Lo!

by Charles Fort

  In the Boiling Lakes District of Dominica, there had been an eruption of mud, at the time of the deluge, which was like the fall of water upon St. Kitts, eight days later. There had, in recorded time, never been an eruption here before.

  Three months before, there had been, in another part of the West Indies, a catastrophe like that of St. Kitts. Upon Oct. 10, 1879, a deluge fell upon the island of Jamaica, and drowned 100 of the inhabitants (London Times, Nov. 8, 1879). A flood that slid out from this island was surfaced with jungles—tangles of mahogany logs, trees, and bushes; brambled with the horns of goats and cattle; hung with a moss of the fleece of sheep. Incoming vessels plowed furrows, as if in a passing cultivation of one of the rankest luxuriances that ever vegetated upon an ocean. Passengers looked at tangles of trees and bodies, as if at picture puzzles. In foliage, they saw faces.

  For months, there had been, in the Provinces of Murcia and Alicante, Spain, a drought so severe that inhabitants had been driven into emigration to Algeria. Whether we think of this drought and the prayers of the people as having relation or not, there came a downpour that was as intense as the necessities. See London Times, Oct. 20, 1879. Upon October 14th, floods poured upon these parched provinces. Perhaps it was response to the prayers of the people. Five villages were destroyed. Fifteen hundred persons perished.

  Virtually in the same zone with Spain and the West Indies (U.S. Colombia) a deluge fell, in December. The River Cauca rose beyond all former high water marks, so suddenly that people were trapped in their houses. This was upon December 19th.

  The next day, the earth started quaking in Salvador, near Lake Ilopanga. This lake was the crater of what was supposed to be an extinct volcano. I take data from the Panama Daily Star and Herald, Feb. 10, 1880.

  Upon the 31st of December—four days before occurrences in the island of Dominica—the earth quaked in Salvador, arid from the middle of Lake Ilopanga emerged a rocky formation. Water fell from the sky, in bulks that gouged gullies. Gullies writhed in the quaking ground. The inhabitants who cried to the heavens prayed to Epilepsy. Mud was falling upon the convulsions. A volcanic island was rising in Lake Ilopanga, displacing the water, in streams that writhed from it violently. Rise of a form that filled the lake—it shook out black torrents—head of a Gorgon, shaggy with snakes.

  Beginning upon October 10th, and continuing until the occurrence at St. Kitts, deluge after deluge came down to one zone around this earth—or a flight of lakes was cast from a constellational reservoir, which was revolving and discharging around a zone of this earth. In the minds of most of us, this could not be. We have been taught to look up at the revolving stars, and to see and to think that they do not revolve.

  Our data are of the slaughters of people, who, by fishmongerish explanations, have been held back from an understanding of an irrigational system: of their emotions, and of the elementary emotions of lands. There’s a hope in a mind, and it turns to despair—or there’s a fertile region in the materials of a South American country—and an unsuspected volcano chars it to a woe of leafless trees. Plains and the promise of crops that are shining in sunlight—plains crack into disappointments, into which fall expectations. An island appears in the ocean, and after a while young palms feel upward. There’s a convulsive relapse, and subliminal filth, from the bottom of the ocean, plasters the little aspirations. Quaking lands have clasped their fields, and have wrung their forests.

  Each catastrophe has been explained by the metaphysical scientists, as a thing in itself. Scientists are contractions of metaphysicians, in their local searches for completeness, and in their statements that, except for infinitesimal errors, plus or minus, completenesses have been found. I can accept that there may be Super-phenomenal Completeness, but not that there can be phenomenal completenesses. It may be that the widespread thought that there is God, or Allness, is only an extension of the deceiving process by which to an explanation of a swarm of lady birds, or to a fall of water at St. Kitts, is given a guise of completeness—or it may be the other way around—or that there is a Wholeness—perhaps one of countless Wholenesses, in the cosmos—and that attempting completenesses and attempting concepts of completenesses are localizing consciousness of an all-inclusive state, or being—so far as its own phenomena are concerned—that is Complete.

  There have been showers of ponds. From blue skies there have been shafts of water, golden in sunshine. Reflections from stars have fluted sudden, dark, watery columns. There have been violent temples of water—colonnades of shafts, revealed against darkness by lightning—foaming façades as white as marble. Nights have been caves, roofed with vast, fluent stalactites.

  These are sprinkles.

  March, 1913.

  The meteorologists study meteorologically. The meteorologists were surprised.

  March 23, 1913—250,000 persons driven from their homes—torrents falling, rivers rising, in Ohio. The floods at Dayton, Ohio, were especially disastrous.

  Traffics of bodies, in the watery streets of Dayton. The wind whistles, and holds up a cab. They stop. Night—and the running streets are hustling bodies—but, coming, is worse than the sights of former beings, who never got anywhere in life, and are still hurrying. The wreck of a trolley car speeds down an avenue—down a side street rushes a dead man. Let him catch the car, and he’ll get about where all his lifetime he got catching other cars. A final dispatch from Dayton—“Dayton in total darkness.”

  March 23, 24, 25—a watery sky sat on the Adirondack Mountains. It began to slide. It ripped its slants on a peak, and the tops of lamp posts disappeared in the streets of Troy and Albany. Literary event, at Paterson, N.J.—something that was called “a great cloudburst” grabbed a factory chimney, and on a ruled page of streets scrawled a messy message. With the guts of horses and other obscenities, it put in popularizing touches. The list of dead, in Columbus, Ohio, would probably reach a thousand. Connecticut River rising rapidly. Delaware River, at Trenton, N.J., fourteen feet above normal.

  March 26th—in Parkersburg, W.V., people who called on their neighbors, rowed boats to second story windows. If they had in their cellars what they have nowadays, there was much demand for divers. New lakes in Vermont, and the State of Indiana was an inland sea. “Farmers caught napping.” Surprises everywhere: napping everywhere. Wherever Science was, there was a swipe at a sleep. Floods in Wisconsin, floods and destruction in Illinois and Missouri.

  March 27th—see the New York Tribune, of the 28th—that the Weather Bureau was issuing storm warnings.

  The professional wisemen were not heard from, before this deluge. Some of us would like to know what they had to say, afterward. They said it, in the Monthly Weather Review, April, 1913.

  The story is told “completely.” The story is told, as if there had been exceptional rains, only in Ohio and four neighboring States. Reading this account, one thinks—as one should think—of considerable, or of extraordinary, rain, in one smallish region, and of its derivation from other parts of this earth, where unusual sunshine had brought about unusual evaporations.

  Canada—and it was not here that the sun was shining. Waters falling and freezing, in Canada, loading trees and telegraph wires with ice—power houses flooded, and towns in darkness—crashes of trees, heavy with ice. California was drenched. Torrents falling, in Washington and Oregon. Unprecedented snow in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma—Alabama deluged—floods in Florida.

  “Ohio and four neighboring states.”

  Downpours in France and in other parts of Europe.

  Spain—seems that, near Valencia, one of these nights, there was a rotten theatrical performance. Such a fall of big hailstones that a train was stalled—vast tragedian, in a black cloak, posing on the funnel of an engine—car windows that were footlights—and disapproval was expressing with the looks of millions of pigeons’ eggs. Anyway, near Valencia, a fall of hail, three feet deep, stopped trains. Just where was all that sunshine?

  South Africa—moving pictures of the low degree of
the now old-fashioned “serials.” Something staged Clutching Hands. There were watery grabs from the sky, at Colesburg, Murraysburg, and Prieska. The volume of one of these bulks equaled one-tenth of the total rainfall in South Africa, in one year.

  Snow, two months before its season, was falling in the Andes—floods in Paraguay, and people spreading in panics—Government vessels carrying supplies to homeless, starving people—River Uruguay rising rapidly.

  Heavy rains in the Fiji Islands.

  The rains in Tasmania, during the month of March, were twenty-six points above the average.

  Upon the first day of the floods in “Ohio and four neighboring States” (March 22nd) began a series of terrific thunderstorms in Australia. There was a “rain blizzard” in New South Wales. In Queensland, all mails were delayed by floods.

  New Zealand.

  Wellington Evening Post, March 31—“The greatest disaster in the history of the Colony!”

  Where there had been sluggish rivers, bodies of countess sheep tossed in woolly furies. Maybe there is a vast, old being named God, and reported strands of tossing sheep were glimpses of his whiskers, in one of those wraths of his. In the towns, there were fantastic savageries. Wherever the floods had been before, it looks as if they had been to college. One of them rioted through the streets of Gore, having broken down store windows. It roystered with the bodies of animals, wrapped in lace curtains, silks, and ribbons. Down the Matura River sounded a torrent of “terrible cries.” It was a rush of drowning cattle. It was a delirium of brandishing horns, upon which invisible collegians were blowing a fanfare.

  “Ohio and four neighboring states.”

  The clip of Paraguay, and the bob of New Zealand: the snip of South Africa, and the shearing of everything else that did not fit in with a theory. Whoever said that the pen is mightier than something else, overlooked the mightiest of all, and that’s the scissors.

  Wherever all this water was coming from, the full account is of North America and four neighboring Continents.

  Peaches flying from orchards, in the winds of New Zealand—icicles clattering in the streets of Montreal. The dripping palms of Paraguay—and the pine trees of Oregon were mounds of snow. At night this earth was a black constellation, sounding with panics. I can think of the origin of the ocean that fell upon it in not less than constellational terms. Perhaps Orion or Taurus went dry.

  If a place, say in China, greatly needs water, and if there be stores of water, somewhere else, in one organism, I can think of relations of requital, as I think of need and response in any lesser organism, or suborganism.

  Need of a camel—and storages—and reliefs.

  Hibernating bear—and supplies from his storages.

  At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Dec. 11, 1922, Sir Francis Younghusband told of a drought, in August, 1906, in Western China. The chief magistrate of Chungking prayed for rain. He put more fervor into it. Then he prayed prodigiously for rain. It began to rain. Then something that was called “a waterspout” fell from the sky. Many of the inhabitants were drowned.

  In the organic sense, I conceive of people and forests and dwindling lakes all expressing a need, and finally compelling an answer. By “prayers” I mean utterances by parched mouths, and also the rustlings of dried leaves and grasses. It seems that there have been responses. There are two explanations. One is that it is the mercy of God. For an opinion here, see the data. The other is that it is an Organism that is maintaining itself.

  The British Government has engineered magnificently for water supply in Egypt. It might have been better to plant persuasive trees and clergymen in Egypt. But clergymen are notoriously eloquent, and I think that preferable would be less excitable tipsters to God, who could convey the idea of moderation.

  In one year the fall of rain, at Norfolk, England, is about twenty-nine inches. In Symons’ Meteorological Magazine, 1889, p. 101, Mr. Symons told of this fall of water of twenty-nine inches in a year, and then told of volumes of water to depths of from twenty to twenty-four inches that had fallen, from May 25th to the 28th, 1889, in New South Wales, and of a greater deluge—thirty-four inches—that, from the 29th to the 30th, had devastated Hong Kong. Mr. Symons called attention to these two bursts from the heavens, thousands of miles apart, saying that they might, or might not, be a coincidence, but that he left it to others to theorize. I point out that a professional meteorologist thought the occurrence of only two deluges, about the same time, but far apart, remarkable, or difficult to explain in terms of terrestrial meteorology.

  It was left a long time to others.

  However, when I was due to appear, I appeared, perhaps right on scheduled time; and I got Australian newspapers. The Sydney newspapers told of the soak in New South Wales. I learned that all the rest of Australia was left to others—or was left, waiting for me to appear, right on scheduled time, most likely. Not rain, but columns of water fell near the town of Avoca, Victoria, and, in the Melbourne Argus, the way of accounting for them was to say that “a waterspout” had burst here. There were wide floods in Tasmania. Fields turned to blanks that were then lumpy with rabbits.

  There had been drought in Australia, and floods were a relief to a necessity, but the greater downpour in China interests us more in conditions in China.

  It was a time of direst drought and extremist famine in China. Homeward Mail, June 4—that, in some of the more cannibalistic regions, sales of women and children were common. It is said to be almost impossible for anybody to devour his own child. Parents exchanged children.

  Down upon monstrous need came relief that was enormous. At Hong Kong, houses collapsed under a smash of alleviation. A fury of mercy tore up almost every street in the Colony. The people had prayed for rain. They got it. Godness so loved Hong Kong that in the town’s morgue it stretched out sixteen of the inhabitants. At Canton, every pietist proclaimed the efficacy of prayer, and I think he was right about that: but the problem is to tone down all this efficacy. If we will personify what I consider an organism, what he, or more likely she, has not, is any conception of moderation. The rise of the river, at Canton, indicated that up country there had been catastrophic efficacy. At Canton efficacy was so extreme that for months the people were rebuilding.

  Show me a starving man—I pay no attention. Show me the starving man—I can’t be bothered. Show me the starving man, on the point of dying—I grab up groceries and I jump on him. I cram bread down his mouth, and stuff his eyes and his ears with potatoes. I rip open his lips to hammer down more food, and bung in his teeth, the better to stuff him. The explanation—it is the god-like in me.

  Now, in a Library, we put in calls for the world’s newspapers. Not a hint have we had that there is anything else—nothing in scientific publications of the period—not another word from Mr. Symons—but there is an implement that is mightier than the pen—and we are led on to one of our attempted correlations, by our experiences with it.

  Germany—there was a drought so severe that there were public prayers for rain. Something that was called “a waterspout” fell from the sky, and people who did not get all the details went to church about it. Liverpool Echo, May 20—one hundred persons perished.

  At the same time, there were public rejoicings in Smyrna, where was staged another assuasive tragedy.

  Drought in Russia. Straits Times, June 6—droughts ended by downpours in Bengal and Java. In Kashmir and in the Punjab, violent thunderstorms and earthquakes occurred together (Calcutta Statesman, June 1 and 3). In Turkey, there would have been extremist distress, but about the first of June, amidst .woe and thanksgiving, destructive salvations demonstrated efficacy, and for a week kept on spreading joy and misery. Levant Herald, June 4—earthquakes preceded deluges, and then continued with them.

  In conventional meteorology, no relation between droughts and exceptional rains is admitted. Our data are of widespread droughts and enormous flows of water. There are two little, narrow strips of views on the margins of our moving pictures
. On one side—that there is a beneficent God. On the other side—that there isn’t anything. And every one of us who has paid any attention to the annals of controversies knows that such oppositions usually give in to an intermediacy. May, 1880—widely this earth was in need—widely waters were coming from somewhere. Now—in Organic terms—I am telling of what seems to me to be Functional Teleportation, or enormous manifestations of that which is sometimes, say in Oklahoma, a little drip over a tree.

  Volcanic eruptions upon this earth, at times of deluges—and maybe, in a land of the stars, there was an eruption, in May, 1889. In France, May 31st, there was one of the singularly lurid sunsets that are known as “afterglows,” and that appear after volcanic eruptions. There was no known volcanic eruption upon this earth, from which a discharge could have gone to the sky of France. It may have come from a volcanic eruption somewhere else. All suggestiveness is that it came to this earth over no such distance as millions of miles.

  Other discharges, maybe—red rain coming down from the sky, at Cardiff, Wales (Cardiff Western Mail, May 26). Red dust falling upon the island of Hyeres, off the coast of France, in the Mediterranean—see the Levant Herald, May 29. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 30—an unknown substance that for several hours had fallen from the sky—crystalline particles, some pink, and some white. Quebec Daily Mercury, May 25—a fine dust that had the appearance of a snowstorm, falling in Dakota.

  Monstrous festivities in Greece—a land that was bedecked with assassinations. Its rivers were garlands—vast twists of vines, budded with the bodies of cattle.

  The Malay States gulped. The mines of Kamunting were suctions, into which flowed floods (Penang Gazette, May 24). The Bahama Islands were thirsts—drought and loss of crops—then huge swigs from the sky. Other West Indian islands went on gargantuan sprees—and I’ll end up a Prohibitionist. Orgies in Greece, and more or less everywhere else—this earth went drunk on water. I’ve experimented—try autosuggestion—you can get a pretty fair little souse from any faucet. Tangier—“great suffering from the drought”—abundant rains, about June 1st. Drought in British Honduras, and heavy rains upon the 1st and 2nd of June. Tremendous downpours described in the newspaper published upon the island of St. Helena. Earthquake at Jackson, California—the next day a gush from the sky broke down a dam. I’m on a spree, myself—Library attendants wheeling me stacks of this earth’s newspapers. Island of Cyprus—a flop from the sky, and the river Pedias went up with a rush from which people at Nicosia narrowly escaped. Torrents in Ceylon. June 4th—a drought of many weeks broken by rains in Cuba. Drought in Mexico—and out of the heavens came a Jack the Ripper. Torn plantations and mutilated cities—rise of the river, at Huezutla—when it subsided the streets were strewn with corpses.