United States or British Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Below us lay a narrow valley or gorge, about a mile broad, separating us from the low range of hills on the far side of which lay Bideshk. The depth of the snow we were about to make a way through was easily calculated by the telegraph-posts, which in places were covered to within two or three feet of the top.
Ottensen smiled, well pleased, and said: "Well, perhaps so!" "They climb the trees well," continued the artilleryman. "I should think so!" said Ottensen. "Trees, corn-stacks, church-towers, roofs of houses, telegraph-posts, and devil knows what besides mountain-tops too, only there aren't any hereabouts." "Perhaps there will be during the manœuvres."
Cocking my revolver, I called to Gerôme, and was answered by a volley of oaths, while another riderless horse galloped past me and disappeared in the darkness. Our foe was a harmless one. The wind had blown down one of the telegraph-posts, and the wires had done the mischief.
The grassy slope rose up, and a number of geometrical lines, as it were, stood out blackly against the grey sky; there were telegraph-posts, connected by thin wires, a superintendent's box, and a red signal plate, the only bright throbbing speck visible.
There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind.
It is clean and unharried. Man can murder orchards and habitations the things which man plants and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside the cement telegraph-posts have been broken off short; some of them lie flat along the ground, others hang limply in the bent shape of hairpins.
He got swift glimpses of other cabs and foot-passengers, the trees seemed to flit past like telegraph-posts on a railway, the barges and lighters on the river dropped one by one behind them: it was a fair course for a race, with never a check before Blackfriar’s Bridge. As they turned into Queen Victoria Street he opened the lid and asked, “Are they still in sight?”
So that although the Spark will stick to his wires when insulated on telegraph-posts on land, he will bolt from them at once and take to flight the moment he gets under water. This difficulty was overcome by coating the wires with gutta-percha, which, being a non-conductor, imprisoned the Spark, and kept him, as it were, on the line.
On the gate-posts, at the entrance, were the nests of two oven-birds, like those we had already seen on the telegraph-posts, so exactly spherical as to look like ornaments. In one of the shrubberies a fine jaguar was shut up in a cage, who looked very like a tiger.
You'll get erysipelas and die. Most dangerous to move with a face like that, he said. I insisted upon his taking the stitches out of my face and ultimately he had to give in. At 6 p.m. I was in the train for London, watching the telegraph-posts flying past me. "My mind was going over every possibility.
Word Of The Day