Word: wail
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...numbers, Hong Kong's 2,400,000 Chinese, speaking every dialect of the mainland, dominate the colony, but a few thousand English-speaking whites run it. The mellow beat of wooden clogs on pavement, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the wail of radios tuned to Chinese opera, the brays of hawkers and cries of countless babies, all insist on its Chineseness-but the eye is reminded, by the flap of the Union Jack and the crisp gesture of a traffic cop, that here, as nowhere else in Asia, British "law and order" yet prevail...
...Ballet was danced before a De Chirico-like architectural backdrop, proved as angularly abstract as the Stravinsky score in an intricate counterpoint of shifting groups. High point was the saucy, mincing solo of young ballerina Nadia Nerina, dancing like a flirtatious marionette to the lilting wail of an oboe...
...high wail of a siren announces: 60 seconds to go. Stapp begins to tense his muscles, stares at the long white ditch of the track bed below him. He concentrates on the cord in his hand; he must remember to pull it when the countdown reaches five. One last breath to last him for the ride, then he is off. "It's like being assaulted in the rear by a fast freight train...
...Times Square through the garish canyon of Seventh Avenue, the traveler finds a varied evening cacophony. Bus engines whine. Subway trains roar through sidewalk gratings. On a corner a Salvation Army band pleads Onward! Christian Soldiers. Suddenly, through an open door, comes a shattering crash and a high-pitched wail, and a competing hymn bounces through the tortured air: When the Saints Go Marching...
...characters jostled streetwalkers, dope peddlers and bug-eyed farm kids who filled it from the De Soto dock* (on the Wolf River just before it joins the Mississippi) to the other end at East Street, a mile away. On Saturday nights the clatter of ragtime music mingled with the wail of ambulances. Its leading citizens have been as bizarre as Beale Street itself: "River George," a giant roustabout of bloody fame; "Tittiwee" and "Black Slick," both pimps; "Treetop Tall" and "Coal Oil Johnny," two policemen; "Speedway," a gambler; and "Dr. Scissors," a famed Beale Street medicine man. They frequented such...