his idea , which he had arrived upon in the last few years , was this : he would build a museum of the history of mankind in the world ( menschheit in der welt as he liked to call it because things sounded more important in german ) , and he would build it here , in the former indian territories , to commemorate this as the place where the myth of the ultima thule had finally petered out and the western appetite had turned back upon itself to pick among the scraps it had hurried past in its march to the pacific , to search for clues to its identity in mental geography rather than physical space , to gobble up what it has discarded and then eye its other cast-offs hungrily .