Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
If in an ordinary ship you replace the shrouds and backstay by strong timbers, and take away the mast altogether, you have the arrangement adopted on board a prau. Above my cabin, and resting on cross-beams attached to the masts, was a wilderness of yards and spars, mostly formed of bamboo.
At the head of each bed hung a rough little cross of dark wood later, as carving became more general, a crucifix and a bit of an olive branch preserved from Palm Sunday throughout the year. The walls themselves were scrupulously whitewashed; the ceilings were of heavy beams, supporting lighter cross-beams, on which in turn thick boards were laid to carry the cement floor of the room overhead.
The captain's orders could be heard plainly and clearly. Then the cross stood up straight. At first the long stake was seen above their heads, bearing a white placard. Then the cross-beams appeared on which trembling human arms were seen, then the head moving in agonising pain. Thus did the cross with the naked human body rise in the air.
It was stayed like the gallery of a mine, with a row of stanchions in the middle, and cross-beams overhead, penetrating into the gloom ahead indefinitely. And to port there loomed, like the caving in of one of the sides, a bulky mass with a slanting outline. The whole place, with the shadows and the shapes, moved all the time.
So in a few days' time nothing remained to him but his practice, the sums that were due to him, and the house in which he lived. Chesnel, stripped of all his lands, paced to and fro in his private office, paneled with dark oak, his eyes fixed on the beveled edges of the chestnut cross-beams of the ceiling, or on the trellised vines in the garden outside.
But he has no need to slow up, for occasional cross-beams stick out far enough to admit of standing out of reach, and when he comes up alongside, he and the fireman look out of the window of the cab and see me squatting on the end of one of these handy beams, and letting the bicycle hang over.
"Well, you see," Pierre said to Brydon one day, as they sat on the high cross-beams of the little bridge, "you can't kill it in a man what he was born. Look, as he piles up the driftwood over there. Broken down, eh? Yes, but then there is something a manner, an eye. He piles the wood like champagne bottles. On the raft, you remember, he took off his hat to death.
The two principal beams of the ceiling, and the three visible cross-beams of support, had not even been whitewashed, and they were blackened by smoke and worm-eaten, while, through the openings of the broken plaster, here and there, the laths of the inner joists could be seen.
What a curious complication of cross-beams is presented in the fronts of the houses!—a barring and binding of huge timbers, with their angles filled in with red bricks. How simple and neat is everything!—the clean stone steps leading up to the principal entrance of each house, and the humbler flight which conducts you to the kellar and kitchen.
In this there was a seine, or part of one, festooned among the cross-beams overhead, and there were snarled fishing-lines, and barrows to carry fish in, like wheelbarrows without wheels; there were the queer round lobster-nets, and "kits" of salt mackerel, tubs of bait, and piles of clams; and some queer bones, and parts of remarkable fish, and lobster-claws of surprising size fastened on the walls for ornament.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking