United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Still there were toys left, toys in abundance; the wondrous benefactors passed slowly on, always going up, up into the huddled village streets tunnelled in rock or arched with stone, where eager, astonished faces peered from the mystery of shadowed doorways, and the hum of joy and admiration swelled to a sound like the murmur of the sea. Of grown folk there were not many.
Coal is said to be very abundant in this neighborhood, and many excavations have been made in the surrounding hills, some of them having been tunnelled over forty feet, and a distinct stratum exhibited of about four feet thick, hard and easily detached, lying between blue soft shale and sandstone.
The gully was prospected from top to bottom, and the hills on both sides were tunnelled, but no more gold, and no reefs were found. There was much speculation by geologists, mining experts, and old duffers as to the manner in which the gold had contrived to get into the creek, and where it came from; where it went to, the diggers who carried it away in their pockets knew well enough.
But the dog had soon had enough of her arms; he broke free, sprang, alighted, and rolled over, and arose sniffing, with earth on his black muzzle.... He looked up at her inquiringly.... Strange, short-frocked blue figure looking down at him! She had a bulging forehead; her brown eyes were tunnelled underneath it. But what living eyes, what ardent eyes, that blazed up and sank like a fire!
From this nearest line he tunnelled to and under Pegram's salient, and deposited in a magazine prepared for it not less than four tons of powder, some of their officers say it was six tons. We knew the enemy were mining, and we sunk a shaft on each side of the four-gun battery, ten feet or more deep, and then extended the tunnel some distance to our front.
And still the niches and the recesses were there, the huge wall too along the face of the hill; all broken and gashed and ruinous, showing the fine reticulated brickwork that had been once faced with marble; alternately supported and torn by the pushing roots of the ilex-trees. The tunnelled passages too were there, choked and fallen in; no flash of the lake now beyond their cool darkness!
Dark Saracen eyes gleamed out of the cold shadows in tunnelled streets, seeming to warm them with their light; and as Vanno reached the tiny Place where towered a large, old church, the pavement was flooded by a wave of brown-faced boys and girls, laughing and shouting. School was just out; and behind the children followed a man in the black cassock of a priest.
I dodged the microbe, and went. To make myself understood I must explain. I was in Rome. For ten days with a sirocco wind the rains had descended, as surely they had never come down since the windows of heaven were opened at the Flood. The Tiber rose thirty-two feet. Now Rome is tunnelled under the streets with drains or sewers that carry all the refuse of a great city into the Tiber.
The pastoral slopes of the valley below were cloaked in lustre-leather: the rare watercourses along the road had faded from the waiting eye and ear; it seemed as if the long and dry summer had even invaded the close-set ranks of pines, and had blown a simoom breath through the densest woods, leaving its charred red ashes on every leaf and spray along the tunnelled shade.
No more a fortress to look at than Fairmont Park water works, but the joke of it is that under every bush there is a gun and every gun is painted green and covered with hanging curtains of moss and every promenade is undermined and the bleakest face of the rock is tunnelled with rooms and halls. Every night we are locked in and the soldiers carry the big iron keys clanking through the streets.
Word Of The Day