United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The spear is employed in warfare, and is losing its place only as iron becomes plentiful enough and cheap enough to substitute for the bamboo blades or heads. Even in sections in which iron spears are relatively common the wooden spear is used much in warfare, since spears thrown at an enemy are frequently lost.

Ticks swarmed in the small bamboo jungle, and my body was covered with these loathsome insects, which got into my bed and hair, and even attached themselves to my eyelids during the night, when the constant annoyance and irritation completely banished sleep. In the daytime they penetrated my trousers, piercing to my body in many places, so that I repeatedly took off as many as twelve at one time.

I being very lazy, did not go ashore, but watched the pantomime from the bamboo staging. The whole flock of goats enter at right end of stage, and tear violently across the scene, disappearing at left. Two minutes elapse. Obanjo and his gallant crew enter at right hand of stage, leg it like lamplighters across front, and disappear at left. Fearful pow-wow behind the scenes. Five minutes elapse.

I must tell you here that although she always slept in her clothes, she changed them for clean ones every day. Then she put on a pale pink shirt of soft material and over that a short silk gown, that was embroidered with bamboo leaves, as she always wore low heeled shoes in the morning and consequently could not wear her long gowns.

They got out and walked to the other end of the bridge where a tall grove had grown from the bank below. Mo put her elbows on the side wall of the bridge, and leaned out, midway up the grove. Joe leaned out beside her. A breeze stirred and they were enveloped by melodious knocking, a hundred percussionists set free. "Wow!" Joe said. "A bamboo orchestra. I've never heard that before."

While the PADI is being dried by the exposure to sun and wind on these platforms, it must be protected from the domestic fowls by a guardian who, sitting in the gallery, drives them away by means of a long bamboo slung by a cord above the platform.

Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage. "Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do with them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed?"

"From Ceylon I proceeded to India, touching the great peninsula first at Cape Comorin, and continuing northward by way of Pondicherry, Madura, and Madras; and thence to the tableland of Bangalore and the Western Ghauts, testing many kinds of wood at every point, but particularly the palm and bamboo families.

The sun, a ball of fire, went slowly down the west. Rose-vines drooped against the hanging lattices, printing their watery lines of split bamboo with a shadow-pattern of leaf and flower. The whole house-front was decked with dead roses, or roses blasted in full bloom, as if to celebrate with appropriate insignia the passing of the hottest day of the year.

Little house lizards are always present, and not infrequently a large lizard makes its home on the ridge pole, and from time to time gives its weird cry. The ground beneath the house is often enclosed with bamboo slats, and is used for storage purposes, or a portion may be used as a chicken coop.