Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/141

Rh our present world system of finance and commerce. They called it TIC—we call it Credit. But they meant a lot more by TIC than we do by the word credit. They meant a social order based upon credits—we call it money and we get it for work. Credit—(See RED, I T). Our own word is one of theirs: "I will stand T for your RED (ink)." We still get in the "RED." We think it is modern slang for the red ink used on losses columns, but in truth they used the word before there was ink. Before Carters ever made a bottle of red ink for bookkeepers to itemize their bills with men used the words "in the red" to describe their debts.

We all have these unconscious assumptions in our minds about words, and most of them are wrong.

I can go on and on with this, but I don't want to tire you. BUT if you are interested in a proof of the Shaver mystery, it can be had by any deductive mind for a few hours work with the alphabet (I hope it will be printed herewith), and the Mantong of the Elder race will emerge in all its wonderfully simple meanings before him, and he will have a complex and wonderful plaything for his mind in its idle moments all his life. For every word bears some flavor of their thought, if you can search it out. And it isn't so hard as our complexly misinformed professors would have us believe. Because they are wrong about the past, and there is better history in King Arthur and Merlin, in Froissart's Roland and Oliver, in fairy tales and myths than there is in any standard text on Classical history on "Rome and Her Fall," on the "Rise of Athens." Those histories are correct as far as they go; but they missed the true beginnings. We did not begin with the pyramids, the way the history books do! We had a vaster beginning than any Pharaoh's foolish piling of block on block to provide a place to put his mummy. And a much more intelligent beginning. To me, the Pyramids are not a great mystery; they are a sample of the imbecility of men in certain early periods AFTER THE FALL. That the cumbrous piling of those square childrens blocks of stone into a pyramid had a meaning, a vast significance, or any other fol-de-rol that is taught about them is not my way of thinking. They are sheer imbecility made concrete, and we still pretend to ourselves that the Egyptians who built them had "wisdom." The wisdom they are talking about existed long before the pyramids, the latter priests who understood that wisdom had nothing whatever to do with causing the pyramids to be built.

Wrap all the mists of wool about a pyramid that you want. I still see a fool making a million lives painful that he may have a hole to be placed in when he dies. PWA on a grand scale in ancient Egypt; a fool king who wasted the lives of his people upon idiocy.

HE Elder race had wisdom. Some of it can be found in the basic sound-meanings of our tongue by use of the Shaver alphabet. I do not claim to have "originated" the alphabet. (To me it was a discovery. Others may have done so.) Maybe I heard it with "voices." Whatever is the truth, it will discover to you a vast race, prove their existence on earth, and give you an inkling of their mighty thought-ways.

I could go on talking about the Elder language for a large book-full, but there is no space for that. Eventually it will (the book) be done, if not by me, by some one like yourself who has read me and understood there was more to the Shaver alphabet than meets a college know-it-all's eye.

About proofs of the Shaver mystery, it is so self-evident to one who talks to ray people over rays from their caverns every day, it is somewhat like asking an ordinary householder to prove the Electric Light Co. exists.

It is not evident to you who have not "heard voices," "seen ghosts," experienced what are called "illusions due to mental derangement," but which we who know call "projections," or "telesolidographs."

It is like two men living near the same river. One has never seen a fish in that river all his life. The other has caught fish in the river every day. They get into an argument, the one who believes there are no fish in the river says: "Show me the proof, the bones and tails, the heads of these fish you have caught."

Well I will show you what is left of some of the fish I have caught in the river of sound that flows from the cavern world to those who are allowed to hear. Snatches of conversation heard over ray: "GOES UP—IS COMING!"

The words mean nothing to you; to me they tell that the ancient plan of coming to the surface and ruling openly is again being taken out of the closet and being brushed off for a new trial. Perhaps "they" will come out and rule with antique-ray openly, and all of us will see it in our lifetime. It is a thing that has been planned many times, fell through because of fear, difficulties of moving apparatus, disorganization due to their medieval governmental set-up, etc.

"— — — — — WAS DOWN HERE. HE WAS THE TOUGHEST MAYOR IN TOWN."

The words mean our surface Mayor — — — — — was down in the caverns on a visit, and that he was seemingly the "toughest" of the group of big-shots with him, of the underworld characters whom he visited. One does not know if he really was down there, we only hear the words.

"TELL, 'EM OUTRIGHT, SHAVER, GET 'EM DOWN HERE? WE NEED 'EM PLENTY!"

It means that there are plenty of the people down there hoping and praying that some effort like my own does break through the dense cloud of "modern" ignorance in America and gets some action out of our powerful nation before less