Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 21, 2025
"The man's a dangerous ruffian, who sticks at nothing. I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad thing to put a rope round the chest and tow it alongside for half an hour; then we could open it at our ease. Or if we just tied the box up and kept him from getting any water maybe that would do as well. Or the carpenter could put a coat of varnish over it and stop all the blow-holes."
Judging from the growth of saltbush and other herbage it would seem likely that the rainfall on these elevated plains is considerable, and apparently runs to waste down blow-holes and cracks in the limestone.
Internal troubles prevail for longer periods still; and these, in their unsupportable agony, bend and burst the solid strata overlying; vomit fire through their self-made blow-holes, rear mountains from the depths of the sea, then dash them in pieces. "Time strides on austere. "The globe still cools. Life appears upon it.
They were like silver cords swaying in the wind, and when brought nearer by the glasses, I saw that some of them were heavy torrents while others, gauzy as wisps of chiffon, hardly veiled the black walls behind them. The whole island dripped. The air was saturated, the decks were wet, and along the shelves of basalt that jutted from the cliffs a hundred blow-holes spouted and roared.
Both kinds grow to an enormous size sometimes to seventy feet in length, but there is considerable difference in their appearance, especially about the head. In a former chapter I have partly described the head of a right whale, which has whalebone instead of teeth, with its blow-holes on the back of the head. The sperm whale has large white teeth in its lower-jaw and none at all in the upper.
Shutting his throat then, as he does, the water is obliged to flow out of his mouth as fast as it flows in; it is also spouted up through his blow-holes, and this with such violence that many of the little creatures would be swept out along with it, but for the hairy-ended whalebone which lets the sea-water out, but keeps the medusae in. Well, let us return to our "cutting-in."
The place into which we gazed was a pit, and may, in the early days, have been one of the smaller volcanic blow-holes of the plateau. It was bowl-shaped and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bullrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante.
She was heavy and she could do no fancy sailing; but having the wind with her she rushed down upon the lone whale like a steamship. Soon we could see the undulating black hump of the whale from the deck. We saw an occasional spurt of water, or mist, from its blow-holes. By and by it breached and was out of sight for a short time.
Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from its blow-holes columns of water mixed with air and vapour.
Whales, spouting jets of feathery water from their blow-holes, appeared at a distance, and I remarked that all them took a southerly direction. There was therefore reason to believe that the sea extended far and wide in that direction. The schooner covered two or three miles of her course without any increase of speed. This coast evidently Stretched from north-west to south-east.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking