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There has always existed a tradition of the joining of the two continents, and now it is believed by geologists that an isthmus once really stretched across to the African coast at the narrowest point of the Straits, at a time when the waters of a Mediterranean gulf, and the waters flowing over the sands of Sahara, together found their outlet in the Indian Ocean.
At night a battleship stood in and played its searchlight directly on the mouth of the channel. The latter was six miles in length, with difficult turns, and at the narrowest point only 300 feet wide. Lieut. Hobson's gallant effort on June 3 to sink the collier Merrimac across the channel had made its navigation even more difficult, though the vessel did not lie athwart-stream.
But, sooth to say, the over-gorged public may well regard that small-tomed author with most favourable eye, who condenses himself within the narrowest limits; a diable boiteux, not the huge spirit of the Hartz; concentrated meat-lozenges, not soup maigre; pocket-pistols of literature, not lumbering parks of its artillery.
Nor was this all, for at its narrowest the ice band was broken away for a space of ten or twelve feet, to continue on the further side of the gap for a few yards at a somewhat lower level, and then run upwards at a steep incline to the breast of snow where Otter sat in safety. On they whizzed, ice beneath them and before them, and ice in Leonard's heart, for he was frozen with fear.
And he past swiftly along the Isthmus, for his heart burned to meet that cruel Sinis; and in a pine-wood at last he met him, where the Isthmus was narrowest and the road ran between high rocks. There he sat, upon a stone by the wayside, with a young fir tree for a club across his knees, and a cord laid ready by his side; and over his head, upon the fir tops, hung the bones of murdered men.
All sound of the woodcutters had long since faded into remoteness, and even had not the interval been too great for hearing them they would have been silent and homeward bound at this twilight hour. But Grace went on her course without any misgiving, though there was much underwood here, with only the narrowest passages for walking, across which brambles hung.
But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
It was a seaport town, about two miles from the wood, a town of narrow, steep streets, picturesque old houses, and odours compounded of tar, dead fish, and many other scents less agreeable than forest perfumes. The thrush was put into a small wicker-cage in an upper room, in one of the narrowest and steepest of the streets. "'I shall die to-night, he piped. But he did not.
It was a dusky back room, plastered and painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings, appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose.
Jackson chose a line two miles above the battlefield, marked by a shallow canal or ditch which crossed the plain at its narrowest point, from the swamp to the river. Behind the ditch he threw up a parapet.
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