There are only two places on earth where diamonds can be found at their original volcanic source. The first is South Africa … and the second, improbably, is Arkansas, where visitors to Crater of Diamonds State Park unearth more than 600 diamonds each year.

More than 25,000 have been found to date — including the 40-carat “Uncle Sam,” which Wesley Bassum sold in 1924 for $150,000.

“Let us not be too particular,” wrote Mark Twain. “It is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.”

On May 3, 1849, God emptied his washtub over Gloucestershire. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal reports that “during a storm of thunder, lightning, and hail, an enormous body of water was seen to rush down a gully in the Bredon Hill, and direct its course to the village of Kemerton,” where it flooded the house of the Rev. W.H. Bellairs.

When Bellairs rode up the hill two days later, “[f]or more than a mile the course of the torrent could be easily traced, from twenty to thirty feet in breadth, every wall being broken down, and the whole, or greater part, of the soil removed.”

He traced this course to a barley field on the northwest shoulder of the hill, “the greater part of which was beaten down flat and hard, as if an enormous body of water had been suddenly poured out upon it. Beyond this field and on higher ground, there were no signs of the fall of water to any great amount.”

The general depth of the torrent seems to have been 6 to 7 feet; it had broken down a stone wall at Bellairs’ house, burst through the foundation of another, carried off a brick wall 6 feet high, and “flowed through the house, to the depth of nearly three feet, for the space of an hour and forty minutes.” No explanation was found.

[H]e drew our attention to the vast difference the position of the shoulders make in a man’s height. This he illustrated by walking from the audience with his shoulders in their natural position, until, having traversed half the length of the room, he suddenly raised them, as represented in the accompanying sketches. The effect was quite startling, and very ludicrous.

— Frank Bellew, The Art of Amusing, 1866

Visit the top of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka and you’ll see a striking sight — at sunrise the mountain’s own shadow is caught in the morning mist before you.

“The shadow seemed to rise up and stand in front of us in the air,” wrote a correspondent to Nature in 1886, “with rainbow and spectral arms, and then to fall down suddenly to the earth as the bow disappeared.”

See The Spectre of the Brocken.

While M.V. Tancred was riding out a typhoon in Kobe Bay in early October 1954, E. Gherzi and his companions noted something strange: The waves had steps.

[T]here were a number of well-defined steps, carved so to say into the water just like the steps of a ladder, starting from the trough of the wave up to about half its height. Although the waves were moving quickly, the steps remained, steadily extending parallel to each other for one or two metres in length. There were at times as many as twenty of these nicely successive steps cut into the body of the wave. We tried to photograph them, but the very poor visibility and the fast motion of the waves resulted only in a blurred print.

— “Peculiar Stratified Shape of Typhoon Waves,” Nature, Feb. 12, 1955

On Oct. 13, 1863, Connecticut manufacturer S.R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool to New York aboard the steamer City of Limerick when he dreamed that his wife visited his stateroom and kissed him. When he awoke, his cabin mate said, “You’re a pretty fellow, to have a lady come and visit you this way.” He related what he had seen, lying awake in his bunk, and Wilmot was surprised to find it corresponded exactly with his dream.

When he joined his wife in Watertown, she asked, “Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?”

“A visit from you?” he asked. “We were more than a thousand miles at sea.”

“I know it,” she said, “but it seemed to me that I visited you.”

She explained that she had been thinking about him on the night in question, and “it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came at length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stern until she came to my state-room.”

“Tell me,” she said, “do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in, but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.”

“The description given by my wife of the steamship was correct in all particulars, though she had never seen it.”

(Frederic Myers, Principles of Psychology, 1891)

Several times a year, the Atlantic sends a tidal wave up the Amazon. It’s loud, violent, and full of debris, and it can be up to 13 feet high.

So, naturally, people surf it.

A good ocean wave might last 30 seconds, but one surfer rode the pororoca for 37 straight minutes. It carried him 7.7 miles upriver.