Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
Our efforts to fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard were as ill-conceived as that sort of work can be and that sort of work can at times be very ill-conceived. The captain had a superstitious fear of his hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and incompetent at the bare thought of it.
I've still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth's appearance in the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye the other was a closed and sunken lid and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible story of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned or undiscovered on the beach behind Mordet's Island among white dead mangroves and the black ooze of brackish water.
These are questions I have never answered, that now I never attempt to answer, but the thought of quap and its mysteries brings them back to me.
There was little for me to do once the digging and wheeling was organised, and so these prowlings of mine grew longer and longer, and presently I began to take food with me. I pushed these walks far beyond the area desolated by the quap.
I found the little man alone in the inner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was looking yellow and deflated. "Lord!" he said at the sight of me. "You're lean, George. It makes that scar of yours show up." We regarded each other gravely for a time. "Quap," I said, "is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There's some bills We've got to pay the men." "Seen the papers?"
The sky was overcast I discovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at the faint quivering luminosity that had spread over the heaps of quap, a phosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And about the beach east and west there were patches and streaks of something like diluted moonshine....
She was a beast of a brig, all hold and dirty framework, and they had ballasted her with old iron and old rails and iron sleepers, and got a miscellaneous lot of spades and iron wheelbarrows against the loading of the quap.
Confound it, uncle! Its Gordon-Nasmyth! Sit down. What is it? Minerals?" "Quap," said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, "in heaps." "In heaps," said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique. "You're only fit for the grocery," said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully, sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle's cigars. "I'm sorry I came.
And the air felt at once hot and austere, dry and blistering, and altogether different the warm moist embrace that had met us at our first African landfall and to which we had grown accustomed. I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to increase the conductivity of our nerves, but that is a mere unjustifiable speculation on my part.
But, still, now I'm here.... And first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most radio-active stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk provisionally. There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don't know.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking