Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/220

 CHAPTER XVII HE vast dark thing that looked like a poised crow of unholy dimensions. Assuming that I shall ever have any readers, let him, or both of them, if I shall ever have such popularity as that, note how dim that bold black datum is at the distance of only two chapters.

The question:

Was it a thing or the shadow of a thing?

Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy. But the dimness of the datum of only two chapters ago. The carved stone disk of Tarbes, and the rain that fell every afternoon for twenty—if I haven't forgotten, myself, whether it was twenty-three or twenty-five days!—upon one small area. We are all Thomsons, with brains that have smooth and slippery, though corrugated, surfaces—or that all intellection is associative—or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant—and a few chapters go by, and there's scarcely an impression that hasn't slid off our smooth and slippery brains, of Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan." There are two ways by which irreconcilables can be remembered—if they can be correlated in a system more nearly real than the system that rejects them—and by repetition and repetition and repetition.

Vast black thing like a crow poised over the moon.

The datum is so important to us, because it enforces, in another field, our acceptance that dark bodies of planetary size traverse this solar system.

Our position:

That the things have been seen:

Also that their shadows have been seen.

Vast black thing poised like a crow over the moon. So far it is a single instance. By a single instance, we mean the negligible.

In Popular Science, 34-158, Serviss tells of a shadow that Schroeter saw, in 1788, in the lunar Alps. First he saw a light. But then, when this region was illuminated, he saw a round shadow where the light had been. 214