224 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



Observatory a clear day appearance of a small black cloud, mov- 

 ing 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 rela- 

 tively low velocity be not pulled to this earth, or being so mo- 

 mentarily affected, bounds away. 



In Finley's Reports on the Character of 600 Tornadoes very sug- 

 gestive 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 

 1 8, 1 88 1, "a strange sulphurous vapor was emitted from the cloud." 

 In many instances, objects, or meteoritic stones, that have come 

 from this earth's externality, 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 Re- 



