The Book of the Damned

I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not very far above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the subject of a whole new science--super-geography--with which we shall immortalize ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of the future-- Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and Jupiter and Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, nails, coal and coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes--things that coat in ice in some regions and things that get into areas so warm that they putrefy--or that there are all the climates of geography in super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there often are 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-- Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds--and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages. Sometime I shall write a guide book to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators, but just at present there wouldn't be much call for it. We now have more of our expression upon hail as a concomitant, or more data of things that have fallen from the sky, with hail. In general, the expression is: These things may have been raised from some other part of the earth's surface, in whirlwinds, or may not have fallen, and may have been upon the ground, in the first place--but were the hailstones found with them, raised from some other part of the earth's surface, or were the hailstones upon the ground, in the first place?