"I write for minds, not ears."
Too, more than once when disposing of difficulties obtruded upon me by the noncoincidence of thought with words, have I had in mind this observation of Saint Augustine:
"For there are but few things which we speak properly, many things improperly; but what we may wish to say is understood."
And, similarly, when reminding myself that I had not set out to produce a work of art but merely to put down upon paper a plain and straightforward account of actual happenings and discoveries, many a time did I think of these words of John Stuart Mill:
"For it is no objection to a harrow that it is not a plough, nor to a saw that it is not a chisel."
And so it should be no objection to this my account of our discovery of another world that it has not the charm of Dante's Hell or the delicate beauties of Kipling's Gunga Din.
In the second place, I wish that I could say more about that mysterious phenomenon the firedrake, Saint Elmo's fire, or whatever it should be called, light-cloudlet, light-cloud, light-mass, light-ghost—sometimes it looks like luminous mist—but I know no more at this date about the origin of that most remarkable manifestation than I did after seeing the first "ghost," nor does Milton Rhodes himself, and Milton Rhodes, as everybody knows, is a scientist.
Of course, if people were like Trimalchio in the Satyricon of Petronius (and many people are) authors or scientists would not need to bother their heads about explanations, conjectures, theories, hypothesis or such sort when telling about strange phenomena or events; for, when some matter was being expounded by one of his guests, a gentleman by the name of Agamemnon, Trimalchio disposed of the whole business in this simple and summary fashion:
"If the thing really happened, there is no problem; if it never happened, it is all nonsense."
But, in the present instance—not to the Trimalchios, of course, but to any person with an iota of the scientific spirit in his encephalon—the fact is the very converse of this; for, if the firedrakes, the light-clouds, did not "happen," there would be no problem at all.