United States or Cyprus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We also rode in the Ferris wheel, and on the ice-railway, and had a sail in the Whale-back.... In the spring of 1893 a club was started in Tuscumbia, of which Mrs. Keller was president, to establish a public library. Miss Keller says: "I wrote to my friends about the work and enlisted their sympathy.
We were at war. There was no craft near us, and our surface speed is nearly twice that of our submerged, so I blew out the tanks and our whale-back came over the surface. All night we were steering south-west, making an average of eighteen knots. At about five in the morning, as I stood alone upon my tiny bridge, I saw, low down in the west, the scattered lights of the Norfolk coast.
A mile to the south a whale-back ridge springs from the valley, nosing northward. No sound breaks the stillness of the day. From the higher ridges the eye falls upon the pallid ghost of the city. Blotches of juniper relieve the monotony of the brown, lifeless grass. Grays fade into leaden hues, to be absorbed in the ashy, indeterminate colors of the sun-soaked plains.
There were no less than two hundred of these strange but terribly destructive craft, the lineal descendants of the Vesuvius, which, as the naval reader will remember, was commissioned in 1890. They were double-hulled vessels built on the whale-back plan, and the compartments between the inner and outer hull could be wholly or partially filled with water.
Still further aft, on the whale-back, Harvey sat, cross-legged, contentedly smoking a stumpy clay pipe lent to him by Huka, and looking, now at the glorious, myriad-starred sky above, and now at the beautiful face just beneath him, and musing upon the events of the past few days.
Then, with many variations and several intermediate types, there are the two main distinctive kinds of inland vessels: the long, low, grimy, cargo-carrying whale-back, tankship, barge, or other useful form of ugliness, simply meant to nose her way through quite safe waters with the utmost bulk her huge stuffed maw will hold; and, at the opposite end of the scale, the high, white, gaily decorated 'palace' steamer, with tier upon tier of decks, and a strong suggestion of the theatre all through.
Seen from the plain, Thorn had an aspect almost imperial. It rose above the colorless flat of gray suddenly, unexpectedly, almost insolently. The city, with its numberless gables, spires of churches, turreted gate-houses, occupied a ridge of gradually swelling ground which rose like a huge whale-back from the misty plain. Its walls were grim, high, and far-stretching.
This is the third day of confinement to the hut: it grows tedious, but there is no help, as it is too thick to see more than a few yards out of doors. Friday, August 25. The gale continued all night and it blows hard this morning, but the sky is clear, the drift has ceased, and the few whale-back clouds about Erebus carry a promise of improving conditions.
Crosbie's estate in Kerry is of 9,913 acres valued by Government at 4,638l., with a present rent roll of 8,500l., thanks to the expenditure of 40,000l. since 1839. As one approaches Ardfert the cabin common in Kerry vanishes to make room for houses well and substantially built of concrete, with whale-back roofs also of concrete.
His "cigar boat" although not a commercial success was the fore-runner of the "whale-back" steamers now in use on the Great Lakes. Of his invention the French Academy of Sciences declared that by its means he had "done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
Word Of The Day