Visitors.
The Deputy Commissioner writes that, in the evening, after the fall of the Dhurmsalla meteorite, or mass of stone covered with ice, he saw lights. Some of them were not very high. They appeared and went out and reappeared. I have read many accounts of the Dhurmsalla meteorite—July 28, 1860—but never in any other of them a mention of this new correlate—something as out of place in the nineteenth century as would have been an aeroplane—the invention of which would not, in our acceptance, have been permitted, in the nineteenth century, though adumbrations to it were permitted. This writer says that the lights moved like fire balloons, but:
"I am sure that they were neither fire balloons, lanterns, nor bonfires, or any other thing of that sort, but bona fide lights in the heavens."
It's a subject for which we shall have to have a separate expression—trespassers upon territory to which something else has a legal right—perhaps someone lost a rock, and he and his friends came down looking for it, in the evening—or secret agents, or emissaries, who had an appointment with certain esoteric ones near Dhurmsalla—things or beings coming down to explore, and unable to stay down long—
In a way, another strange occurrence during an earthquake is suggested. The ancient Chinese tradition—the marks like hoof marks in the ground. We have thought—with a low degree of acceptance—of another world that may be in secret communication with certain esoteric ones of this earth's inhabitants—and of messages in symbols like hoof marks that are sent to some receptor, or special hill, upon this earth—and of messages that at times miscarry.
This other world comes close to this world—there are quakes—but advantage of proximity is taken to send a message—the message, designed for a receptor in India, perhaps, or in Central Europe, miscarries all the way to England—marks like the marks of the Chinese tradition are found upon a beach, in Cornwall, after an earthquake—
Phil. Trans., 50-500:
After the quake of July 15, 1757, upon the sands of Penzance, Cornwall, in an area of more than 100 square yards, were found marks like hoof prints, except that they were not crescentic. We feel a similarity, but note an arbitrary disregard of our own, this time. It seems to us that marks described as "little cones surrounded by basins of equal diameter" would be like hoof prints, if hoofs printed complete circles. Other disregards are that there were black specks on the tops of cones, as if something, perhaps gaseous, had issued from them; that from one of these formations came a gush of water as thick as a man's wrist. Of course the opening of springs is common in earthquakes—but we suspect, myself, that the Negative Absolute is compelling us to put in this datum and its disorders.
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.