Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
I can conceive may God avert the omen! centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires a world- spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were but clumsy and impotent.
You were tricked by the sound into almost believing you could see them. The six-inch shells passed with a whistling roar that was quite terrifying. It was as though just above you invisible telegraph-wires had jangled, and their rush through the air was like the roar that rises to the car window when two express-trains going in opposite directions pass at sixty miles an hour.
Such were Nagendra's thoughts as he was borne on in his palanquin; its doors were open, the night was lightened by the October moon, stars shone in the sky. The telegraph-wires by the wayside hummed in the wind; but on that night not even a star could seem beautiful in the eyes of Nagendra, even the moonlight seemed harsh. All things seemed to give pain. The earth was cruel.
The only trumpets freely allowed are of a musical sort, fit to amuse the people, the only spectacles, green goggles to keep out the glare of truth's sunshine, the magnifying-glasses, those which exaggerate the proportions of the imperial governor of the machinery. All sorts of moral lightning-rods and telegraph-wires are arrested, and lie in great piles outside the city walls.
The office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed that fed on men.
Then there are mud huts, and palatial residences, and streets of stately dwelling-houses, shaded by avenues of ilanthus-trees; waggons discharging goods across the pavements; shops above and cellars below; railway whistles and steamboat bells, telegraph-wires, eight and ten to a post, all converging towards Wall Street the Lombard Street of New York; militia regiments in many-coloured uniforms, marching in and out of the city all day; groups of emigrants bewildered and amazed, emaciated with dysentery and sea-sickness, looking in at the shop-windows; representatives of every nation under heaven, speaking in all earth's Babel languages; and as if to render this ceaseless pageant of business, gaiety, and change, as far removed from monotony as possible, the quick toll of the fire alarm-bells may be daily heard, and the huge engines, with their burnished equipments and well- trained companies, may be seen to dash at full speed along the streets to the scene of some brilliant conflagration.
"Yes, it's too easy to get hold of liquids out there, that's the worst of it," the pilot went on. "But for that any booby could manage a ship. He's only got to keep well to the right of Mads Hansen's farm, and he's got a straight road before him. And the deuce of a fine road! Telegraph-wires and ditches and a row of poplars on each side just improved by the local board.
"From the roof of Wyatt's Buildings you know the spot? I saw the second yellow devil coming. By God! They meant to have it to-night! They don't value their lives a brass farthing against that damned slipper!" "But how " "Along the telegraph-wires, Mr. Cavanagh! They cross Wyatt's Buildings and cross this house. It was a moonless night or we should have seen it at once!
He watched a row of small birds sitting on the telegraph-wires just outside the station, and all at once the London train came gliding rapidly and unexpectedly out of the cutting close by, and was there.
For a long while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music. Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by rich meadows.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking