Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/231

Rh , July, 1881, as "a strange sulphurous vapor . . . burning and sickening all who approached close enough to breathe it."

The conventional explanation of tornadoes as wind-effects—which we do not deny in some instances—is so strong in the United States that it is better to look elsewhere for an account of an object that has hurtled through this earth's atmosphere, rising and falling and defying this earth's gravitation.

Nature, 7-112:

That, according to a correspondent to the Birmingham Morning News, the people living near King's Sutton, Banbury, saw, about one o'clock, Dec. 7, 1872, something like a haycock hurtling through the air. Like a meteor it was accompanied by fire and a dense smoke and made a noise like that of a railway train. "It was sometimes high in the air and sometimes near the ground." The effect was tornado-like: trees and walls were knocked down. It's a late day now to try to verify this story, but a list is given of persons whose property was injured. We are told that this thing then disappeared "all at once."

These are the smaller objects, which may be derailed railway trains or big green snakes, for all I know—but our expression upon approach to this earth by vast dark bodies

That likely they'd be made luminous: would envelope in clouds, perhaps, or would have their own clouds But that they'd quake, and that they'd affect this earth with quakes

And that then would occur a fall of matter from such a world, or rise of matter from this earth to a nearby world, or both fall and rise, or exchange of matter—process known to Advanced Seismology as celestio-metathesis Except that—if matter from some other world—and it would be like some one to get it into his head that we absolutely deny gravitation, just because we can not accept orthodox dogmas—except that, if matter from another world, filling the sky of this earth, generally, as to a hemisphere, or locally, should be attracted to this earth, it would seem thinkable that the whole thing should drop here, and not merely its surface-materials.

Objects upon a ship's bottom. From time to time they drop to the bottom of the ocean. The ship does not.

Or, like our acceptance upon dripping from aerial ice-fields, we think of only a part of a nearby world succumbing, except in being