United States or Papua New Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
One could see how far they fell short by the clouds of smoke that hung suspended beneath it, floating like shadowy balloons. I felt that the aëroplane had its eyes on my car. They drop darts do the aëroplanes two hundred and more at a time; small pencil-shaped arrows of steel, six inches long, extremely sharp and weighted at the point end. I did not want to die by a dart.
Dictation exercises were turned to account in the study of grammar and orthography, and writing was taught by imitation, though the "copy-book" was not paper, but a tablet covered with a thin coating of wax, and the pen a stylus, pencil-shaped, sharp at one end and flat at the other, so that the mark made by the point might be smoothed out by reversing the instrument.
Jack and Frank saw all this, soaring above the sea, a part of it, and yet not a part of it, for so far they had had little to do. Pierre, seated in front of Jack, suddenly uttered a shout. Following the direction of the pilot's eyes, Jack perceived a great, gray, pencil-shaped object approaching through the air. He recognized it instantly a German war dirigible, sent to help the Austrians.
Within were to be had stores of toy canoes graceful little things hewn after the Haida model, with prows and sides painted in strange hieroglyphics; paddles were there life-size, so to speak, gorgeously dyed, and just the things for hall decorations; also dishes of carved wood of quaint pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles, grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained with subdued dyes the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even the big horn-spoon itself was no doubt made by these ingenious people; Indian masks of wood, inlaid with abalone shells, bears' teeth, or lucky stones from the head of the catfish; Indian wampum; deer-skin sacks filled with the smooth, pencil-shaped sticks with which the native sport passes the merry hours away in games of chance; bangles without end, and rings of the clumsiest description hammered out of silver coin; bows and arrows; doll papooses, totem poles in miniature.
From the house-top above the first floor, on to which we went last, there was at least a view of a thousand flat white roofs, of pencil-shaped minarets, of turtle-backed mosques; but at the same time the sun itself could not be more dazzling to look at than was the impossible whitewash which besmeared all the roofs, and we soon left for our first floor, in whose four little dark rooms we proposed to live.
The women are expert divers for oysters, which are found in great abundance in the Lualaba. Rua, at a place called Katanga, is rich in copper. The copper-mines of this place have been worked for ages. In the bed of a stream, gold has been found, washed down in pencil-shaped pieces or in particles as large as split peas.
Word Of The Day