Shulamite

“ For Shulamith is thought of as a רעה shepherdess, Sol 1:8, and she thinks of Solomon as a רעה shepherd. She remains so in her inclination even after her elevation to the rank of a queen. The solitude and glory of external nature are dearer to her than the bustle and splendour of the city and the court. ”

“ That Shulamith leant on her beloved, arose not merely from her weariness, with the view of supplementing her own weakness from his fulness of strength, but also from the ardour of the love which gives to the happy and proud Solomon, raised above all fears, the feeling of his having her in absolute possession. The road brings the loving couple near to the apple tree over against Shulamith's parental home, which had been the witness of the beginning of their love. ”

“ The Zulu had not left the main body above five minutes when the inky-looking vault right over head was suddenly rent in twain as if some giant hand had ripped the veil of clouds, and heaven and earth seemed fairly to meet for one brief instant in a dazzling, blazing glare of lurid light, which flooded veldt and mountain, rock and river, for miles around the spot, and was instantly succeeded by an unremitting roll of thunder, which seemed to shake all nature to her utmost depths, and threaten earth with chaos worse confounded. ”

“ Yet we confine ourselves to the nearest sense, in which Solomon relates a self-experience. Shulamith, the lightly esteemed, cannot boast that she is so ruddy and fair of countenance as they who have just sung how pleasant it is to be beloved by this king; but yet she is not so devoid of beauty as not to venture to love and hope to be loved: “Black am I, yet comely.” ”

“ After eating all of this peculiar food-product that grew on the plateau, they gleaned the field above the deep gorge, and as a last resort they made a hunting expedition to the half-acre of rocks and brambles where they had found the mica. Terrible as the passage through the cavern had at first seemed to the mind of Lieutenant Coleman, the lapse of time and a better acquaintance with the interior of the subterraneous tunnel made it but a commonplace covered way to the field of mica. Not that the soldiers had any further use for the mineral wealth which was so lavishly strewn among the rocks. ”

“ Crossing the meadow we climbed a gentle slope of clay and sulfur [173] to the very edge of the solfatara. What a weird and impressive scene it is! Every beauty of form and color, every horror of sound and odor are here united. Unnumbered tons of sublimed sulfur are piled in banks and pyramids at the base of the cliffs. Great pools of boiling bolus hiss, splutter and stink. The air is foul with hot hydrogen sulfid and stifling with sulfur dioxid. Wavering columns of steam render the walking dangerous as oftentimes one can not see the place where he is about to set his foot. ”

“ There was too little land for the tribe of Shala, and the making of land is slow among mountains where stone walls must be built to catch the little earth that remains when rain melts limestone. He had heard that in the valley of Scutari there was soil, as there had been in Kossova, and his voice sank into silence as though it were a burden too heavy to lift. ”

“ From the fact that the temperature of these wells and that of the mineral springs just east of them is said to be identical, and that they are, like the latter, never affected by surface-drainage, it is claimed that both have a common origin, and those that advocate the theory of sublimation claim that, if the waters are fresh at the site of these fresh-water wells, it is impossible for them to become mineral in their character by the short passage through the rocks that intervene between them and the fault; and hence they insist that the theory of percolation is untenable. ”

“ Before Sulamith was to enter the pool, young maid-servants poured aromatic compounds into it, that made the water to turn white and blue and to play with all the colours of a milky opal. The female slaves disrobing Sulamith gazed with delight upon her body; and, when they had disrobed her, they led her up to a mirror. Not a single blemish was there upon her beautiful body, made aureate like a tawny, ripe fruit by the golden down of soft hair. ”

“ Possibly at the temperature of the magma-reservoirs even silica and various silicates may be volatilized, and might thus yield sublimation products. Many of the volcanic sublimates occur at first as incandescent crusts on the lava. Being generally unstable they are difficult of preservation, and are not usually well represented in collections.
Among the commonest sublimates is halite, or sodium chloride, NaCl, occurring as a white crystalline incrustation, sometimes accompanied, as at Vesuvius, by sylvite, or potassium chloride, KCl, which forms a similar sublimate. ”

“ The molten sulphur is exposed to a temperature of 262° Fahrenheit, and a pressure of two or three atmospheres, in the presence of steam; under these circumstances it is found that the sulphur absorbs a considerable quantity of water, which is given off again with great violence from the mass as it undergoes solidification. The hardened crust which forms on the surface of the molten sulphur is agitated and fissured, miniature cones and lava-streams being formed upon it, which have a striking resemblance to the grander phenomena of the same kind exhibited upon the crust of the globe. ”

“ Leaving the trail, we pushed our way up the steep slope of the valley, through underbrush that dropped a shower of water on us at the slightest touch. There were only a few hundred yards between us and the foot of the big wall which shot high above the tops of the pines, but by the time we arrived there night had fairly come. At this point a huge pile of boulders formed the upper edge of the slope, and for a moment we stood undecided which way to turn. "Toward home, of course!" Pitamakan exclaimed, and led the way along the edge of the boulders, and finally to the cliff. ”

“ It is thought that when the masses of halite and anhydrite pushed toward the earth’s surface, some of the upper part of the halite dissolved. The anhydrite, however, did not dissolve, and it remained on top of the salt column. Then, a part of this anhydrite was altered into the gypsum, limestone, and sulfur that now are found in some of the cap-rocks. Laboratory experiments have shown that the sulfur in the cap-rocks likely formed through the action of sulfate-reducing bacteria. These bacteria, in the presence of petroleum, converted the sulfate in some of the anhydrite into hydrogen sulfide. ”

“ The great abundance of chlorite in this trap might have rendered it probable that the rare mineral heliotrope was an inmate of it: accordingly I have laid before the Society some small specimens found there by Lord Gray's workmen in removing earth at the foot of one of the precipices. It forms veins of different dimensions in the fragments of rock, with which it is intimately united: it is of a finer green colour than that which is found in Rum, but none of the specimens which I procured contain the red spots for which this mineral is principally valued. ”

“ They sank down in collapse, feeling an icy coldness in their loins, and an overwhelming weight upon their eyelids.
They rose, and bounded against the rocks. But the lowest were weighted by the pressure of the others, and were immovable. They tried to cling to them so as to reach the top, but the bellying shape of the great masses rendered all hold impossible. They sought to cleave the ground on both sides of the gorge, but their instruments broke. They made a large fire with the tent poles, but the fire could not burn the mountain.
They returned to the portcullis ”

“ We were in the sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor. At each side of our little gay-colored cavalcade a gray cliff rose perhaps two hundred feet, too sheer to hold the snow that thickly crusted its top. These cliffs were the posts of a gateway through which we looked into the country of the hidden tribes.
I had never seen or dreamed such mountains. ”

“ It is unlikely that magma which had ascended from great depths and had just penetrated the resistant Hulett Member of the Sundance Formation, as well as the Lakota and Fall River Formations, would be stopped abruptly by the less resistant shales above. When the magma reached the shale beds, the weight of the column of igneous rock could have exceeded the strength of the shale, causing the magma to flow horizontally. ”

“ The basalt of the Wadi Huluz [10,410] is a close grained greenish-black rock containing white spots (amygdules) up to three millimetres diameter. Its sp. gr. is 2·93. The microscope shows the main bulk of the rock to be formed of lath-shaped plagioclase crystals, around and between which is green matter, now mostly chlorite. Here and [313] there are small clear areas within the green patches, which show bright polarisation colours, and are probably augite, being the remains of the original mineral which has been largely chloritised. There is a fair amount of magnetite in scattered grains. ”

“ Though many of the decomposed hornblende-schists contain more or less chlorite, I have only in two localities come across rocks in situ which contain so large a proportion of this mineral as to deserve the [347] name of chlorite-schists. The first is in the hills of Um el Huetat (latitude 25°) , where typical chlorite-schists are mixed with mica, talc, and hornblende schists. The second locality is between Gebels Ras Shait and Nugrus, where the rock [10,388] is remarkable not only in its peculiar appearance but also by its strongly magnetic character. ”

“ For long it trembled mournfully and wavered in the air, and when it had grown silent its quavering echoes still floated on for a long while.
“This marks the ending of the mystery in the temple of Isis,” said the king.
“I am afraid, my comely one,” whispered Sulamith. “A dark terror has penetrated into my soul.... I do not want to die.... I have not yet had time to enjoy my fill of thy embraces.... Embrace me.... Press me closer to thee.... Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm!...”
“Fear not death, Sulamith! For love is strong as death.... ”

“ War-hosts with their banners, their standards, go forth confident of victory. Such is Shulamith's whole appearance, although she is unconscious of it - a veni, vidi, vici. Solomon is completely vanquished by her. ”

“ Shasta is a loftier mountain than any that frown above the Peace River Pass. Yosemite can boast its half-dozen waterfalls, trickling down their thousand feet of rock; but for wild beauty, for the singular spectacle of a great river flowing tranquilly through a stupendous mountain range,—these mountains presenting at every reach a hundred varied aspects,—not the dizzy glory of Shasta nor the rampart precipices of Yosemite can vie with that lonely gorge far away on the great Unchagah. ”

“ According to the shepherd-hypothesis, here occurs the expression of the peculiar point of the story of the intercourse between Solomon and Shulamith; she scorns the offers of Solomon; her love is not to be bought, and it already belongs to another. But of offers we read nothing beyond Song Sol 1:11, where, as in the following Sol 8:12, it is manifest that Shulamith is in reality excited in love. ”

“ Shishaldin, an active volcano nearly nine thousand [23] feet high and located about thirty miles east of Unimak Pass. In symmetry and in the beauty of its curves it rivals Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan. No geographer has ever visited Mt. Shishaldin. No man has yet ascended it. Unimak, the island on which it stands, is a continuation of the Alaskan Peninsula, being separated from it only by a narrow strait. Like the rest of the Aleutian chain, it lies between Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ It is not indeed till fragments of the rock are examined in the hand that the spectator can discover that he sees any thing but a bed of shale alternating with sandstone: but on thus examining the schist, it is found to be an extremely brittle and hard substance, of a black colour, giving fire freely with steel, sharp in the fragments, and with an obscurely rhomboidal fracture; this last character being the only one by which it can be distinguished from the fine grained basalts, particularly such as I have mentioned as occurring in the form of veins in the Cuchullin. ”

“ Well, I laughed at this story at the time, though it interested me, for the Diamond Fields were not discovered then, but poor Evans went off and was killed, and for twenty years I never thought any more of the matter. However, just twenty years afterwards—and that is a long time, gentleman; an elephant hunter does not often live for twenty years at his business—I heard something more definite about Suliman's Mountains and the country which lies behind them. ”

“ It is a mineral of spinach-green or dark-green colour, having a specific gravity of 3.4, or even as high as 3.65, and may be regarded as a variety of jadeite rich in iron. Chloromelanite occurs in the Cyclops Mountains in New Guinea, and is used for hatchets or agricultural implements, whilst the sago-clubs of the island are usually of serpentine. Sillimanite, or fibrolite, is a mineral which, like chloromelanite, was used by the Neolithic occupants of western Europe, and is sometimes mistaken for a pale kind of jade. ”