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


God-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably great and compelling. Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on. Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain.

He sat now in what little shadow there was, watching the figure of the Zappo Zap. Félix, the tent-pole finished, had slunk off westward, hunting about, or pretending to hunt for salvage.

It grew in size, and as it grew Adams fingered the triggers of the gun, and his lips became as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them and keep on licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his palate dry as his tongue. Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had come to speaking distance. Adams advanced to meet him.

Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.

The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the "soldiers" of the state by special leave from headquarters. Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing.

He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head. A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight. It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by.

A shout from Félix, and the Zappo Zap came running up the line; his head was flung up and he was sniffing the air. Then, walking beside Adams, he stared ahead right away over the country before them to the far skyline.

"Oh, I've been up to my eyeballs in what I've been doing !" Julia nearly hung up the phone, but decided she had to try one more trick before giving up. She leaned against the counter and tried to make her voice sound threatening. "Tell me where Seltsam is or I'll send you off God knows where!" There was a sobering silence at the other end. "What?" "You know what I mean. Zap! You're somewhere else.

As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that pronouncement on the spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool were lying just as he had seen them last.

How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!" and "Jump! Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!