Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/168

162 Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently both in style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third tier begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:

That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent-looking.

In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, 3-12-460, there is a full account of this find. Three of the coffins and three of the figures are pictured.

So Elvera with its downy forests and its microscopic oyster shells—and if the Elvereans be not very far-advanced, they take baths—with sponges the size of pin heads Or that catastrophes have occurred: that fragments of Elvera have fallen to this earth:

In Popular Science, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing of the corals and sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr. Hahn had asserted that he had found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that their "notable peculiarity" is their "extreme smallness." The corals, for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial corals. "They represent a veritable pigmy animal world," says Bingham.

The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I think, at the time of their occasional visits to this earth—though, of course, in a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of anything may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and detectives and jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal Astronomic Society recognize this indeterminateness, but have the delusion that in the method of agreement there is final, or real evidence. The method is good enough for an "existence" that is only semi-real, but also it is the method of reasoning by which witches were burned, and by which ghosts have been feared. I'd not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition. But stories of them have been supported by astonishing fabrications of details and of different accounts in agreement.