Word: ashli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Until last spring, the Comoro Islands were known, if at all, chiefly as a source of ilang-ilang, an exotic flower whose extract is widely used in French perfumes. Now the Comoros are called the Mercenary Isles. Last spring the four tiny specks of volcanic ash off the coast of Mozambique were invaded by a motley troop of white soldiers of fortune, who took over the hapless islands lock, stock, and ilang-ilang...
...grave robbers damage antiquities and also trample on important archaeological clues, such as ash, seeds and bone fragments, that can reveal much about ancient civilizations. U.S. Archaeologist Emil Peterson tells how he and his team of diggers from Quito's Central Bank museum would spend weeks at a site, painstakingly excavating only a few inches at a time in order to preserve all possible traces. Then one morning they would find that thieves had come by in the night and obliterated most of the evidence. Eventually, barbed wire had to be installed and guards posted...
...wind heavy and warm with moisture, but violent, too; the limbs of trees groaned in it, ash cans banged, unhooked shed doors rattled and slammed... The wind made him feel a queer inner release, a sickening kind of happiness, and he threw back his head and yelled into the crazy wind...
...sometimes garish colors seemed to produce a falsification. If any world needed to be filmed in black and white, it was what French Writer David Rousset called I'univers concentrationnaire. All that obscenity transpired in an absence of color: ashes and smoke were gray, the SS uniforms black, the skin ash white, the bones white. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor, used to greet the trains wearing a white riding costume...
Volcanically speaking, the eruption of Vesuvius on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, was a squib compared with the more recent explosions of Krakatoa or Mont Pelée. But no seismic event has ever had wider cultural repercussions. Buried under 12 ft. of deadly ash and scoriae, the city of Pompeii-a flourishing town on the Bay of Naples, filled with rich men's villas, tradesmen's houses and the workshops of the poor-was in the moment of its snuffing-out turned into the most complete social time capsule left by the Roman world. Since major excavations...