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


And we could not smoke, could not talk above a faint murmur, and nodded in our saddles. The clear stars danced fantastically in the sky ahead of us, and the ground seemed to be falling away from us into vast hollows, then rising to our horses' noses ready to smash into us like an impalpable wall.

These hollows are generally so close together, and also so close to the fire-place, and to the sides of the wigwam, that I think it probable these people have been accustomed to sleep in a sitting position. There was one wooden building constructed for drying and smoking venison in, still perfect; also a small log-house, in a dilapidated condition, which we took to have been once a store-house.

Scrubs are frequent round the low rises of sandstone; and, where the country is level, and the soil loamy, the hollows are often filled with water by the thunder-storms.

The mystery of the place was less, its beauty a thousandfold greater: and the beauty was still of the dream-exciting kind that made him long to climb all its hills and seek in all its hollows, for there are some scenes that, by their very contour, suggest more than they display, and in which the human mind cannot rid itself of the notion that the physical aspect is not all that there is to be seen.

The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward a mere dot.

He hastened ahead of the group to the shop of Webber. and taking a short length of iron chain, which he found on the earth, he slashed and beat at the bar of steel with frantic strength. The sharp, metallic notes rang out with every stroke. The bar was swaying like a pendulum. Blow after blow the man delivered, filling all the hollows of the hills with wild alarm.

Here I at length took leave of my friend to pursue a long and dreary ride along the track which led to Buree. The wood consisted chiefly of those kinds of eucalyptus termed box and apple-tree, forming a very open kind of forest, the hollows being in general quite clear of trees. The farther I proceeded westward the more the country exhibited the withering effects of long drought.

We buried poor Traverse, and his chain-bearers, near the spring, using one of the same natural hollows in the earth as that in which we had interred the hunter. On a search, it was ascertained that their arms and ammunition had been carried off, and that the pockets of the dead men had been rifled.

The Bushmen never light a fire by day, lest the ascending smoke, which cannot be concealed, should betray their whereabouts. Their fires are lit at night in hollows or places well surrounded with thickets, and, that the flame may not be seen, they will build screens of fir boughs or fern.

The opposite side of the rift seemed to take his attention most, and perhaps he was examining some of the deep cavernous hollows seen here and there high up or low down towards the sea; or maybe his attention was riveted upon some quaint puffin, crouching, solemn and big-beaked, watching patiently for the next visit of main or dad; or, again, maybe the lad was looking at a solitary greatly-blotched egg, big at one end, going off to almost nothing at the other, and wanting in the soft curves of ordinary eggs, while he wondered how it was that such an egg should not blow out of its rocky hollow when the wind came, but spin round as upon a pivot instead.