Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
Luckily the first mad fury of the blast lasted only for two or three minutes, or our mast could never have resisted the tremendous strain upon it; as it was, stout though the spar absurdly disproportionate to the size of the craft, I then considered it it swayed and bent like a fishing-rod, causing the lee-rigging to blow out quite in bights, while that to windward was strained as taut as harp-strings, the resemblance to which was increased by the weird sound of the wind as it shrieked through it.
Gilian forgot the hazards of the enterprise and the discomforts to be faced; he had no time to think of what was to be done next for them in their flight, so full was he with the romance of those multitudinous lakelets lost in the empty and sunny wilds, some with isle, all with shelving heathery braes beside them, or golden bights where the little wave lapped.
Each of his ear-lobes, pierced in infancy, had from long years of continuous distention by means of rolls of pandanus leaf, become so pendulous that they now hung loosely upon his shoulders in two great bights of thin flesh as thick as a lead pencil, though one of them had twisted in it a long stick of tobacco and a spare pipe.
To form this splendid knot, pass one strand around the standing part of the rope and through its own bight, then pass B underneath and through bight of A and through its own bight also; next pass C underneath and around and through the bights of A, B, and its own bight.
The Joan had been as handsome a craft as ever left the stocks when we hauled out of dock at London some three weeks earlier; but now her bows were crumpled in until she was as flat for'ard as the end of a sea-chest; her decks were lumbered high with the wreckage of her masts and spars; the standing and running rigging was hanging down over her sides in bights; and she had settled so low in the water that her channels were already buried; while her poop was crowded with madly struggling figures, from which arose a confused babel of sound shouting, screaming, and cursing than which I have never heard anything more awful in all my life.
The mizen topsail, which was a comparatively new sail, and close-reefed, split, from head to foot, in the bunt; the fore-topsail went, in one rent, from clew to earing, and was blowing to tatters; one of the chain bobstays parted; the spritsail-yard sprung in the slings; the martingale had slued away off to leeward; and, owing to the long dry weather, the lee rigging hung in large bights, at every lurch.
This began to worry me and finally I lashed the tiller fastening it in the bights of two ropes prepared for that purpose, and crept back into the cabin again. It was little use to remain outside, save that if the sloop was flung upon a rock, I might have a little better chance to escape.
Throughout the Bights of Benin and Biafra, where the chief stalks about with his fetishman and his executioner, there is still some manliness amongst men, some modesty amongst women. There the offending wife fears beheading and 'saucy water; here she leaves with impunity her husband, who rarely abandons the better half.
These English and German lines, having come to a friendly understanding regarding freights, work the Bights of Benin, Biafra, and Panavia, without any rivals, save now and again the vessels chartered by the African Association to bring out a big cargo, and the four sailing vessels belonging to the Association which give an eighteenth-century look to the Rivers, and have great adventures on the bars of Opobo and Bonny.
Between the black worm-eaten headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking