Word: bitumen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there," advised the smiling service station attendant. "It's a sacred place," croaked a gimlet-eyed crone squatting outside a shop where I stopped for water. "Be careful." Thus it was with some trepidation that I turned off the highway and followed the signs along a strip of crumbling bitumen. I passed through the gates of a temple and found the tallest palm trees I've ever seen, jutting skyward from a lush hump of jungle-covered earth in the middle of a weed-strewn lake. It looked like one of southern Thailand's tropical isles had been picked...
...summer of 1954, air-crew briefing rooms at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport were abuzz with reports of construction at an air base near Sanya, a town at the southern tip of China's Hainan island. To date, the runway had been all bitumen, a surface suited to propeller aircraft but given to melting if hit by jet exhausts. Suddenly, concrete sections appeared at each end. Pilots flying along aviation routes past Hainan could see new, jet-fighter-sized dispersal bays under construction. One Cathay Pacific Airways pilot suggested to a Hong Kong official that, in view...
When she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket for him and calked it with bitumen and pitch. (From the translation by the Jewish Publication Society...
...national epic out of the tales of neighbors. They point out that a birth narrative of Sargon of Akkad, a Mesopotamian King who ruled in the millennium before Moses, reads, "My priestly mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid." There is also the Egyptian legend of the god Horus, who is hidden in the Nile delta by his mother Isis to protect him from the wrath of his uncle Seth...
...learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look of genetic diagrams...