Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/237

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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
231

Lias: the phenomenon was seen by him, at Pernambuco, April 11, 1860.

Comptes Rendus, 50-1197:

It was about noon—sky cloudless—suddenly the light of the sun was diminished. The darkness increased, and, to illustrate its intensity, we are told that the planet Venus shone brilliant. But Venus was of low visibility at this time. The observation that burns incense to the New Dominant is:

That around the sun appeared a corona.

There are many other instances that indicate proximity of other worlds during earthquakes. I note a few—quake and an object in the sky, called "a large, luminous meteor" (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 5-132); luminous body in the sky, earthquake, and fall of sand, Italy, Feb. 12 and 13, 1870 (La Science Pour Tous, 15-159); many reports upon luminous object in the sky and earthquake, Connecticut, Feb. 27, 1883 (Monthly Weather Review, Feb., 1883); luminous object, or meteor, in the sky, fall of stones from the sky, and earthquake, Italy, Jan. 20, 1891 (L'Astronomie, 1891-154); earthquake and prodigious number of luminous bodies, or globes, in the air, Boulogne, France, June 7, 1779 (Sestier, "La Foudre," 1-169); earthquake at Manila, 1863, and "curious luminous appearance in the sky," (Ponton, "Earthquakes," p. 124).

The most notable appearance of fishes during an earthquake is that of Riobamba. Humboldt sketched one of them, and it's an uncanny-looking thing. Thousands of them appeared upon the ground during this tremendous earthquake. Humboldt says that they were cast up from subterranean sources. I think not myself, and have data for thinking not, but there'd be such a row arguing back and forth that it's simpler to consider a clearer instance of the fall of living fishes from the sky, during an earthquake. I can't quite accept, myself, whether a large lake, and all the fishes in it, was torn down from some other world, or a lake in the Super-Sargasso Sea, distracted between two pulling worlds, was dragged down to this earth——

Here are the data:

La Science Pour Tous, 6-191:

Feb. 16, 1861. An earthquake at Singapore. Then came an extraordinary downpour of rain—or as much water as any good-sized lake would consist of. For three days this rain or this fall of water came down in torrents. In pools on the ground, formed by this deluge, great numbers of fishes were found. The writer says