Word: silt
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What keeps the average sedentary young executive from toning up at court tennis is mainly that there are only twelve courts in the U. S., and a proper court costs some $100,000, must be plastered with a secret British cement apocryphally said to be made from silt from the bed of the Thames. Courts are 110 ft. long, 38 ft. wide, with a net-covered recess behind the server's court called a dedans, in which the spectators sit. On the left of the server's court, and continuing along the same wall beyond the low-slung...
...built dams. When one pond filled up they went a little farther upstream and built another. When the whole valley was a series of muddy terraces the beavers went off to another stream. Then the stream broke through the dams one by one and carried a huge load of silt down to the bottom of the valley, forming an alluvial plain...
...Yellow River to flood is nothing new. Its Chinese name, Hwang Ho, is taken from hwang tu, the "yellow dirt" which it carries down in great quantity from Shansi and Shensi. This pale silt is constantly being dropped on the riverbed, which consequently steadily rises above the adjoining land. To keep the river in line the Chinese have long built dikes. Rising floor and walls have made the river an aqueduct, lifted its surface at high water as much as 30 feet above the surrounding plain. So frequently has the ochre stream cracked its dikes and devastated the countryside that...
...change in mining technique from the pick-&-pan methods of the forty-niners to the high-pressure system of 30 years later. As the rows of hydraulic monitors claw the gold from the hillsides with watery talons, farm lands in the valley below are mucked under by the sluiced silt. Actor George Brent commands the monitors and their tough-mug crews, backed by San Francisco financiers with "ideals and traditions of highwaymen." Shaking their fists from the valley are Farmerette Olivia de Havilland, fiery -Planter Claude Rains and a pack of farmers. The ensuing battle is long, bloody, rough...
...present system should be changed, because under it the raw material situation in Turkestan may remain unexplored and the forest laws of medieval England may lie forgotten beneath the silt of centuries while the student who would burrow for such knowledge is balked by the carelessness of other Widener patrons. No longer should the four week privilege obstruct the channels of knowledge...