The origins of flamenco

The origins of flamenco are lost in history. That does not stop the cognoscenti, a passionate, opinionated and nit-picking bunch, from spending much time disagreeing on them. The Romans were said to be fascinated by the dancing girls of Cádiz, though they predate flamenco and gypsies girls – by centuries. Records show gypsy dancers from Triana being hired for parties in the 1740s though they were also deemed as pre-flamenco. Early nineteen century travellers would watch fandangos being danced. Mi preferred version of the story is of a series of musical forms brought by the gypsies in their exodus from India and their slow crossing, over several centuries, of the Middle East and Europe. They crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in the fifteenth century. They were noted musicians whose services could be bought for weddings and celebrations. Spanish culture was itself a melting pot at the time, with Arab, and Jewish music adding to a stock of romances, traditional poetry, occasionally set to music. Flamenco, it seems, emerged from this stew over the centuries- appearing in a recognisable form in the early nineteenth century. The rhythms inherited from all sides, be they the metre of medieval poetry or the beat of Indian music, created what is , at times, an extraordinary difficult structure. It is not , and never has been, a purely gypsy music. Some of the best exponents have no gipsy blood at all in them. Gypsies, however, have always been at its centre.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

From Triana the gipsy singers and dancers

From Triana the gipsy singers and dancers would be called across the river for the parties of wealthy señoritos and bullfighters. They would come, too, to the popular cafés cantantes of the late nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, to the tablaos, the tourists shows. Then they were dispatched back across the bridge to their own side of town. Spaniards as a whole have never learned to love their gypsies – who are estimated to number 650.000. Even today polls show that many would rather not live beside them.
There are gypsies left in Triana, but nothing like there used to be. The melody has gone. Las Tres Mil was an excuse for a huge real-state scam. The gypsies were lured away from their forges and houses in the Cava de Los Gitanos and the chabolas on the edges of Triana.
They were promised brand new modern housing. Orders were issued for the demolition of their old homes, many with shared patios that acted as the centre of social, and cultural, life. The Cava of the civilians, the payo non-gipsy part of Triana, remained relatively untouched. Gleaming new blocks – their unimaginative name of “The three Thousand Homes” a giveaway to the bureaucratic nature of the project – way to the south of the city would keep them happy. It would also keep them out of sight and by extension, out of mind.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Perched on the west bank

Perched on the west bank of the broad River Guadalquivir, their original barrio of Triana looks across its murky waters at old Seville. From its riverside cafes you look out at the splendours of the gold tower, the white walls of the Maestranza bull ring, the palm lined Walk Cristóbal Colón and a city skyline crowned by the twelfth century minaret turned cathedral bell tower, the Giralda,. For several hundred years this was a part of Seville’ docklands. It was famous for his artisans. Their reputation spread, in the wake of the Spanish galleons, across the New World. Fifty years, or a century ago, this would also have been the place to look for the raw substance of flamenco. Thóphile Gautier, the French Romantic, came across a group of gypsies camped out beside a bubbling cauldron. ‘Beside this impoverished heart was seated a gypsie with her hook nosed, tanned and bronze profile, naked to the waist, a proof that she was completely devoid of coquetry…This state of nudity is nor uncommon, and shocks no one, ’he said.
In the 1950s, flamenco was still part of his everyday life. “In the afternoon one could hear the tune of bulerias and tangos ( two flamenco styles or palos) coming from a cluster of houses. A baptism, a wedding, a request for a woman’s hand in marriage, a son returned from military service, a woman who had just won the lottery… any event set the tribe into action, Triana still had melody,’ recalls Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer who grew up there.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Narrow, chaotic streets

Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches, palaces, bars _ allowing everybody to discover and claim for their own , some favourite hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here at, a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters served stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold manzanilla sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de la Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype of Don Juan asked for the following words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ?Here lies the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel painting here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else, ‘ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby air. Around the corner, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list pf personal jewels, in fact it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty
Andalusian Beauty, simply demands your attention.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Seville is the most seductive

Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the riches places on the planet. Visitors do not generally, care that all this came to a rather abrupt halt. They may in fact, like the idea . For they have been left with the sixteenth and seventeenth century baroque architecture, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the white and ochre painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.
Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘ You are here to enjoy’
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

The main corrupting power

The main corrupting power in Spain is what, generically, has become known as ‘the brick’ . The phenomenon is by no means restricted to the coast. As Spain’s economy booms, towns and cities have been turned into vast building sites. The building of new homes. Office blocks, EU-funded motorways or other public works is being done on a scale unthinkable in cluttered northern Europe. Everywhere you look in Spain, the city skylines are crammed with cranes. Vast new boroughs appear almost overnight in Madrid, complete with their shopping malls, sports centers and underground stations. Tiny satellite villages become, in the space of just a few years, busy new towns. Massive bulldozers push new motorways through olive groves as bewildered elderly villagers look on, and their grandchildren calculate whether they can go now for nights out in the nearest city.
Catalonia, Madrid, Seville and the Sun Coast account for much, if not most, of Spain’s new building work. Where politicians are builders, as they often are in the Sun Coast, corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.
Thing could be a lot worse, however. Compared with the deep institutionalized corruptin in , say Italy, Spain is a clean country. For while corruption – or the popular belief in it – floats freely around regional and local government, it has not settled in the core of the Spanish state.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Driving north from Almería

Driving north from Almería I am reminded, once more that this is Spain’s driest, dustiest corner. Every time I come here, I am shocked by the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Even Old Castile, with its parched, yellowed plains, has nothing on it. Water is the local gold, fought over by neighbours, villages and towns. The politicians in Madrid invent, and then scrap pharaonic systems for diverting the rivers of northern Spain down to this parched corner of the country. Ancient irrigation systems, Roman or Moorish in origin, allow the soil to perform the miracle of growing things., The plants traditionally grown here give an idea of the almost biblical nature of the place. There are acid – sweet meddlers, almonds, carobs (which supposedly kept St John the Baptist alive in the wilderness) and, inland at Elche, ancient plantations of date palms that transport you straight to the Arabian desert. The mountains here are all rock. They rear up in great, glinting shards or loom, hazy, grey and menacing, in the distant, pulsating heat.
From the book 'Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

It is shortly 7.00 a.m. on a cool spring morning

It is shortly 7.00 a.m. on a cool Madrid spring morning. The traffic is still just a purr, though it will soon be a rumble and some time after that, the usual riot of horns, ambulance sirens, and roaring motorbike exhausts. This should be a small moment of peace in what must be one of Europe’s noisiest cities. A helicopter, however, has spent the past fifteen minutes poised noisily at roof-top level just a block down our street. The wide open well of our six-storey apartment block is acting as a sound box that amplifies the relentless chugging and clattering. Sleep in our top-floor apartment seems, under these circumstances, impossible. I lie in bed worrying about whether the helicopter – which does this every few weeks – will wake the children. It is not as though they went to bed early, even though they have school today. One of them seven year old, got out of bed to take a phone call at 10 p.m. last night. It was another seven year old, excitedly inviting him to a birthday party at the weekend. Madrid boasts that it is a party town, a city that never sleeps. But does this really have to apply to the under eights?
I go out onto the balcony to wave a fist at the sleek white helicopter- wondering why on earth it is hovering there, so low, so loud and so early. I expect all the other balconies to be filled up with angry people roused from their beds. I am, however, alone. I stand solitary, deranged and dishevelled, amongst the wilting geraniums. Even at this stage of the year, they are gasping for water. It is one of those moments when I am reminded that, although I now consider this to be my city, I am really a foreigner. Noise in Madrid, in Spain as a whole, is just background. It is part of the atmosphere, like air or daylight. I realised that I have been caught with my guard down. During the day, after I showered and slipped my daily coat of Madridness on, I would not care about the mere roar of a helicopter. Noise and bustle are normally part of what I like about this city. At night, when I sleep. Though. I am returned to my natural condition as what Spaniards like to call an AngloSaxon. This description for native English speakers –be they British, American, or from anywhere else- has always amused me. It makes me think of runes and lyres, of Beowulf and the Venerable Bede.
From the book 'Ghosts of Spain' By Giles Tremlet

Martinsson wade out into the water

Martinsson wade out into the water to pull the life raff ashore, wearing gumboots. Wallender squatted down to examine the bodies. He could see Peters trying to calm the woman. It struck him how fortunate they were that the boat hadn’t come ashore in the summer, when there would have been hundreds of children playing and swimming on the beach. What he was looking at was not a pretty sight, and there was the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh despite the fierce wind.
He took a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket and searched the men’s pockets carefully. He found nothing at all. When he opened the jacket of one of the men he could see a liver-coloured stain on the chest of the white shirt.
He looked at Martinsson.
“This is no accident,” he said. “It’s murder. This man has been shot straight through the heart.”
He stood up and moved to one side so that Norén could photograph the life raft.
“What do you reckon?” he asked Martinsson. Martinsson shook his head.
“I don’t know”
Wallender walked slowly round the boat without taking his eyes off the two dead men. Both were fair haired, probably in their early 30s. Judging by their hands and clothes, they were not manual labourers. Who were they? Why was there nothing in their pockets? He continued walking round and round the boat . occasionally exchanging a few words with Martinsson. After half an hour he decided that here was nothing more for him to discover. By then the forensic team had begun their methodical examination. A plastic tent had been put up over the rubber boat. Norén had finished taking photographs, everybody was bitterly cold and couldn’t wait to get away.
It was several hours before Wallander was able to give the ambulance men the nod, and they moved forward with their stretchers. By then , Wallander was so cold that he couldn’t stop shivering. They had no choice but to break a few bones to release the men from their embrace. When the bodies had been removed. Wallander gave the boat another thorough investigation, but found nothing , not even a paddle. He gazed out to sea, as if the solution was to be found somewhere on the horizon.
From the book ‘The dogs of Riga’ By Henning Mankell

Two minutes later

Two minutes later Wallender was on his way along the coast road. Peters and Norén were ahead of him in a patrol car, sirens blaring. Wallender shuddered as he saw the freezing breakers slamming onto the beach. He could see an ambulance in his rear-view mirror, and Martinsson in a second police car.
Mossby Strand was deserted. As he clambered out of his car, the icy wind met him head-on. The beach shop was boarded up, and the shutters were creaking and groaning in the wind. High up on the path that sloped down to the beach was a woman waving her arms about agitatedly, the dog beside her tugging at its lead. Wallander strode out, fearful as usual about what was in store for him- he would never be able to reconcile himself to the sight of dead bodies. Dead people were just like the living. Always different.
“Over there”, screeched the woman hysterically. Wallender looked in the direction she was pointing. A red life-raft was bobbing up and down at the water’s edge where it had become stuck among some rocks by the bathing jetty.
“Wait here.” Wallander told the woman. He scrambled down the slope and ran over the sand, then walked out along the jetty and looked down into the rubber boat. There were two men lying with their arms wrapped round each other, their faces ashen. He tried to capture what he saw in a mental photograph. His many years as a police officer had taught that the first impression was always important. A dead body was generally the end of a long and complicated chain of events, and sometimes it was possible to get an idea of that chain right from the start.
From the book ‘The dogs of Riga’ By Henning Mankell

Two minutes later Wallender was on his way along the coast road. Peters and Norén were ahead of him in a patrol car, sirens blaring. Wallender shuddered as he saw the freezing breakers slamming onto the beach. He could see an ambulance in his rear-view mirror, and Martinsson in a second police car.
Mossby Strand was deserted. As he cla,mbered out of his car, the icy wind met him head-on. The beach shop was boarded up, and the shutters were creaking and groaning in the wind. High up on the path that sloped down to the beach was a woman waving her arms about agitatedly, the dog beside her tugging at its lead. Wallander strode out, fearful as usual about what was in store for him- he would never be able to reconcile himself to the sight of dead bodies. Dead people were just like the living. Always different.
“Over there”, screeched the woman hysterically. Wallender looked in the direction she was pointing. A red life-raft was bobbing up and down at the water’s edge where it had become stuck among some rocks by the bathing jetty.
“Wait here.” Wallander told the woman. He scrambled down the slope and ran over the sand, then walked out along the jetty and looked down into the rubber boat. There were two men lying with their arms wrapped round each other, their faces ashen. He tried to capture what he saw in a mental photograph. His many years as a police officer had taught that the first impression was always important. A dead body was generally the end of a long and complicated chain of events, and sometimes it was possible to get an idea of that chain right from the start.
From the book ‘The dogs of Riga’ By Henning Mankell

He made up his mind quickly.

He made up his mind quickly. He unfastened a painter, leaned over the rail and tied it to the life-raft. Jakobson changed course for Ystad, and Holmgren secured the line when the dinghy was about 10 metres behind the boat and free of its wake.
When the Swedish coast came into sight, Holmgren cut the rope and the life-raft with the two dead men inside disappeared far behind. Jajobson changed course to the east, and a few hours later they chugged into the harbour at Brantevik. Jakobson collected his pay, got into his Volvo and drove off towards Svarte.
The harbour was deserted. Holmgren locked the wheelhouse and spread a tarpaulin over the cargo hatch, He checked the hawsers slowly and methodically. Then he picked up the bag containing the money, walked over to his old Ford, and coaxed the reluctant engine to life.
On the spur of the moment, he turned right and stopped at one of the phone boxes opposite the bookshop in the square. He rehearsed what he was going to say carefully. Then he dialled 999 and asked for the police. As he waited for them to answer, he watched the snow begin to fall again through de dirty glass of the phone box
From the book ‘The dogs of Riga’ By Henning Mankell

At Rome we lived in the big house

At Rome we lived in the big house which had belonged to my grandfather and which he had left in his will to my grandmother. It was on the Palatine Hill, close to Augustus’s palace and the temple of Apollo built by Augustus, where the library was. The Palatine Hill looked down on the Market Place. Under the steepest part of the cliff was the temple of the Twin Gods, Castor and Pollux. (This was the old temple, built of timber and sods, which sixteen years later Tiberius replaced, at his own expense, with a magnificent marble structure, the interior painted and gilded and furnished as sumptuously as a rich noblewoman’s boudoir . My grandmother Livia made him do this to please Augustus, I may say. Tiberius was not religious-minded and very stingy with money.) It was healthier on that hill than down in the hollow by the river; most of the houses there belonged to senators. I was a very sickly child – a very battleground of diseases, ‘ the doctors said – and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which as to which should have the honour of carrying me off. To begin with, I was born prematurely, at only seven months, and then my fuster-nurse’s milk disagreed with me, so that my skin broke out in an ugly rash and then I had malaria, and measles, which left me slightly deaf on one ear, and erypselas, and colitis, and finally infantile paralysis, wich shortened my left so that I was condemned to a permanent limp.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

I remember once hearing

I remember once hearing two of my mother’s freedwomen discussing modern marriage from the point of view of a woman of family. What did she gain by it? They asked. Morals were so loose now that nobody took marriage seriously any longer. Granted, a few old-fashioned men respected sufficiently to have a prejudice against children being fathered on them by their friends or household servants, and a few old-fashioned women respected their husbands sufficiently to be very careful not to become pregnant to any but them. But as a rule, any good looking woman nowadays could have any man to sleep with whom she chose. If she did marry and then tired of her husband, as usually happened, and wanted someone else to amuse herself with, there might easily be her husband’s pride or jealousy to contend with. Nor in general was she better off financially after marriage. Her dowry passed into the hands of her husband, or her father-in-law as master of the households, if he happened to be alive,; and a husband , or father-in-law, was usually a more difficult person to manage than a father, or elder brother, whose foibles she had long come to understand. Being married just meant vexatious household responsibilities. As for children, who wanted them? They interfered with the lady’s health and amusement for several months before birth and, though she had a foster mother for them immediately. Afterwards. it took time to recover from the wretched business of childbirth, and it often happened that her figure was ruined after having more than a couple. Look wow the beautiful Julia had changed by obediently gratifying Augustus’s desire for descendants. An a lady’s husband, if she was fond of him, could not be expected to keep off other women throughout the time of her pregnancy, and anyway he paid very little attention to the child when it was born. And then, as if all this were not enough, fosters mothers were shockingly careless nowadays, and the child often died. What a blessing it was that those Greeks doctors were so clever, if the thing had not gone too far-they could rid any lady of an unwanted child in two or three days , and nobody be any the worse or wiser. Of course some ladies, even modern ladies, had an old-fashioned hankering for children, but they could always buy a child for adoption into their husband’s family, from some man of decent birth who was hard pressed by his creditors...
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Athenodorus

Athenodorus was a stately old man with dark gentle eyes, a hooked nose and the most wonderful beard that surely ever grew on human chin. . It spreads in waves down to his waist and was as white as a swan's wing. I do not make this as an idle poetical comparison, for Y am not the sort of historian who writes in pseudo epic style. I mean that it was literally as white as a swan 's wing. There were some tame swans on an artificial lake in the Gardens of Sallust, where Athenodorus and I once fed them with bread from a boat, and I remember noticing that his beard and their wings as he leaned over the side were exactly the same colour. Athenodorus used to strike his beard so slowly and rhytthmically as he talked, and told me once that it was this thar made it grow so luxuriantly . He said that invisible seeds of fire streamed off from his fingers , which were food for the hairs. This was a typical Stoic joke at the expense of Epicurean speculative philosophy.
From the book 'I Claudius', by Robert Graves

It started snowing

It started snowing shortly after 10 a.m.
The man in the wheelhouse of the fishing boat cursed. He'd heard the forecast, but hoped they might make the Swedish coast before the storm hit. If he hadn´t been held up at Hiddensee the night before, he'd have been within sight of Ystad by now and could have changed course a few degrees eastwards. As it was, there will still 7 nautical miles to go and if the snow started coming down heavily, he'd be forced to heave to and wait until visibility improved.
He cursed again. It doesn't pay to be mean,he thought. I should have done what I'd meant to do last autumn, and bought a new radar. My old Decca can't be relied on any more. I should have got one of those new American models, but I was too mean. I didn't trust them not to cheat me.
He found hard it to grasp that there was no longer a country called East Germany, that a whole nation state had ceased to exist. History had tidied up its old borders overnight.
Now there was just Germany, and nobody really knew what was going to happen when the two formerly separate peoples tried to work together. At first, when the Berlin Wall came down, he had felt uneasy. Would the enormous changes mean the carpet would be pulled from under his feet? His east German partners had reassured him. Nothing would change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, this upheaval might even create new opportunities.
From the book 'The dogs of Riga' by Henning Mankell and translated by Laurie Thompson

On one occasion

On one occasion when the Noble Order the Knights, from whom the senators were chosen, complained of the severity of his laws against bachelors, he summoned the entire order into the Market Place for a lecture. When he had them assembled there he divided them up into two groups, the married and the unmarried. The unmarried were a very much larger group than the married and he addressed separate speeches to each group, He worked himself up into a great passion with the unmarried, calling the beasts and brigands and, by a queer figure of speech, murderers of their posterity. By this time Augustus was an old man with all the petulance and crankiness of an old man who has been at the head odd affairs all his life. He asked them, had they an hallucination that they were Vestal Virgins ? At lest Vestal Virgins slept alone, which was more than they did. Would they, pray, explain why instead of sharing their beds with decent women of their own class and begetting healthy children, they squandered all their virile energy on greasy slaves-girls and nasty Asiatic-Greek prostitutes? And if he were to believe what he heard , the partner of their nightly bed-play was more often one of those creatures of loathsome profession whom he would not even name, lest the admission of their existence in the City should he construed as a condonation of it. If he had his way a man who shirked his social obligations and at the same time lived a life of sexual debauch should be subject to the same dreadful penalties as a Vestal who forgets her vows- to be buried alive.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Find what you love and do it

Find what you love and do it. That’s what it boils down to. I admit I didn’t always love teaching. I was out of my depth. You’re on your own in the classroom, one man or woman facing five classes every day, five classes of teenagers. One unit of energy against one hundred and seventy-five ticking bombs, and you have to find ways of saving your own life. They may like you, they may even love you, but they are young and it is the business of the young to push the old off the planet. I know I’m exaggerating but it’s like a boxer going into the ring or a bullfighter into the arena. You can’t be knocked out or gored and that’s the end of your teaching career. But if you hang on you learn the tricks. It’s hard but you have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish. The airlines tell you if oxygen fails you are to put on your mask first, even if your instinct is to save the child.
The classroom is a place of high drama. You’ll never know what you’ve done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tell when you’ve reached them or alienated them. It’s chemistry. It’s psychology. It’s animal instinct. You are with the kids and , as long as you want to be a teacher, there’s no escape. Don’t expect help from the people who’ve escaped the classroom, the higher-ups. They’re busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It’s you and the kids. So there’s the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it.
From the book ‘Teacher Man’ by Frank Mc Court

‘You a wobbly?'

‘You a wobbly?’
‘Sure I am, you dirty yellow…,’he began.
The sheriff came up and hauled off to hit him. ‘Look out, he’s got glasses on.’ A big hand pulled his glasses off. ‘We’ll fix that. ‘Then the sheriff punched him in the nose with his fist. ‘Say you ain’t.?
Ben’s mouth was full of blood . He set his jaw. ?He’s a kike, hit him a again for me.’
‘Say you ain’t a wobbly.? Somebody whacked a rifle barrel against his shins and fell forward. ‘Run for it,’ they were yelling. Blows with clubs and rifle buts were splitting his ears.
He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped on a rail and fell, cutting his arm on something sharp. There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn’t see. A heavy boot was kicking him again and again on the side. He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Somebody was holding him up under the arms and was dragging him free of the cattle guard on the track. Another fellow began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief . He heard Bram’s voice way off somewhere, ‘We’re over the county line, boys.’ What with losing his glasses and the rain and the night and the shooting pain all up and his back Ben couldn’t see anything. He heard shots behind them and yells from where other guys were running the gantlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of wobblies making their way down the railroad track. ?Fellow workers.’ Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, ‘we must never forget this night.’
At he interurban trolley station they took up a collection among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk the thirty miles back to Seattle.
Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so dopey he barely knew what was happening when they brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Evertett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At General Delivery he found a letter from Gladys, enclosing fifty dollars and saying his father wanted him to come home.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

They went down on the boat to Seattle

They went down on the boat to Seattle, I.W.W. headquarters there was like a picnic ground, crowed with young men coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. The dock was full of deputies with rifles, and revolvers. ‘The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us,? Some guy’s voice tittered nervously. The deputies had white handkerchiefs around their necks. There’s Sheriff McRae’ said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben ‘We better stick together…Looks to me like we was going to get tamped up some.’ The wobblies were arrested as fact as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of the dock. The deputies were drunk, most of them . Ben could smell the whiskey on the breath of the red-faced guy who grabbed him by the arm. ‘Get a move on there, you son of bitch…’ He got a blow from a riffle butt in the small of his back. He could hear the crack of saps on men’s skulls. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jelly with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. ‘Boys we got to show them we got guts’ a red haired boy said. A deputy who was holding on to the back of the track aimed a blow at him with his sap, but lost his balance and fell off. The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, purple in the face. ?You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your dirty mugs when we get through with you.’ He yelled.
Out in the woods where the country road crossed the railroad track they were made to get out of the tracks. The deputies stood around them with their guns levelled while the sheriff who was reeling drunk, and two well-dressed middle aged men talked over what they’ do. Ben heard the world gantlet.
‘Look here, sheriff,’ somebody said. ‘we’re not here to make any kind of disturbance. All we want is our constitutional rights of free speech.’
The sheriff turned towards them waving the butt of his revolver. ‘Oh, you do, you do. Well this is Snohomish County and you ain’t going to forget it… if you come here again some of your fellers is going to die, that’s all there is about it… All right, boys, let’s go.’
The deputies made two lines down towards the railroad track. They grabbed the wobblies one by one and beat them up.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

He fumbled with the engine

He fumbled with the engine awhile and she could hear him swearing in French. Then he went into the hangar to wake up a mechanic. Daughter stood there shivering in the growing silvery light.: She wouldn’t think of anything. She wanted to go up in a plane. Her head ached,, but she didn’t feel nauseated. When the mechanic came back with Pierre, she could make out that she was arguing with him trying to make him give up the flight. She got very sore: Pierre, you’ve got to take me up,’ she yelled at the two men sleepily arguing in French. ?All right , miss Sistair’. They wrapped a heavy army coat around her and strapped her very carefully in the observer’s seat. Pierre climbed into the pilot seat. It was a Blèriot monoplane, he said. The mechanic spun the propeller. Te engine started. Everything was full of the roar of the engine. Suddenly she was scared and sober, thought about home and the boat she was going to take tomorrow. It seemed an endless time with the engine roaring. The light was brighter . She started to fumble with the straps to unstrap them. It was crazy going up like this. She had to catch the boat. The plane had started. It was bouncing over the field, bouncing along the ground. They were still on the ground rumbling bouncing along. Maybe it wouldn’t go up. She hoped it wouldn’t go up. A row of poplars swept past below them. The motor was a settles roar now, they were climbing. It was daylight: a cold silver sun shone in her face. Underneath them was a floor of thick white clouds like a beach.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Joe had been hanging around New York

Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and getting tanked all the time. One day she went to work and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every god dam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary seaman on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt treated like a jailbird again and swobbing decks and chipping paint. In the fo’c’stile there was mostly country kids who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who weren’t good for anything. They got into a dirty blow four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scattered and they found that the deck hadn’t been properly caulked and the water kept coming down into the fo’c’style. It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bordeaux he’d have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Bran knew all the ropes

Bran knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who have got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. There they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he’d caved in, but he fourteen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweaty clothes he’d still feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the tracks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to speak like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruit cannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour stench of rotting fruit peelings . there they read in Solidarity about the shingle weavers’ strike and the free speech fight en Everett, and decided they’ go down and see wht they could do to help out.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

It was a funny trip round Spain

It was a funny trip round Spain and through the Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. All the way there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, all hugging the coast and creeping along with life preservers piled on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing them was another line coming back light, transports and colliers from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their screws so far out of the water you could hear them a couple of hours after they were hull down and out of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were French and British battleships to seaward all he time and silly looking destroyers with their long smokes smudges that would hail you and come aboard to see your papers Ashore it didn’t look like the war a bit. The weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Spanish coast was green with bare pink and yellow mountains back of the sore and all scattered with little white houses like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into towns. Crossing the gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and driving fog and nasty choppy sea,,, they came within an ace of running down a big felucca with barrels of wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera in a howling north west wind, with the red roofed towns all bright and shiny and the dry hills rising rocky behind them, and snow mountains standing out clear above. After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses were all pink and blue and yellow and there were tall poplars and tall pointed church steeples in all the valleys.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos

Now obviously there comes a time

Now obviously there comes a time when a girl has to make decisions, and clearly this was one of those times. What to do? I’d seldom found anything as profoundly ridiculous as the fig display – thank God we didn’t have oysters, or mussels. Or clams, or he’d have probably tongued those as well, making some ghastly remark about them ‘tasting of sea’ – but, on the other hand, beggars etc. Nor That I think of myself as a beggar,but this definitely constituted an offer, and offers have been thin in the ground thin on the ground in my neck on the woods. (Still, what a thing to do: I couldn’t _ I can’t _ conceive of a situation where I’d be out at dinner and get it into my head that it would be a really terrific idea to impress the man next to me by cheerfully fellating a sausage. Imagine if you got it all the way in and choked a bit and had to be rescued by your hosts, the head, as it were, of the sausage peering helplessly out of your parted lips.)
So, que faire ? I was given a few minutes’ respite by Emma, on Cooper’s left, asking him whether it was really true that liposuction was bad for you, and during these minutes I am sorry to say I decided, Yes. I decided that since I was practically rusty from lack of sexual use, I’d give Cooper a go. Why not? He was remarkably good-looking, he clearly had the horn, ha had quite a long tongue and I never needed to see him again, so who cared if his seduction techniques involved violating fruits ?
I thought about it – fortifying myself with another couple of glasses of wine – the more it seemed to me that Cooper coitus was really a good idea: the perfect way of easing myself back in the saddle. As it were – a neat. Nonsense solution to my problem. I’d go somewhere with him after dinner, have a quickie, prove to myself that I was still capable of having sex, perhaps an orgasm, and go home. Perfect. It was about time I slept with someone who wasn’t Dom, and got on with my life. Once the decision was made, I began rather looking forward to it
From the book ‘Don’t you want me?’ By India Knight

Mr Cooper’s flirting

William Cooper does not rub fake into his proud member, it turns out, I know, because I saw it.
I was seated next to him at dinner. Cooper, it quickly7 became clear, was very much on for it: what started off as mildly flirtatious banter, of the kind you might have with your husband’s half-gaga great-uncle, turned into something rather fuller on as the evening progressed and the claret flowed. I went along with it: everyone enjoys being flirted with, and I haven’t had anyone flirt with me for ages. Not exactly subtle, though, Mr Cooper’s flirting, consisting as it did of double entendres, compliments addressed to my bosoms and much flashing of his weirdly white teeth. Funnily, the harder he flirted, the more I found myself flirting back (the wine helped, as did his face). His technique may have been unspeakably naff, but in the half light, he really looked pretty sexy.
And then it was pudding: a cheese plate, passion fruit crême brulée and imported figs. I’d turned to my left to speak to George Bigsby ( I was right about Tree: absolutely riddled with allergies to wheat, dairy, fish and alcohol, poor thing) when i felt my calf being stroken by somebody’s foot – somebody’s cashmere-sock-clad foot, by the feel of things. I stared at George, who stared back somewhat blankly, and then turned my head to my right. William Cooper winked, and carried on stroking. The stroking was oddly vigorous –like having a good rubdown – rather sensual, but none the worse for it. Looking around the table, I noticed that everyone was deep in conversation. I turned back to William to say something – I wasn’t sure what – but one look at his face left me (and this is quite a rare occurrence) absolutely speechless. Cooper was performing cunnilingus on a fig.
From the book Don’t you want me? By India Knight

Ayla didn’t feel the trembling

Ayla didn’t feel the trembling beneath her feet until she saw the people toppling over, unable to keep their balance. Her own face mirrored the stunned expressions of the rest as they changed to fear, and then stark terror. It was then she heard the deep, terrifying rumble from the bowels of the earth.
She scrambled up the swaying slope trying to reach the large triangular entrance. A huge rock rolled down the steep wall that held the opening , and, deflected by a tree that splintered under the impact, crashed to the ground beside her. Ayla’s didn’t notice . She was numb, in shock. The memories locked in her old nightmare were released, but jumbled and confused by sheer panic.
The ground beneath her dropped several feet, then heaved up again. She fell over and struggled to get up again, and then saw the vaulted ceiling of the cave collapse. Jagged chunks, torn from the high roof, crashed down and slipt on impact. Then more fell. All around her boulders bounced and tumbled down the rocky face, rolled down the gentler slope, and splashed into the icy stream. The ridge to the east cracked and half of it toppled.
Inside the cave, it was raining rocks and pebbles and dirt, mixed with the intermittent thunder of large sections of the walls and vaulted dome. Outside, tall conifers danced like clumsy giants and naked deciduous trees shook bare limbs in an ungraceful jitter, moving in speeded time to the thunderous dirge. A crack in the wall, near the east side of the opening, opposite the spring fed pool, widened with an explosive gush that flushed out loose rock and gravel. It opened another underground channel that deposited its load of debris on the broad front porch of the cave before making its maiden voyage to the stream. The roar from the earth and the smashing rocks overpowered the screams of the terror stricken people. The sound was deafening.
Finally, the quaking subsided. A last few stones tumbled off the mountain, bounced, rolled, then came to rest.
From the book ‘The clan of the cave bear’ by Jean M. Auel

By mid-morning the rain eased

By mid-morning the rain eased to a dreary drizzle and by afternoon stopped altogether. A wan, tired sun broke through the solid cloud cover, but did little to warm or dry the drenched earth. Despite the dismal weather and sparse fare, the clan was excited by so notable an occasion for a feast. A change in leadirship was rare enough, but a new mog-ur at the same time made it exceptional. Orga and Ebra would have a part to play in the ceremony, and brac as well. The seven year old would be the next heir apparent.
Oga was a tight bundle of stretched nerves. She jumped up to cheek every fireplace where food was cooking every other moment. Ebre tried to calm her, but Ebra wasn’t so settled herself. Trying to seem more grown-up, Brac was issuing commands to the small children and busy women. Brun finally stepped in and called him off to the side to practise his part once more. Uba took the children to Vorn’s hearth to get them out of the way, and after most of the preparations were completed, Ayla joined her. Aside from helping , Ayla’s only role would be to make datura for the men since Creb had told her not to make the drink from the roots.
By evening, only a few wisps of clouds remained to dart fitfully before the full moon that lit the bare, lifeless landscape. Inside the cave , a large fire burned in a space behind the last hearth, defined by a circle of torches.
From the book ‘The clan of the cave bear’ by Jean M. Auel

The first light of pre-dawn

The first light of pre-dawn glowed through the opening of the cave, filling in the triangular space. She slipped quietly out of bed, quickly threw on a wrap and some foot coverings, and moved silently towards the entrance.
She took a deep breath as soon as she stepped beyond the cave’s mouth. Her relief was so great, she didn’t care that icy rain soaked through her leather wrap. She slogged through the mucky quagmire in front of the cave towards the stream,, shivering from a sudden chill. Patches of snow, blackened by soot sifting out from the many fires, sent muddy runnels of water down the slope adding their small measure, to the drenching downpour that swelled the ice locked channel.
Her leather foot coverings gave small purchase on the reddish brown ooze, and she slipped and fell half way down to the stream. Her limp hair, plastered against her head, hung in thick ropes extending into rivulets that cut through the mud clinging to her wrap before the rain washed it away. She stood for a long time on the bank of the watercourse, struggling to break free of its frozen keep, and watched the dark water swirl around chunks of ice, finally break them loose, and send them careering to some unseen destination.
Her teeth were chattering when she struggled back up the slippery slope watching the overcast sky grow imperceptibly lighter beyond the ridge to the east. She had to force herself through an invisible barrier that blocked the mouth of the cave, and felt the sense of uneasiness again the moment she entered.
From the book ‘The clan of the cave bear’ by Jean M. Auel

Brun threw up his hand in a signal to stop

Brun threw up his hand in a signal to stop, then pointed ahead at the monstrous shaggy bruin rubbing his back against a tree. Even the children sensed the awe with which the clan viewed the massive vegetarian. His physical presence was impressive though. The brown bears of their own mountains, and these too, averaged about three hundred and fifty pounds; the weight of a male cave bear, during the summer while he was still fairly lean, was closer to a thousand. In Late autumn, when he was fattened for winter, his bulk was much greater. He towered above the men of the clan by nearly three times their height, and with his huge head and shaggy coat seemed even bigger. Lazily scratching his back on the rough bark of the old snag, he appeared unaware of the people frozen on their tracks so close by. But he had little to fear from any creature and was simply ignoring them. The smaller brown bears inhabiting the area near their own cave had been known to break the neck of a stag with one blow of a powerful foreleg, what couldn’t this huge bruin do? Only another male during rutting season, or the female of the species protecting her cubs, would dare to stand up to him. She was invariably successful.
The bear tired of his activity – or his itch was satisfied – and he stretched to his full height, walked on hind legs a few paces, then dropped down on all four legs. Muzzle drooping close to the ground, he loped ponderously away with a lumbering gallop. For all his great size, the cave bear was basically a peaceful creature and rarely attacked unless he was annoyed.
From the book ‘The clan of the cave bear’ by Jean M. Auel

For two days

For two days they struggled through putrid, mosquito infected swamps of brackish water, broken through by occasional channels, before they reached the mainland. Scrub oak and hornbeam quickly led to the cool, welcome shade of parkland oak woods. They passed through an almost pure stand of beech, relieved by a few chestnut, and into a mixed forest dominated by oak, but including boxwood and yew, draped with clinging ivy and clematis. The lianas thinned out, but still climbed an occasional tree when they reached a belt of fir and spruce intermixed with beech, maple and hornbeam. The western part was the wettest of the entire range, and carried a dense cover of forests, and the lowest snowline.
They caught glimpses of forest bison and the red deer, roe deer and elk of wooden landscapes; they saw boar, fox, badger, wolf, lynx, leopard, wildcat and many smaller animals, but not a single squirrel

The travellers settled into a monotonous routine

The travellers settled into a monotonous routine, one day blending into the next with weary regularity. The advancing season changed so gradually, they hardly noticed when the warm sun become a scorching ball of flame searing the steppes, turning the flat plain into a jaundiced monochrome of dun earth, buff grass and beige rocks against a dust laden yellowish drab sky. For three days their eyes smarted with smoke and ashes carried by the prevailing winds from a sweeping prairie fire. They passed massive herds of bison, and giant deer with huge palmate antlers, horses, onagers and asses; more rarely, saiga antelope with horns growing straight out of the tops of their heads slightly curved back at the tips; tens upon tens of thousands of grazing animals supported by the extensive grassland.
Long before they neared the marshy isthmus, that both connected the peninsula to the main continent and served as an outlet for the shallow salty sea to the northeast, the massive mountain range, second highest on earth, loomed into view. Even the lowest peaks were capped with glacial ice to halfway down their flanks, coldly unmoved by the searing heat of the plains. When the level prairie merged into low rolling hills, dotted with fescue and father grass, and red with a richness of iron ore - the red ochre making it hallowed ground - Brun knew the salt marsh was not far beyond. It was a secondary and more tenuous link . The primary connection of the peninsula to the mainland was the northern one that formed past of the western boundary of the smaller inland sea.

The freshness of early summer

The freshness of early summer in the temperature zone near the cave changed character on the open plains of the continental steppes to the east. Gone was the rich green foliage that filled out brush and deciduous trees and still betrayed the new season' growth of conifers with needles a shade lighter at the tips of branches and spires. Instead quick-rooting and sprouting herbs and grasses, already chest high, whose youthful verdancy was lost to the drab hue indeterminate between green and gold, stretched to the horizon. Thick, matted, old season growth cushioned their steps as the clans wove their way across the illimitable prairie, leaving his contemporary ripple behind showing the way they had come. Clouds rarely marred the boundless expanse above except for an occasional thunderstorm, more often seen from a distance. Surface water was scarce. They stopped to fill water bags at every stream, unsure if they would find any conveniently close when they camped for the night.
From the book 'Theclan of the cave bear' by Jean M. Auel

Spring was in full flower

Spring was in full flower the day she decided to hunt ptarmigan for Creb’s favourite dish. She thought she would look over the new growths and begin re-stocking Iza’s pharmacopoeia while she was at it. She spent the morning ranging the nearby countryside, then headed for a broad meadow near the steppes. She flushed a couple of the lowing flying fowl, brought down quickly by swifter stones, then searched trough the tall grass looking for a nest had hopefully some eggs. Creb liked the birds stuffed with their own eggs in a nest of edible greens and herbs. She uttered an exclamation of joy when she spied it, and carefully wrapped the eggs in soft moss and tucked them into a deep fold of her wrap. She was delighted with herself. Out of sheer joyful exuberance, she sprinted across the meadow in a fast run, coming to a halt, out of breath, at the top of a knoll covered with new green grass.
Flopping to the ground, she checked her eggs to make sure they were undamaged, and took out a piece of dried meat to lunch on. She watched a bright yellow-breasted meadowlark trilling gloriously from an open perch, then taken to wing and continue his song in flight. A pair of golden crowned sparrows, warbling their woeful tune of descending pitch, flitted among the blackberry canes at the border of the field. Another pair of black capped, grey coated birds named by the chick-a –dee- dee of their call, darted in and out of their nesting hole in a fir tree near a small creek winding its way through the dense vegetation at the floor of the knoll. Small, vivacious, browns wrens scolded the others as they carried twigs and dried moss to a nest cavity in an ancient, gnarled apple tree, proving its youthful fecundity with its flock of pink blooms.

Ayla's days were busy

Ayla's days were busy filled with activity to ensure her survival. She was no longer the inexperienced, unknowledgeable child she had been at five, During the years with the clan, she had had to work hard, but she had learned in the process. She wove tight waterproof baskets to carry water and for cooking, and made herself a new collecting basket. She cured the skins of animals she hunted and made rabbit fur for linings for the insides of her foot coverings, leggings wrapped and tied with cord, and hand coverings made in the style of foot coverings - circular pieces that tied at the wrist in a pouch, but with slits cut in the palms for thumbs. She made tools from flint and collected grass to make her bed softer.
The meadow grasses supplied food, too. They were top heavy with seeds and grains. In the immediate vicinity were also nuts, high bush cranberries, bear berries, hard small apples, starchy potato like roots, and edible ferns. She was pleased to find milk vetch, the non poisonous variety of the plant whose green pods held rows of small round legumes, and she even collected the tiny hard seeds from dried pig weed to grind and add to grains that she cooked into mush. Her environment supplied her needs.
From the book 'The clan of the cave bear' by Jean M. Auel

After Ayla made herself a new sling

After Ayla made herself a new sling out of Zoug’s scraps to replace the old one that had finally worn out, she decided to look for a place to practise away from the cave. She was always afraid someone would catch her . She started upstream along the watercourse that flowed near the cave, then began ascending the mountain along a tributary creek, forcing her way through heavy underbrush.
She was stopped by a steep rock wall over which the creek spilled in a cascading spray. Jutting rocks, whose jagged outline were softened by a deep cushion of lush green moss, separated the falling water bouncing from rock to rock, into long thin streams that splashed up, creating veils of mist, and fell again. The water collected itself in a foaming pool that filled a shallow rocky basin at the foot of the waterfall before it continued down to meet the larger waterway. The wall presented a barrier that ran parallel to the stream, but as Ayla hiked along its base, back towards the cave, the sheer drop angled up in a steep, but climbable, grade. At the top, the ground levelled out and as she continued , she came to the upper course of the creek and began to follow it upstream again.
Moist, grey-green lichen draped the pine and spruce that dominated the higher elevation. Elevation. Squirrels darted up the tall trees and across an underlying turf of variegated moss, carpeting earth and stones and fallen logs alike in a continuous cover that shaded from light yellow to deep green. Ahead she could see bright sunshine filtering trough the evergreen woods. As she followed the creek, the trees thinned out, intermixed with a few deciduous trees dwarfed to brush, then opened out to a clearing. She emerged from the woods into a small field whose far end terminated in the grey- brown rock of the mountain, sparsely covered with clinging growth as it soared to higher reaches.
The creek, which meandered across one side of the meadow, found its source in a large spring gushing out of the side of a rock wall near a large hazelnut clump growing against the rock. The mountain range was honeycombed with underground fissures and chutes that filtered the glacial run-off which appeared again as clear, sparkling springs.
From the book “The clan of the cave bear”, by Jean M. Auel

In an animal hide

In an animal hide hung from a thong-lashed frame set over a fire, a savoury broth bubbled. Careful watch was kept to make sure the liquid didn't boil down too far. As long as the level of boiling broth was above the level reached by the flames, it kept the temperature of the skin pot too low to burn. Ayla watched Uka stir up chunks of the meat and bone from the neck of the bison that were cooking with wild onion, salty coltsfoot and other herbs. She tasted it and then added peeled thistle stalks, mushrooms, lily buds and roots, watercress, milkweed buds, small immature yams, cranberries carried from the other cave, and wilted flowers from the previous days's growth of day lilies for thickening.
The hard fibrous old roots of cattails had been crushed and the fibres separated and removed. Dried blueerries they had carried with them, and parched ground grains, were added to the resulting starch that settled in the bottom of the baskets of cold water. Lumps of the flat, dark, unleavened bread were cooking on hot stones near the fire. Pigweed greens, lamb's quarter, young clover and dandelion leaves seasoned with coltsfoot were cooking in another pot, and a sauce of dried , tart apples mixed with wild rose petals and a lucky find of honey steamed near another fire.
From the book 'The clan of the cave bear' by Jean M. Auel

The decibel level of the conversational roar

The decibel level of the conversational roar in the drawing room is rising. Most of the guests have had two or three glasses of wine by now. Ralph and Carrie exchange a glance. Ralph raises an interrogative eyebrow; Carrie nods. She begins to direct guests towards the dinning room, where a line soon forms around the long mahogany table, cooing and exclaiming over the appetizing dishes. The guests take their laden plates back into the drawing room, the television room – which have been opened up and tidied for the occasion, with chairs and cushions and stools arranged invitingly in small arcs.
From the book ‘Thinks’, by David Lodge