Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/218

212 record of a race of aerial beings, perhaps with no substantial habitat, seen by some one in India—"locusts."

This will be disregarded:

If locusts fly high, they freeze and fall in thousands.

Nature, 47-581:

Locusts that were seen in the mountains of India, at a height of 12,750 feet—"in swarms and dying by tnousands."

But no matter whether they fly high or fly low, no one ever wonders what's in the air when locusts are passing overhead, because of the falling of stragglers. I have especially looked this matter up—no mystery when locusts are flying overhead—constant falling of stragglers.

Monthly Notices, 30-135:

"An unusual phenomenon noticed by Lieut. Herschel, Oct. 17 and 18, 1870, while observing the sun, at Bangalore, India."

Lieut. Herschel had noticed dark shadows crossing the sun—but away from the sun there were luminous, moving images. For two days bodies passed in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity.

The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says:

"As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers, in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy."

He tried different focussing—he saw wings—perhaps he saw planes. He says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like appendages.

Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his nineteenth-centuriness, he writes:

"There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort."

One of them had paused.

It had hovered.

Then it had whisked off.

The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon certain parts of India."

We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several respects—super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins, crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or dinosaurs—except that I think the thing had planes or wings—one of them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of