Word: canoemen
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Thus went the "Congo Canoemen's Mass." Its drumbeat did not seem out of place to the natives who crowded the mission church of St. Anne in Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa. The church's curving Gothic arch resembled the silhouette of an outsized mud hut, and its lofty vaults and arches were modeled after palm trees. The altar was made of two rough boulders topped by a monolith and the simple carved benches resembled witch doctors' ritual chairs. With its glassless windows admitting light and air and its roof covered with brilliant emerald tiles, the church seemed...
...memorial to French soldiers) needed money, and Father Bureth organized some unemployed Africans in France into a song-and-dance group. He took them on a triumphal tour of the country, and francs rolled into the church-building fund. Between shows. Father Bureth taught French church choirs the Canoemen's Mass (written especially for St. Anne's by a French musicologist) and personally played the drums. He had to turn down an offer to put on an African floor show in a California nightspot...
...Erell, a Protestant, was awarded the Order of St. Sylvester by the Pope. This, according to Bureth, entitles Erell by ancient 'custom to enter St. Anne's Church on horseback. Showman Bureth is arranging to have the architect ride into church astride a horse just before the Canoemen's Mass on Whitsunday...
Civilizing Trickle. One common explanation of these likenesses: a thin trickle of Polynesian canoemen might have brought such cultural bits from the South Seas to the Americas. But Heyerdahl decided that the trickle must have moved in the opposite direction. Ancient Peru, even during the Tiahuanaco period (about 1,000 A.D., before the start of the Inca Empire), was far more civilized than Polynesia. The Peruvians built large rafts of balsa wood which were probably capable of voyaging as far as the South Seas. The prevailing winds and the ocean currents (both moving from east to west-see map) would...
...river we see at frequent intervals the mouths of tributaries. These small rivers are leased by the government for from five to twenty years to private parties for fishing purposes. At one of the larger of these openings our boat stops, and we find our guides or canoemen ready to take us ashore. The mouth of the river is perhaps a hundred feet wide, and the shallow water shows us a shingle bottom. On the bank a small French Canadian settlement manages to support itself and a few ponies. Little carts are the common vehicles for these rough roads, although...
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