Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made
masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen's
brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of the
upper empire; and when the new religion forbade them any longer to
worship those vain heathen deities, they managed to hand over the flames
at the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection stood them in
just as good stead as that of the original alternate immortals.
Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes such as to
produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm
idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from
heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long
hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence
as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like gigantic drills such
as quarrymen make for putting in a blast. They are produced, of course,
by the melting of the rock under the terrific heat of the electric
spark; and they grow narrower and narrower as they descend till they
finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they irresistibly suggest
the notion that a material weapon has struck the ground, and buried
itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit of Little Ararat, that
weather-beaten and many-fabled peak (where an enterprising journalist
not long ago discovered the remains of Noah's Ark), has been riddled
through and through by frequent lightnings, till the rock is now a mere
honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like an old target at the end of a
long day's constant rifle practice.
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