United States or Slovenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yes, yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the headwaters of the Niger. "Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913." "Yes, so I have heard.
Then lines of quietly dressed worshippers stroll along the bordered walks, the children's hands fast in their mothers' the arched vestibule-door closing upon them. Most of these oases, like Trinity, St. Paul's, and St. Mark's, differ but little the same low-pitched church, the same slender spire, the same stretch of green with its scattered gravestones.
No one lives here now, but there are many flocks and llamas, and not far away we saw ancient storehouses and burial places. That night we suffered from intense cold and were kept awake by the bitter wind which swept down from the snow fields of Coropuna and shook the walls of our tent violently. The next day we crossed two small oases, little gulches watered from the melting snow of Coropuna.
It is a place where one may talk freely or even foolishly one of those rare oases in which an artist, for example, may venture to read a lesson to an avowed patron of art. All the way down the Patron had bored us with his new Corot, which he described at tedious length.
Like drops of luminous dew the stars fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss, whose bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul, contemplating these fields of ether, this blue Sahara with its wandering and perishing oases, is stricken by a grief so hopeless, so profound, that neither enthusiasm nor love can ever soothe it more.
This region, the Djerid, is all sand; an isthmus of sand thrust in between the two Chotts of Djerid and Rharsa; the oases ara scattered about the country, says some old writer, like the spots on a leopard's skin.... The air was keen, and I shivered on my mule, looking back often at the dark forest of Tozeur, where I had spent some happy days.
So she followed the old road, along which her sisters had tramped from immemorial time, and would still tramp through the generations to come, when her journey was ended and the wonderful country of man's love explored its oases visited, its antres endured. Now Sabina played priestess to the Spinning Machine a monster reared above her, stupendous and insatiable.
In my estimate of Saharan populations, I have confined myself to Ghat and Ghadames; the oases of Fezzan, and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes.
To English eyes, to our eyes, the scene, these oases in the limitless brown of the bog, had been wild and rude; but to Colonel John, long familiar with the treeless plains of Poland and the frozen flats of Lithuania, it spoke of home, it spoke of peace and safety and comfort, and even of a narrow plenty.
The slopes of the few scattered kopjies were sparsely covered with verdure and as he strode along, he passed here and there clumps of trees, veritable oases in the desert, or deep water holes under overhanging rocks where under cover of night, strange beasts came to drink.
Word Of The Day