great gossips.
"Then a strange Evil came upon these hidden rulers of earth; the Evil that culminated in Ragnerak and Armageddon and in eventual Hell and Earth's near domination by Hell. The Twilight and Death of the Latter Gods was not a pleasant time. For the sun is a fearful and deadly thing in the same way that glow-metal is fearful and deadly, and though these Latter Gods learned much, they did not learn that the sun throws an invisible pollen of poison that infects all the energy of earth with a horrible accumulating ever-fire that is the true Cause of age. The machines that gave them their strength and life and growth contained filters that swept the energy flows clean of these sun poisons; but this second race of Gods did not learn the secret of the filters and well though they were builded the machines at last became saturated with the deadly rust.
"Now, a good man is one whose will is a flow of beneficial energy generated by healthy cells, and his will is a force bringing only good to all things. But as the machines became filled with the disintegrant motes from the sun's infection of earth energy, these machines in turn affected the great bodies and minds of the Latter Gods with a destructive flow of energy. A destructive, evil will, gradually took the place of good will in their mighty frames. So it was that one by one the underground cities became Hells where men were brought to amuse the mad minds of their masters with unending agonies, for a man can suffer long when his life is renewed from the old machines. Many of the machines still gave off a force that kept life in the body even though that body were racked with tortures that else would cause death a thousand times.
"Gradually this evil stole over earth and, not knowing the cause—the failure of the filters in the machines to remove the disintegrant dust of the sun—they fought each other in such battles as still live in the mouths of men.
"Evil and good fought titanically for possession of earth, and Evil won, for the ancient polluted mechanisms turned even the best willed men into Demons of destructive will. Magic lived on as evil witchery, as 'the works of the devil' and the secret people of the underworld were feared and hated as the curse they were. They came to the surface in fierce raids and returned again before the still sane remnants of those who knew of the caves could catch them.
"Here and there the white magic lived on, ever hunted by the maddened men of the underworld who were no longer men but devils who strove to destroy all wisdom so that no one should ever be able to resist them. How well they succeeded is shown by the darkness of centuries—"
Daha's almost chanting voice ceased. He returned the paper to the drawer. Then his voice went on, almost as if to himself.
"Those are an ancient God's words!
"Sometimes during the near past," he continued, "probably soon after the advent of gunpowder, it is said that they practised blowing up the entrances to the underworld, to trap each other and to keep themselves safe from their eternal raids on each other; that now all trace of these passages is lost. Others say that it is not true, and that one reason Earth men are so backward is that still, even today, wild men come up from deep in the earth; wild men with the weapons and the tools of Gods, and steal secretly about the world killing men of science so quietly and in such a way that other men never suspect the true cause of death. These hint that the death of such men as Pierre Curie are not accidents, that Pierre was murdered because that is the hereditary custom of these things from the depths—to kill those who approach in their studies the use of rays, the properties of magnets, and strange virtues that lie in synthetic animal magnetism. Some hint that the Legend of the Wandering Jew, of the Watcher, of the Hag, of the Howling Mother of Sin herself, of witches and goblins, are still living beings who live for no one knows how many centuries, yet who become evil in time even today because they never learn that the antique generators always degenerate into generators of an evil force that overwhelms and distorts the will into a kind of hypnosis of destructive command. That men can never recover from these beings, for they have the weapons of the Gods, as well as certain wisdoms long handed down secretly. That this evil hypnosis by the defective machinery that they now build or find still can never be fought
