Word: spearmen
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PADDLE-FOOTING through blue-green waters off the Bahamas, these submarine spearmen are demonstrating one of the fastest growing of modern sports. Since the end of World War II, the number of spearfishing addicts in the U.S. alone has grown to almost 1,000,000. The sport has spread, from the Mediterranean, where it started, as far south as Latin America and the coral shoals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Alone, in pairs, or as members of spearfishing clubs (there are close to 100 in the U.S. today), skin divers take goggle-eyed aim at everything with fins...
...Some spearmen (also known as bottom scratchers, gogglers, frogmen) satisfy themselves with homemade spears, inexpensive flippers and masks. But there is a growing tendency among expert spearfishermen (such as those shown on the following pages) to mechanize with aqualungs ($115 to $275) for underwater breathing, to use powerful spear guns charged with steel springs or compressed...
...lookouts off guard by staging a mock polo tournament, then suddenly dropped their polo sticks, whipped out rifles and charged the Mau Mau redoubt. From the ridges above came the sweating Fusiliers; behind, the Mau Mau found their retreat cut off by tall, pig-tailed Masai spearmen, recruited by the British from the fierce nomadic tribes that roam Kenya's vast Rift Valley. A hundred Mau Mau were captured...
...really expect the workingman to come to church to sing 'I will think upon Rahab and Babylon' ... or such gibberish as the verse of the 68th Psalm beginning, 'Rebuke the company of the spearmen'? I am told that the correct translation of these words is 'Rebuke the hippopotamus.'* Our churchgoers would sing this with equal unction if they had it before them, as fashionable ladies cheerfully sing the Magnificat, which is more violent than The Red Flag...
Tigre tribesmen apparently considered that the authority of Emperor Haile Selassie in their province had been shattered and that any of his soldiers not natives of Tigre were fair game. As an exhausted straggler would stumble into a village last week, angry spearmen would rush out to ask "Ane men? Who are you?" If the straggler answered in any Ethiopian tongue except the Tigrean dialect he was killed...