Here are the quotations for next week, November 24th to 30th):
1. The twelve Government elephants rocked at their pickets outside the big
mud-walled stables (one arch, as wide as a bridge-arch, to each restless
beast), and the mahouts were preparing the evening meal. Now and again some
impatient youngster would smell the cooking flour-cakes, and squeal; and the
naked little children of the elephant-lines would strut down the row,
shouting or commanding silence . The sunset was dying, and the elephants
heaved and swayed dead black against the one sheet of rose-red low down in
the dusty gray sky.
2. The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons, eight feet to each stride,
and the wrinkled skin of the elbow-points rustled. The undergrowth on either
side of him ripped with a noise like torn canvas, and the saplings that he
heaved away right and left with his shoulders sprang back again and banged
him on the flank, and great trails of creepers, all matted together, hung
from his tusks as he threw his head from side to side and ploughed out his
pathway.
3. ...Hathi had been plucking off the roofs of the huts as you pluck
water-lilies, and a rebounding beam had pricked him. He needed only this to
unchain his full strength, for of all things in the Jungle, the wild
elephant enraged is the most wantonly destructive. He kicked backward at a
mud wall that crumbled at the stroke, and, crumbling, melted to yellow mud
under the torrents of rain. Then he wheeled and squealed, and tore through
the narrow streets, leaning against the huts right and left, shivering the
crazy doors and crumpling up the eaves.
The sources of this week's extracts (November 17th to 23rd) are as follows:
1. ('...I made haste, the river aiding me, but ere I had touched the shoal,
the pulse of the stream beat, as it were, within me and around...') This is
from "In Flood Time" in 'Soldiers Three'.
2. ('...A tarred road, she shoots every drop o' water into a valley same's
a slate roof...') This is from "Friendly Brook" in 'A Diversity of
Creatures'.
3. (...There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide
across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty
minutes...) This is from "My Son's Wife" in 'A Diversity of Creatures'.
Good wishes to all, John R
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