Word: blaze
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RAVENNA is the world's chief repository of early Byzantine art, surpassing even Istanbul, the capital of Byzantium. The ancient churches and chapels of the sleepy Italian town (pop. 35,000) are lit by windowpanes of translucent alabaster and by the glitter and blaze of great mosaics such as the triumphant Christ opposite. Ravenna's mosaics, made of innumerable bits of glass, gold and marble chips stuck in plaster, have neither the drama of Gothic church art nor the human warmth of the Renaissance masters. Yet they are equally great, and gayer than either. Their gaiety expresses...
...slow, relentless, staircase-climb of drama. Too much explodes, too little uncoils; much more is highlighted than truly plumbed. There is no law that the more sick and tormented the subject matter, the more severe should be the approach; but even most of Elizabethan drama, for all its blaze of poetry, foundered from an undisciplined portrayal of disordered lives. The disturbed people in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof seldom become truly disturbing; the audience merely reacts where it should be made to respond...
...last I came under a huge archway and beheld the Grand Lunar exalted on his throne in a blaze of incandescent blue . . . The quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within . . . Tiers of attendants were busy spraying that great brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining...
...filing cases, stretching in a 60-ft. semicircle about the room. From within the grey metal cases came a faint humming sound; along the light-studded metallic face were scores of twinkling orange sparks, rippling like waves of thought. As in the Grand Lunar's palace, a blaze of light flooded over the pale walls and pillars of rosy pink. Air conditioning filtered out the dust, kept the temperature at an even 75°. Along one end of the chamber was a gleaming plate-glass observation window, through which mere humans-attendants and sightseers -could watch and marvel...
...change the mosquitoes? No, thanks") are hooked on the same cruel question mark: How to get back to civilization? Suddenly they get a vein-freezing answer. An oil well catches fire. Only an explosion can put it out. The nearest nitroglycerin sits in a shed 300 miles from the blaze-in the very town where the men happen to be. The oil company, a U.S. outfit, offers $2,000 apiece for four good drivers with the guts to truck the soup, over roads that hardly deserve the name, to the scene of the fire...