Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
That fabric covering you was woven from the masses of filaments that anchor certain seashells; as the ancients were wont to do, it was dyed with purple ink from the murex snail and shaded with violet tints that I extract from a marine slug, the Mediterranean sea hare. The perfumes you'll find on the washstand in your cabin were produced from the oozings of marine plants.
Among other specimens in these two branches, I noted some windowpane oysters with thin valves of unequal size, a type of ostracod unique to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, then orange-hued lucina with circular shells, awl-shaped auger shells, some of those Persian murex snails that supply the Nautilus with such wonderful dye, spiky periwinkles fifteen centimeters long that rose under the waves like hands ready to grab you, turban snails with shells made of horn and bristling all over with spines, lamp shells, edible duck clams that feed the Hindu marketplace, subtly luminous jellyfish of the species Pelagia panopyra, and finally some wonderful Oculina flabelliforma, magnificent sea fans that fashion one of the most luxuriant tree forms in this ocean.
The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. Two poems, and each of them a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. One, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, is a singularly successful tour de force, if it is no more.
It's a sort of murex and there's another kind that they catch at Sidon and then, of course, there's the kind that's used for the dibaptha. But that's quite different. It's 'Hold your tongue! shouted the skipper. And the man held it. The laden boat was rowed slowly round the end of the island, and was made fast in one of the two great harbours that lay inside a long breakwater.
The rich fisheries of its gulf, the production and manufacture of its excellent wool, and the dyeing of it with the purple juice of the Tarentine -murex-, which rivalled that of Tyre both branches of industry introduced there from Miletus in Asia Minor employed thousands of hands, and added to the carrying trade a traffic of export.
Because of his great happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio of which this day was the design. The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
As for the local fauna, it included thousands of crustaceans of every type: lobsters, hermit crabs, prawns, mysid shrimps, daddy longlegs, rock crabs, and a prodigious number of seashells, such as cowries, murex snails, and limpets. In this locality there gaped the mouth of a magnificent cave. My companions and I took great pleasure in stretching out on its fine-grained sand.
It is called by several different names, such as the Murex, Tenuispina, or Thin Spined Murex; The Thorny Woodcock; and Venus's Comb. It lives in the Indian Ocean, which, you know, is many thousand miles off from where we live.
Its long line of coast fronted the semi-barbarous populations of Asia Minor, of the Ægean, and of the northern shores of Africa, while the sea furnished it with the purple dye of the murex. The country itself formed the high-road and link between the great kingdoms of the Euphrates and the Nile.
The jungle is in consequence advancing close upon the city, which is thus rendered almost uninhabitable from malaria the only manufacturers which continue to flourish being those of violins, bracelets, made from a peculiar shell resembling the Murex tulipa, and idols for Hindoo worship!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking