BOOK OF THE DAMNED 161 



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, determin- 

 ing 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 whirl- 

 wind 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. 



