Word: ditch
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...review of the cadet corps. For both men it was a big day; both had worked hard for it, both had waited for it eagerly. There, on a site that lay along Van Fleet's "Golden Line" the location of what was to be 1951's last-ditch stand against the Communists -the four-year-old academy last week graduated its first class. Guns boomed, the band blared, sabers flashed in the sun. "Today," said President Rhee. "is just like a dream...
...fire stormed downhill through the basin, Geil sent in a picked crew with curt orders to dig a last-ditch firebreak. His orders: the crew must be prepared to hole up in the cliffs, to live without supplies, lay through the fire if trapped,* but "tie up" the basin. They did. Last week a ranger and three Indians with 1,200 ft. of line clambered into Kings Canyon (which drops 4,000 ft. in two miles) to keep the fire from shooting along the canyon's wall. Hemmed in, the fire came at last under control. Loss...
...high wail of a siren announces: 60 seconds to go. Stapp begins to tense his muscles, stares at the long white ditch of the track bed below him. He concentrates on the cord in his hand; he must remember to pull it when the countdown reaches five. One last breath to last him for the ride, then he is off. "It's like being assaulted in the rear by a fast freight train...
...serene-looking inner box throbs the metropolitan life of Peking itself. Leading off from Kublai's broad roads, which checkerboard the city, are warrens of hutungs, narrow lanes of deep dust or mud lined by windowless walls of inward-facing houses, and named in keeping with their history: Ditch of a Thousand People, Dog's Neck Lane, Human Hair Lane, Chase the Thief Lane...
...gets it by marrying Attila the Hun and luring Hagen and his cohorts to a Hunland banquet that becomes a blood bath. Rich with omens and enchantments, brimming with the life, dress and manners of the time, The Twelve Pictures also breathes life into a profounder theme-the last-ditch war of the pagan spirit v. the Christian faith. Author Simon writes a slightly cramped neo-archaic prose, but few living writers can dip a reader's mind so wholly and fascinatingly in a sense of the past...