United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was pitch-dark, but they could hear the carriage tearing along until the sound became very distant; then in another moment the sound changed, as the vehicle turned on to the metalled road a couple of miles off. Then it died away altogether.
Some few were metalled, some were cart-ruts merely, some were open lanes of rank grass; and along most there went a horrible ditch, and in many fields the standing water proclaimed desolation. IN so far as I can be said to have had a way at all, I lost it. I could not ask my way because my only ultimate goal was Piacenza, and that was far off. I did not know the name of any place between.
Christchurch at this time was about fourteen years in existence. It consisted of only a few hundred houses, chiefly single-storeyed and entirely constructed of timber. The streets were well laid out, broad, and on the principle of the best modern towns, but few of them were as yet made or metalled.
The principal body was moving up what is called the main road from Deir Sineid, through Beit Jerjal to Julis, to get to Suafir esh Sherkiyeh, Kustineh, and Junction Station, from which they could reach Latron by a metalled road, or Ramleh by a hard mud track by the side of their railway.
The workshops were some 40 miles south of Baghdad and a mile or so from the Arab town; the town was out of bounds to us but a metalled road from there passed between our camp and the workshops; we only ever saw military traffic on it. Both camp and workshop compound were separately surrounded with barbed wire, three coil dannert and apron was the official name for it.
The transport problem was no less difficult. Beersheba, itself some thousand feet above the sea level, lies in a recess on the western slopes of the Judæan Hills. In the bed of this recess runs the Wadi Es Saba. Towards the north-east a good metalled road leads gradually to the summit of the hills and on through Hebron to Jerusalem. North-west a good road led along the enemy's front to Gaza.
And there I stood, and looked forth composedly, as may one who has been born to know of such matters, and reared in the knowledge of them. And, anon, I would look upward, and see the grey, metalled mountain going up measureless into the gloom of the everlasting night; and from my feet the sheer downward sweep of the grim, metal walls, six full miles, and more, to the plain below.
It extends for nearly sixteen hundred miles, an unbroken highway of marvellous perfection, from Peshawur on the Afghan frontier to Calcutta. It is metalled for much of its length with a substance peculiar to the country, known as kunkah. Kunkah is obtained almost anywhere throughout the Land of the Five Rivers, underlying the surface soil.
The uphill and downhill of Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by détour and zigzag. But here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far worse metalled than with us in England knotty masses of talc and nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings that only Dante's words describe the journey:
Thus a man who is true, upright, respected, a man to be depended on, is called a pucca man. It is a word in constant use among Anglo-Indians. A pucca road is one which is bridged and metalled. If you make an engagement with a friend, and he wants to impress you with its importance, he will ask you, Now is that pucca? and so on.
Word Of The Day