Mirages 
By James H. Gorpon + 
[With 1 plate] 
Men have been seeing mirages and wondering about them for 
thousands of years. They must have talked about them, too, but when 
it came to writing about them, the subject seems almost to have been 
taboo. Nothing about them appears in the literature of the Egyp- 
tians or other early civilizations, or in the writings of the Greeks or 
Romans. They are not mentioned in the Bible, by Marco Polo, or by 
writers about the Crusades. Perhaps not too long after the Crusades, 
a recurring mirage seen over the Straits of Messina was given a 
name—Fata Morgana. In 1798 a physician with Napoleon’s army in 
Egypt wrote about appearances of water on the desert. To the best 
of my knowledge, only one mirage is mentioned in American history ; 
that was in 1878, when Custer’s little army marched away from Fort 
Abraham Lincoln to play its tragic part in the Battle of the Little 
Big Horn. Farewells said, the force had passed out of sight when to 
those left in the fort a mirage showed the column marching away 
through the sky, each man and horse clear. 
Another mirage story is told of World War I days when Allenby’s 
army was moving north from Egypt against the Turks. The two 
forces had met and were joined in a great battle, with the stronger 
Turkish army slowly gaining the advantage. A Turkish outpost 
rushed word in to the high command that strong British reinforce- 
ments had been seen moving up, possibly to attack the flank. A hur- 
ried conference decided that the Turkish army should break off the 
battle and withdraw, which was done. But there had been no rein- 
forcements, What had been seen was a mirage—one that had a hand 
in the making of history. I have not been able to verify this story. 
Mirages of course act strictly in accordance with the laws of na- 
ture, though it may seem that these laws are used with a bit of poetic 
license at times. Two of them are so deeply involved that they might 
well be called the mirage makers. One has to do with the density of 
1Former meteorologist with the U.S. Weather Bureau. 
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