1 THE practitioners¹ of occult science in the east tell us of certain dwellers² in the solitudes³ of Thibet and the Himalayas, Initiates⁴, Masters, heirs to the wisdom of the “Sons of Light,” or the “Seven Primordials,” who possess the seven keys which enable them to understand the sacred prehistoric⁵ texts. They are said to be the silent depositories of the secret of the intermolecular or interetheric forces, by the aid of which the races of beings who preceded man upon this earth used to transport to enormous distances monoliths of more than five hundred tons’ weight, which have no relation to the stones that surround them and whose arrangement and astronomical⁶ orientation⁷ manifestly reveal the intervention⁸ of an[272] intelligent and even a highly scientific mind.
 
These monoliths are sometimes carved, as for instance the famous colossal⁹ idols¹⁰ in the valley of Bamian, in Afghanistan, of which one is 173 feet high, or the five hundred and fifty monsters of Easter Island, in Polynesia, which, we may observe in passing, remain one of the most insoluble and perplexing riddles¹¹ in the world. Hewn out of basalt, reclining or standing¹² erect¹³ upon their platforms, these sculptures, one of which measures over 90 feet in height, are undoubtedly¹⁴ the most ancient human effigies¹⁵ to be found upon our earth. Official science ascribes to them an antediluvian¹⁶ origin, while esoteric tradition regards them as portraits of the giants of the last Atlantean race, which became degenerate¹⁷ and lapsed¹⁸ into witchcraft¹⁹ shortly before the disappearance²⁰ of the mysterious continent whereof Easter Island is supposed to be merely one of the loftier summits to-day emerging from the lonely Pacific.
 
I have before me as I write the photographs[273] of some of these haunting giants; and I do not believe that in our most oppressive nightmares it would be possible to imagine faces more formidable, more impassive and unfeeling, more eternally ferocious²¹, more coldly supercilious²², more pitilessly disdainful and icily omnipotent²³. Are they Selenites or Martians, with their tightly-closed, implacable mouths and those eyes of theirs, hollow, like wells of malediction²⁴, or protuberant²⁵ and framed in an airman’s goggles²⁶? They are not in any way simian²⁷, as one might have supposed, but rather represent demoniacal and abstract entities²⁸, such as evil, doom²⁹ and fatality³⁰. They seem not so much inhuman³¹ as prehuman or posthuman; and they bear a horrible relation to certain ancestral memories which slumber³² in the marrow³³ of our bones, warning us that such faces undoubtedly once existed.
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