The Book of the Damned

And still, and for regiments to come, hypnosis and inertia rule us-- One of the damnedest of our data: In the Scientific American, Sept. 10, 1910, Charles F. Holder writes: "Many years ago, a strange stone resembling a meteorite, fell into the Valley of the Yaqui, Mexico, and the sensational story went from one end to the other of the country that a stone bearing human inscriptions had descended to the earth." The bewildering observation here is Mr. Holder's assertion that this stone did fall. It seems to me that he must mean that it fell by dislodgment from a mountainside into a valley--but we shall see that it was such a marked stone that very unlikely would it have been unknown to dwellers in a valley, if it had been reposing upon a mountainside above them. It may have been carelessness: intent may have been to say that a sensational story of a strange stone said to have fallen, etc. This stone was reported by Major Frederick Burnham, of the British Army. Later Major Burnham revisited it, and Mr. Holder accompanied him, their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon it, if possible. "This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis about eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription."