Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
In other parts of the country, as in Izumo, farming was forbidden to samurai: they were not even allowed to hold rice-land, though they might own forest-land. But in various provinces they were permitted to farm, even while strictly forbidden to follow any other occupation, any trade or craft.... At no time did any degradation attach to the pursuit of agriculture.
Siege was laid to the treasury and all its inmates were burned, with the exception of one minor official to whom mercy was extended and who, in token of gratitude, presented twenty-five acres of rice-land to the o-muraji, Lord Otomo, commander of the investing force. The Emperor Seinei had no offspring, and for a time it seemed that the succession in the direct line would be interrupted.
The Malays are certainly not industrious; they have no need to be so, and their cultivation is rude. They plow the rice-land with a plow consisting of a pole eight feet long, with a fork protruding from one end to act as a coulter, and a bar of wood inserted over this at an oblique angle forms a guiding handle. This plow is drawn by the great water buffalo.
I will write rather of the voyage to China, and how I landed the motor on the wharf at Tientsin, and went up the river through a maize and rice-land most charming in spite of intense cold, I thick with clothes as an Arctic traveller; and of the three dreadful earthquakes within two weeks; and how the only map which I had of the city gave no indication of the whereabouts of its military depositories, and I had to seek for them; and of the three days' effort to enter them, for every gate was solid and closed; and how I burned it, but had to observe its flames, without deep pleasure, from beyond the walls to the south, the whole place being one cursed plain; yet how, at one moment, I cried aloud with wild banterings and glad laughters of Tophet to that old Chinaman still alive within it; and how I coasted, and saw the hairy Ainus, man and woman hairy alike; and how, lying one midnight awake in my cabin, the Speranza being in a still glassy water under a cliff overhung by drooping trees it was the harbour of Chemulpo to me lying awake came the thought: 'Suppose now you should hear a step walking to and fro, leisurely, on the poop above you just suppose'; and the night of horrors which I had, for I could not help supposing, and at one time really thought that I heard it: and how the sweat rolled and poured from my brow; and how I went to Nagasaki, and burned it; and how I crossed over the great Pacific deep to San Francisco, for I knew that Chinamen had been there, too, and one of them might be alive; and how, one calm day, the 15th or the 16th April, I, sitting by the wheel in the mid-Pacific, suddenly saw a great white hole that ran and wheeled, and wheeled and ran, in the sea, coming toward me, and I was aware of the hot breath of a reeling wind, and then of the hot wind itself, which deep-groaned the sound of the letter V, humming like a billion spinning-tops, and the Speranza was on her side, sea pouring over her port-bulwarks, and myself in the corner between deck and taffrail, drowning fast, but unable to stir; but all was soon past and the white hole in the sea, and the hot spinning-top of wind, ran wheeling beyond, to the southern horizon, and the Speranza righted herself: so that it was clear that someone wished to destroy me, for that a typhoon of such vehemence ever blew before I cannot think; and how I came to San Francisco, and how I burned it, and had my sweets: for it was mine; and how I thought to pass over the great trans-continental railway to New York, but would not, fearing to leave the Speranza, lest all the ships in the harbour there should be wrecked, or rusted, and buried under sea-weed, and turned unto the sea; and how I went back, my mind all given up now to musings upon the earth and her ways, and a thought in my soul that I would return to those deep places of the Filipinas, and become an autochthone a tree, or a snake, or a man with snake-limbs, like the old autochthones: but I would not: for Heaven was in man, too: Earth and Heaven; and how as I steamed round west again, another winter come, and I now in a mood of dismal despondencies, on the very brink of the inane abyss and smiling idiotcy, I saw in the island of Java the great temple of Boro Budor: and like a tornado, or volcanic event, my soul was changed: for my recent studies in the architecture of the human race recurred to me with interest, and three nights I slept in the temple, examining it by day.
At Batticaloa a "cheetah" in two instances in succession was known to carry off men placed on a stage erected in a tree to drive away elephants from rice-land: but such cases are rare, and, as compared with their dread of the bear, the natives of Ceylon entertain but slight apprehensions of the "cheetah."
The sea rose nearly twelve feet higher than it had ever been known to do before, and completely spoiled the only spots of rice-land in Sang'ir sweeping away houses and everything within its reach. The whirlwind lasted about an hour. No explosions were heard till the whirlwind had ceased, at about 11 P.M. From midnight till the evening of the 11th, they continued without intermission.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking