Word: throng
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Usually, Bar Beach on Nigeria's Victoria Island is dotted with sun umbrellas and gaily painted food stalls. Last week it became the scene of a kind of festival of death. Thousands of Nigerians, chanting "Traitors, traitors," jammed the beach, trampling the candy-striped awnings underfoot. A similar throng gathered not far away at Kirikiri Prison, just outside Lagos, the capital. Both high-spirited crowds were assembled to witness the public executions of some 30 soldiers, including four lieutenant colonels and six majors, and a lone civilian. A special military board had convicted them of planning the abortive coup...
...mufti," a Lagos radio correspondent announced crisply, giving a running account of the executions on Bar Beach. "Most of them look sober. Some manage to smile at newsmen." Religious confessions, Christian and Moslem, were received by two priests and a mallam (a Moslem religious leader). While the throng looked on, the 15-man firing squad opened up. The shooting lasted ten minutes, as one by one the coup plotters slumped to the blood-soaked sand...
...packed with bodies. And the sexual tension that infiltrates all relations at Harvard threatened to break through to the surface. Ours, like all parties, had a grim line-up of men against the walls, openly inspecting every clothed package of flesh that squeezed through the doorway, the past the throng, and out onto the floor. Jealous singles. myself included, anxiously waited to dance with that one person, who managed to be engaged all evening. Students who in their everyday miens betray no trace of libidinal expression were liberated in that dark room, exhibitionists beneath the sensual pommeling of a bass...
...Convention. The most distinct image I recall from the occasion is that of a mouse-like man with a choir-boy's face and a Sunday schooler's plaintive, sincerely righteous voice, leaning in to the mike to tell of his conversion experience and waving somewhat embarrassedly to the throng of Baptist delegates, his arm draped around president-elect Jaroy Weber, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lubbock, Texas, a man who last made national headlines when he called a press conference this summer to denounce Betty Ford for her libertinism...
When Carter stood on another stage some 2000 miles away, arm-in-arm with hell-raisin', needle-poppin', perversely angelic Gregg Allman, waving to a generally stoned-out, dismal and politically-indifferent throng of the type that drab-and-dreary Providence seems to muster best, he seemed once again ill-at-ease but nevertheless convivial. Once again, he gave the crowd what it wanted--this time, a short speech, and the Allman Brothers Band. To a chorus of chortles and hisses, Carter raised his arms like a quarterback beckoning for audibility, and said...