The Book of the Damned

I begin to suspect something else. A whopper is coming. Later it will be as reasonable, by familiarity, as anything else ever said. If someone should study the stone of Cashel, as Champollion studied the Rosetta stone, he might--or, rather, would inevitably--find meaning in those lines, and translate them into English-- Nevertheless I begin to suspect something else: something more subtle and esoteric than graven characters upon stones that have fallen from the sky, in attempts to communicate. The notion that other worlds are attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion is that it is not attempt at all--that it was achievement centuries ago. I should like to send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen, say, somewhere in New Hampshire-- And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone--trace down his affiliations--keep track of him-- Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at Stockholm, say-- Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be met again in Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society-- It is only a dawning credulity. Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form, and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.