Word: pitting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clear the rubble with no particular fear, for ledoma (earthquake) is a commonplace to the natives who work the Rand and Free State mines. But then, without warning, the wall along the coal seam collapsed with a roar, and a gale-force gust of wind tossed men, machinery and pit props like feathers in its wake. Ventilation fans were smashed and behind the mile-long debris most of the men lay trapped with 70 pit ponies...
That night, when the first dazed rescuers began to dig, there was hope the prisoners might still be alive. Canaries, carried underground in cages to test the air, survived, and 31 pit ponies were taken out alive and well. But, ominously, no "pipe talk" came back when the diggers tapped messages on the one water pipe that seemed to be intact, and a weary worker came to the surface shaking his head, saying, "It will take us a week to get near them." All through the night, womenfolk, some wailing, others grimly tightlipped, stood clinging to a fence near...
Incomprehensible World. As the two men lie dying, they agree that at last life has some meaning. Author Pick (Out of the Pit, The Lonely Aren't Alone) makes his moral clear-and, finally, unnecessarily explicit. Man, saysPick in effect, is a creature of turmoil who, if he is doomed outside the sheltered valleys, is stifled within them. The view, powerfully expressed in a well-written book, is that of an existentialist, a romanticist who believes that a free man is one who accepts the world as incomprehensible...
Then Thomas quietly asked the officials to put the bar at 7 ft. 2¼ in. He nearly made it. On his second try, he was lying on his back in the foam-rubber pit before the quivering bar followed him down. "My timing has to be straightened up," said John Thomas. But he had proved that he was still the world's finest high jumper...
...dung," his mother told him. "At least you'll survive." Survive he did-for 18 years in his living grave. Twice a day his mother slipped him food, scarcely paused for a word. In winters he nearly froze, and when the summer heat beat down on his reeking pit, he almost suffocated. Yet only on darkest nights would he surface for air. One night, crawling out for fresh air, he saw crosses on the rooftops and fled back in panic, mistaking the new TV aerials for signs of doom. At last, when his younger brother married and the whole...