BOOK OF THE DAMNED 225 



view, July, 1 88 1, 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 some- 

 times high in the air and sometimes near the ground." The effect 

 #as 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 dis- 

 appeared "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 



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 gravita- 

 tion, 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 



