Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.
In the garden, and in the lanes when he went for a walk, Nicholas came across a few birds, of which the largest were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeon; here were herons and bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, brush turkeys, ibises, golden pheasants, a whole portrait gallery of undreamed-of creatures.
Pelicans and flamingoes, geese and ducks, storks and herons, ibises and cranes, bitterns and lapwings, flew in dark flocks of manifold forms from all directions.
It seemed the rendezvous for the many species of wild winged creatures that people the great marais of Louisiana. There were the egrets, the ibises both white and scarlet the various species of Ardeidae, the cranes, and the red flamingoes.
This fair water, extending from Med to Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
The progress of research since Cuvier's time has supplied far more striking examples of the long duration of specific forms of life than those which are furnished by the mummified Ibises and Crocodiles of Egypt. A remarkable case is to be found in your own country, in the neighbourhood of the falls of Niagara.
The handles were formed of two lotus stalks gracefully falling over two rose ornaments; on the cover were ibises with erect ears and sharp horns, and on the body of the vase were represented gazelles flying from the dogs amid stalks of papyrus. Another, no less curious, had for cover a monstrous Typhon head, adorned with palms and grimacing between two vipers.
Then marshes spread afar: the transparent stalks of papyrus trembled above the bluish pallor of lotuses. As the declining sun poured its gold across the world, the air over the marshes was jeweled from a great rush of geese, ducks, heron, ibises, and storks. They camped on the clean, white sand beside the stream.
Tall cranes, pelicans, ibises, and other large water-birds rose occasionally from the ponds, and fanned themselves slowly away. On portions of the road the telegraph wires, running parallel with the track, were covered with tiny birds of indigo-blue, decked with long slim tail-feathers.
In one of these we saw a number of ibises and spoonbills; and the natives succeeded in killing two or three snakes. Our view to the westward was extremely limited; but to the eastward the country appeared in some places to expand into plains. After travelling some miles down the banks of the river, finding that they still retained their steep character, we turned back to a place which Mr.
Word Of The Day