Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/165

Rh Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found.

A race of tiny beings.

They crucified cockroaches.

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 anæsthetic, if theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage 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 assimilation. 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.