thereby causing the venomous fluid of death and decay to breathe and germinate in manifold shape and effect. How extraordinarily curious—don't you think so too?—that nevertheless men actually prefer the moon to all other stars? Even their poets, who are superstitiously credited with seers' powers, sing their songs to her with ecstatic sighs and upturned eyes. And not one of them feels his lips grow pale for horror at the thought that for millions and millions of years, month after month, this bloodless cosmic corpse turns round our earth. The very dogs have more sense—especially the black ones! They at least put their tails between their legs and howl when they see the moon!"
"Did you not write me quite recently, Monseigneur and Master, that machines were the direct creatures of the moon?" asked Dr. Haselmayer. "How then am I to understand that?"
"You have misunderstood me," interrupted the Count. "The moon has only impregnated the brains of, men with ideas through her venomous breath, and machines are the visible births engendered in this way.
"The sun has implanted into mortal souls the wish to grow richer in delights and finally the curse on man, to produce in the sweat of his brow transitory works and to break them up again. But the moon, the secret source of earthly shapes, has overcast all for them with a deluding glamour, so that they have run astray into a wrong imagination and projected into outward reality—into the tangible world—what they ought to have contemplated inwardly.
"As a consequence machines have become visible titan-bodies, born out of the brains of degenerate heroes.
"And even as 'to conceive' and 'to create' something is nothing else but to cause one's soul to assume
