A Sea above the cloudsExtraordinary Superstition once prevalent in England |
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A Sea above the Clouds
- Extraordinary Superstition Once Prevalent in England The curious superstition that there is an ocean obove the clouds is illustrated by the following strange story by an old English writer: "One Sunday the people of a certain village were coming out of a church an a thick, cloudy day, when they saw the anchor of a ship hooked to one of the tombstones - the cable, which was tightly streched, hanging down from the air. The people were astonished; and while they were consulting about it, suddenly they saw the rope move as though some one labored to pull up the anchor. The anchor, however, still held fast by this stone, and a great noise was heard in the air, like the shouting of sailors. Presently a sailor was seen sliding down the cable for the purpose of unfixing the anchor. When he had just loosened it the villagers seized hold of him and while in their hands he quickly died, just as though he had been drowned. About an hour after the sailors above, hearing no more of their comrade, cut the cable and sailed away. In memory of this extraordinary event, the people of the village made the hinges of the church doors out of the iron of the anchor." It is further stated that these hinges "are still to be seen there;" a bit of evidence much like Munchhausen's rope wherewith he once climbed to the moon. If you doubted the story, you were confronted with the rope. There ist another queer tale about this aerial ocean. "A merchant of Bristol," it is said, "set sail with his cargo for Ireland. Some time after, while his family were at supper, a knife sudeenly fell in, through a window, on the table. When the merchant returned and saw the knife, he declared it to be his own, and said that on such a day, at such an hour while sailing in an unknown part of the sea, he dropped the knife overboard; and thae day and the hour were found to be exactly the time when it fell through the window." All of which was once implicitly believed by many, and regarded as incontrovertible proof of the existence of a sea above the sky. One is at a loss to conjecture how that "unknown part of the sea" connected with the rest of it. A physical geography showing this would be no small curiosity." [The Daily Tribune,
Salt Lake City, Utah, Sunday, March 7, 1897, p. 15]
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