A bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a tea-shop that had gone mad and turned. Bbylonian, a while palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the other building like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilization, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand llights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitress and cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farming, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and conds a waitress( five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen life to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, nsuous, vulgar life flowering in the upp
er storeys, and a cold science working in the bament. Such as the gigantic tea-shop into which Turgis marched, in arch not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived in such luxury. The place was built for him.
It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were al there. It emed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high mid-summer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide stairca until he reached his favourite floor, whre an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls, scented air, the nsuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, s sleek grave man, older tha
n he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “ For one, sir? This way, plea,” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.
豆角饭
15 words/minute 470words
I Now elwhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness. But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypasd the majority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the way one is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t do anything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beat-en paths of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’re all bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own inhab-itants. For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-t being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the “Mona Lisa.”
经济损失
日记400字大全When the opportunity aro in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-ye
各个朝代
ar contract with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter, tho who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decades jumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of the world’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long life expectancy. But the proj-ect’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, were more emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want, hardship, and colonial rvitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in 1944 and who psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longest time, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegeta-tion and livestock, all spirit—a world revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.
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