United States or Israel ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There was snow but once during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade.
In summer, while the water of the sea is still chilled with masses of unmelted ice, the great steppes behind the mountains are covered with vegetation and warm with almost perpetual sunshine, and the direction of the wind is consequently reversed. This valley of the Viliga, therefore, may be regarded as a great natural breathing-hole, through which the interior steppes respire once a year.
On this knoll there was a white patch that Rostov could not at all make out: was it a glade in the wood lit up by the moon, or some unmelted snow, or some white houses? He even thought something moved on that white spot. "I expect it's snow... that spot... a spot une tache," he thought. Rostov lifted his head that had sunk almost to his horse's mane and pulled up beside the hussar.
Later on we emerged from the woods, and, still climbing, we rode for the remaining distance on magnificent grassy slopes far above the forest belt. Several snow-patches still lay unmelted in the shady hollows, and often far below us. From this ridge we obtained our first good view of the lofty Kom, the second highest mountain in Montenegro, and our ultimate destination.
Snow covered every housetop, and hung in ponderous masses from their edges, as if it were about to fall; but it never fell it hung there in the same position day after day, unmelted, unchanged. Snow covered the whole land, and the frozen river, the swamps, the sea-beach, and the sea itself, as far as the eye could reach, seemed like a pure white carpet.
But when I did get it open the first thing that came out of it was a stench so vile that I had to jump up in a hurry and rush to the open deck until the worst of it had ebbed away; and this exceeding evil odor was given off by a slimy ooze of rotted leather as I knew a little later by finding still unmelted some bits of small leather bags in which what was stored there had been tied.
In the Aberdeen-granite, lumps of unmelted gneiss are abundant; and we can ourselves bear witness that the granite on the banks of Loch Sunart yields proofs that, when molten, it contained incompletely-fused clots of sedimentary strata. Nor is this all.
Snow covered every housetop, and hung in ponderous masses from their edges, as if it were about to fall; but it never fell it hung there in the same position day after day, unmelted, unchanged. Snow covered the whole land, and the frozen river, the swamps, the sea-beach, and the sea itself, as far as the eye could reach, seemed like a pure white carpet.
Having seen more than a little of the Near East, and knowing how the peace of the whole world depends on preserving that unmelted hotpot of nations from anarchy, I was not impressed by the stability of things in general!
The cold at times was arctic, the thermometer dropping thirty degrees below zero in January. "Venison was crunching with ice after being an hour in the oven, and a large lump of ice was still unmelted in a pot where water was steaming all around it." Their cottage was dubbed "Hunter's Home." It was far from the railroad, few luxuries were to be had, and they lived a simple life in earnest.
Word Of The Day