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The Book of the Damned
·
Charles Fort
201
Except--that,
no
matter
how
cheerful
and
unsuspicious
my
disposition
may
be,
when
I
go
to
the
American
Museum
of
Natural
History,
dark
cynicisms
arise
the
moment
I
come
to
the
fossils--or
old
bones
that
have
been
found
upon
this
earth--gigantic
things--that
have
been
reconstructed
into
terrifying
but
"proper"
dinosaurs--but
my
uncheerfulness--
The
dodo
did
it.
On
one
of
the
floors
below
the
fossils,
they
have
a
reconstructed
dodo.
It's
frankly
a
fiction:
it's
labeled
as
such--but
it's
been
reconstructed
so
cleverly
and
so
convincingly--
Fairies.
"Fairy
crosses."
Harper's
Weekly,
50-715:
That,
near
the
point
where
the
Blue
Ridge
and
the
Allegheny
Mountains
unite,
north
of
Patrick
County,
Virginia,
many
little
stone
crosses
have
been
found.
A
race
of
tiny
beings.
They
crucified
cockroaches.
Exquisite
beings--but
the
cruelty
of
the
exquisite.
In
their
diminutive
way
they
were
human
beings.
They
crucified.
The
"fairy
crosses,"
we
are
told
in
Harper's
Weekly,
range
in
weight
from
one-quarter
of
an
ounce
to
an
ounce:
but
it
is
said,
in
the
Scientific
American,
79-395,
that
some
of
them
are
no
larger
than
the
head
of
a
pin.
They
have
been
found
in
two
other
states,
but
all
in
Virginia
are
strictly
localized
on
and
along
Bull
Mountain.
We
are
reminded
of
the
Chinese
seals
in
Ireland.
I
suppose
they
fell
there.
Some
are
Roman
crosses,
some
St.
Andrew's,
some
Maltese.
This
time
we
are
spared
contact
with
the
anthropologists
and
have
geologists
instead,
but
I
am
afraid
that
the
relief
to
our
finer,
or
more
nearly
real,
sensibilities
will
not
be
very
great.
The
geologists
were
called
upon
to
explain
the
"fairy
crosses."
Their
response
was
the
usual
scientific
tropism--"Geologists
say
that
they
are
crystals."
The
writer
in
Harper's
Weekly
points
out
that
this
"hold
up,"
or
this
anaesthetic,
if
theoretic
science
be
little
but
attempt
to
assuage
pangs
of
the
unexplained,
fails
to
account
for
the
localized
distributions
of
these
objects--which
make
me
think
of
both
aggregation
and
separation
at
the
bottom
of
the
sea,
if
from
a
wrecked
ship,
similar
objects
should
fall
in
large
numbers
but
at
different
times.
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