...of the damned

May you never be impaled upon His horns.’
‘Amen,’ says the Chief; then straightening himself up and changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly business-like, ‘Everything O.K. for tonight?’ he asks. In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic long accustomed to playing the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervison of the Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of Familiars and Postulants has traveled from settlement to settlement, making the yearly census. Every mother of a monster has been marked down. Heads have been shaved and the preliminary whippings administered. By this time all the guilty have been transported to one or other of the three Purification Centres at Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles. The knives and the consecrated bulls’ pizzles have been made ready and, Belial willing, the ceremonies will begin at the appointed hour. Before tomorrow’s sunrise the purification of the land should be complete.
Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Reopening his eyes, he turns to the ecclesiastics in his train.
‘Go, take the shaven ones,’ he squeaks, ‘take these defiled vessels, these living testimonies of Belial’s enmity, and lead them to the place of their shame.’
A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and out into the crowd of mothers.
‘Hurry, hurry!’
‘In Belial’s name.’
Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their feet. Their little burdens of deformity pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move towards the door in a silence more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.

[Ape and Essence, Huxley, A.]