Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
So some of the party stepped upon a solid platform about six feet square, lying under a trap in the floor overhead, and were slowly wound up to the mixing-room, feeling quite sure, when they stepped upon the solid floor once more, that they had done a very heroic thing, and were not hereafter to be dismayed by travellers' tales of descents into coal-mines, or swinging to the tops of dizzy spires in creaking baskets.
Its aspect now is that of a place of dignity and importance left to loneliness and the quiet wear of time; like an antique mansion of a noble not quite allowed to decay, but merely existing shorn of its full glories. “Nürnberg with its long, narrow, winding, involved streets, its precipitous ascents and descents, its completely Gothic physiognomy is by far the strangest old city I ever beheld; it has retained in every part the aspect of the Middle Ages.
The two merchants touch each other on the right shoulder, one of them passes in, and his friend goes on through the moonlight, his servant's lantern dancing ahead. But here we are in an open space looking down one of the descents to El Attarine.
"Sir Arthur may consider what he pleases," answered the Highlander scornfully; "but any one with common sense will consider that the wife takes rank from the husband, and that my father's pedigree of fifteen unblemished descents must have ennobled my mother, if her veins had been filled with printer's ink."
Then there are softer descents, slippery with damp, and perilous in heavy rains, down which they slide dexterously, gathering all their legs under them. On a few of these tracks a false step means death, but the vegetation which clothes the pali below, blinds one to the risk.
It was no easy matter to wade through the snow; but, fortunately, the stars gave me sufficient light to keep in the right path as I dashed down the mountain to Blankenburg. How often I plunged into ditches filled with snow and slid down short descents I don't know; but as I write these lines I can vividly remember the relief with which I at last trod the pavement of the little town.
One stretch of three and a half miles we ran in fifteen minutes. There were numerous whirlpools, but nothing to stop our triumphant progress. On the 2d of September there were two portages, and twenty rapids run, in the fifteen miles made during the day. Many of these rapids were very heavy descents. That night we camped above a bad-looking place, but it was decided to run it in the morning.
It was of course impossible to foresee where these descents would be made, but as soon as an attack was heard of assistance was always promptly rendered, and every now and then we succeeded in killing a few savages. As a general thing, though, the raiders escaped before relief arrived, and when they had a few miles the start, all efforts to catch them were futile.
The wide sweep of the heath-clad hills whose gradual descents form the spacious glen, and the broad and brawling stream careering through its centre, give the place an air of solitude and of quiet repose that, notwithstanding its monotony, is exceedingly impressive.
The scenery was grand, and for the artist no doubt full of attractions; but for Europeans, driven like cattle by semi-barbarians, the precipitous descents and steep acclivities had certainly no charms. Another couple of hours' march brought us to the gate's of Begemder.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking