The Book of the Damned

Data of more than the thrice-accursed: Tablets of stone, with the ten commandments engraved upon them, in Hebrew, said to have been found in mounds in the United States: Masonic emblems said to have been found in mounds in the United States. We're upon the borderline of our acceptances, and we're amorphous in the uncertainties and mergings of our outline. Conventionally, or, with no real reason for so doing, we exclude these things, and then, as grossly and arbitrarily and irrationally--though our attempt is always to approximate away from these negative states--as ever a Kepler, Newton, or Darwin made his selections, without which he could not have seemed to be, at all, because every one of them is now seen to be an illusion, we accept that other lettered things have been found in mounds in the United States. Of course we do what we can to make the selection seem not gross and arbitrary and irrational. Then, if we accept that inscribed things of ancient origin have been found in the United States; that cannot be attributed to any race indigenous to the western hemisphere; that are not in any language ever heard of in the eastern hemisphere--there's nothing to it but to turn non-Euclidian and try to conceive of a third "hemisphere," or to accept that there has been intercourse between the western hemisphere and some other world. But there is a peculiarity to these inscribed objects. They remind me of the records left, by Sir John Franklin, in the Arctic; but, also, of attempts made by relief expeditions to communicate with the Franklin expedition. The lost explorers cached their records--or concealed them conspicuously in mounds. The relief expeditions sent up balloons, from which messages were dropped broadcast. Our data are of things that have been cached, and of things that seem to have been dropped--