Nipe

“ But you haven't been able to pinpoint the Nipe's activities that easily yet, have you?" Stanton asked.
"Ah, no," said Yoritomo. "Not at all. That was merely an analogy, and we must not make the mistake of carrying an analogy too far. The more intelligent a creature is, the greater, in general, is its scope of action. The Nipe is far from being so simple as a monkey or a hamster. On the other hand—" He smiled widely, showing bright, white teeth. "—he is not so bright as a human being." ”

“ First you must remove the erroneous data. Not so?"
"Agreed," Stanton said.
"Very good. Then let us look at the Nipe race, wherever it was spawned in this universe. Let us look at the race a long time back—way back when they first became Nipe sapiens. Back when they first developed a true language. Each little Nipe child, as it is born or hatched or budded—whatever [118] it is they do—is taught as rapidly as possible all the things it must know in order to survive. And once a little Nipelet is taught a thing, it knows. ”

“ In spite of his high rate of metabolism, the Nipe can store a tremendous amount of oxygen in his body and can stay underwater for as long as half an hour without breathing apparatus, if he conserves his energy. When he's wearing his scuba mask, he's practically a self-contained submarine. ”

“ Yoritomo was sitting in one of the big, soft chairs, puffing at his pipe, but he leaped to his feet when Stanton came in.
"Ah! About the ritual-taboo culture of the Nipe! Yes. Sit down. Yes. So. Do you find it impossible that a high technology could be present in such a system?" ”

“ Two years after he arrived, the Nipe was almost caught. He had managed, somehow—we're not sure yet exactly how—to get here from Asia. According to the psychologists who have been studying him, he apparently does not believe that human beings are any more than trained animals; he was looking then—as he is apparently still looking—for the 'real' rulers of Earth. He expected to find them, of course, in Government City. ”

“ Innovators, even in our own culture, have a very hard time working against the great inertia of a recognized theory. How much harder it would be in a ritual-taboo society with a perfect memory! How long—how incredibly long—it would take such a race to achieve the technology the Nipe now has! ”

“ The English word "gnipe" meaning a peak, or hill, Old Norse gnipa, or nipr is not applicable to this place, which is flat land lying by the banks of the river Don. The Middle English neep, which occurs in neap-tide, low tide, comes nearer, and it may be connected, but the Don is not a tidal river. There seems to be no way of explaining the word unless we take Nepe (1365) or Neep (1637) either as a personal, or a mythological, name. In the belief of our ancestors, the woods, fields, and rivers were peopled with spirits, just as they are now in the belief of savage nations. ”

“ Arrack made from the sap of a palm tree, a manufacture by no means confined to the Philippines. The Portuguese, appropriating the word Nipa to this spirit, called the tree itself nipeira.
a.—
1611.—"Other wine is of another kind of palm which is called Nipa (growing in watery places) , and this is also extracted by distillation. It is very mild and sweet, and clear as pure water; and they say it is very wholesome. It is made in great quantities, with which ships are laden in Pegu and Tanasarim, Malaca, and the Philippines or Manila ”

“ We need the tonic of wildness -- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. ”

“ Nipa palms the charm diminishes, until at last all beauty is lost in satiety and the sight becomes infinitely tedious. It is, by the way, from these Nipa palms thus growing in brackish water that the natives obtain salt; the ashes of the stalks, leaves, and roots are soaked in water, which, when the water is evaporated, yields a very dirty looking salt, much preferred, however, by the natives to that which can be bought in the Bazaar. Where the Nipa palms end wild sugar-cane begins, and its gray-green, grassy stalks become quite as monotonous as the Nipa ”

“ One of the Sheppey fruits may be mentioned as an especially interesting sample of the early Tertiary flora, namely the genus Nipadites, so named from the very close resemblance of the fossils to the fruits of the existing tropical plant Nipa. Nipa fruticans, sometimes described as a stemless palm because of the absence of the erect stem which is usually a characteristic feature of palms, grows in brackish estuaries of many tropical countries (Fig. 5, A) : it has long leaves not unlike those of the date-palm and bears clusters of fruits as large as a man's head ”

“ The nipa palm looks like a gigantic fern. It grows in swamps, and its leaves are deemed invaluable for the thatching of native huts. A tall grass, called cógon, is also used for this purpose. From the fruit-stalks of the nipa a wine is distilled that is a Government monopoly; and the art of manufacturing brandy from sugar-cane seems to be aboriginal. The inhabitants of the most distant islands and provinces have a patient, slow, inglorious way of making their favorite drink. ”

“ In the midst of the clustering roofs of nipa, tiles, corrugated iron, and palm leaves, separated by groves and gardens, each one is able to discover his own home, his little nest. Everything serves as a mark: a tree, that tamarind with its light foliage, that coco palm laden with nuts, like the Astarte Genetrix, or the Diana of Ephesus with her numerous breasts, a bending bamboo, an areca palm, or a cross. ”

“ To the eyes of the treasure-seeker there affords no fairer sight than Sagartia nivea at home in its native bower, in brownish olive or orange-coloured column, the upper part dotted with suckers, with slender tentacles and rippled disc of opaque white, as it waits with graceful bearing and outspread tentacula “for the meat that will come in due season,” and presents a perfect picture of placid happiness.
But like some individuals, who can judge the mind by the face, the gifted Nivea at our first glance instinctively learns that our appearance bodes no good to him and his. ”

“ I should first have made mention of the verde antico, the dark green with white irregular spots, because it is of the greatest value, and nearest the Nile. This is produced in the mountains of the plain green, or serpentine, as is the jasper, and is not discoverable by the dust, or any particular colour upon it. First, there is a blue fleaky stone, exceedingly even and smooth in the grain, solid, and without sparks or colour. When broken, it is something lighter than a slate, and more beautiful than most marble; it is like the lava of volcanoes, when polished. ”

“ All are painted with the four colors of the Nile—mellow tones of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green fields and harvest—imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so many languages—will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey it now! ”

“ Once or twice it happened that she was aroused from her torpor at night by feeling a firm, hard grasp upon her body, and she darted round in a circle like a dog after its tail; but the Nipper always knew when to let go.
One day she was also obliged to leave this hole. She managed to break down the ridge between her and a neighbouring pit, where she enjoyed a few months’ ease and comfort. Here she passed the winter, and cleared the mud of every tench, every leech, and every snail. ”

“ The light of day is subdued into a depressing gloom by the foliage of the mangrove forest: the air, charged with the miasma of decaying vegetable life, is impregnated with a sour, unpleasant odour; and the silence that prevails is interrupted only by the fall of a branch, or by the startled cry of some wading-bird disturbed in its haunt. Nipa palms line the banks in places, and occasionally occupy the swamp for some distance on either side of the stream. ”

“ The fruits of Nipa, which may be carried a considerable distance by ocean-currents without losing the power of germination, are constantly found with other vegetable drift on the beaches of tropical islands. ”

“ The current must be tremendously strong in this river, which gives its name to a large tract of country; for not only are trees and logs washed down, but huge clumps of Nipa and Nebong palms, looking like (what they really are) small floating islands, are carried out to sea with their numerous feathered inhabitants. More than once when a sail had been reported in the offing, it proved to be one of those masses of vegetation, the branches and large fan-shaped leaves of which presented a deceptive likeness to masts and sails. Those which can be seen are not dangerous ”

“ I see a hundred miles of mere—great wastes of weed through which the Nile rushes down narrow lanes between wide, placid pools, where the heavy thud of a leaping 7-foot fish and the sad cries of water-birds alone break the silence of the evening—a mere set in a long trough of sun-shorn hills, where trees burst like guns and the brown grass shrivels and drifts, ash-like, on the breeze; where heat is heat, and aged rhinos wander unceasingly through dry belts of thorn; where Shulis and Lures—curious Nilotic men—sit meditating in the sun—a sun round, red, and glowing like a furnace door ”

“ NINE-PIN BLOCK. A block in that form, mostly used for a fair-leader under the cross-pieces of the forecastle and quarter-deck bitts.
NINES, To the. An expression to denote complete.
NINGIM. A corruption of ginseng (which see) .
NIP. A short turn in a rope. Also, a fishing term for a bite. In Arctic parlance, a nip is when two floes in motion crush by their opposite edges a vessel unhappily entrapped. Also, the parts of a rope at the place bound by the seizing, or caught by jambing. Also, Nip in the hawse; hence "freshen the nip," by veering a few feet of the service into the hawse. ”

“ Oreads, or mountain nymphs, wandered over the mountains, and their laughter echoed in the valleys. Nereids and oceanids—water nymphs—sported in the waves of the ocean, and, with the tritons, attended Neptune, god of the deep blue sea.
The sunflower concealed the sea nymph Clytie, and lovely Echo was transformed into a voice. The laurel tree, with its glossy green leaves, was but the nymph Daphne, to whom, when fleeing from Apollo, her father, the river god, gave this form. ”

“ It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee ”

“ The roof and sides of the house were of attap. This is made from the long, arrow-like leaves of the nipah palm. Unlike its brother palms—the cocoa, the sago, the gamooty, and the areca—the nipah is short, and more like a giant cactus in growth. Its leaves are stripped off by the natives, then bent over a bamboo rod and sewed together with fibres of the same palm. When dry they become glazed and waterproof. ”

“ In confinement, the Nepa is the least hardy of any creature in the collection, if the sun strikes the jar it perishes, and it will not live long unless it has means of occasionally leaving the water—hence a broad jar should be used for it, and a small piece of pumice stone should be floated in it, to form an island on which the insects may take refuge. ”

“ The same author remarks, that "if the habits of the plants to which the fossil fruits belonged were similar to those of the recent Nipa, it will account for their abundance in the London Clay in the Isle of Sheppey; which formation, from the great variety of stems and branches, mixed up with star-fishes, shells of mollusks, and bones of fishes, crustaceans, and reptiles of numerous marine and fresh-water genera, is strikingly characteristic of the delta of a river, which probably flowed from near the Equator towards the spot where these interesting relics are deposited." ”

“ Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature’s creative powers are greater than man’s destructive instincts. True to those instincts, Ned Land greedily stuffed the finest of these mollusks into a net he carried at his side. ”

“ Such was the region our Nautilus was visiting just then: a genuine prairie, a tightly woven carpet of algae, gulfweed, and bladder wrack so dense and compact a craft’s stempost couldn’t tear through it without difficulty. Accordingly, not wanting to entangle his propeller in this weed-choked mass, Captain Nemo stayed at a depth some meters below the surface of the waves. ”

“ But it was afterward found that the White Nile was the longer of the two and the greater in volume, and many lives were sacrificed in the attempt to find its origin. The discovery and exploration of the lakes of Central Africa, where the Nile rises, belongs to our day; and the names of Burton, Speke, Grant, Livingstone, Stanley, Baker, Long, and others, will go down in history for solving a mystery which has puzzled the world for centuries. ”