Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 21, 2025
Odoacer was waiting for him. He was defeated and all Venetia fell into the hands of the Ostrogoth. Odoacer retreated to Verona, that red fortress on the Adige; once more and more certainly he was beaten. He retreated to Ravenna, while Theodoric advanced to Milan, to Milan which now led nowhere. Anon. After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of Odoacer's army under Tufa.
We may follow the same course, but our road offers an unusual distraction. It passes from the farmer's hall beneath a high glazed arch. Some thirty feet beyond, the path is stopped by a wall of tufa and stalactite which rises to the lofty roof, and compels the traveller to turn right or left. Water pours down it and falls trickling into a narrow pool beneath.
At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and black scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault of stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped out of the living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in walking and driving through the country.
Indeed, many parts are much like the Thames at the Isle of Dogs, only the Leeambye has to rise twenty or thirty feet before it can overflow some of its meadows. The rivers have each a bed of low water a simple furrow cut sharply out of the calcareous tufa which lined the channel of the ancient lake and another of inundation.
Older travellers tell us that it used to be exported to Naples and kept in the cellars of the best houses for the enjoyment of its fruit sometimes in lumps measuring two feet in diameter which, being soaked in water, produced these edible fungi. A stone yielding food a miracle! It is a porous tufa adapted, presumably, for sheltering and fecundating vegetable spores.
They are of all sizes, from a rope to a cable multiplied a thousandfold; and they stand out in boldest dado-relief where the soft background of tufa, or laterite, has been crumbled away by rain and storm-blast. Some writers have described them as ramifying like a tree and its branches, and crossing and interlacing like the ties of a building; as if sundry volcanic vents had a common centre below.
This would not be so unless the mountains had beneath them huge fires of burning sulphur or alum or asphalt. So the fire and the heat of the flames, coming up hot from far within through the fissures, make the soil there light, and the tufa found there is spongy and free from moisture.
The depth varies from 300 to 700 feet, and the diameter from 700 to 1,200. The walls of some are of a smooth grey stone, the bottoms flat, and very deep in sand, but others resemble the tufa cones of Mauna Kea. They are so crowded together in some places as to be divided only by a ridge so narrow that two mules can scarcely walk abreast upon it.
The little steps cut in the volcanic tufa or white pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold.
We proceeded slowly on our way by the villages of San Mateo, Turmero, and Maracay, to the Hacienda de Cura, a fine plantation belonging to Count Tovar, where we arrived on the evening of the fourteenth of February. The valley, which gradually widens, is bordered with hills of calcareous tufa, called here tierra blanca.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking