The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 274 of 376

Page 274 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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It had hovered. The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says: "As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers, in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy." He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes. He says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like appendages. Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his nineteenth-centuriness, he writes: "There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort." One of them had paused. Then it had whisked off. The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon certain parts of India." We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins, crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or dinosaurs--except that | think the thing had planes or wings--one of them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of photography no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken. L'Astronomie, 1885-347: