全新版大学英语综合教程-4-课文电子书
成语故事大全-小学四年级英语
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全新版大学英语第四册课文
Unit 1
Text A The ICY Defender
Text 课文
They say that pride comes before a fall. In
the case of both Napoleon and Hitler, the many
victories
they enjoyed led them to believe
that anything was possible, that nothing could
stand in their way.
Russia's icy defender was
to prove them wrong.
THE ICY
DEFENDER
Nila B, Smith
In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of
the French, led his Grand Army into Russia. He was
prepared for the fierce resistance of the
Russian people defending their homeland. He was
prepared
for the long march across Russian
soil to Moscow, the capital city. But he was not
prepared for the
devastating enemy that met
him in Moscow — the raw, bitter, bleak Russian
winter.
In 1941, Adolf Hitler, leader
of Nazi Germany, launched an attack against the
Soviet Union, as
Russia then was called.
Hitler's military might was unequaled. His war
machine had mowed down
resistance in most of
Europe. Hitler expected a short campaign but, like
Napoleon before him, was
taught a painful
lesson. The Russian winter again came to the aid
of the Soviet soldiers.
Napoleon's
Campaign
In the spring of 1812,
Napoleon assembled an army of six hundred thousand
men on the
borders of Russia. The soldiers
were well trained, efficient, and well equipped.
This military force was
called the Grand Army.
Napoleon, confident of a quick victory, predicted
the conquest of Russia in
five weeks.
Shortly afterwards, Napoleon's army
crossed the Neman River into Russia. The quick,
decisive
victory that Napoleon expected never
happened. To his surprise, the Russians refused to
stand and
fight. Instead, they retreated
eastward, burning their crops and homes as they
went. The Grand Army
followed, but its advance
march soon became bogged down by slow-moving
supply lines.
In August, the French
and Russian armies engaged at Smolensk, in a
battle that left over ten
thousand dead on
each side. Yet, the Russians were again able to
retreat farther into Russian territory.
Napoleon had won no decisive victory. He was
now faced with a crucial decision. Should he
continue
to pursue the Russian army? Or should
he keep his army in Smolensk for the approaching
winter?
Napoleon took the gamble of
pressing on to Moscow, 448 kilometers away. On
September
7,1812, the French and Russian
armies met in fierce battle at Borodino, 112
kilometers west of
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Moscow.
By nightfall, thirty thousand French and forty-
four thousand Russians lay dead or wounded
on
the battlefield.
Again, the Russian
army retreated to safety. Napoleon had a clear
path to Moscow, but the
occupation of the city
became an empty victory. The Russians fled their
capital. Soon after the French
arrived, a
raging fire destroyed two-thirds of the city.
Napoleon offered a truce to Alexander I, but the
Russian czar knew he could bide his time:
Napoleon soon realized he could not
feed, clothe, and quarter his army in Moscow
during the
winter. In October 1812, he ordered
his Grand Army to retreat from Moscow.
The French retreat turned into a nightmare. From
fields and forests, the Russians launched
hit-
and-run attacks on the French. A short distance
from Moscow, the temperature had already
dropped to minus 4 degrees Celsius. On
November 3, the winter's first snow came.
Exhausted horses
fell dead in their tracks.
Cannon became stuck in the snow. Equipment had to
be burned for fuel.
Soldiers took ill and
froze to death. The French soldiers dragged on,
leaving the dead along every
mile.
As the Russian army was gathering its strength,
the French had to flee Russia to avoid certain
defeat. At the Berezina River, the Russians
nearly trapped the retreating French by burning
the
bridges over the swollen river. But
Napoleon, by a stroke of luck, was able to build
two new bridges.
Thousands of French soldiers
escaped, but at the cost of fifty thousand dead.
Once across the
Berezina, the tattered
survivors limped toward Vilna.
Of the
six hundred thousand soldiers Napoleon had led
into Russia, less than one hundred
thousand
came back. The weakened French army continued its
retreat westward across Europe. Soon,
Britain,
Austria, Russia, and Prussia formed a powerful
alliance and attacked these stragglers. In
March 1814, Paris was captured. Napoleon
abdicated and went into exile, his empire at an
end.
Hitler's Invasion
By early 1941,
Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, had seized
control of most of Europe. To
the east of
Hitler's German empire was the Soviet Union. On
June 22,1941, without a declaration of
war,
Hitler began an invasion of the Soviet Union that
was the largest military land campaign in
history. Confident of a quick victory, Hitler
expected the campaign to last no longer than three
months. He planned to use the blitzkrieg, or
war,tactics that had defeated the rest of
Europe. The invasion had three broad thrusts:
against Leningrad and Moscow and through the
Ukraine.
Caught off guard by the
invasion, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin instructed
the Russian people to
rendered useless.
During the first ten weeks of the invasion, the
Germans pushed the front eastward,
and the
Russians suffered more than a million casualties.
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In the north, the
Germans closed in on Leningrad. Despite great
suffering, however, the people
of Leningrad
refused to surrender. As the battle of Leningrad
dragged on into winter, the city's
situation
became desperate. As food ran out, people died
from hunger and disease. By the middle of
the
winter of 1941-1942, nearly four thousand people
starved to death every day. Close to one million
people died as a result of the siege.
In the center of Russia, Hitler's goal was
the capture of Moscow. Because the Germans had
anticipated a quick victory, they had made no
plans for winter supplies. October arrived with
heavy
rains.
As Hitler's armies
drew closer and closer to Moscow, an early, severe
winter settled over the
Soviet Union, the
harshest in years. Temperatures dropped to minus
48 degrees Celsius. Heavy snows
fell. The
German soldiers, completely unprepared for the
Russian winter, froze in their light summer
uniforms. The German tanks lay buried in the
heavy snowbanks. The Russian winter brought the
German offensive to a halt.
By
the summer of 1942, Hitler had launched two new
offensives. In the south, the Germans
captured
Sevastopol. Hitler then pushed east to Stalingrad,
a great industrial city that stretched for 48
kilometers along the Volga River. Despite
great suffering, Soviet defenders refused to give
up
Stalingrad.
In November 1942,
the Russians launched a counterattack. With little
or no shelter from the
winter cold in and
around Stalingrad, German troops were further
weakened by a lack of food and
supplies. Not
until January 1943 did the Germans give up their
siege. Of the three hundred thousand
Germans
attacking Stalingrad, only ninety thousand
starving soldiers were left. The loss of the
battle
for Stalingrad finally turned the tide
against Hitler. The German victories were over,
thanks in part to
the Russian winter.
During 1943 and 1944, the Soviet armies
pushed the German front back toward the west. In
the
north, the Red Army broke the three-year
siege of Leningrad with a surprise attack on
January
15,1944. Within two weeks, the heroic
survivors of Leningrad saw their invaders depart.
By March
1944, the Ukraine farming region was
again in Soviet hands. On May 9, 1944, Sevastopol
was
liberated from the Germans. The Russians
were now heading for Berlin.
For
Hitler, the invasion of the Soviet Union had
turned into a military disaster. For the Russian
people, it brought unspeakable suffering. The
total Soviet dead in World War II reached almost
23
million.
Russia's Icy Defender
The elements of nature must be
reckoned with in any military campaign. Napoleon
and Hitler
both underestimated the severity of
the Russian winter. Snow, ice, and freezing
temperatures took
their toll on both invading
armies. For the Russian people, the winter was an
icy defender.
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Unit Two Text A Smart Cars
Text
课文
Smart cars that can see, hear, feel,
smell, and talk? And drive on their own? This may
sound like a
dream, but the computer
revolution is set to turn it into a reality.
SMART CARS
Michio Kaku
Even the automobile
industry, which has remained largely unchanged for
the last seventy years,
is about to feel the
effects of the computer revolution.
The automobile industry ranks as among the most
lucrative and powerful industries of the
twentieth century. There are presently 500
million cars on earth, or one car for every ten
people. Sales
of the automobile industry stand
at about a trillion dollars, making it the world's
biggest
manufacturing industry.
The car, and the roads it travels on, will be
revolutionized in the twenty-first century. The
key to
tomorrow's
smell and talk and
act,
program, which is designing the smart car
and road of the future.
Approximately
40,000 people are killed each year in the United
States in traffic accidents. The
number of
people that are killed or badly injured in car
accidents is so vast that we don't even bother
to mention them in the newspapers anymore.
Fully half of these fatalities come from drunk
drivers,
and many others from carelessness. A
smart car could eliminate most of these car
accidents. It can
sense if a driver is drunk
via electronic sensors that can pick up alcohol
vapor in the air, and refuse to
start up the
engine. The car could also alert the police and
provide its precise location if it is stolen.
Smart cars have already been built which
can monitor one's driving and the driving
conditions
nearby. Small radars hidden in the
bumpers can scan for nearby cars. Should you make
a serious
driving mistake (e.g., change lanes
when there is a car in your spotthe computer would
sound an immediate warning.
At
the MIT Media Lab, a prototype is already being
built which will determine how sleepy you
are
as you drive, which is especially important for
long-distance truck drivers. The monotonous,
almost hypnotic process of staring at the
center divider for long hours is a grossly
underestimated,
life-threatening hazard. To
eliminate this, a tiny camera hidden in the
dashboard can be trained on a
driver's face
and eyes. If the driver's eyelids close for a
certain length of time and his or her driving
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becomes erratic, a
computer in the dashboard could alert the driver.
Two of the most frustrating things
about driving a car are getting lost and getting
stuck in traffic.
While the computer
revolution is unlikely to cure these problems, it
will have a positive impact.
Sensors in your
car tuned to radio signals from orbiting
satellites can locate your car precisely at any
moment and warn of traffic jams. We already
have twenty-four Navstar satellites orbiting the
earth,
making up what is called the Global
Positioning System. They make it possible to
determine your
location on the earth to within
about a hundred feet. At any given time, there are
several GPS
satellites orbiting overhead at a
distance of about 11,000 miles. Each satellite
contains four
clocks,
As a
satellite passes overhead, it sends out a radio
signal that can be detected by a receiver in a
car's computer. The car's computer can then
calculate how far the satellite is by measuring
how long it
took for the signal to arrive.
Since the speed of light is well known, any delay
in receiving the satellite's
signal can be
converted into a distance.
In Japan
there are already over a million cars with some
type of navigational capability. (Some of
them
locate a car's position by correlating the
rotations in the steering wheel to its position on
a map.)
With the price of microchips
dropping so drastically, future applications of
GPS are virtually
limitless.
Corp., which
manufactures navigational systems. Blind
individuals could use GPS sensors in walking
sticks, airplanes could land by remote
control, hikers will be able to locate their
position in the woods
— the list of potential
uses is endless.
GPS is actually but
part of a larger movement, called
to put smart
cars on smart highways. Prototypes of such
highways already exist in Europe, and
experiments are being made in California to
mount computer chips, sensors, and radio
transmitters
on highways to alert cars to
traffic jams and obstructions.
On an
eight-mile stretch of Interstate 15 ten miles
north of San Diego, traffic engineers are
installing an MIT-designed system which will
introduce the plan calls for
computers, aided
by thousands of three-inch magnetic spikes buried
in the highway, to take complete
control of
the driving of cars on heavily trafficked roads.
Cars will be bunched into groups of ten to
twelve vehicles, only six feet apart,
traveling in unison, and controlled by computer.
Promoters of this computerized
highway have great hopes for its future. By 2010,
telematics may
well be incorporated into one
of the major highways in the United States. If
successful, by 2020, as
the price of
microchips drops to below a penny a piece,
telematics could be adopted in thousands of
miles of highways in the United States. This
could prove to be an environmental boon as well,
saving
fuel, reducing traffic jams, decreasing
air pollution, and serving as an alternative to
highway
expansion.
Unit 3 Text A Get
The Job You Want
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Text 课文
Harvey Mackay, who runs his
own company, often interviews applicants for jobs.
Here he lets us into
the secret of what
qualities an employer is looking for, and gives
four tips on what can help you to
stand out
from the crowd.
GET THE JOB YOU WANT
Harvey B, Mackay
I run a
manufacturing company with about 350 employees,
and I often do the interviewing and
hiring
myself. I like talking to potential salespeople,
because they're our link to customers.
When a recent college graduate came into my office
not too long ago looking for a sales job, I
asked him what he had done to prepare for the
interview. He said he'd read something about us
somewhere.
Had he called anyone
at Mackay Envelope Corporation to find out more
about us? No. Had he
called our suppliers? Our
customers? No.
Had he checked with
his university to see if there were any graduates
working at Mackay whom
he could interview? Had
he asked any friends to grill him in a mock
interview? Did he go to the
library to find
newspaper clippings on us?
Did he
write a letter beforehand to tell us about
himself, what he was doing to prepare for the
interview and why he'd be right for the job?
Was he planning to follow up the interview with
another
letter indicating his eagerness to
join us? Would the letter be in our hands within
24 hours of the
meeting, possibly even hand-
delivered?
The answer to every
question was the same: no. That left me with only
one other question: How
well prepared would
this person be if he were to call on a prospective
customer for us? I already knew
the answer.
As I see it, there are four keys to
getting hired:
1. Prepare to win.
among musicians.
days of practice, the
audience notices the difference.
When
we watch a world-class musician or a top athlete,
we don't see the years of preparation
that
enabled him or her to become great. The Michael
Jordans of the world have talent, yes, but
they're also the first ones on and the last
ones off the basketball court. The same
preparation applies
in every form of human
endeavor. If you want the job, you have to prepare
to win it.
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When I
graduated from college, the odds were good that I
would have the same job for the rest
of my
life. And that's how it worked out. But getting
hired is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime
experience.
Employment experts believe that
today's graduates could face as many as ten job
changes during their
careers.
That may sound like a lot of pressure. But if
you're prepared, the pressure is on the other
folks
— the ones who haven't done their
homework.
You won't get every job you
go after. The best salespeople don't close every
sale. Michael Jordan
makes barely half of his
field-goal attempts. But it takes no longer to
prepare well for one interview
than to wander
in half-prepared for five. And your prospects for
success will be many times better.
2.
Never stop learning. Recently I played a doubles
tennis match paired with a 90-year-old. I
wondered how things would work out; I
shouldn't have. We hammered our opponents 6-1,
6-1!
As we were switching sides to
play a third set, he said to me, you mind if I
play the
backhand court? I always like to work
on my weaknesses.
has never stopped learning.
Incidentally, we won the third set 6-1.
As we walked off the court, my 90-year-old partner
chuckled and said,
know about my number-one
ranking in doubles in the United States in my age
bracket, 85 and up!
He wasn't thinking 90; he
wasn't even thinking 85. He was thinking number
one.
You can do the same if you work
on your weaknesses and develop your strengths. To
be able to
compete, you've got to keep
learning all your life.
3. Believe in
yourself, even when no one else does. Do you
remember the four-minute mile?
Athletes had
been trying to do it for hundreds of years and
finally decided it was physically impossible
for humans. Our bone structure was all wrong,
our lung power inadequate.
Then one
human proved the experts wrong. And, miracle of
miracles, six weeks after Roger
Bannister
broke the four-minute mile, John Landy beat
Bannister's time by nearly two full seconds.
Since then, close to eight hundred runners
have broken the four-minute mile!
Several years ago my daughter Mimi and I took a
crack at running the New York Marathon. At
the
gun, 23,000 runners started — and 21,244 finished.
First place went to a Kenyan who completed
the
race in two hours, 11 minutes and one second. The
21,244th runner to finish was a Vietnam
veteran. He did it in three days, nine hours
and 37 minutes. With no legs, he covered 26.2
miles. After
my daughter and I passed him in
the first few minutes, we easily found more
courage to finish
ourselves.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't
accomplish your goals. Who says you're not
tougher,
harder working and more able than
your competition? You see, a goal is a dream with
a deadline: in
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writing,
measurable, identifiable, attainable.
4. Find a way to make a difference. In my opinion,
the majority of New York cabdrivers are
unfriendly, if not downright rude. Most of the
cabs are filthy, and almost all of them sport an
impenetrable, bulletproof partition. But
recently I jumped into a cab at LaGuardia Airport
and guess
what? It was clean. There was
beautiful music playing and no partition.
Lane Hotel, please,I said to the driver.
With a broad smile, he said, my name is
Wally,
safely, courteously and on time.
As we drove off, he held up a choice
of newspapers and said,
myself to the fruit in
the basket on the back seat. He held up a cellular
phone and said,
minute if you'd like to make a
call.
Shocked, I blurted, long have
you been practicing this?He answered, or four
years.
He doesn't know it, but he's my hero. He's living
proof that you can always shift the odds in
your favor.
My mentor, Curt
Carlson, is the wealthiest man in Minnesota, owner
of a hotel and travel
company with sales in
the neighborhood of $$9 billion. I had to get to a
meeting in New York one day,
and Curt
generously offered me a ride in his jet. It
happened to be a day Minnesota was hit with one
of the worst snowstorms in years. Minneapolis-
St. Paul International Airport was closed for the
first
time in decades.
Then,
though the storm continued to pound us, the
airport opened a runway for small craft only.
As we were taxiing down it to take off, Curt
turned to me and said gleefully,
in the snow!
Curt Carlson, 70 years old at the
time, rich beyond anyone's dreams, could still
sparkle with
excitement about being first.
From my standpoint, that's what it's
all about. Prepare to win. Never stop learning.
Believe in
yourself, even when no one else
does. Find a way to make a difference. Then go out
and make your
own tracks in the snow.
Unit 4Text A America As A Collage
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Text 课文
Is America
going to decline like other great nations have
before? The author thinks not, arguing that
the type of society being created in America
is quite unlike any that has gone before it. Read
what he
has to say and see whether you agree.
AMERICA AS
A COLLAGE
Ryzsard Kapuscinski
The mere fact
that America still attracts millions of people is
evidence that it is not in decline.
People
aren't attracted to a place of decline. Signs of
decline are sure to be found in a place as
complex as America: debt, crime, the homeless,
drugs, dropouts. But the main characteristic of
America, the first and most enduring
impression, is dynamism, energy, aggressiveness,
forward
movement.
It is so hard
to think of this nation in decline when you know
that there are vast regions of the
planet
which are absolutely paralyzed, incapable of any
improvement at all.
It is difficult
for me to agree with Paul Kennedy's thesis in The
Rise and Fall of Great Powers
that America
must inevitably follow historical precedent.
That's the way history used to be — all
powerful nations declined and gave way to
other empires. But maybe there is another way to
look at
what is happening. I have a sense that
what is going on here concerns much more than the
fate of a
nation.
It may be that
the Euro-centered American nation is declining as
it gives way to a new Pacific
civilization
that will include, but not be limited to, America.
Historically speaking, America may not
decline, but instead fuse with the Pacific
culture to create a kind of vast Pacific collage,
a mix of
Hispanic and Asian cultures linked
through the most modern communication
technologies.
Traditional history has
been a history of nations. But here, for the first
time since the Roman
Empire, there is the
possibility of creating the history of a
civilization. Now is the first chance on a
new
basis with new technologies to create a
civilization of unprecedented openness and
pluralism. A
civilization of the polycentric
mind. A civilization that leaves behind forever
the ethnocentric, tribal
mentality. The
mentality of destruction.
Los Angeles
is a premonition of this new civilization.
Linked more to the Third World and Asia
than to the Europe of America's racial and
cultural
roots. Los Angeles and southern
California will enter the twenty-first century as
a multiracial and
multicultural society. This
is absolutely new. There is no previous example of
a civilization that is
being simultaneously
created by so many races, nationalities, and
cultures. This new type of cultural
pluralism
is completely unknown in the history of mankind.
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America is
becoming more plural every day because of the
unbelievable facility of the new Third
World
immigrants to put a piece of their original
culture inside of American culture. The notion of
a
you are somewhere else — in Seoul, in
Taipei, in Mexico City. You can travel inside this
Korean
culture right on the streets of Los
Angeles. Inhabitants of this vast city become
internal tourists in the
place of their own
residence.
There are large
communities of Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians,
Mexicans, Salvadorans,
Guatemalans, Iranians,
Japanese, Koreans, Armenians, Chinese. We find
here Little Taipei, Little
Saigon, Little
Tokyo, Koreatown, Little Central America, the
Iranian neighborhood in Westwood, the
Armenian
community in Hollywood, and the vast Mexican-
American areas of East Los Angeles.
Eighty-one
languages, few of them European, are spoken in the
elementary school system of the city
of Los
Angeles.
This transformation of
American culture anticipates the general trend in
the composition of
mankind. Ninety percent of
the immigrants to this city are from the Third
World. At the beginning of
the twenty-first
century, 90 percent of the world's population will
be dark-skinned; the white race will
be no
more than 11 percent of all human beings living on
our planet.
Something that can only
be seen in America: In the landscaped, ultraclean
high-technology parks
of northern Orange
County there is a personal computer company that
seven years ago did not exist.
There were only
strawberry fields where the plant is. Now, there
is a $$500 million company with
factories in
Hong Kong and Taiwan as well.
The
company was founded by three young immigrants — a
Pakistani Muslim and two Chinese
from Hong
Kong. They only became citizens in 1984. Each
individual is now probably worth $$30
million.
Walking through this company we see
only young, dark faces — Vietnamese, Cambodians,
Laotians, Mexicans — and the most advanced
technology. The culture of the work force is a mix
of
Hispanic-Catholic family values and Asian-
Confucian group loyalty. Employment notices are
never
posted; hiring is done through the
network of families that live in southern
California. Not
infrequently, employees ask to
work an extra twenty hours a week to earn enough
money to help
members of their extended family
buy their first home.
In Los Angeles,
traditional Third World cultures are, for the
first time, fusing with the most
modern
mentalities and technologies.
Usually, the contact between developed and
underdeveloped worlds has the character of
exploitation — just taking people's labor and
resources and giving them nothing. And the border
between races has usually been a border of
tension, of crisis. Here we see a revolution that
is
constructive.
This Pacific Rim
civilization being created is a new relationship
between development and
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underdevelopment. Here, there is openness.
There is hope. And a future. There is a
multicultural
crowd. But it is not fighting.
It is cooperating, peacefully competing, building.
For the first time in
four hundred years of
relations between the nonwhite Western world and
the white Western world,
the general character
of the relationship is cooperation and
construction, not exploitation, not
destruction.
Unlike any other
place on the planet, Los Angeles shows us the
potential of development once
the Third World
mentality merges with an open sense of
possibility, a culture of organization, a
Western conception of time.
For
the destructive, paralyzed world where I have
spent most of my life, it is important, simply,
that such a possibility as Los Angeles exists.
To adjust the concept of time is the
most difficult thing. It is a key revolution of
development.
Western culture is a
culture of arithmetical time. Time is organized by
the clock. In non-Western
culture, time is a
measure between events. We arrange a meeting at
nine o'clock but the man doesn't
show up. We
become anxious, offended. He doesn't understand
our anxiety because for him, the
moment he
arrives is the measure of time. He is on time when
he arrives.
In 1924, the Mexican
philosopher Jose Vasconcelos wrote a book dreaming
of the possibility
that, in the future, all
races on the planet would merge into one type of
man. This type of man is
being borne in Los
Angeles, in the cultural sense if not the
anthropological sense. A vast mosaic of
different races, cultures, religions, and
moral habits are working toward one common aim.
From the
perspective of a world submerged in
religious, ethnic, and racial conflict, this
harmonious cooperation
is something
unbelievable. It is truly striking.
What is the common aim that harmonizes competing
cultures in one place?
It is not only
the better living standard. What attracts
immigrants to America is the essential
characteristic of American culture: the chance
to try. There is a combination of two things that
are
important: culture and space. The culture
allows you to try to be somebody — to find
yourself, your
place, your status. And there
is space not only in a geographical sense, but in
the sense of opportunity,
of social mobility.
In societies that are in crisis and in societies
which are stagnant — or even in those
which
are stable — there is no chance to try. You are
defined in advance. Destiny has already
sentenced you.
This is what
unites the diverse races and cultures in America.
If the immigrant to America at first
fails, he
always thinks,
and pessimistic, accepting the
place that was given to him. In America, he's
thinking, will have
another chance, I will try
again.
Unit 5 Text A A Friend in Need
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Text 课文
Some people seem easy to understand: their
character appears obvious on first meeting.
Appearances,
however, can be deceptive.
A
FRIEND IN NEED
Somerset Mauqham
For thirty years now
I have been studying my fellowmen. I do not know
very much about them.
I shrug my shoulders
when people tell me that their first impressions
of a person are always right. I
think they
must have small insight or great vanity. For my
own part I find that the longer I know
people
the more they puzzle me.
These
reflections have occurred to me because I read in
this morning's paper that Edward Hyde
Burton
had died at Kobe. He was a merchant and he had
been in business in Japan for many years. I
knew him very little, but he interested me
because once he gave me a great surprise. Unless I
had
heard the story from his own lips, I
should never have believed that he was capable of
such an action.
It was more startling because
both in appearance and manner he suggested a very
definite type. Here
if ever was a man all of a
piece. He was a tiny little fellow, not much more
than five feet four in height,
and very
slender, with white hair, a red face much
wrinkled, and blue eyes. I suppose he was about
sixty when I knew him. He was always neatly
and quietly dressed in accordance with his age and
station.
Though his offices were
in Kobe, Burton often came down to Yokohama. I
happened on one
occasion to be spending a few
days there, waiting for a ship, and I was
introduced to him at the
British Club. We
played bridge together. He played a good game and
a generous one. He did not talk
very much,
either then or later when we were having drinks,
but what he said was sensible. He had a
quiet,
dry humor. He seemed to be popular at the club and
afterwards, when he had gone, they
described
him as one of the best. It happened that we were
both staying at the Grand Hotel and next
day
he asked me to dine with him. I met his wife, fat,
elderly, and smiling, and his two daughters. It
was evidently a united and affectionate
family. I think the chief thing that struck me
about Burton was
his kindliness. There was
something very pleasing in his mild blue eyes. His
voice was gentle; you
could not imagine that
he could possibly raise it in anger; his smile was
benign. Here was a man who
attracted you
because you felt in him a real love for his
fellows. At the same time he liked his game of
cards and his cocktail, he could tell with
point a good and spicy story, and in his youth he
had been
something of an athlete. He was a
rich man and he had made every penny himself. I
suppose one
thing that made you like him was
that he was so small and frail; he aroused your
instincts of
protection. You felt that he
could not bear to hurt a fly.
One
afternoon I was sitting in the lounge of the Grand
Hotel when Burton came in and seated
himself
in the chair next to mine.
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'What do you say to a little drink?'
He clapped his hands for a boy and
ordered two gin fizzes. As the boy brought them a
man
passed along the street outside and seeing
me waved his hand.
'Do you know
Turner?' said Burton as I nodded a greeting.
'I've met him at the club. I' m told he's
a remittance man.'
'Yes, I believe he
is. We have a good many here.'
'He
plays bridge well.'
'They generally
do. There was a fellow here last year, oddly
enough a namesake of mine, who
was the best
bridge player I ever met. I suppose you never came
across him in London. Lenny Burton
he called
himself. I believe he'd belonged to some very good
clubs.'
'No, I don't believe I
remember the name.'
'He was quite a
remarkable player. He seemed to have an instinct
about the cards. It was
uncanny. I used to
play with him a lot. He was in Kobe for some
time.'
Burton sipped his gin fizz.
'It's rather a funny story,' he said.
'He wasn't a bad chap. I liked him. He was always
well-dressed
and smart-looking. He was
handsome in a way with curly hair and pink-and-
white cheeks. Women
thought a lot of him.
There was no harm in him, you know, he was only
wild. Of course he drank too
much. Those sort
of fellows always do. A bit of money used to come
on for him once a quarter and
he made a bit
more by card-playing. He won a good deal of mine,
I know that.'
Burton gave a kindly
chuckle. I knew from my own experience that he
could lose money at
bridge with a good grace.
He stroked his shaven chin with his thin hand; the
veins stood out on it and
it was almost
transparent.
'I suppose that is why
he came to me when he went broke, that and the
fact that he was a
namesake of mine. He came
to see me in my office one day and asked me for a
job. I was rather
surprised.' He told me that
there was no more money coming from home and he
wanted to work. I
asked him how old he was.
'
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'
'I couldn't
help laughing.
'afraid I can't do
anything for you just yet,I said. back and see me
in another
thirty-five years, and I'll see
what I can do.
'He didn't move. He
went rather pale. He hesitated for a moment and
then he told me that he
had had bad luck at
cards for some time. He hadn't been willing to
stick to bridge, he'd been playing
poker, and
he'd got trimmed. He hadn't a penny. He'd pawned
everything he had. He couldn't pay his
hotel
bill and they wouldn't give him any more credit.
He was down and out. If he couldn't get
something to do he'd have to commit suicide.
'I looked at him for a bit. I could
see now that he was all to pieces. He'd been
drinking more
than usual and he looked fifty.
The girls wouldn't have thought so much of him if
they'd seen him
then.
'
'
'
'I could hardly
believe my ears; it seemed such an insane answer
to give.
'
'I got some
glimmering of what he was driving at. I've known
too many men who were little tin
gods at their
university to be impressed by it.
'
'Suddenly I had an idea.'
Pausing in his story, Burton turned to me.
'Do you know Kobe?' he asked.
'No,' I said, 'I passed through it once, but I
only spent a night there.'
'Then you
don't know the Shioya Club. When I was a young man
I swam from there round the
beacon and landed
at the creek of Tarumi. It's over three miles and
it's rather difficult on account of
the
currents round the beacon. Well, I told my young
namesake about it and I said to him that if he'd
do it I'd give him a job.
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'I could see he was rather taken
aback.
'
'I didn't say anything. I shrugged my shoulders.
He looked at me for a moment and then he
nodded.
'
'I looked
at my watch. It was just after ten.
half past twelve and meet you. I'll take you
back to the club to dress and then we'll have
lunch
together.
'
'We shook hands. I wished him good luck and he
left me. I had a lot of work to do that morning
and I only just managed to get to the creek at
Tarumi at half past twelve. But I needn't have
hurried;
he never turned up.'
'Did he funk it at the last moment?' I asked.
'No, he didn't funk it. He started all
right. But of course he'd ruined his constitution
by drink and
dissipation. The currents round
the beacon were more than he could manage. We
didn't get the body
for about three days.'
I didn't say anything for a moment or
two. I was a trifle shocked. Then I asked Burton a
question.
'When you made him that
offer of a job, did you know he'd be drowned?'
He gave a little mild chuckle and he
looked at me with those kind and candid blue eyes
of his.
He rubbed his chin with his hand.
'Well, I hadn't got a vacancy in my office
at the moment.'
Unit 6 Text A OLD Father
Time Becomes A Terror
Text 课文
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As the pace of life in
today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever
on the go. With so much to do
and so little
time to do it in, how are we to cope? Richard
Tomkins sets about untangling the problem
and
comes up with an answer.
OLD FATHER TIME BECOMES A TERROR
Richard Tomkins
Once upon a time,
technology, we thought, would make our lives
easier. Machines were
expected to do our work
for us, leaving us with ever-increasing quantities
of time to waste away on
idleness and
pleasure.
But instead of liberating
us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are
occurring at a
bewildering rate: as many now
arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium.
And as each invention
arrives, it eats further
into our time.
The motorcar, for
example, promised unimaginable levels of personal
mobility. But now, traffic
in cities moves
more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-
drawn carriage, and we waste our lives
stuck
in traffic jams.
The aircraft
promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it
delivered them. Its very existence
created a
demand for time-consuming journeys that we would
never previously have dreamed of
undertaking —
the transatlantic shopping expedition, for
example, or the trip to a convention on the
other side of the world.
In most
cases, technology has not saved time, but enabled
us to do more things, in the home,
washing
machines promised to free women from having to
toil over the laundry. In reality, they
encouraged us to change our clothes daily
instead of weekly, creating seven times as much
washing
and ironing. Similarly, the weekly
bath has been replaced by the daily shower,
multiplying the hours
spent on personal
grooming.
Meanwhile, technology has
not only allowed work to spread into our leisure
time — the
laptop-on-the-beach syndrome — but
added the new burden of dealing with faxes,
e-mails and
voicemails. It has also provided
us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing
software glitches on
our personal computers or
filling our heads with useless information from
the Internet.
Technology apart, the
Internet points the way to a second reason why we
feel so time-pressed:
the information
explosion.
A couple of centuries ago,
nearly all the world's accumulated learning could
be contained in the
heads of a few
philosophers. Today, those heads could not hope to
accommodate more than a tiny
fraction of the
information generated in a single day.
News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner
of the world. The television set offers 150
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channels. There are millions of
Internet sites. Magazines, books and CD-ROMs
proliferate.
century, and the
publication of a book was an event,says Edward
Wilson, honorary curator in
entomology at
Harvard University's museum of comparative
zoology. I find myself
subscribing to 60 or 70
journals or magazines just to keep me up with what
amounts to a minute
proportion of the
expanding frontiers of scholarship.
There is another reason for our increased time
stress levels, too: rising prosperity. As ever-
larger
quantities of goods and services are
produced, they have to be consumed. Driven on by
advertising,
we do our best to oblige: we buy
more, travel more and play more, but we struggle
to keep up. So we
suffer from what Wilson
calls discontent with super abundance — the
confusion of endless choice.
Of
course, not everyone is overstressed. a convenient
shorthand to say we're all
time-starved, but
we have to remember that it only applies to, say,
half the population,
Willmott, director of the
Future Foundation, a London research company.
got people retiring early, you've got the
unemployed, you've got other people maybe
only
peripherally involved in the economy who don't
have this situation at all. If you're unemployed,
your problem is that you've got too much time,
not too little.
Paul Edwards,
chairman of the London-based Henley Centre
forecasting group, points out that
the feeling
of pressures can also be exaggerated, or self-
imposed.
that about 50 percent of unemployed
or retired people will tell you they never have
enough time to
get things done,
you're not
succeeding. Everyone wants to have a little bit of
this stress to show they're an important
person.
There is another aspect
to all of this too. Hour-by-hour logs kept by
thousands of volunteers
over the decades have
shown that, in the U.K., working hours have risen
only slightly in the last 10
years, and in the
U.S., they have actually fallen — even for those
in professional and executive jobs,
where the
perceptions of stress are highest.
In
the U.S., John Robinson, professor of sociology at
the University of Maryland, and Geoffrey
Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn
State University found that, since the mid-1960s,
the
average American had gained five hours a
week in free time — that is, time left after
working,
sleeping, commuting, caring for
children and doing the chores.
The
gains, however, were unevenly distributed. The
people who benefited the most were singles
and
empty-nesters. Those who gained the least — less
than an hour — were working couples with
pre-
school children, perhaps reflecting the trend for
parents to spend more time nurturing their
offspring.
There is, of course, a
gender issue here, too. Advances in household
appliances may have
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encouraged women to take paying jobs: but as
we have already noted, technology did not end
household chores. As a result, we see
appalling inequalities in the distribution of free
time between
the sexes. According to the
Henley Centre, working fathers in the U.K. average
48 hours of free time
a week. Working mothers
get 14.
Inequalities apart, the
perception of the time famine is widespread, and
has provoked a variety of
reactions. One is an
attempt to gain the largest possible amount of
satisfaction from the smallest
possible
investment of time. People today want fast food,
sound bytes and instant gratification. And
they become upset when time is wasted.
and it's a sense that you've lost
something precious. If you lose some money you can
earn some more,
but if you waste time you can
never get it back.
People are also
trying to buy time. Anything that helps streamline
our lives is a growth market.
One example is
what Americans call concierge services — domestic
help, childcare, gardening and
decorating. And
on-line retailers are seeing big increases in
sales — though not, as yet, profits.
A third reaction to time famine has been the
growth of the work-life debate. You hear more
about people taking early retirement or giving
up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations
with
shorter working hours. And bodies such as
Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up,
urging employers to end the long-hours culture
among managers and to adopt family-friendly
working policies.
The trouble
with all these reactions is that liberating time —
whether by making better use of it,
buying it
from others or reducing the amount spent at work —
is futile if the hours gained are
immediately
diverted to other purposes.
As Godbey
points out, the stress we feel arises not from a
shortage of time, but from the surfeit
of
things we try to cram into it.
things to do.
The array of choices is stunning. Our free time is
increasing, but not as fast as our sense
of
the necessary.
A more successful
remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather
than evading it.
Before the
industrial revolution, people lived in small
communities with limited communications.
Within the confines of their village, they
could reasonably expect to know everything that
was to be
known, see everything that was to be
seen, and do everything that was to be done.
Today, being curious by nature, we are
still trying to do the same. But the global
village is a
world of limitless possibilities,
and we can never achieve our aim.
It
is not more time we need: it is fewer desires. We
need to switch off the cell-phone and leave
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the children to play by
themselves. We need to buy less, read less and
travel less. We need to set
boundaries for
ourselves, or be doomed to mounting despair.
Unit 7 Text A The Nightmare And The
Dreams
Text 课文
Peggy Noonan
lives in New York and writes a weekly column for
The Wall Street Journal. This piece
is taken
from one of them. In it she reflects on her week
and on life in the city. Writing less than a
year away from the destruction of the World
Trade Center, her thoughts are inevitably affected
by
that terrible event.
THE NIGHTMARE AND THE DREAMS
¡ª How has Sept. 11 affected our national
unconscious?
Peqqy Noonan
It is hot in New York.
It is so hot that once when I had a fever a friend
called and asked me how
I felt and I said,
And how I felt all day yesterday. It is hot.
We feel as if we've been faxed.
I
found myself fully awake at 5 a.m. yesterday and
went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. Now
more than ever the bridge seems like a great
gift to my city. It spans. In the changed
landscape of
downtown it is our undisturbed
beauty, grown ever more stately each year. People
seem to love it
more now, or at least mention
it more or notice it more. So do I. It's always
full of tourists but always
full of New
Yorkers, too.
I am struck, as I
always am when I' m on it, that I am walking on
one of the engineering
wonders of the world.
And I was struck yesterday that I was looking at
one of the greatest views in
the history of
man's creation, Manhattan at sunrise.
And all of it was free. A billionaire would pay
billions to own this bridge and keep this view,
but
I and my jogging, biking and hiking
companions have it for nothing. We inherited it.
Now all we do is
pay maintenance, in the form
of taxes. We are lucky.
As I rounded
the entrance to the bridge on the Brooklyn side, a
small moment added to my
happiness. It was
dawn, traffic was light, I passed a black van with
smoked windows. In the driver's
seat with the
window down was a black man of 30 or so, a cap low
on his brow, wearing thick black
sunglasses. I
was on the walkway that leads to the bridge; he
was less than two feet away; we were the
only
people there. We made eye contact. morning!he
said. morning to you,I
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answered, and for no reason at all we started
to laugh, and moved on into the day. Nothing
significant
in it except it may or may not
have happened that way 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not
sure the full charge
of friendliness would
have been assumed or answered.
It
made me think of something I saw Monday night on
TV. They were showing the 1967 movie
a
young white woman and a young black man who fall
in love, hope to marry and must contend with
disapproving parents on both sides. It's held
up well, and parts of it seemed moving in a way I
didn't
remember, and pertinent.
There was a bit of dialogue that packed a wallop.
Spencer Tracy as the father of the would-be
bride is pressing Mr. Poitier on whether he
has considered the sufferings their mixed-race
children
might have to endure in America. Has
he thought about this? Has his fiancee?
says
Mr. Poitier.
I on the other hand would settle
for secretary of state.
seemed dreamy then. But
in its audience when the movie came out would
likely have been a young,
film-loving Army
lieutenant named Colin Powell who, that year, was
preparing for a second tour of
duty in
Vietnam. And now he is secretary of state. This is
the land dreams are made of. Does that
strike
you as a corny thing to say and talk about? It is.
That's another great thing.
Late
Tuesday, on a subway ride from Brooklyn to the
north of Manhattan, I resaw something I'd
noticed and forgotten about. It is that more
and more, on the streets and on the train, I see
people
wearing ID tags. We all wear IDs now.
We didn't use to. They hang from thick cotton
string or an
aluminum chain; they're worn one
at a time or three at a time, but they're there.
I ponder the implications. What does
it mean that we wear IDs? What are we saying, or
do we
think we're saying? I mean aside from
the obvious.
I imagined yesterday the
row of people across from me on the train, looking
up all of a sudden
from their newspaper and
answering one after another:
''I'm not just blowing through life, I'm
integrated into it. I belong to something. I
receive a
regular paycheck.
had a
background check done by security and have been
found to be a Safe Person.
Have you?
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I wonder if unemployed
people on the train look at the tags around the
other peoples' necks and
think. Soon I hope
I'll have one too. I wonder if kids just getting
their first job at 17 will ever know
that in
America we didn't all use to be ID'd. Used to be
only for people who worked in nuclear power
plants or great halls of government. Otherwise
you could be pretty obscure. Which isn't a bad way
to
be.
A month ago there were
news reports of a post-Sept. 11 baby boom.
Everyone was so rocked by
news of their
mortality that they realized there will never be a
perfect time to have kids but we're here
now
so let's have a family. I believed the baby boom
story and waited for the babies.
Then
came the stories saying: Nah, there is no baby
boom, it's all anecdotal, there's no statistical
evidence to back it up. And I believed that
too. But I've been noticing something for weeks
now. In
my neighborhood there is a baby boom.
There are babies all over in Brooklyn. It is full
of newborns,
of pink soft-limbed infants in
cotton carriers on daddy's chest. It is full of
strollers, not only regular
strollers but the
kind that carry two children ¡ª double-wides. And
triple-wides. I don't care what
anyone says,
there have got to be data that back up what I'm
seeing: that after Sept. 11, there was at
least a Brooklyn baby boom.
A
dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a
friend I hadn't seen since the world changed.
He was two blocks away when the towers fell,
and he saw everything. We have all seen the
extraordinary footage of that day, seen it
over and over, but few of us have seen what my
friend
described: how in the office buildings
near the World Trade Center they stood at the
windows and
suddenly darkness enveloped them
as the towers collapsed and the demonic cloud
swept through.
Did you see those forced to
jump? I asked.
Have you
had bad dreams?
I
thought about this for a few days. My friend is
brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt
and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a
friend who is a therapist. Are your patients
getting
extraordinary dreams? I asked.
Sept. 11-related?
I asked if he was saving them,
writing them down. He shook his head no.
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So: The Sept. 11 Dream
Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I'm
not sure why. I think
maybe down the road I
will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am
certain, however, that dreams
can be an
expression of a nation's unconscious, if there can
be said to be such a thing, and deserve
respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)
To respect is to record. Send in your Sept. 11
related dream ¡ª recurring, unusual, striking,
whatever. I will read them, and appreciate
them and possibly weave them into a piece on what
Sept.
11 has done to our dream lives and to
our imaginations, when our imaginations are
operating on their
own, unfettered, unstopped,
spanning.
Unit 8 Text A In The Jungl
Text 课文
Annie Dillard tells of
her visit to the Napo River in the heart of the
Ecuadorian jungle, one of nature's
most
unspoiled places. She describes the beauty of the
forest and her admiration for the people who
live there.
IN THE JUNGLE
Annie Dillard
Like any out-of-the-way
place, the Napo River in the Ecuadorian jungle
seems real enough when
you are there, even
central. Out of the way of what? I was sitting on
a stump at the edge of a bankside
palm-thatch
village, in the middle of the night, on the
headwaters of the Amazon. Out of the way of
human life, tenderness, or the glance of
heaven?
A nightjar in deep-leaved
shadow called three long notes, and hushed. The
men with me talked
softly: three North
Americans, four Ecuadorians who were showing us
the jungle. We were holding
cool drinks and
idly watching a hand-sized tarantula seize moths
that came to the lone bulb on the
generator
shed beside us.
It was February, the
middle of summer. Green fireflies spattered lights
across the air and
illumined for seconds, now
here, now there, the pale trunks of enormous,
solitary trees. Beneath us
the brown Napo
River was rising, in all silence; it coiled up the
sandy bank and tangled its foam in
vines that
trailed from the forest and roots that looped the
shore.
Each breath of night smelled
sweet. Each star in Orion seemed to tremble and
stir with my
breath. All at once, in the
thatch house across the clearing behind us came
the sound of a recorder,
playing a tune that
twined over the village clearing, muted our talk
on the bankside, and wandered
over the river,
dissolving downstream.
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This will do, I thought. This will do, for
a weekend, or a season, or a home.
Later that night I loosed my hair from its braids
and combed it smooth — not for myself, but so
the village girls could play with it in the
morning.
We had disembarked at the
village that afternoon, and I had slumped on some
shaded steps,
wishing I knew some Spanish or
some Quechua so I could speak with the ring of
little girls who were
alternately staring at
me and smiling at their toes. I spoke anyway, and
fooled with my hair, which they
were obviously
dying to get their hands on, and laughed, and soon
they were all braiding my hair, all
five of
them, all fifty fingers, all my hair, even my
bangs. And then they took it apart and did it
again,
laughing, and teaching me Spanish
nouns, and meeting my eyes and each other's with
open delight,
while their small brothers in
blue jeans climbed down from the trees and began
kicking a volleyball
around with one of the
North American men.
Now, as I combed
my hair in the little tent, another of the men, a
freelance writer from
Manhattan, was talking
quietly. He was telling us the tale of his life,
describing his work in Hollywood,
his
apartment in Manhattan, his house in Paris....
tent under a tree in the village of Pompeya,
on the Napo River, in the jungle of
Ecuador.
pause he added,
The
point of going somewhere like the Napo River in
Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular
anything. It is simply to see what is there.
We are here on the planet only once, and might as
well get a
feel for the place. We might as
well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in
which life is lived, for the
Amazon basin,
which covers half a continent, and for the life
that — there, like anywhere else — is
always
and necessarily lived in detail: on the
tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking
this particular
white-fleshed guava in this
particular pattern of shade.
What is
there is interesting. The Napo River itself is
wide and brown, opaque, and smeared with
floating foam and logs and branches from the
jungle. Parrots in flocks dart in and out of the
light.
Under the water in the river, unseen,
are anacondas — which are reputed to take a few
village
toddlers every year — and water boas,
crocodiles, and sweet-meated fish.
Low water bares gray strips of sandbar on which
the natives build tiny palm-thatch shelters for
overnight fishing trips. You see these
extraordinarily clean people (who bathe twice a
day in the river,
and whose straight black
hair is always freshly washed) paddling down the
river in dugout canoes,
hugging the banks.
Some of the Indians of this region,
earlier in the century, used to sleep naked in
hammocks. The
nights are cold. Gordon
MacCreach, an American explorer in these Amazon
tributaries, reported that
he was startled to
hear the Indians get up at three in the morning.
He was even more startled, night
after night,
to hear them walk down to the river slowly, half
asleep, and bathe in the water. Only later
did
he learn what they were doing: they were getting
warm. The cold woke them; they warmed their
skins in the river, which was always ninety
degrees; then they returned to their hammocks and
slept
through the rest of the night.
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.
When you are inside the
jungle, away from the river, the trees vault out
of sight. Butterflies,
bright blue, striped,
or clear-winged, thread the jungle paths at eye
level. And at your feet is a swath of
ants
bearing triangular bits of green leaf. The ants
with their leaves look like a wide fleet of
sailing
dinghies — but they don't quit. In
either direction they wobble over the jungle floor
as far as the eye
can see.
Long
lakes shine in the jungle. We traveled one of
these in dugout canoes, canoes paddled with
machete-hewn oars, or poled in the shallows
with bamboo. Our part-Indian guide had cleared the
path to the lake the day before; when we
walked the path we saw where he had impaled the
lopped
head of a boa, open-mouthed, on a
pointed stick by the canoes, for decoration.
This lake was wonderful. Herons plodded
the shores, kingfishers and cuckoos clattered from
sunlight to shade, great turkey like birds
fussed in dead branches, and hawks hung overhead.
There
was all the time in the world. A turtle
slid into the water. The boy in the bow of my
canoe slapped
stones at birds with a simple
sling, a rubber thong and leather pad. He aimed
brilliantly at moving
targets, always, and
always missed; the birds were out of range. He
stuffed his sling back in his shirt. I
looked
around.
The lake and river waters are
as opaque as rainforest leaves; they are veils,
blinds, painted screens.
You see things only
by their effects. I saw the shoreline water heave
above a thrashing paichi, an
enormous black
fish of these waters; one had been caught the
previous week weighing 430 pounds.
Piranha
fish live in the lakes, and electric eels. I
dangled my fingers in the water, figuring it would
be
worth it.
We would eat chicken
that night in the village, together with rice,
onions and heaps of fruit. The
sun would ring
down, pulling darkness after it like a curtain.
Twilight is short, and the unseen birds of
twilight wistful, catching the heart. The two
nuns in their dazzling white habits — the
beautiful-boned
young nun and the warm-faced
old — would glide to the open cane-and-thatch
schoolroom in
darkness, and start the children
singing. The children would sing in piping
Spanish, high-pitched and
pure; they would
sing My God to Theein Quechua, very fast. As the
children became
excited by their own singing,
they left their log benches and swarmed around the
nuns, hopping,
smiling at us, everyone
smiling, the nuns' faces bursting in their cowls,
and the clear-voiced children
still singing,
and the palm-leafed roofing stirred.
The Napo River: it is not out of the way. It is in
the way, catching sunlight the way a cup catches
poured water; it is a bowl of sweet air, a
basin of greenness, and of grace, and, it would
seem, of
peace.
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