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


The rounded top of Ashingdon hill seemed to tower higher than its wont, and close at hand, beyond the swampy meadows to our left, and I wondered that Cnut had not chosen that for his camping ground, though maybe it would have been less well placed for reaching the ships, owing to some shoaling of water that did not suit them.

After encountering some high fences and swampy ground, we came to a narrow rocky pathway in a wood, with bright green, moss-covered trees, stones, and earth. On descending a rocky bank we came to the "natural staircase," where the rapid Montmorenci forces its way through a bed of limestone, the broken but extremely regular appearance of the layers being very much like wide steps.

But I should say he has been letting himself in for constant exposure to extreme heat by day, and to swampy dampness by night; not taking proper food; living in a whirl of excited imagination with no rational companionship to form an outlet; and, on the top of all this, contracted some malarial germ, which has put up his temperature and destroyed the power of natural sleep.

Let us set out on a journey from Timbuktu, and let us go first eastwards to the singular Lake Chad, which is half filled with islands, is shallow and swampy, choked with reeds, rises and falls with the discharge of the great rivers which flow into it, and has a certain similarity to Lop-nor in Central Asia.

The road traversed a low swampy country, from which the rank moisture arose in a hot palpable mist, and crossed several shallow lagoons, from two to six feet deep of tepid, muddy, brackish water, some of them half a mile broad, and swarming with wild waterfowl.

At midday they rested for an hour and a half, and then, feeling almost worn out, continued their journey, reckoning that they could not be more than sixteen or seventeen miles from Mooifontein. It was about two hours after this that the catastrophe happened. The course they were following ran down the side of one land wave, then across a little swampy sluit, and up the opposite slope.

Most of the dilapidated houses were replaced by handsome new edifices, having long and elegant balconies fronting the first floors, at an elevation of several feet above the roadway. The large, swampy squares had been drained, weeded, and planted with rows of almond and casuarina trees, so that they were now a great ornament to the city, instead of an eyesore as they formerly were.

He thought of Vivia sitting far away and looking out upon the quiet starlight night; then he thought of swampy midnight lairs, with maddened men in fevered covert there, of little children crying for their mothers, of girls betrayed to hell, of flesh and blood at price, of blistering, crisping fagot and stake to-day, of all the anguish and despair down there before him.

Any strollers in their vicinity would keep near the river or the lake; but the former had swampy shores in many places, and was both so crooked and so fringed with bushes, that it was quite possible to move by daylight without incurring much danger of being seen.

Below this point there was a network of rivers, and but few villages, and the country was swampy and unhealthy.