rom intermarriage
with other and more distant tribes of the Vril-ya, who, whether by the
accident of climate or early distinction of race, were of fairer hues
than the tribes of which this community formed one. It was considered
that the dark-red skin showed the most ancient family of Ana; but they
attached no sentiment of pride to that antiquity, and, on the contrary,
believed their present excellence of breed came from frequent crossing
with other families differing, yet akin; and they encourage such
intermarriages, always provided that it be with the Vril-ya nations.
Nations which, not conforming their manners and institutions to those
of the Vril-ya, nor indeed held capable of acquiring the powers over
the vril agencies which it had taken them generations to attain and
transmit, were regarded with more disdain than the citizens of New York
regard the negroes.

I learned from Zee, who had more lore in all matters than any male with
whom I was brought into familiar converse, that the superiority of
the Vril-ya was supposed to have originated in the intensity of their
earlier struggles against obstacles in nature amidst the localities
in which they had first settled. "Wherever," said Zee, moralising,
"wherever goes on that early process in the history of civilisation, by
which life is made a struggle, in which the individual has to put forth
all his powers to compete with his fellow, we invariably find this
result--viz., since in the competition a vast number must perish, nature
selects for preservation only the strongest specimens. With our
race, therefore, even before the discovery of vril, only the highest
organisations were preserved; and there is among our ancient books a
legend, once popularly believed, that we were driven from a region
that seems to denote the world you come from, in order to perfect our
condition and attain to the purest elimination of our species by the
severity of the struggles our forefathers underwent; and that, when our
education shall become finally completed, we are destined to return
to the upper world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing
therein."

Aph-Lin and Zee often conversed with me in private upon the
political and social conditions of that upper world, in which Zee so
philosophically assumed that the inhabitants were to be exterminated
one day or other by the advent of the Vril-ya. They found in my
accounts,--in which I continued to do all I could (without launchi