The Book of the Damned

There's another matter in which the Negative Absolute seems to work against us. Though to super-chemistry, we have introduced the principle of celestio-metathesis, we have no good data of exchange of substances during proximities. The data are all of falls and not of upward translations. Of course upward impulses are common during earthquakes, but I haven't a datum upon a tree or a fish or a brick or a man that ever did go up and stay up and that never did come down again. Our classic of the horse and barn occurred in what was called a whirlwind. It is said that, in an earthquake in Calabria, paving stones shot up far in the air. The writer doesn't specifically say that they came down again, but something seems to tell me they did. The corpses of Riobamba. Humboldt reported that, in the quake of Riobamba, "bodies were torn upward from graves"; that "the vertical motion was so strong that bodies were tossed several hundred feet in the air." I explain. I explain that, if in the center of greatest violence of an earthquake, anything ever has gone up, and has kept on going up, the thoughts of the nearest observers were very likely upon other subjects. The quay of Lisbon. We are told that it went down. A vast throng of persons ran to the quay for refuge. The city of Lisbon was in profound darkness. The quay and all the people on it disappeared. If it and they went down--not a single corpse, not a shred of clothing, not a plank of the quay, nor so much as a splinter of it ever floated to the surface.