BOOK OF THE DAMNED 159 



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 geolo- 

 gists 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 assuage 

 pangs of the unexplained, fails to account for the localized distribu- 

 tions 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 re- 

 striction 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 anthropolo- 

 gists 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. 



