The Book of the Damned (30 page)

In
Notes and Queries,
2-4-139, there is an account of a darkness in Holland, in the midst of a bright day, so intense and terrifying that many panic-stricken persons lost their lives stumbling into the canals.

Gentleman’s Magazine,
33-414:

A darkness that came upon London, Aug. 19, 1763, “greater than at the great eclipse of 1748.”

However, our preference is not to go so far back for data. For a list of historic “dark days,” see Humboldt,
Cosmos,
1-120.

Monthly Weather Review,
March, 1886-79:

That, according to the
La Crosse Daily Republican,
of March 20, 1886, darkness suddenly settled upon the city of Oshkosh, Wis., at 3 p.m., March 19. In five minutes the darkness equaled that of midnight.

Consternation.

I think that some of us are likely to overdo our own superiority and the absurd fears of the Middle Ages—

Oshkosh.

People in the streets rushing in all directions—horses running away—women and children running into cellars—little modern touch after all: gas meters instead of images and relics of saints.

This darkness, which lasted from eight to ten minutes, occurred in a day that had been “light but cloudy.” It passed from west to east, and brightness followed: then came reports from towns to the west of Oshkosh: that the same phenomenon had already occurred there. A “wave of total darkness” had passed from west to east.

Other instances are recorded in the
Monthly Weather Review,
but, as to all of them, we have a sense of being pretty well-eclipsed, ourselves, by the conventional explanation that the obscuring body was only a very dense mass of clouds. But some of the instances are interesting—intense darkness at Memphis, Tenn., for about fifteen minutes, at 10 a.m., Dec. 2, 1904—“We are told that in some quarters a panic prevailed, and that some were shouting and praying and imagining that the end of the world had come.” (
M.W.R.,
32-522.) At Louisville, Ky., March 7, 1911, at about 8 a.m.: duration about half an hour; had been raining moderately, and then hail had fallen. “The intense blackness and general ominous appearance of the storm spread terror throughout the city.”
(M.W.R.,
39-345.)

However, this merger between possible eclipses by unknown dark bodies and commonplace terrestrial phenomena is formidable.

As to darknesses that have fallen upon vast areas, conventionality is—smoke from forest fires. In the
U.S. Forest Service Bulletin,
No. 117, F.G. Plummer gives a list of eighteen darknesses that have occurred in the United States and Canada. He is one of the primitives, but I should say that his dogmatism is shaken by vibrations from the new Dominant. His difficulty, which he acknowledges, but which he would have disregarded had he written a decade or so earlier, is the profundity of some of these obscurations. He says that mere smokiness cannot account for such “awe-inspiring dark days.” So he conceives of eddies in the air, concentrating the smoke from forest fires. Then, in the inconsistency or discord of all quasi-intellection that is striving for consistency or harmony, he tells of the vastness of some of these darknesses. Of course Mr. Plummer did not really think upon this subject, but one does feel that he might have approximated higher to real thinking than by speaking of concentration and then listing data of enormous area, or the opposite of circumstances of concentration—because, of his nineteen instances, nine are set down as covering all New England. In quasi-existence, everything generates or is part of its own opposite. Every attempt at peace prepares the way for war; all attempts at justice result in injustice in some other respect: so Mr. Plummer’s attempt to bring order into his data, with the explanation of darkness caused by smoke from forest fires, results in such confusion that he ends up by saying that these daytime darknesses have occurred “often with little or no turbidity of the air near the earth’s surface”—or with no evidence at all of smoke—except that there is almost always a forest fire somewhere.

However, of the eighteen instances, the only one that I’d bother to contest is the profound darkness in Canada and northern parts of the United States, Nov. 19, 1819—which we have already considered.

Its concomitants:

Lights in the sky;

Fall of a black substance;

Shocks like those of an earthquake.

In this instance, the only available forest fire was one to the south of the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon be our expression that profound darkness, fall of matter from the sky, lights in the sky, and earthquakes are phenomena of the near approach of other worlds to this world. It is such comprehensiveness, as contrasted with inclusion of a few factors and disregard for the rest, that we call higher approximation to realness—or universalness.

A darkness, of April 17, 1904, at Wimbledon, England
(Symons’ Met. Mag.,
39-69). It came from a smokeless region: no rain, no thunder; lasted ten minutes; too dark to go “even out in the open.”

As to darknesses in Great Britain, one thinks of fogs—but in
Nature,
25-289, there are some observations by Major J. Herschel, upon an obscuration in London, Jan. 22, 1882, at 10:30 a.m., so great that he could hear persons upon the opposite side of the street, but could not see them—“It was obvious that there was no fog to speak of.”

Annual Register,
1857-132:

An account by Charles A. Murray, British Envoy to Persia, of a darkness of May 20, 1857, that came upon Bagdad—“a darkness more intense than ordinary midnight, when neither stars nor moon are visible . . . .” “After a short time the black darkness was succeeded by a red, lurid gloom, such as I never saw in any part of the world.”

“Panic seized the whole city.”

“A dense volume of red sand fell.”

This matter of sand falling seems to suggest conventional explanation enough, or that a simoon, heavily charged with terrestrial sand, had obscured the sun, but Mr. Murray, who says that he had had experience with simoons, gives his opinion that “it cannot have been a simoon.”

It is our comprehensiveness now, or this matter of concomitants of darknesses that we are going to capitalize. It is all very complicated and tremendous, and our own treatment can be but impressionistic, but a few of the rudiments of Advanced Seismology we shall now take up—or the four principal phenomena of another world’s close approach to this world.

If a large substantial mass, or super-construction, should enter this earth’s atmosphere, it is our acceptance that it would sometimes—depending upon velocity—appear luminous or look like a cloud, or like a cloud with a luminous nucleus. Later we shall have an expression upon luminosity—different from the luminosity of incandescence—that comes upon objects falling from the sky, or entering this earth’s atmosphere. Now our expression is that worlds have often come close to this earth, and that smaller objects—size of a haystack or size of several dozen skyscrapers lumped, have often hurtled through this earth’s atmosphere, and have been mistaken for clouds, because they were enveloped in clouds—

Or that around something coming from the intense cold of interplanetary space—that is of some regions: our own suspicion is that other regions are tropical—the moisture of this earth’s atmosphere would condense into a cloud-like appearance around it. In
Nature,
20-121, there is an account by Mr. S.W. Clifton, Collector of Customs, at Freemantle, Western Australia, sent to the Melbourne Observatory—a clear day—appearance of a small black cloud, moving not very swiftly—bursting into a ball of fire, of the apparent size of the moon—

Or that something with the velocity of an ordinary meteorite could not collect vapor around it, but that slower-moving objects—speed of a railway train, say—may.

The clouds of tornadoes have so often been described as if they were solid objects that I now accept that sometimes they are: that some so-called tornadoes are objects hurtling through this earth’s atmosphere, not only generating disturbances by their suctions, but crushing, with their bulk, all things in their way, rising and falling and finally disappearing, demonstrating that gravitation is not the power that the primitives think it is, if an object moving at relatively low velocity be not pulled to this earth, or being so momentarily affected, bounds away.

In Finley’s
Reports on the Character of 600 Tornadoes
very suggestive bits of description occur:

“Cloud bounded along the earth like a ball”—

Or that it was no meteorological phenomenon, but something very much like a huge solid ball that was bounding along, crushing and carrying with it everything within its field—

“Cloud bounded along, coming to the earth every eight hundred or one thousand yards.”

Here’s an interesting bit that I got somewhere else. I offer it as a datum in super-biology, which, however, is a branch of advanced science that I’ll not take up, restricting to things indefinitely called “objects”—

“The tornado came wriggling, jumping, whirling like a great green snake, darting out a score of glistening fangs.”

Though it’s interesting, I think that’s sensational, myself. It may be that vast green snakes sometimes rush past this earth, taking a swift bite wherever they can, but, as I say, that’s a super-biologic phenomenon. Finley gives dozens of instances of tornado clouds that seem to me more like solid things swathed in clouds, than clouds. He notes that, in the tornado at Americus, Georgia, July 18, 1881, “a strange sulphurous vapor was emitted from the cloud.” In many instances, objects, or meteoritic stones, that have come from this earth’s externally, have had a sulphurous odor. Why a wind effect should be sulphurous is not clear. That a vast object from external regions should be sulphurous is in line with many data. This phenomenon is described in the
Monthly Weather Review,
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 envelop 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 celestiometathesis—

Except that—if matter from some other world—and it would be like someone to get it into his head that we absolutely deny gravitation, just because we cannot 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 caught in suspension, to this earth’s gravitation, and surface-materials falling from that part—

Explain or express or accept, and what does it matter? Our attitude is:

Here are the data.

See for yourself.

What does it matter what my notions may be?

Here are the data.

But think for yourself, or think for myself, all mixed up we must be. A long time must go by before we can know Florida from Long Island. So we’ve had data of fishes that have fallen from our now established and respectabilized Super-Sargasso Sea—which we’ve almost forgotten, it’s now so respectable—but we shall have data of fishes that have fallen during earthquakes. These we accept were dragged down from ponds or other worlds that have been quaked, when only a few miles away, by this earth, some other world also quaking this earth.

In a way, or in its principle, our subject is orthodox enough. Only grant proximity of other worlds—which, however, will not be a matter of granting, but will be a matter of data—and one conventionally conceives of their surfaces quaked—even of a whole lake full of fishes being quaked and dragged down from one of them. The lake full of fishes may cause a little pain to some minds, but the fall of sand and stones is pleasantly enough thought of. More scientific persons, or more faithful hypnotics than we, have taken up this subject, unpainfully, relatively to the moon. For instance, Perrey has gone over 15,000 records of earthquakes, and he has correlated many with proximities of the moon, or has attributed many to the pull of the moon when nearest this earth. Also there is a paper upon this subject in the
Proc. Roy. Soc. of Cornwall,
1845. Or, theoretically, when at its closest to this earth, the moon quakes the face of this earth, and is itself quaked—but does not itself fall to this earth. As to showers of matter that may have come from the moon at such times—one can go over old records and find what one pleases.