United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Then Spendius had some pigs carried off from the farms, smeared them with bitumen, set them on fire, and drove them towards Utica. The elephants were terrified by the flames and fled. The ground sloped upwards, javelins were thrown at them, and they turned back; and with great blows of ivory and trampling feet they ripped up the Carthaginians, stifled them, flattened them.

Like Grand Bassam it was under the station admiral, who inspected the two once a year, and who periodically sent a gunboat to support French interests. By night we passed New Town, not on the charts, but famed for owning a fine gold placer north of the town-lagoon. After my departure from the coast it was inspected by Mr. Grant, who sent home specimens of bitumen taken from the wells.

Apollonius was mixing the cement with bitumen and chopped straw, pronouncing words of might known only to himself; while Bruno and Buffalmacco were picking the little cubes of stone to be used, and Tafi arranging them according to the sketch he had made on a slab of slate he held in his hand.

Walls of this reign have a rock-like solidity and tenacity that should make them easily recognizable. Those of immediately preceding reigns show the bitumen far more clearly, and the bricks are usually not as finely made as Nebuchadnezzar's; at Babylon the latter's work is thus at once distinguishable from that of Nabopolassar.

A people is said to dwell in that country, called Daraqui-Dara, having tails like sheep . There are likewise springs of rock oil or bitumen. In the kingdom of Pedir, likewise, there is said to be a river of oil; which is not to be wondered at, as we are assured there is also a well of oil in Bactria.

The interior of this story is built of crude or sun-dried bricks of small size, laid in bitumen; but it is faced through out with a wall, ten feet in thickness, composed of red kiln dried bricks, likewise cemented with bitumen.

For this purpose, he spread upon a piece of canvass of the size of the painting to be transferred, a composition of glue or bitumen, and placed it upon the picture.

Neither can we admit that the penetration of the plants by bitumen was effected at a certain distance, and that they have been transported, after the operation, to the places where we now find them, since it is not rare to find at Commentry trunks of Calamodendrons, Anthropitus, and ferns which are still provided with roots from 15 to 30 feet in length, and the carbonized wood of which surrounds a pith that has been replaced by a stony mould.

Their wine-presses showed considerable ingenuity, and after the necessary fermentation the wine was poured into large earthen jars, corresponding to the amphorae of the Romans, and covered with lids made air-tight by resin and bitumen. The Egyptians had several kinds of wine, highly praised by the ancients; and wine among them was cheap and abundant.

Herodotus lays stress upon the same detail in his description of the way in which the walls of Babylon were built: "As they dug the ditches they converted the excavated earth into bricks, and when they had enough, they burnt them in the kiln. Finally, for mortar they used hot bitumen, and at every thirty courses of bricks they put a layer of reeds interlaced."