United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Captain Cook visited one of their villages before leaving the coast. It contained about a dozen dwellings of the poorest description. They were mere hovels; nothing more than a few poles set up in a circle and meeting together at the top, each forming a kind of cone. On the weather side each cone was covered with a few boughs and a little grass.
Before his shuddering soul defiled men maimed, blind, bleeding from ghastly hurts; men long dead. Women he saw in lowly hovels, weeping over cots fashioned from rough boxes; women, dry-eyed, mutely tragic, surrounded by softness, luxury and servitude, wearing love gifts of a hand for ever stilled, dreaming of lover-words whispered in a voice for ever mute.
Wendover was one of the subtlest living judges of character when he pleased, and his enforced progress through these hovels with Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him with a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment. 'History would be inexplicable after all without the honest fanatic, he said to himself on the way home. 'I suppose I had forgotten it.
'He shall not make haste. Remember the picture of the context a suddenly descending storm, a swiftly rising and turbid flood, the lashing of the rain, the howling of the wind. The men in the clay-built hovels on the flat have to take to flight to some higher ground above the reach of the innundation, on some sheltered rock out of the flashing of the rain and the force of the tempest.
The place proved to be a collection of poverty-stricken hovels built in a circle, of the native tapia, which was crumbling to pieces through age and neglect.
Little girls of ten and over regularly attended these awful hovels, and children grew out of their childhood with no other vision than that of entering into the disgraceful life as early as Nature would allow them. It meant little less than that practically the whole of the population was illegitimate, viewed from a Western standpoint. No such thing as marriage existed.
Only a few terrified women and children, who fled away as we advanced, were in sight as we passed through the streets of the town; and from many of the hovels came the moans of poor wounded wretches who had crawled to their miserable homes to die in them; and from others came the lamentations of women over their dead; and in nooks and corners, whither with their last strength they had dragged themselves, we saw men lying dead in pools of their own blood.
Houses in The Wady are of palm-branches, and some of sun-dried mud-bricks, but mostly miserable hovels, the very picture of wretchedness. Palms in The Wady are not very fine. There are many patches of cultivation of grain and vegetables. Water is found near the surface, and the wells are numerous. 20th. I left our caravan early this morning for Mourzuk.
we gathered information about Egger's from the infrequent hovels on the road, which inflamed our imaginations. Egger was the thriving man of the region, and lived in style in a big brick house. We began to feel a doubt that Egger would take us in, and so much did his brick magnificence impress us that we regretted we had not brought apparel fit for the society we were about to enter.
The burning of mud hovels cannot at any rate be condemned by nations whose customs of war justify the bombardment of the dwelling-houses of a city like Paris, to induce the garrison to surrender by the sufferings of the non-combatants.
Word Of The Day