United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For one thing I hate breaking up a plan of combined foot-travel; it seems to me hard on one's native fellow-travelers, on whom one is apt to call for big efforts. To ride on ahead, and leave them struggling alone with the sandy monster of a road for any long distance, seems vile desertion, and I was by no means sure that the invitation to board the train included them.
There was a heronry among the trees on the edge of it, but otherwise the marsh was not used save as a storehouse for the basket-makers. They made paniers, hampers, mews or wicker cages in which the hunting birds were kept when moulting, and even small boats from the osiers and reeds. But the greater part of the swamp was impassable to a boat and too insecure for foot-travel.
The nutritious properties of the banana are far in excess of any other known vegetable food. African explorers have told the author that in an emergency, when threatened with famine, they have sustained life and strength for themselves and their followers upon two bananas a day for six consecutive days, all the time engaged in the hardest sort of foot-travel through the pathless forest.
It floods the banks, extends in great lagoons over a monstrous waste of country, and forms a huge district, called locally the Gapo, which is for the most part too marshy for foot-travel and too shallow for boating. About June the waters begin to fall, and are at their lowest at October or November.
The lad had shot up in these few months into the full stature, without the breadth, of manhood. The first soft, uneven curls of a light-brown beard were on his thin cheek and chin. Patient weariness and humble perseverance were in his eyes. His coarse, ill-matched attire was whole and, but for the soilure of foot-travel, clean.
A railroad spans it with an iron trussed bridge, and the demands of wagon and foot-travel are met by an airy one suspended by cables from tower-like abutments on either side, both bridges swung high in the air, out of reach of flood and of the smoke-stacks of passing steam-craft.
Word Of The Day