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


One that runs along over the earth. With an underground fire, now, it's a difficult job to deal. What's one to do, when the earth's on fire for a whole yard's depth? There's only one means of safety digging ditches, and do you suppose that's easy? But an overground fire's nothing. It only scorches the grasses and burns the dry leaves! The forest will be all the better for it.

As a consequence of this, the water cannot escape by an overground bed, so it forces itself through the porous surface to reappear in a lower valley, undermining the subsoil, which in time collapses, and forms the oases of this otherwise barren land.

The nearer we moved to it, the more indefinite became its outlines; soon all the air was clouded over, there was a strong smell of burning, and here and there between the trees, with a strange, weird quivering in the sunshine, gleamed the first pale red tongues of flame. 'Well, thank God, observed Kondrat, 'it seems it's an overground fire. 'What's that? 'Overground?

This development, however, is independent of proper burial, upon which, as we have already had occasion to see, great stress was at all times laid. The greatest misfortune that could happen to a dead person was for his body to remain overground, or to be removed from the tomb and exposed to the light of day.

I even noticed, more than once, an oak-bush, with dry hanging leaves, hemmed in all round and yet untouched, except for a slight singeing at its base. I must own I could not understand why the dry leaves were not burned. Kondrat explained to me that it was owing to the fact that the fire was overground, 'that's to say, not angry. 'But it's fire all the same, I protested.

The earth, which had been burrowed out by these human rabbits in their search after tin, lay around in huge ungainly heaps; the overground buildings of the establishment consisted of a few ill-arranged sheds, already apparently in a state of decadence; dirt and slush, and pods of water confined by muddy dams, abounded on every side; muddy men, with muddy carts and muddy horses, slowly crawled hither and thither, apparently with no object, and evidently indifferent as to whom they might overset in their course.

The electric car system is one of the most modern, while underground and overground electric railways lead to the most distant suburbs. The city has a gay and new look about it; all along the walks trees are planted, and cafés are to be seen with a screen of shrubs or flowers around them. In the evening the sound of music floats from the houses and cafés.

And deep under the earth, hurrying toward the subterranean stream, were other streams, small and great, but all deep, hurrying to and from that great mother-stream underneath, just as the small and great overground streams hurry to and from their mother Mississippi.

Their wonderful nests, their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and granaries; their corn-fields, harvesting and "malting" of grain; their, rational methods of nursing their eggs and larvae, and of building special nests for rearing the aphides whom Linnaeus so picturesquely described as "the cows of the ants"; and, finally, their courage, pluck, and, superior intelligence all these are the natural outcome of the mutual aid which they practise at every stage of their busy and laborious lives.

Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far from their work as does the seagull or the eagle. It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable tenements, and homes will be scattered.