“The nine creatures now awaiting death have been condemned in this way. My Leader tells me that they are not worth saving, as you will agree when you hear their own account of their condemnation. “They say that they were the controlling race on the earth’s surface about 200,000 years ago. When I learnt this I remembered that you had said that you came of a race 300,000 years more ancient, and I asked my Leader to inquire whether the Dwellers had any specimens of your race also. “They replied that they did not know, as they had never left their own reservation until this undeserved (as they considered) catastrophe had fallen upon them, but from their own knowledge of the civilisations which had preceded their own, they should think it unlikely. They said that the time mentioned was one at which there was a race of men existing for a short period, too transient and too barbarous for the Dwellers to be likely to consider them worthy of any study. Of all the myriad creations that the earth has known before and since, they were in some ways the most abortive. Although they only occupied, at their most numerous time, about one-half of the earth’s surface, they are believed to have destroyed themselves for fear of their own fecundity. They killed each other in many violent ways, and rewarded those who devised fresh methods for their own destruction. The stench of their diseases rose in the sky till the other planets protested, and there would certainly have been a Divine intervention, had they not destroyed themselves, as I have told you. “All this may be true, or not. You can judge of that. The creatures that tell it believe themselves to be much better, but are of a very filthy kind. Their appearances may be better than yours, but their minds are worse. I will show them to you, as my Leader has given them to me.” She then gave me a picture which was as vivid in her thought as though I stood at the side of the killing-pens, and looked through the steam at those who were confined within them. The first I saw was of the size and shape of a man, the body very thickly and grossly formed, and of a dark sepia colour, irregularly blotched with yellow, in some places as light as sulphur. It sat cross-legged. It had a heavy head, which hung forward; the nose was very large and horny, like a vulture’s beak. The natural impression of the face was rapacious and cruel, but it had now an appearance of abject and hopeless misery, which was almost comic, through all its tragic reality. It had large bat-wings, wide open on either side, and as it crouched thus, with wings extended, it appeared to me as though it were seeking a space beneath an umbrella which was not sufficient to cover it. There were six more of these creatures--all males. There were two others--one male, one female--alike, except that their faces, though equally brutal, were less intelligent, and that their wings were closed when I saw them.