United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
After examining the chart, I steered South-East towards Mount Hale and, striking the river, we followed along it a short distance and camped at some brackish water, Mount Hale bearing North 178 degrees East, and Mount Gould North 28 degrees East. Barometer 28.96; thermometer 77 degrees at 5.30 p.m. As Pierre was walking along, he suddenly turned round and saw four or five natives following.
This was a mercy, for it veiled me from my sufferings that else would have killed me. In the night I was roused by the beat of rain, and I crawled from hole to hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. Brackish it was, but drinkable. It was what saved me, for, toward morning, I awoke to find myself in a profuse perspiration and quite free of all delirium.
The water-tank boats brought it from Alexandria. It was filthy water, full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water it was always sickly lukewarm, sun-stewed.
It proved, as we feared, to be slightly brackish, but not undrinkable. Near the edge of the water, or rather about four or five feet from it, there was a belt of fine weeds, between which and the shore there were myriads of small fish of all sizes swimming, similar to those we had captured to the westward, in the fourth or O'Halloran's Creek.
I, who had asked of God's mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and a sufficiency of water not too brackish, was no sooner blessed with an abundance of cured meat and sweet water than I began to know discontent with my lot. I began to want fire, and the savour of cooked meat in my mouth.
People who saw the Southern herd of buffalo, fifteen or twenty years ago, can appreciate the size of the Texas band of wild horses in 1846. At the point where the army struck the Little Colorado River, the stream was quite wide and of sufficient depth for navigation. The water was brackish and the banks were fringed with timber. Here the whole army concentrated before attempting to cross.
He went beyond the mouth of the Arkansas, reached by Joliet and Marquette; he was entertained by the Indians of whom Chateaubriand has written with such charm in his "Atala"; and at last, in April, 1682, fifteen years from the days that he looked longingly from his seigniory above the Lachine Rapids, he found the "brackish water changed to brine," the salt breath of the sea touched his face, and the "broad bosom of the great gulf opened on his sight limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life."
I had dug for water, and procured it at a depth of five feet; but it was too brackish either to drink, or give to our horses; we used it, however, in boiling up our flour into paste. The afternoon was exceedingly dark and stormy looking, but only a few light showers fell. The night then set in cold, with a heavy dew. May 16.
Oh, I could fill an hour with the mere recital of the names of great and famous people who have toiled through a long life, and as the last gray hour came over their dim sea of life, "brackish with the salt of human tears," have acknowledged with infinite bitterness that they have caught nothing.
At the end of two hours, after having ascended a little by a paved causeway formed across the valley, which is about forty yards in breadth, we entered Wady Muna. Near the causeway we saw a small field, irrigated by means of a brackish well, where a few miserable Bedouins raised onions and leeks for the market at Mekka.
Word Of The Day