World of Strange Powers by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780399130663
Google: RgwvAAAAYAAJ
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TOC

6 - Supernatural Scenes

Fata Morgana

Travellers and explorers love to report curious sights, but some of the things they describe are decidedly stranger than others. Consider these weird tales.

On 24 June 1906 Robert E. Peary, who later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole, spotted through his field glasses, far away on the Arctic horizon, ‘the faint white summits of a distant land’. Four days later, according to his diary, from Cape Thomas Hubbard (on the edge of the polar ice) Peary saw the mysterious mountains again, more clearly, to the north-west. ‘My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy trod its shores, and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.’

Pausing only to name his discovery ‘Crocker Land’, after his expedition’s sponsor, Peary pushed on towards the Pole, convinced that he had found an unknown island or even an uncharted continent. ‘Crocker Land’ duly appeared on US Hydrographic Office maps; but in 1914 an expedition sent to explore it found not a single trace of Peary’s ‘discovery’. After a gruelling journey over 150 miles of treacherous Arctic ice, the baffled explorers concluded that ‘Crocker Land’ simply did not exist.

On the other side of the world, in January 1915, Frank Worsley, captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship Endurance, noted as he sailed along the Antarctic coast: ‘Inshore appears a beautiful dazzling city of cathedral spires, domes and minarets.’ And yet, as Worsley well knew, there were no such buildings anywhere in the vast ice deserts surrounding the South Pole.

One August day in the seventeenth century an Italian priest, Father Angelucci, was looking out to sea across the Strait of Messina, which divides the southern tip of Italy from Sicily. Suddenly a shimmering city rose up before him from the midst of the waters. Its pillars, arches and aqueducts were dominated by glittering castles; but within minutes, as Father Angelucci watched in wonder, the magnificent metropolis had vanished.

Almost 300 years later, in the summer of 1929, villagers from Niemiskylia, central Finland, picking berries in the nearby Osmankisuo swamp, watched in amazement as ‘an obscure dark mass’ on the north-eastern horizon turned rapidly into ‘a most wonderful city with its buildings, squares and streets’. In it, they told a reporter from the Iisalmen Sanomat newspaper, they could see people ‘on their Sunday morning stroll’. One well-travelled berry-picker identified the city as far-off Berlin, complete with the Unter den Linden and its famous zoo.

In 1852 a Mr M’Farland, in a report to the British Association, described this charming scene; it unfolded as he stood with a party of friends upon a rock at Portbalintrea, Ireland.

They perceived a small roundish island as if in the act of emerging from the deep, at a distance of a mile from the shore; at first it appeared but as a green field, afterwards it became fringed with red, yellow and blue; whilst

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