United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The tropical heat during the day and the low temperature at night, the frequent rainstorms from the north, the camping on bare and often wet ground, the ever increasing want of pure water and fresh provisions, the immense masses of dust, which, cloudlike, hung over the marching columns all these difficulties put together had sapped the strength of the soldiers already at the beginning of the campaign.
Now that African proverb is very suggestive. 'No rain, no mushrooms. The mushroom, that is to say, has its roots away back in old rainstorms, in fallen forests, and in ancient climatic experiences too subtle to trace. I have been reading Dr. Cooke's text-book, and he and Mr. Cuthill have convinced me that it takes about a million years to grow a mushroom.
I've be'n out in some considerable rainstorms, take it first an' last, but I never seen it come down solid before. A fish could swim anywheres through this." "The creek is rising," answered the girl. "Yes, an' we ain't goin' to cross it many more times. In the canyon she'll be belly-deep to a giraffe, an' we got to figure a way out of the coulee 'fore we get to it."
When the sultry summer air has become pregnant with poisonous vapors and miasmas, atmospheric crises, such as rainstorms, thunder, lightning and electric storms, cool and purify the air and charge it anew with life-giving ozone. In like manner will healing crises purify the disease-laden bodies of men.
To add to our troubles up came one of the hardest rainstorms, such as only Long Island can produce. As there was no other place, we were compelled to quarter in the old barn which was later turned into a guard house, where we slept on bare boards. Not a wisp of straw had we to lie on, for it was so rainy we could not gather any.
In these dark days he would sit crouching over the wood-fire in the little salon, or lie drawn to the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.
Consequently, when we were visited by rainstorms, and it does rain in Germany, rendering a British torrential downpour a Scotch mist by comparison, the rain water, unable to escape, gathered in this depression, forming a respectable pond, with the booth or stores standing, a dejected island, in the middle. If the storm were unduly heavy this pond assumed imposing dimensions.
We encountered several rainstorms, and once during the last week it snowed a little. Except for the storms, the wind held steady, a gentle breeze from the colder regions in front blowing back toward the Light Country behind us. During the latter days of our journey I noticed a curious change in the ground.
The sides of these nullahs were sheer cliffs often fifteen feet or more in depth so that they became really formidable obstacles to progress, though excellent places for shelter from artillery fire. They were the result, we supposed, of the sudden heavy winter rainstorms rushing down the hill sides, but for 350 days out of the 365 they were completely dry. During this time the Staff were not idle.
And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat, seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul litter. Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted telegraph wires.
Word Of The Day