Llyddwdd.
Cook then becomes a second narrator, relating in flashback the night of his disappearance, and a series of subsequent adventures in time with Nebogipfel.
A 'time loop' is implied, in which Nebogipfel went back to the past and killed the previous owners of the house, thus causing it to fall into ruin and enabling him to occupy it for his present-day experiments.