Word: boatmen
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Rich in songs is the history of slavery. Toiling on the Great Pyramids, Egyptian slaves intoned rhythmical chants (sample: "Hey, you, work! You, get up!"). Dixie's Negroes put body & soul into their work songs. Volga boatmen were soothed by the haunting tautology of Ei Ukhnem. More recently, political prisoners in Nazi concentration camps composed and sang such songs as the now famous Peat-Bog Soldiers...
...bleary-eyed on Monday mornings at 8:40. "We had a hell of a good time," says Albion. Eventually he found the conflict between flunking students as a dean and nursing them as a professor a little strenuous, and he threw a tough hour quiz at his group of boatmen. There were dark muttering from the white-shoe crowd, and a subsequent undergraduate musical appeared with verses warning to "beware of perfidious Albion...
...Mexico City's tourist attractions, canal-laced Xochimilco, "Place of Flowers," is probably the best advertised. In their flatbottomed, flower-decked canoas, Xochimilco's boatmen pole sightseers, picnickers and lovers between the canals' eucalyptus-lined banks. Other canoes with gardenias, carnations and violets draw alongside; or gondolalike chalupas glide up while their mariachis play and sing La Paloma or Cielito Lindo. Some of the big canoas have luncheon tables in their centers at which the tourists can eat mole and tortillas and drink the famed Mexican beer...
...months, truck farmers around Xochimilco had been pulling down the water level by digging artesian wells to feed their cauliflower and carrot patches. The municipality of Mexico City did nothing about it. As the waterline in the canals dipped under the one-foot mark (four feet is normal), the boatmen, led by Pacheco, tackled the problem themselves. Armed with picks & shovels, 1,000 of them with their wives and children started digging in the mucky canals. Thousands more joined them, all seeking new springs to feed Xochimilco...
...municipality gave them some help. It hustled well-digging machinery and pumps out to the canals. It signed a contract with a nearby factory to use its pump during off-hours. As a result, in a single night 396,262 gallons of water were pumped into the canals. The boatmen, on their own, had accounted for plenty more...