B173 <=> B175 (BTG XVIII The Arch-preposterous, p. 174)

“But I will tell you meanwhile that there proceeded in that fragment of red copper something rather like those terrifying pictures which I occasionally observed among your favorites on the planet Earth through my Teskooano from Mars.

“I said ‘rather-like’ because what occasionally proceeded among your favorites had a visibility only possible of observation at its beginning, whereas in the fragment of red copper, the visibility was continuous until the final completion of transformation.

“A rough parallel can be drawn between the occasional proceedings on your planet and the proceedings then in that small fragment of copper, if you imagine yourself high up and looking down upon a large public square, where thousands of your favorites, seized with the most intense form of their chief psychosis, are destroying each other’s existence by all kinds of means invented by them themselves, and that in their places there immediately appear what are called their ‘corpses,’ which owing to the outrages done to them by the beings who are not yet destroyed, change color very perceptibly, as a result of which the general visibility of the surface of the said large square is gradually changed.

“Then, my boy, this subsequent essence-friend of mine, Gornahoor Harharkh, by means of switching on and off the influx of the three active parts of Okidanokh and changing their force-of-striving, also changed the density of the elements of the said metal and thereby transformed the red copper into all the other also definite intraplanetary metals of lower or higher degree of vivifyingness.

“And here, for the elucidation of the strangeness of the psyche of the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, it is very important and interesting to note that while Gornahoor Harharkh was, with the aid of his new invention, artificially and deliberately producing the evolution and involution of the density and vivifyingness of the elements of red copper, I noticed very clearly that this metal was transformed once upon the said plate into just that same definite metal about which the sorry-savants of your planet have been wiseacring during nearly the whole of their arising and existing, in the hope of transforming other metals into this metal, and thus constantly leading astray their already sufficiently erring brethren.