Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/167

Rh method is the scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera

By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant 's world:

Monstrator.

Spindle-shaped world—about 100,000 miles along its major axis—more details to be published later.

But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as clouds of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions—for mice, I should say: for bees, very likely—or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the heathen here—horrified with any one who would gorge himself with more than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dew drop at a time—hordes of tiny missionaries, determined that right should prevail, determining right by their own minutenesses.

They must have been missionaries.

Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.

The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own little world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the exquisite to the enormous—gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal—half a dozen of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook—torn away in a mighty torrent

Or never anything but conventional, we adopt from Darwin:

"The geological records are incomplete."

Their flints would survive, but, as to their fragile bodies—one might as well search for prehistoric frost-traceries. A little whirlwind—Elverean carried away a hundred yards—body never found by his companions. They'd mourn for the departed. Conventional emotion to have: they'd mourn. There'd have to be a funeral: there's no getting away from funerals. So I adopt an explanation that I take from the anthropologists: burial in effigy. Perhaps the Elvereans would not come to this earth again until many years later—another distressing occurrence—one little mausoleum for all burials in effigy.

London Times, July 20, 1836:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave.

Seventeen tiny coffins.