Part 74

Sig. Ricco's estimate is that these objects or beings or cranes must have been at least five and a half miles high.

The vast dark thing that looked like a poised crow of unholy dimensions. Assuming that I shall ever have any readers, let him, or both of them, if I shall ever have such popularity as that, note how dim that bold black datum is at the distance of only two chapters.

The question:

Was it a thing or the shadow of a thing?

Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy. But the dimness of the datum of only two chapters ago. The carved stone disk of Tarbes, and the rain that fell every afternoon for twenty--if I haven't forgotten, myself, whether it was twenty-three or twenty-five days!--upon one small area. We are all Thomsons, with brains that have smooth and slippery, though corrugated, surfaces--or that all intellection is associative--or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant--and a few chapters go by, and there's scarcely an impression that hasn't slid off our smooth and slippery brains, of Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan." There are two ways by which irreconcilables can be remembered--if they can be correlated in a system more nearly real than the system that rejects them--and by repetition and repetition and repetition.

Vast black thing like a crow poised over the moon.

The datum is so important to us, because it enforces, in another field, our acceptance that dark bodies of planetary size traverse this solar system.

Our position:

That the things have been seen:

Also that their shadows have been seen.

Vast black thing poised like a crow over the moon. So far it is a single instance. By a single instance, we mean the negligible.

In Popular Science, 34-158, Serviss tells of a shadow that Schroeter saw, in 1788, in the lunar Alps. First he saw a light. But then, when this region was illuminated, he saw a round shadow where the light had been.

Our own expression:

That he saw a luminous object near the moon: that that part of the moon became illuminated, and the object was lost to view; but that then its shadow underneath was seen.

Serviss explains, of course. Otherwise he'd not be Prof. Serviss. It's a little contest in relative approximations to realness. Prof. Serviss thinks that what Schroeter saw was the "round" shadow of a mountain--in the region that had become lighted. He assumes that Schroeter never looked again to see whether the shadow could be attributed to a mountain. That's the crux: conceivably a mountain could cast a round--and that means detached--shadow, in the lighted part of the moon. Prof. Serviss could, of course, explain why he disregards the light in the first place--maybe it had always been there "in the first place." If he couldn't explain, he'd still be an amateur.

We have another datum. I think it is more extraordinary than--

Vast thing, black and poised, like a crow, over the moon.

But only because it's more circumstantial, and because it has corroboration, do I think it more extraordinary than--

Vast poised thing, black as a crow, over the moon.

Mr. H.C. Russell, who was usually as orthodox as anybody, I suppose--at least, he wrote "F.R.A.S." after his name--tells in the Observatory, 2-374, one of the wickedest, or most preposterous, stories that we have so far exhumed:

That he and another astronomer, G.D. Hirst, were in the Blue fountains, near Sydney, N.S.W., and Mr. Hirst was looking at the moon--

He saw on the moon what Russell calls "one of those remarkable facts, which being seen should be recorded, although no explanation can at present be offered."

That may be so. It is very rarely done. Our own expression upon evolution by successive dominants and their correlates is against it. On the other hand, we express that every era records a few observations out of harmony with it, but adumbratory or preparatory to the spirit of eras still to come. It's very rarely done. Lashed by the phantom-scourge of a now passing era, the world of astronomers is in a state of terrorism, though of a highly attenuated, modernized, devitalized kind. Let an astronomer see something that is not of the conventional, celestial sights, or something that it is "improper" to see--his very dignity is in danger. Some one of the corralled and scourged may stick a smile into his back. He'll be thought of unkindly.

With a hardihood that is unusual in his world of ethereal sensitivenesses, Russell says, of Hirst's observation:

"He found a large part of it covered with a dark shade, quite as dark as the shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon."

But the climax of hardihood or impropriety or wickedness, preposterousness or enlightenment:

"One could hardly resist the conviction that it was a shadow, yet it could not be the shadow of any known body."

Richard Proctor was a man of some liberality. After a while we shall have a letter, which once upon a time we'd have called delirious--don't know that we could read such a thing now, for the first time, without incredulous laughter--which Mr. Proctor permitted to be published in Knowledge. But a dark, unknown world that could cast a shadow upon a large part of the moon, perhaps extending far beyond the limb of the moon; a shadow as deep as the shadow of this earth--