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


Little sunlight penetrated the dense curtain of brown and red leaves overhead, and what little flickered through had an electric brightness against the dead brown of the leaf-carpeted ground and the grey and hoary tree-trunks. Every bird that came to the tree-tops sang once, but it was only when he discovered his mistake, lifted his wings and careened away gladly into the upper light. "Whayee!"

The green dwarf leaped toward it, thrust us within, pushed us ahead of him up a steep rocky fissure well-nigh, indeed, a chimney. Up and up this we scrambled until my lungs were bursting and I thought I could climb no more. The crevice ended; we crawled out and sank, even Rador, upon a little leaf-carpeted clearing circled by lacy tree ferns.

Over stubble fields and leaf-carpeted lanes, with half frightened smiles upon their parted lips, Elfgiva and her fair ones kept up bravely; then across a stream into a thicket, over hollows and fallen logs, under low-hanging boughs, through brush and brier and bramble, leaping, dodging, tearing, crashing.

Bare as our leaf-carpeted bamboo-glade appeared, yet a select little company found life worth living there. The dry sand beneath the house was covered with the pits of ant-lions, and as we watched them month after month, they seemed to have more in common with the grains of quartz which composed their cosmos than with the organic world.

He wouldn't need much gear; it wasn't as if he was Robinson Crusoe, having to live off the land indefinitely. He'd be out twenty days, at the most. He would have to have some kind of shoes, though; his feet were simply too tender for him to walk fifty kilometers barefoot, even through this open, leaf-carpeted forest.

Taking a side street at the back of the military post, they soon reached a point over which frowned the ruins of the fort, and here they left their horses. After a brief climb to the northward they entered on an old road, grass-grown and leaf-carpeted, and soon passed through the gaping sally-port, on either side of which cone-like cedars stood as sentinels.

The hush of the evening had fallen; the light was faint; above the last rose flush a great star palely shone. All was quiet, deserted; nothing stirring on the leaf-carpeted slope; no sound save the distant singing of the slaves. The river lay bare from shore to shore, save where the Westover landing stretched raggedly into the flood.

One can become intimately acquainted with it, and learn to love its quiet solitude, only by living in or near it, and wandering at will through its trackless, leaf-carpeted aisles.