United States or Egypt ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dark corridors and colonnades and hollow walls; roofs that have ears and peep-holes; floors that are undermined by secret stairs; trees that have swayed with the weight of rotting human skulls and have shimmered with the silken bannerets of emperors. Such is Hanadra, half-ruined, and surrounded by a wall that was age-old in the dawn of written history.
In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a couple of peep-holes one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a portion of the street by which I had reached the gate.
Like almost all amateurs, they insisted on peering through the peep-holes in the curtain, which augmented their nervousness, and if the persuasive Colonel Judson had not been at their elbows, reminding them that he, also, was to take part in the play, it is more than likely they would have slipped quietly out at the stage door and bought railway passage to the West.
He didn't want to go. He loathed the very thought of it. Every flinching nerve in him protested. A masked ball a masked ball at a Cairo hotel! Grimacing through peep-holes, self-conscious advances, flirtations ending in giggles! Tourists as nuns, tourists as Turks, tourists as God-knows-what, all preening and peacocking!
Larger peep-holes were soon cut away mysteriously in the high arbor-vitae hedge, and therein were often set for a few moments, when they passed that way, the eager eyes of Mrs. Martha or her daughter Flora or Fidelia Loomis.
The snowsheds of the Southern Pacific Railway come into sight, perched like peculiar long black boxes, with peep-holes, along an impossible ledge of the massive granite cliffs, and the Sierran trees tower upright from every possible vantage ground in the granite beneath.
Isaac Polhemus came first: Sixty years of age, silent, gray, thick-set; face scarred and seamed by many weathers, but fresh as a baby's; two china-blue eyes peep-holes through which you looked into his open heart; shoulders hard and tough as cordwood hands a bunch of knots; legs like snubbing-posts, body quick-moving; brain quick-thinking; alert as a dog when on duty, calm as a sleepy cat beside a stove when his time was his own.
They waved their trunks hopefully from side to side, and their little brown eyes, which seemed to have no relation to their bodies, peered out like prisoners out of the peep-holes of a monstrous moving prison.
The door was open, and they went right through to the rear. Up in the third story three little noses were flattened against the window pane, and three childish mouths were breathing peep-holes through which to keep a lookout for the expected Santa Claus. It was cold, for there was no fire in the room, but in their fever of excitement the children didn't mind that.
To give the pirates their due, at least a dozen men instantly sprang up on the poop, and rushed aft to replace the injured helmsman; but our people had been watching through a number of peep-holes what was happening, and no sooner did they see the Chinese on the poop than they leaped to their feet, and opened fire upon them with such murderous effect that half of them dropped, while the other half turned and fled from the poop, seeking shelter under cover of their craft's bulwarks.
Word Of The Day