It is their misfortune to have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens-the late Walter Brown, for example.

If only I had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very differently from ours. Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious-my previous estimate being merely a phase of manвЂ™s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they wish in connection with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech-speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of. He told me much that neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and showed clearly how totally we had misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this planet. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a messenger from those outside-a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. Last night this exchange of speech became actual. I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Those phenomena are real and important enough my mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them. I say 'silly,' although by that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding all the silly things IвЂ™ve been writing you.

what was it? The entire thing implied such a diametrical reversal of AkeleyвЂ™s previous attitude! But here is the substance of the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I take some pride. If Akeley had been sane in his terror, was he now sane in his deliverance? And the sort of 'improved rapport' mentionedВ .В .В . To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. The text, though, was marvellously accurate for a tyroвЂ™s work and I concluded that Akeley must have used a machine at some previous period-perhaps in college. It was postmarked Bellows Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typed-as is frequent with beginners in typing. Again I will quote from memory-seeking for special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can.

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on a new machine that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. 40533 The Whisperer in Darkness - Chapter 5 H.P.

Whisperer in darkness