A super-dragnet?
That something was trawling overhead?
The birds of Baton Rouge.
I think that we’re fished for. It may be we’re highly esteemed by
super-epicures somewhere.”
... “Melanicus.
That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and
over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on
wings or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles
from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I
mean that which makes us useful.”
... “British India Company’s steamer _Patna_, while on a voyage up
the Persian Gulf. In May, 1880, on a dark night about 11:30 P. M.
there suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous
luminous wheel, whirling around, the spokes of which seemed to brush
the ship along ... and although the wheels must have been some 500
or 600 yards in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly seen all
the way round.”
... “I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth,
there are often fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic
Ocean—volumes of water in which are many fishes and frogs—tracts of
land covered with caterpillars—”
... “Black rains—red rains—the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet black snow—pink snow—blue hailstones—hailstones flavored like
oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal.”
... “A race of tiny beings
They crucified cockroaches.
Exquisite beings—”
But here I turned back to the beginning and read this vigorous and
astonishing book straight through, and then re-read it for the pleasure
it gave me in the way of its writing and in the substance of what it
told. Doré should have illustrated it, I thought, or Blake. Here indeed
was a “brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse”; though the wildest
mundane earthquakes are but earthquakes in teapots compared to what goes
on in the visions conjured up before us by Mr. Charles Fort. For he
deals in nightmare, not on the planetary, but on the constellational
scale, and the imagination of one who staggers along after him is
frequently left gasping and flaccid.
Now he has followed “The Book of the Damned” with “New Lands” pointing
incidentally to Mars as “the San Salvador of the Sky,” and renewing his
passion for the dismayingly significant “damned—” tokens and strange
hints excluded by the historically mercurial acceptances of “Dogmatic
Science.” Of his attack on the astronomers it can at least be said that
the literature of indignation is enriched by it.
To the “university-trained mind” here is wildness almost as wild as
Roger Bacon’s once appeared to be; though of course even the layest of
lay brothers must not assume that all wild science will in time become
accepted law, as some of Roger’s did. Retort to Mr. Fort must be left to
the outraged astronomer, if indeed any astronomer could feel himself so
little outraged as to offer a retort. Lay brethren are outside the
quarrel and must content themselves with gratitude to a man who writes
two such books as “New Lands” and “The Book of the Damned”; gratitude
for passages and pictures—moving pictures—of such cyclonic activity and
dimensions that a whole new area of a reader’s imagination stirs in
amazement and is brought to life.