The Book of the Damned

Some day we shall have an expression which will be, to our advanced primitiveness, a great joy: That devils have visited this earth: foreign devils: human-like beings, with pointed beards: good singers; one shoe ill-fitting--but with sulphurous exhalations, at any rate. I have been impressed with the frequent occurrence of sulphurousness with things that come from the sky. A fall of jagged pieces of ice, Orkney, July 24, 1818 (Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., 9-187). They had a strong sulphurous odor. And the coke--or the substance that looked like coke--that fell at Mortree, France, April 24, 1887: with it fell a sulphurous substance. The enormous round things that rose from the ocean, near the Victoria. Whether we still accept that they were super-constructions that had come from a denser atmosphere and, in danger of disruption, had plunged into the ocean for relief, then rising and continuing on their way to Jupiter or Uranus--it was reported that they spread a "stench of sulphur." At any rate, this datum of proximity is against the conventional explanation that these things did not rise from the ocean, but rose far away above the horizon, with illusion of nearness. And the things that were seen in the sky July, 1898: I have another note. In Nature, 58-224, a correspondent writes that, upon July 1, 1898, at Sedberg, he had seen in the sky--a red object--or, in his own wording, something that looked like the red part of a rainbow, about 10 degrees long. But the sky was dark at the time. The sun had set. A heavy rain was falling.