What you do-in’ there boy? This query was addressed to me by a previously unnoticed grizzled old man sitting on a river bank deep in the Georgia backwoods. What I was doing was collecting water samples to determine pesticide content from upriver water runoff. Being past forty at the time and hardly a ‘boy’ I knew better than to reveal this as my vocation to a character tailor made for the movie “Deliverance”. Visions of being told to “oink like a pig” danced in my head. As events would later prove, rarely have I ever so utterly misjudged a man. So I said, “I’m looking to see if there is any magic left in the river”. To which he replied, “Oh there be magic right enough but you ain’t gonna to see it that-a-way. See them thunderclouds up yonder? Tonight St. Elmo be a-dance-in’ and magic aplenty be about then. Me be goin a-froggin. Them frogs be plumb easy for the pick-in’ when St. Elmo be about. Ye wants to come see, ye be welcome.” So, to make a very long story short enough to fit this venue, I found myself in a flat-bottomed boat, on the river, late in the evening. As the old man had predicted (in his way) static St. Elmo’s fire in the electrical charge from the thunderhead was palpable. Every leaf, every blade of grass was bathed in a luminous electrical halo. The entire forest was transformed into a giant Kirlian photograph. There was an audible hiss in the air. The fresh, clean smell of ozone was pervasive. The old man’s beard became a tracery of light. The ghostly luminance gave distinct visibility off in the distance to a usually dark, invisible scene. It was a magical, mystical, place. “See boy, there be magic left in the river if ye knows where to look fer it”. Herman Melville saw it. Here is a quote from “Moby-Dick” (1851), during which the ship Pequod encountered St Elmo’s fire: "Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!" All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar. […] [Stubb] cried, "The corpusants have mercy on us all!" …in all my voyagings seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning finger has been laid on the ship… —Ch. CXIX, "The Candles", (Moby-Dick) Created in Ultra Fractal