Word: hippos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, saw the Roman Empire falling about him. A few months after he died (430 A.D.), the invading Vandals took Hippo, then a major North African strongpoint. In the ages that followed, the great cities of man crumbled, but their citizens found a spiritual home in Saint Augustine's City of God. To this day, Christian churches of all denominations draw upon the theological system that Augustine tirelessly nailed down before the storm broke. Yet the 20th century is haunted by a question: Is Christian civilization going the way of the Roman Empire? Perhaps, say prophets...
Soft Noses Are Best. Dempster was a farmer's son, born and bred in the province of Natal. He was eight years old when his father shot a hippo in the Zambezi River and tethered it to the bank as crocodile bait. That night, creeping to within a yard's distance, Bryan Dempster shot his first croc...
Dempster took to the Zambezi a service rifle. 4,000 rounds of war-surplus ammunition and a wooden dinghy with an outboard motor. He soon met an indignant bull-hippo, who immediately seized both the dinghy and the Zulu helmsman and tore them to pieces. Dempster also found that his hard-nosed service bullets were useless: they ricocheted off a croc's bumpy hide. But the worst snag was the crocodile-birds, a species of African plover. The crocodile's "dental service" is provided by his plovers ("a mating pair ... to each crocodile"), who fly fearlessly into...
...Augustine, the 5th century Bishop of Hippo, was Christianity's first great philosopher. Writes Anglican Rebecca West: "His works are the foundation of modern Western thought . . . He took as his subject matter a certain complex of ideas which intrude into every developed religion and are present in Christianity also; the idea that matter, and especially matter related to sex, is evil; that man, wearing a body made of matter, living in a material world, and delighting in the manifestations of sex, is tainted with evil, and must cleanse himself before God; and that this atonement must take the form...
...plot is simply incredible--something about a girl aerialist who, when spurned by her sawdust impressario for a sick hippo, falls head over heels in love with a daring young man who falls head over heels off his 60 foot trapeze and does a triple somersault into the hospital...