Page:New lands - (IA newlands00fort).pdf/13

Rh voyage up the Persian Gulf. In May, 1880, on a dark night about 11:30 there suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous luminous wheel, whirling around, the spokes of which seemed to brush the ship along. . . and although the wheels must have been some 500 or 600 yards in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly seen all the way round."

". . . "I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there are often fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Ocean—volumes of water in which are many fishes and frogs—tracts of land covered with caterpillars—""

". . . "Black rains—red rains—the fall of a thousand tons of butter.

Jet black snow—pink snow—blue hailstones—hailstones flavored like oranges.

Punk and silk and charcoal.""

". . . "A race of tiny beings

They crucified cockroaches.

Exquisite beings—""

But here I turned back to the beginning and read this vigorous and astonishing book straight through, and then re-read it for the pleasure it gave me in the way of its writing and in the substance of what it told. Dore should have illustrated it, I thought, or Blake. Here indeed was a "brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse"; though the wildest mundane earthquakes are but earthquakes in teapots compared to what goes on in the visions conjured up before us by Mr. Charles Fort. For he deals in nightmare, not on the planetary, but on the constellational scale, and the imagination of one who staggers along after him is frequently left gasping and flaccid.

Now he has followed "The Book of the Damned" with "New Lands" pointing incidentally to Mars as "the San Salvador of the Sky," and renewing his passion for the dismayingly significant "damned—" tokens and strange hints excluded by the historically mercurial acceptances of "Dogmatic Science." Of his attack on