Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 21, 2025
Even within comparatively recent years the estuary of the Gannel, now sand-locked, was navigable for large fishing-craft; and the "new quay" of the prosperous neighbour points indirectly to a time when there was an old quay here. In the sand-flats and rocks around the river-mouth it is possible to trace signs of old shipping, old mooring-rings, and curious excavations.
We anchored on just such a day as this has been, off a little old river-mouth, so badly silted that she had to lie well out. A chief in a campong half a day inland had promised to send some specimens down that evening, armor, harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats.
The gates of the river-mouth are the Stepper Point, with its white day-mark, and Pentire Point; the Doom Bar lies well within these, almost blocking the passage, which, with vessels of any draught, must be made on the Stepper side. The name Doom Bar is, of course, provocative of legend, and an appropriate one has been found.
And as I hearkened, every individual timber seemed to find a voice, and what with this and the uneasy pitching and rolling of the ship I judged we were well under weigh and beyond the river-mouth. "What, Mart'n pal," says he, sitting beside me on my berth and setting down the food and drink he had brought, "are ye waking at last?" "Have I slept long, Godby?"
By this we were all so used to M. Radisson's doings, 'twould not have surprised us when the craft shot out from river-mouth to open sea if he had ordered us to circumnavigate the ocean on a chip. He did what was nigh as venturesome.
"The river-mouth looked deserted enough; on either bank it was bare of trees a bald and bleak expanse of withered scrub, affording little cover. It would be difficult for any man to approach me, without being seen before he had come within gun-range. I followed along the left-hand bank, which I had been travelling, till I reached the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join.
At the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station; and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat.
And as the grey wharves recede, a long Aaaaaaaaaa rises from the uniformed ranks, and all the caps wave, flashing their Chinese ideographs of brass. The packet glides out of the river-mouth, shoots into the blue lake, turns a pine-shadowed point, and the faces, and the voices, and the wharves, and the long white bridge have become memories.
They throw the continent open; they are doors and windows, through which the nations look forth upon the world, and leave and enter their own household. They are the hospitality of the continent, every river-mouth chanting out over the sea a perpetual, "Walk in," to all the world.
And afterwards the shark died and was washed ashore at the river-mouth of Saru; and the tip of the harpoon made half of iron and half of bone had stuck in its flesh; and it had felt in its body the reverberation of the hammering of the iron and the scraping of the bone; and in its skin were growing the rasupa-tree and the shiuri-tree of which the spear-handle used by Okikurumi was made, and the hai-grass by which the tip of the harpoon was tied to the body of it, and the nipesh-tree of which the rope tying the harpoon itself was made; and even the carrion-crows and the dogs and foxes would not eat the bad shark, but only voided their fœces upon him; and at last he rotted away to earth.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking