The Book of the Damned Part 32

That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth--all others warned off.

Nothing in our own times--perhaps--because I am thinking of certain notes I have--has ever appeared upon this earth, from somewhere else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as Hudson sailed up his river. But as to surrept.i.tious visits to this earth, in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.

But, in this vast subject, I shall have to do considerable neglecting or disregarding, myself. I don't see how I can, in this book, take up at all the subject of possible use of humanity to some other mode of existence, or the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth something.

Pigs, geese, and cattle.

First find out that they are owned.

Then find out the whyness of it.

I suspect that, after all, we're useful--that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out a.n.a.logues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us--all others warned off--that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received--from Somewhere else--in our mysterious usefulness.

But I accept that, in the past, before proprietorship was established, inhabitants of a host of other worlds have--dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored--walked here, for all I know--been pulled here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited occasionally, have visited periodically for hunting, trading, replenishing harems, mining: have been unable to stay here, have established colonies here, have been lost here; far-advanced peoples, or things, and primitive peoples or whatever they were: white ones, black ones, yellow ones--

I have a very convincing datum that the ancient Britons were blue ones.

Of course we are told by conventional anthropologists that they only painted themselves blue, but in our own advanced anthropology, they were veritable blue ones--

_Annals of Philosophy_, 14-51:

Note of a blue child born in England.

That's atavism.

Giants and fairies. We accept them, of course. Or, if we pride ourselves upon being awfully far-advanced, I don't know how to sustain our conceit except by very largely going far back. Science of today--the superst.i.tion of tomorrow. Science of tomorrow--the superst.i.tion of today.

Notice of a stone ax, 17 inches long: 9 inches across broad end. (_Proc.

Soc. of Ants. of Scotland_, 1-9-184.)

_Amer. Antiquarian_, 18-60:

Copper ax from an Ohio mound: 22 inches long; weight 38 pounds.

_Amer. Anthropologist_, n.s., 8-229:

Stone ax found at Birchwood, Wisconsin--exhibited in the collection of the Missouri Historical Society--found with "the pointed end embedded in the soil"--for all I know, may have dropped there--28 inches long, 14 wide, 11 thick--weight 300 pounds.

Or the footprints, in sandstone, near Carson, Nevada--each print 18 to 20 inches long. (_Amer. Jour. Sci._, 3-26-139.)

These footprints are very clear and well-defined: reproduction of them in the _Journal_--but they a.s.similate with the System, like sour apples to other systems: so Prof. Marsh, a loyal and unscrupulous systematist, argues:

"The size of these footprints and specially the width between the right and left series, are strong evidence that they were not made by men, as has been so generally supposed."

So these excluders. Stranglers of Minerva. Desperadoes of disregard.

Above all, or below all, the anthropologists. I'm inspired with a new insult--someone offends me: I wish to express almost absolute contempt for him--he's a systematistic anthropologist. Simply to read something of this kind is not so impressive as to see for one's self: if anyone will take the trouble to look up these footprints, as pictured in the _Journal_, he will either agree with Prof. Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as profoundly enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, or of the spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, upon us of the more nearly real:

That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.

We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of course--Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we shall have to admit that there are remains of many tremendous habitations of giants upon this earth, and that their appearances here were more than casual--but their bones--or the absence of their bones--

Except--that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History, dark cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils--or old bones that have been found upon this earth--gigantic things--that have been reconstructed into terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs--but my uncheerfulness--

The dodo did it.

On one of the floors below the fossils, they have a reconstructed dodo.

It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such--but it's been reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly--

Fairies.

"Fairy crosses."

_Harper's Weekly_, 50-715:

That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found.

A race of tiny beings.

They crucified c.o.c.kroaches.

Exquisite beings--but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified.

The "fairy crosses," we are told in _Harper's Weekly_, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the _Scientific American_, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the head of a pin.

They have been found in two other states, but all in Virginia are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain.

We are reminded of the Chinese seals in Ireland.

I suppose they fell there.

Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This time we are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead, but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real, sensibilities will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to explain the "fairy crosses." Their response was the usual scientific tropism--"Geologists say that they are crystals." The writer in _Harper's Weekly_ points out that this "hold up," or this anaesthetic, if theoretic science be little but attempt to a.s.suage pangs of the unexplained, fails to account for the localized distributions of these objects--which make me think of both aggregation and separation at the bottom of the sea, if from a wrecked ship, similar objects should fall in large numbers but at different times.

But some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese.

Conceivably there might be a mineral that would have a diversity of geometric forms, at the same time restricted to some expression of the cross, because snowflakes, for instance, have diversity but restriction to the hexagon, but the guilty geologists, cold-blooded as astronomers and chemists and all the other deep-sea fishes--though less profoundly of the pseudo-saved than the wretched anthropologists--disregarded the very datum--that it was wise to disregard:

That the "fairy crosses" are not all made of the same material.

It's the same old disregard, or it's the same old psycho-tropism, or process of a.s.similation. Crystals are geometric forms. Crystals are included in the System. So then "fairy crosses" are crystals. But that different minerals should, in a few different regions, be inspired to turn into different forms of the cross--is the kind of resistance that we call less nearly real than our own acceptances.

We now come to some "cursed" little things that are of the "lost," but for the "salvation" of which scientific missionaries have done their d.a.m.nedest.

"Pigmy flints."

They can't very well be denied.

They're lost and well known.