CHAPTER XVI 



ANGELS. 

 Hordes upon hordes of them. 



Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling 

 whiffs of spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pic- 

 tured so often. 



It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff, frozen, 

 finally-static, absolute angels. We shall have data of little Milky 

 Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or 

 still dynamic. I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really 

 fixed, and that the minute motions said to have been detected in 

 them are illusions. I think that the fixed stars are absolutes. Their 

 twinkling is only the interpretation by an intermediatist state of 

 them. I think that soon after Leverrier died, a new fixed star was 

 discovered that, if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the thou- 

 sands of fishes from one pail of water, had written upon it, lectured 

 upon it, taken to street corners, to convince the world that, whether 

 conceivable or not, his explanation was the only true explanation: 

 had thought of nothing but this last thing at night and first thing 

 in the morning his obituary another "nova" reported in 

 Monthly Notices. 



I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order, have 

 often been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the 

 phenomena that we shall now consider are not angels at all. We 

 are simply feeling around, trying to find out what we can accept. 

 Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists 

 in inter-planetary space but then data of long, lean, hungry ones. 

 I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space Super Tamer- 

 lanes, at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers which have come 

 here and pounced upon civilizations of the past, cleaning them up 

 all but their bones, or temples and monuments for which later 

 historians have invented exclusionist histories. But if something 

 now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its proprietorship, 

 they've been warned off. It's the way of all exploitation. I should 

 say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, 



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