That the earthquake had occurred at the climax of intense darkness and
the fall of black rain.

* * * * *

Red rains.

Orthodoxy:

Sand blown by the sirocco, from the Sahara to Europe.

Especially in the earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many
falls of red substance, usually, but not always, precipitated in rain.
Upon many occasions, these substances have been "absolutely identified"
as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came
across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect, that, had
I not been an Intermediatist, I'd have looked no further. Samples
collected from a rain at Genoa--samples of sand forwarded from the
Sahara--"absolute agreement" some writers said: same color, same
particles of quartz, even the same shells of diatoms mixed in. Then the
chemical analyses: not a disagreement worth mentioning.

Our intermediatist means of expression will be that, with proper
exclusions, after the scientific or theological method, anything can be
identified with anything else, if all things are only different
expressions of an underlying oneness.

To many minds there's rest and there's satisfaction in that expression
"absolutely identified." Absoluteness, or the illusion of it--the
universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen
in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds,
that's assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered
minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world,
free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile,
undisturbed by inter-planetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble
is that a chemist's analysis, which seems so final and authoritative to
some minds, is no more nearly absolute than is identification by a child
or description by an imbecile--

I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher--

But that it's based upon delusion, because there is no definiteness, no
homogeneity, no stability, only different stages somewhere between them
and indefiniteness, heterogeneity, and instability. There are no
chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsay and others have
settled that. The chemical elements are only another disappointment in
the quest for the positive, as the definite, the homogeneous, and the
stable. If there were real elements, there could be a real science of
chemistry.