Word: lava
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Etna, the great hump of Sicily, was just lukewarm then, with an occasional wisp of smoke emanating from its 10,000 foot cone and only the heat still left in old lava flows to hint at its previous activity...
...dawn, we discovered our tents in shreds and all the control and window surfaces of our B-29's wrecked, but the chances of dodging the larger chunks of falling lava (the biggest I saw was the size of a small watermelon) appeared good enough, and the natural rain from the clouds which formed under the great tornado of smoke overhead managed to allay the sulfuric fumes...
Wealthy from Lava. In Colombia's heartland, enterprise is the key word. Unlike most of South America, Antioquia has never been feudal. Topography was against a feudal land economy. Poor but independent peasants scratched for a living in the pinched valleys and on the mountainsides...
...with the advent of coffee in the second half of the 19th Century, the rich decomposed lava of the mountainsides suddenly sprouted wealth. The enormous Antioquian families (20 children were not unusual) began spilling along the Cauca River and the valleys of the Cordillera Central. The department of Caldas, colonized a few decades ago, produces more coffee than any other department today. The Antioquian peasant transplanted his democratic land system wherever he went: Caldas coffee farms are even smaller than those of southern Antioquia; the owners' families themselves pick the crop. Like the U.S., Colombia thus had a homesteading...
Nearest and most probable source of the stone (a "cyclopean" basalt naturally divided into columns as it cooled from molten lava) is 15 miles away by sea. The heavy masses must have been ferried across to Nanmatol on rafts or dugouts, and horsed into position by main force and primitive awkwardness...