United States or Pakistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This man saw the present war; he saw that Belgium would be invaded by Germany; he saw that the Germans hated England with a profound and bitter hate; that German diplomatic blunders had placed that nation in almost complete isolation in the world; that the Triple Alliance was really only a Dual Alliance, popular feeling in Italy becoming increasingly hostile to Austria and to Prussia; that Germans felt their culture to be superior to the civilization of the rest of the world, and themselves to be a superior race, with the right to rule other peoples; that Prussianism and Junkerism and militarism were in complete control of the German soul; that Germany had ambitions for world empire, a recurrence of “the old Napoleonic dream”; that the danger to European peace lay with Germany and not with England; that Germans believed war to be essentially moral and the mainspring of national progress; that the whole German people had become Bismarckian; that the Germans hoped to obtain by a victory over England that shadowless place in the sun toward which they began to leap when they beat France in 1870.
The man had undoubtedly possessed the bird's nest which communicates its charm of invisibility to its possessor, though not equally so to his shadow; and this nest he had now thrown away. I looked all round, and soon discovered the shadow of this invisible nest. I sprang towards it, and was fortunate enough to seize the precious booty, and immediately became invisible and shadowless.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel.
No sooner had the moon reached its utmost height, shrouding the lands in a shadowless vortex, than a great blaze erupted from the northern lands, and it rose almost instantly to its estimated height of five miles.
Bendel, pale and trembling, but more discreet than I, gave me a sign. I sought refuge in the all-silencing gold; but that too had lost its power. He threw it at my feet. "From a shadowless man I accept nothing!" He turned his back upon me, and went most deliberately out of the room with his hat upon his head, and whistling a tune.
Swift and shadowless as the thought of her own brave heart, she ran. Her sense of power and speed was glorious. She felt not thought herself a human goddess, the daughter of the Eternal. Up height and down hollow she flew, running her race with death, not an open eye, save the eyes of her father and mother, within miles of her in a world of sleep and snow and night.
Behind and before, look as they would, they could see only the weird white hills of sand, treeless, almost shadowless now, the seahorses foaming and plunging in endless line, and between them the road, whose apparent narrowing in the far perspective was but an emblem of the truth that the waves were encroaching upon it inch by inch.
And no wonder, for indeed his lordship's presence in the actual world made a poor show beside that of the painter in the ideal world of the woman who, if she could not with truth be said to love him, yet certainly had a powerful fancy for him: the mean phrase is good enough, even although the phantom of Lenorme roused in her all the twilight poetry of her nature, and the presence of Liftore set her whole consciousness in the perpendicular shadowless gaslight of prudence and self protection.
But you could feel the wood more in my gun: so that it was difficult to keep the hand off it, though the rabbits would not come out; and the shadowless recess grew like a furnace, for it focussed the rays of the sun.
All the soft perfumes of wood and field seem beaten to the ground by this rain which brings with its salt tang faint breathings of some distant spiciness. The gray light of the lower spaces goes up into the clouds and in the dusk below shadowless shrubs take on strange shapes. The pasture edge is familiar no longer.
Word Of The Day