B320 <=> B322 (BTG XXIV Beelzebub’s fifth flight, p. 321)

“This time our ship Occasion alighted on what is called the ‘Persian Gulf’ because we had ascertained through the Teskooano before our flight that for our further traveling, that is to reach the town of Babylon, and also for the mooring of our ship Occasion itself, the most convenient place would be that same Saliakooriapnian space of the surface of your planet now existing there under the name of the Persian Gulf.

“This water space was convenient for my further traveling because the large river, on the banks of which the city of Babylon stood, flowed into it, and we proposed to sail up the stream of this river to get there.

“During that period of the flow of time this ‘incomparably majestic’ Babylon was flourishing in every respect. It was a Center-of-Culture not only for the beings dwelling on the continent Ashhark, but also for all the beings of all those other large and small terra firmas which were adapted to the needs of ordinary being-existence on that planet.

“At the time of my first arrival there in this Center-of-Culture of theirs, they were just preparing that which was afterwards the principal cause of the acceleration of the rate of the degeneration of their ‘psychic-organization,’ especially in the sense of the atrophy in them of the instinctive functioning of those three fundamental factors which ought to exist in the presence of every three-brained being – namely, those factors which give rise to the being-impulses existing under the names of ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Love.’

“These being-factors degenerating by heredity from generation to generation has brought it about that instead of a real being-psyche, such as should exist in the presence of every kind of three-brained being, there now already exists in the presences of your contemporary favorites, although a ‘real-psyche’ also, nevertheless one that can be very well defined by one of the wise sayings of our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin, which consists of the following words: ‘There is everything in it except the core or even the kernel.’