Word: perching
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Like two red-headed buzzards sitting on a fence, the volcanoes Acatenango and Fuego perch not far from Guatemala City and wait for a catastrophe. Twice earthquakes have destroyed the city; each time Acatenango and Fuego have picked it clean. The old capital of Antigua Guatemala has its skeletons of whitened ruins. Last week a series of earthquakes shook the country. Panes rattled, pictures fell, walls cracked. Guatemalans, remembering the destruction of their capital in 1918, fell on their knees and prayed. The shocks continued, grew more violent. The two volcanoes reared their heads. Fire, ashes, lava spouted from their...
...circumvallated by whatever body it may inhabit. The stars knew not that the cat killed the goldfinch; the cat knew nothing about that particular finch; the bird did not know that it was life's only joy to the old couple whose dead grandchild had trained it to perch on their shoulders, peck at their ears. But the old couple thought the bird sang only to ease their mourning, that the cat planned death to their particular bird, that the stars wept for their sorrow...
...with them the audience. They had girded themselves well for this moment. Quick the exits. And Boston whirled out into the track outside the circle of boxes. The lights showed bravely on the brilliant ladies and the handsome men. How much the Vagabond had missed up there on his perch in the rafters, how little he knew of those people who dwelt "down under." And most of all how little he knew of the Opera...
...doctors to avoid a nervous breakdown. France's Foreign Minister Aristide Briand found quiet refuge at his farm near Cocherel, Normandy. There on a small platform built over a branch of the Eure River. Brer Briand stays the day long in the shade of a tree, angling for perch and pike...
...seized by the "jitters." He dared not let go, he dared not turn back; so he reached for the steel ring above his heart and yanked it. In a split second the silk 'chute whipped out of its pack in the propeller blast, jerked Private Osborne from his perch-and fouled itself securely on the plane's tail surfaces. Twenty feet below the unhappy soldier dangled, swinging out behind the speeding plane like the weighted tail of a kite, while the cursing pilot struggled to stabilize the ship. At length the officer signalled to Osborne to cut himself...