Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
a.m. And the story?
A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
of the world had come," one of the sailors said.
And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
rocks.
And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
glory of the fiery rose had been about them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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