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"The process involved no pain," he said. "Only submission. Andfor no good reason, really, or I should say from simple Nature, to useGod's favorite word, I sheathed my own self, my own essence inflesh. Only the wings-did I leave out of the scheme altogether, and soI stood as tall as an angel, and as I walked to the water of a clear poolnear me and looked down in it, I saw Memnoch for the first time inmaterial form. I saw exactly myself, my fair hair, my eyes, my skin, allthe gifts God had given me in invisible form made manifest in flesh.
"I realized immediately that this was too much! I was too large allover; I was blazing with the essence inside me! This would not work.
And so instantly I began to reshape and scale down the entire bodyuntil it resembled more myself the size of a man.
"You'll know how to do all this once you're with me," he said, "ifyou choose to come, and die, and be my lieutenant. But let me say fornow that this is neither impossible nor terribly simple. It is not likepressing the keys of a complex computer program and sitting backand watching the machine execute the commands one by one. On theother hand, it is not cumbersome and overly conscious. It merelytakes angelic knowledge, angelic patience, and angelic will.
"Now a man stood beside the pool, naked, blond of hair and lightof eye, very similar to many of those who inhabited the region,though perhaps more nearly perfect, and endowed with physicalorgans of reasonable but not splendid size.
"Now as my essence went into these organs, into the scrotum andthe penis, to be specific, I felt something which had been utterlyunknown to me as an angel. Utterly unknown. It was compounded ofmany realizations. I knew gender, I knew maleness; I knew a certainhuman vulnerability firsthand now rather than from watching andsensing; and I was very surprised at how powerful I felt.
"I had expected to be quaking with humility in this form! To beshivering with indignity at the mere smallness of myself, and myimmobility and a host of other things梩hings you felt when youswapped your vampire body for that of a man.""I remember vividly.""But I didn't feel this. I had never been material. I had never,never thought about doing it. I had never, never even thought ofwanting to see what I might look like in an earthly mirror. I knew myimage from its reflection in the eyes of other angels. I knew my partsbecause I could see them with my angelic eyes.
"But now I was a man. I felt the brain inside my skull. I felt its wet,intricate, and near-chaotic mechanics; its layers and layers of tissue,involving as it does the earliest stages of evolution, and wedding themto a wealth of higher cells in the cortex in a manner that seemedutterly illogical and yet totally natural梟atural if you knew what I, asan angel, knew.""Such as what?" I asked, making it as polite as I could.
"Such as that emotions stirred in the limbic part of my brain couldtake hold of me without having first made themselves known to myconsciousness," he said. "That can't happen with an angel. Ouremotions cannot slip by our conscious minds. We cannot feel irrationalterror. At least I don't think so. And whatever the case, I certainlydidn't think so then when I stood on the earth, in the flesh of a man.""Could you have been wounded, or killed, in this form?" I asked.
"No. I'll get to that in a minute, as a matter of fact. But as I was ina wild, wooded area, as I was in this very valley which is Palestine, ifyou would know it, before it was ever called Palestine, as I was here, Iwas aware that this body was food for wild animals, and so I did createaround myself, of angelic essence, an extremely strong shield. Itbehaved electrically. That is, when an animal approached me, whichhappened almost immediately, it was repulsed by this shield.
"And thus shielded, I decided to start walking all through thenearby settlements of men and to look at things, knowing full well noone could hurt me or push me or attack me or anything else. Yet Iwould not appear miraculous. On the contrary, I would seem tododge the blows if any were dealt, and I would seek to behave in sucha matter that nobody noticed me at all.
"I waited for nightfall, and went to the nearest encampment,which was the largest in the area and had grown so in strength that itnow exacted tribute from other encampments nearby. This was ahuge circular walled gathering place, full of individual huts in whichmen and women lived. Fires burnt in each hut. There was a centralplace where everyone gathered. There were gates to be locked atnight.
"I slipped inside, slumped down beside a hut, and watched forhours what the people of this encampment did in the twilight andthen by dark. I crept from place to place. I peered inside the littledoorways. I watched many things.
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