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Page 6
Naturally the newspapers took up the question in their thousands, and
treated it in every form, throwing on it both light and darkness,
recording many things about it true or false, alarming and
tranquillizing their readers--as the sale required--and almost
driving ordinary people mad. At one blow party politics dropped
unheeded--and the affairs of the world went on none the worse for it.
But what could this thing be? There was not an observatory that was
not applied to. If an observatory could not give a satisfactory
answer what was the use of observatories? If astronomers, who doubled
and tripled the stars a hundred thousand million miles away, could
not explain a phenomenon occurring only a few miles off, what was the
use of astronomers?
The observatory at Paris was very guarded in what it said. In the
mathematical section they had not thought the statement worth
noticing; in the meridional section they knew nothing about it; in
the physical observatory they had not come across it; in the geodetic
section they had had no observation; in the meteorological section
there had been no record; in the calculating room they had had
nothing to deal with. At any rate this confession was a frank one,
and the same frankness characterized the replies from the observatory
of Montsouris and the magnetic station in the park of St. Maur. The
same respect for the truth distinguished the Bureau des Longitudes.
The provinces were slightly more affirmative. Perhaps in the night of
the fifth and the morning of the sixth of May there had appeared a
flash of light of electrical origin which lasted about twenty
seconds. At the Pic du Midi this light appeared between nine and ten
in the evening. At the Meteorological Observatory on the Puy de Dome
the light had been observed between one and two o'clock in the
morning; at Mont Ventoux in Provence it had been seen between two and
three o'clock; at Nice it had been noticed between three and four
o'clock; while at the Semnoz Alps between Annecy, Le Bourget, and Le
L�man, it had been detected just as the zenith was paling with the
dawn.
Now it evidently would not do to disregard these observations
altogether. There could be no doubt that a light had been observed at
different places, in succession, at intervals, during some hours.
Hence, whether it had been produced from many centers in the
terrestrial atmosphere, or from one center, it was plain that the
light must have traveled at a speed of over one hundred and twenty
miles an hour.
In the United Kingdom there was much perplexity. The observatories
were not in agreement. Greenwich would not consent to the proposition
of Oxford. They were agreed on one point, however, and that was: "It
was nothing at all!"
But, said one, "It was an optical illusion!" While the, other
contended that, "It was an acoustical illusion!" And so they
disputed. Something, however, was, it will be seen, common to both
"It was an illusion."
Between the observatory of Berlin and the observatory of Vienna the
discussion threatened to end in international complications; but
Russia, in the person of the director of the observatory at Pulkowa,
showed that both were right. It all depended on the point of view
from which they attacked the phenomenon, which, though impossible in
theory, was possible in practice.
In Switzerland, at the observatory of Sautis in the canton of
Appenzell, at the Righi, at the G�briss, in the passes of the St.
Gothard, at the St. Bernard, at the Julier, at the Simplon, at
Zurich, at Somblick in the Tyrolean Alps, there was a very strong
disinclination to say anything about what nobody could prove--and
that was nothing but reasonable.
But in Italy, at the meteorological stations on Vesuvius, on Etna in
the old Casa Inglesi, at Monte Cavo, the observers made no hesitation
in admitting the materiality of the phenomenon, particularly as they
had seen it by day in the form of a small cloud of vapor, and by
night in that of a shooting star. But of what it was they knew
nothing.
Scientists began at last to tire of the mystery, while they continued
to disagree about it, and even to frighten the lowly and the
ignorant, who, thanks to one of the wisest laws of nature, have
formed, form, and will form the immense majority of the world's
inhabitants. Astronomers and meteorologists would soon have dropped
the subject altogether had not, on the night of the 26th and 27th,
the observatory of Kautokeino at Finmark, in Norway, and during the
night of the 28th and 29th that of Isfjord at Spitzbergen--Norwegian
one and Swedish the other--found themselves agreed in recording that
in the center of an aurora borealis there had appeared a sort of huge
bird, an aerial monster, whose structure they were unable to
determine, but who, there was no doubt, was showering off from his
body certain corpuscles which exploded like bombs.
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