and the wrath
of the Old Dominant against such an irreconcilability as large, opaque
objects in the sky, casting down shadows upon clouds. Still the
Dominants are suave very often, or are not absolute gods, and the way
attention was led away from this subject is an interesting study in
quasi-divine bamboozlement. Upon page 268, Charles J.P. Cave, the
meteorologist, writes that, upon April 5 and 8, at Ditcham Park,
Petersfield, he had observed a similar appearance, while watching some
pilot balloons--but he describes something not in the least like a
shadow on clouds, but a stationary cloud--the inference seems to be that
the shadows at Chisbury may have been shadows of pilot balloons. Upon
page 322, another correspondent writes upon shadows cast by mountains;
upon page 348 someone else carries on the divergence by discussing this
third letter: then someone takes up the third letter mathematically; and
then there is a correction of error in this mathematic demonstration--I
think it looks very much like what I think it looks like.

But the mystery here:

That the dark patches at Chisbury could not have been cast by stationary
pilot balloons that were to the west, or that were between clouds and
the setting sun. If, to the west of Chisbury, a stationary object were
high in the air, intercepting the sun's rays, the shadow of the
stationary object would not have been stationary, but would have moved
higher and higher with the setting of the sun.

I have to think of something that is in accord with no other data
whatsoever:

A luminous body--not the sun--in the sky--but, because of some unknown
principle or atmospheric condition, its light extended down only about
to the clouds; that from it were suspended two triangular objects, like
the object that was seen in Bermuda; that it was this light that fell
short of the earth that these objects intercepted; that the objects were
drawn up and lowered from something overhead, so that, in its light,
their shadows changed size.

If my grope seem to have no grasp in it, and, if a stationary balloon
will, in half an hour, not cast a stationary shadow from the setting
sun, we have to think of two triangular objects that accurately
maintained positions in a line between sun and clouds, and at the same
time approached and receded from clouds. Whatever it may have been, it's
enough to make the devout make the sign of the crucible, or whatever the
devotees of the Old Dominant do in t