United States or Mauritius ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A few inches more metalling, perhaps, another generation of menders, and so on. The traffic, of course, was different, for the traffic is the world. Indeed, when you stop and reflect, you will see that a great road like this one I was walking on that warm spring day, is a pulsing artery.
This includes not only the actual cost of maintenance, but very extensive improvements, such as the metalling of the road from the so-called zigzag to Baguio, the construction of five steel bridges, and the replacing of all the original bridges on the road and of all the original culverts except those made of concrete or masonry.
Half a dozen Kru-boys with their matchets can open, at the rate of some miles a day, a path fit to carry a 'sulky; and the ground wants only metalling with the stone which lines every stream. At the same time I hold that here, as in Mexico, we should begin with railways and tramways. Nor will there be any difficulty in keeping down the jungle.
The two men exchanged few words as they drove up to the new quarter in the direction indicated to the driver by Contini. The cab entered a sort of broad lane, the sketch of a future street, rough with the unrolled metalling of broken stones, the space set apart for the pavement being an uneven path of trodden brown earth.
In places the metalling broke through, making holes similar to holes in thick ice, with well-defined margin. These were filled to the brim with water, and churned into deep pits by the wheels of loaded wagons. It required watchfulness to see them, as the whole surface of the road was flowing with slush and mud.
Telford pursued the same system that he had adopted in the formation of the Carlisle and Glasgow road, as regards metalling, cross-draining, and fence-walling; for the latter purpose using schistus, or slate rubble-work, instead of sandstone.
Houses seven stories high, abandoned within a month of completion rise uninhabited and uninhabitable out of a rank growth of weeds, amidst heaps of rubbish, staring down at the broad, desolate streets where the vigorous grass pushes its way up through the loose stones of the unrolled metalling.
It is the best ground of all, especially where the yellow or brown sands are overlaid by hard gravel, or by a natural metalling of trap and other stones. Wa'r the broken stony surface, over which camels either cannot travel, or travel with difficulty: it is the horror of the Bedawi; and, when he uses the word, it usually means that it causes man to dismount.
The want of metalling, and the consequent fearful ruts and sloughs, drove vehicles and travellers further and further from what was the original line, till they formed a track perhaps a score or two of yards wide. When fields became more generally enclosed it was still only in patches, and these strips and spaces of green sward were left utterly uncared for and unnoticed.
The first rise of sandy yellow loam showed the normal Gold Coast metalling of iron-stone and quartz-gravel, thinly spread with water-rounded pebbles. Then the path, very badly laid out, merged into a second foul morass, whose depths were crossed by the rudest of bridges, single and double trunks of felled or fallen trees. Nothing easier than to corduroy this mauvais pas.
Word Of The Day