Chapter 9

 Mondaugen's story

 

I

 One May morning in 1922 (meaning nearly winter here in the Warmbad district)  a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of the Technical  University in Munich, arrived at a white outpost near the village of  Kalkfontein South. More voluptuous² than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes  and a shy smile that enchanted⁵ older women, Mondaugen sat in an aged⁶ Cape⁷  cart idly picking his nose, waiting for the sun to come up and contemplating  the pontok or grass hut of Willem van Wijk, a minor⁸ extremity⁹ of the  Administration in Windhoek. His horse drowsed and collected dew while  Mondaugen squirmed on the seat, trying to control anger, confusion,  petulance¹¹; and below the farthest verge¹² of the Kalahari, that vast death,  the tardy¹³ sun mocked him.

Originally a native of Leipzig, Mondaugen exhibited at least two aberrations  peculiar¹⁴ to the region. One (minor), he had the Saxon habit of attaching  diminutive¹⁵ endings to nouns, animate¹⁶ or inanimate, at apparent random¹⁷. Two  (major), he shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust  of the South, however relative a region that might be. Imagine then the  irony¹⁸ with which he viewed his present condition, and the horrid¹⁹ perversity²⁰  he fancied had driven him first to Munich for advanced study, then (as if,  like melancholy²¹, this southsickness were progressive and incurable) finally  to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and  enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate.

Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric²² radio  disturbances²⁴: sferics for short. During the Great War one H. Barkhausen,  listening in on telephone messages among the Allied²⁵ forces, heard a series  of falling tones, much like a slide whistle descending²⁶ in pitch. Each of  these "whistlers" (as Barkhausen named them) lasted only about a second and  seemed to be in the low or audio-frequency range. As it turned out, the  whistler was only the first of a family of sferics whose taxonomy was to  include clicks, hooks, risers, nose-whistlers and one like a warbling of  birds called the dawn chorus. No one knew exactly what caused any of them.  Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone agreed that in  there someplace was the earth's magnetic field, so a plan evolved to keep a  record of sferics received at different latitudes²⁸. Mondaugen, near the  bottom of the list, drew South-West Africa, and was ordered to set up his  equipment as close to 28 degrees S. as he conveniently could.

It had disturbed him at first, having to live in what had once been a German  colony. Like most violent young men - and not a few stuffy²⁹ old ones - he  found the idea of defeat hateful. But he soon discovered that many Germans  who'd been landowners before the war had simply continued on, allowed by the  government of the Cape to keep their citizenship³⁰, property and native  workers. A kind of expatriate social life bad indeed developed at the farm  of one Foppl, in the northern part of the district, between the Karas range  and the marches of the Kalahari, and within a day's journey of Mondaugen's  recovery station. Boisterous³¹ were the parties, lively the music, jolly the  girls that had filled Foppl's baroque plantation³² house nearly every night  since Mondaugen's arrival, in a seemingly eternal Fasching. But now what  well-being³³ he'd found in this godforsaken region seemed about to evaporate.

The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway³⁴ like a two-dimensional  figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys. A vulture lit in front of  the but and stared at van Wijk. Mondaugen himself acquired motion; jumped  down off the cart, moved toward the but.

Van Wijk waved a bottle of homemade beer at him. "I know," he shouted across  the parched³⁵ earth between them, "I know. I've been up all night with it. You  think I don't have more to worry about?"

"My antennas³⁶," Mondaugen cried.

"Your antennas, my Warmbad district," the Boer said. He was half drunk. "Do  you know what happened yesterday? Get worried. Abraham Morris has crossed  the Orange."

Which, as had been intended, shook Mondaugen. He managed, "Only Morris?"

"Six men, some women and children rifles, stock. It isn't that. Morris isn't  a man. He's a Messiah."

Mondaugen's annoyance³⁷ had given way all at once to fear; fear began to bud  from his intestinal³⁸ walls.

"They threatened to rip down your antennas, didn't they."

But he'd done nothing ....

Van Wijk snorted. "You contributed. You told me you'd listen for  disturbances and record certain data. You didn't say you'd blast them out  all over my bush country and become a disturbance²³ yourself. The  Bondelswaartz believe in ghosts, the sferics frighten them. Frightened,  they're dangerous."

Mondaugen admitted he'd been using an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. "I  fall asleep," he explained. "Different sorts come in at different times of  day. I'm a one-man research team, I have to sleep sometime. The little  loudspeaker is set up at the head of my cot, I've conditioned myself to  awake instantaneously, so no more than the first few of any group are lost .  . ."

"When you return to your station," van Wijk cut in, "those antennas will be  down, and your equipment smashed. A moment -" as the young man turned,  redfaced and snuffling - "before you dash off screaming revenge, one word.  Just one. An unpleasant word: rebellion."

"Every time a Bondel talks back to you people, it's rebellion." Mondaugen  looked as if he might cry.

"Abraham Morris has joined forces by now with Jacobus Christian³⁹ and Tim  Beukes. They're trekking⁴¹ north. You saw for yourself that they'd heard about  it already in your own neighborhood. It wouldn't surprise me if every  Bondelswaartz in the district were under arms within the week. Not to  mention a number of homicidally-disposed Veldschoendragers and Witboois from  up north. Witboois are always looking for a fight." Inside the but a  telephone began to ring. Van Wijk saw the look on Mondaugen's face. "Yes,"  he said. "Wait here, it may be interesting news." He vanished inside. From a  nearby but came the sound of a Bondelswaartz pennywhistle, insubstantial as  wind monotonous⁴³ as sunlight in a dry season. Mondaugen listened as if it had  something to say to him. It didn't.

Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. "Now listen to me, younker, if I were you  I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over."

"What's happened."

"That was the location superintendent⁴⁴ at Guruchas. Apparently⁴⁵ they caught up  with Morris, and a Sergeant⁴⁶ van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come  in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand an  Morris's shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version -  which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese⁴⁷ frontier - the  Sergeant then proclaimed 'Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle  smelt⁴⁸.' The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic⁴⁹, Wouldn't  you say?

"The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon's  gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet keep going and get safely  across the Orange. That's my best advice."

"No, no," Mondaugen said, "I am something of a coward, you know that. But  tell me your second-best advice, because you see there are my antennas."

"You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted⁵⁰ from your forehead. Go  ahead. Return - if you have the courage, which I certainly don't - return  up-country and tell them at Foppl's what you've heard here. Hole up in that  fortress⁵¹ of his. If you want my own opinion it will be a blood bath. You  weren't here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of yon  Trotha are back again."

"You could have prevented this," Mondaugen cried. "Isn't that what you're  all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?"

Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally  drawled, "to be under certain delusions⁵² about the civil service. History,  the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally  sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the  morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

"Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of  a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense  of history and time prevailing⁵³ against chaos⁵⁴. Very well! Let a few of them  melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be  reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the  shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the  worse for me."

To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped⁵⁵ a desperate farewell  salute⁵⁶, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was  uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the  scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying  something small and quick among the cactus⁵⁷ and thorn trees. The sun was hot.  Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted⁵⁸ awake; once  dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in  the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment  undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled⁵⁹ the antennas and  packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen  Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the  sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision,  Mondaugen would see small scurrying⁶⁰ bands of Bondels, seeming almost to  merge⁶¹ with the twilight⁶², moving in and out of the small settlement in every  direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened⁶³ the  last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a  moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were  watching started to giggle⁶⁴. The laughter swelled⁶⁵, until it sounded like a  jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen  knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart.  No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle  and the laughter.

It was several more hours to Foppl's. The only incident on route was a  flurry of gunfire - real, this time - off to his left, behind a hill. At  last, quite early in the morning, the lights of Foppl's burst on him  suddenly out of the scrubland's absolute blackness. He crossed a small  ravine on a plank⁶⁶ bridge and drew up before the door.

As usual a party was in progress, a hundred windows blazed, the gargoyles,  arabesques⁶⁷, pargeting and fretwork of Foppl's "villa¹" vibrated in the  African night. A cluster of girls and Foppl himself stood at the door while  the farm's Bondels offloaded the Cape cart and Mondaugen reported the  situation.

The news alarmed certain of Foppl's neighbors who owned farms and stock  nearby. "But it would be best," Foppl announced to the party, "if we all  stayed here. If there's to be burning and destruction, it will happen  whether or not you're there to defend your own. If we disperse⁶⁹ our strength  they can destroy us as well as our farms. This house is the best fortress in  the region: strong, easily defended. House and grounds are protected on all  sides by deep ravines. There is more than enough food, good wine, music  and -" winking⁷⁰ lewdly⁷¹ - "beautiful women.

"To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold  Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and  distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege."

 

II

 Thus began Foppl's Siege Party. Mondaugen left after two and a half months.  In that time no one had ventured outside, or received any news from the rest  of the district. By the time Mondaugen departed, a dozen bottles of wine  still lay cobwebbed in the cellar, a dozen cattle remained to be  slaughtered⁷². The vegetable garden behind the house was still abundant with  tomatoes, yams, chard, herbs. So affluent⁷³ was the farmer Foppl.

The day after Mondaugen's arrival, the house and grounds were sealed off  from the outside world. Up went an inner palisade of strong logs, pointed⁷⁴ at  the top, and down went the bridges. A watch list was made up, a General  Staff appointed, all in the spirit of a new party game.

A curious crew were thus thrown together. Many, of course, were German: rich  neighbors, visitors from Windhoek and Swakopmund. But there were also Dutch  and English from the union; Italians, Austrians, Belgians from the diamond  fields near the coast; French, Russian, Spanish and one Pole from various  corners of the earth; all creating the appearance of a tiny European  Conclave⁷⁵ or League of Nations, assembled here while political chaos howled  outside.

Early on the morning after his arrival, Mondaugen was up on the roof,  stringing his antennas along the iron fanciwork that topped the villa's  highest gable. He had an uninspiring view of ravines, grass dry pans, dust,  scrub; all repeating, undulating east to the eventual⁷⁶ wastes of the  Kalahari; north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the  horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn.

Back here Mondaugen could also see down into a kind of inner courtyard.  Sunlight, filtered through a great sandstorm far away in the desert, bounced  off an open bay window and down, too bright, as if amplified⁷⁷, into the  courtyard to illuminate⁷⁸ a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it  extended to a nearby doorway. Mondaugen shivered and stared. The reflected  sunlight vanished up a wall and into the sky. He looked up, saw the window  opposite complete its swing open and a woman of indeterminate age in a  negligee of peacock blues⁷⁹ and greens squint⁸⁰ into the sun. Her left hand rose  to her left eye, fumbled⁸¹ there as if positioning a monocle. Mondaugen  crouched⁸² behind curlicues  of wrought⁸³ iron, astonished not so much at  anything in her appearance as at his own latent desire to see and not be  seen. He waited for the sun or her chance movement to show him nipples,  navel, pubic hair.

But she had seen him. "Come out, come out, gargoyle," she called playfully.  Mondaugen lurched vertical⁸⁴, lost his balance, nearly fell off the roof,  grabbed hold of a lightning rod, slid to a 45 degree angle and began to  laugh.

"My little antennas," he gurgled.

"Come to the roof garden," she invited, and disappeared then back into a  white room turned to blinding enigma⁸⁵ by a sun finally free of its Kalahari.

He completed his job of setting up the antennas, then made his way round  cupolas and chimney pots, up and down slopes and slates⁸⁶ till at length he  vaulted⁸⁷ clumsily over a low wall and it seemed some tropic as well, for the  life there he found too lavish⁸⁸, spectral⁸⁹, probably carnivorous; not in good  taste.

"How pretty he is." The woman, dressed now in jodhpurs and an army shirt,  leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he'd been  half-expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had known only  visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling⁹⁰ of the exterior⁹¹ veld.

 

Mondaugen knew, without having to run to see, that the cries had come from  the courtyard where he'd seen the crimson⁹² stain. Neither he nor the woman  moved. It somehow having become part of a mutual⁹³ constraint⁹⁴ that neither of  them show curiosity. Voila: conspiracy⁹⁵ already, without a dozen words having  passed between them.

Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a Lieutenant⁹⁶ Weissmann,  her city Munich.

"Perhaps we even met one Fasching," she said, "masked and strangers."

Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis for that  "conspiracy" a moment ago: it would surely have been somewhere like Munich,  a city dying of abandon, venality⁹⁷, a mark swollen⁹⁸ with fiscal⁹⁹ cancer.

As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her  left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the  eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown  translucent¹⁰⁰, its "white" would show up when in the socket¹⁰¹ as a half-lit sea  green. A fine network of nearly microscopic¹⁰² fractures covered its surface.  Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch,  wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round  her neck. Darker green and flecks¹⁰³ of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely  zodiacal shapes, placed annular¹⁰⁴ on the surface of the bubble to represent  the iris¹⁰⁵ and also the face of the watch.

"What was it like outside?"

He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he noticed  it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely hear her when she  said:

"It could be 1904 again."

Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people? He was about  to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an  unwholesomelooking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the depths of  the house.

Two things made Foppl's a fortunate place to be carrying on sferic research.  First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in a turret¹⁰⁶ at one  corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor, buffered¹⁰⁸ by a  number of empty storage roams and with access to the roof through a  stained-glass window portraying¹⁰⁹ an early Christian martyr¹¹⁰ being devoured¹¹² by  wild beasts.

Second, modest though their demands were, there was an auxiliary¹¹³ source of  electric power for his receivers in the small generator¹¹⁴ Foppl kept to light  the giant chandelier in the dining hall. Rather than rely, as he had been  doing, on a number of bulky batteries, Mondaugen was sure it wouldn't be too  difficult simply to tap off and devise circuitry to modify what power he  needed, either to operate the equipment directly or to recharge the  batteries. Accordingly, that afternoon, after arranging his effects,  equipment and the attendant paper work into an imitation of professional  disorder¹¹⁵, Mondaugen set off into the house and down, in search of this  generator.

Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to attention  by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the interior of a  room around the next corner. Framed for him there were Vera Meroving and her  lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what appeared to be a  small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and talking to  her all the while, so precisely¹¹⁶ that the voyeur¹¹⁷ Mondaugen could lip-read  each obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound:  Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he'd felt watching her at her window  that morning, expected captions¹¹⁸ explaining it all to flash on to the mirror.  But she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously¹¹⁹ gloved  hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them.

Presently he began to hear music, which grew louder the deeper he descended  into this house. Accordion¹²⁰, fiddle¹²¹ and guitar were playing a tango full of  minor chords and an eerie¹²² Ratting of certain notes which to German ears  should have remained natural. A young girl's voice was singing sweetly:

   Love's a lash³,

   Kisses gall¹²³ the tongue, harrow the heart;

   Caresses¹²⁴ tease

   Cankered tissue apart.

   Liebchen, come

   Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight,

   The sjambok's kiss

   Is unending delight.

   Love, my little slave,

   Is color-blind;

   For white and black

   Are only states of mind.

   So at my feet

   Nod and genuflect¹²⁶, whimper for me:

   Though tears are dried

   Their pain is yet to be.

 

Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and found the singer to be a  child of not more than sixteen, with white-blond, hip-length hair and  breasts perhaps too large for her slender frame.

"I am Hedwig Vogelsang," she informed him, "and my purpose on earth is to  tantalize¹²⁸ and send raving¹²⁹ the race of man." Whereupon the musicians, hidden  from them in an alcove¹³⁰ behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of  schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent¹³¹ of musk¹³², brought in a  puff¹³³ to his nostrils¹³⁴ by interior winds which could not have arisen by  accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room,  and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors round a canopied  four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals¹³⁵ down its  length by yellow daggers¹³⁶ of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a  Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who'd died  long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender  ladies who'd nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic¹³⁷ gusts¹³⁸ of blond  sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a  tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet¹³⁹, high as the house, narrowing  into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the  daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl's own planetarium¹⁴⁰, a  circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold  in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended  from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys,  belts, racks, pinions¹⁴¹ and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a  treadmill¹⁴² in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by  a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges¹⁴³ of music  Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot  that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining¹⁴⁴ in a way that  raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling¹⁴⁵, shuddering¹⁴⁶, the wooden planets  began to rotate and spin, Saturn's rings to whirl, moons their precessions,  our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl  continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as  Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a  generation of slaves.

When at length he tired, slowed and stopped she'd gone, vanished into the  wooden reaches of what remained after all a parody¹⁴⁷ of space. Mondaugen,  breathing heavily, staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and  search for the generator.

Soon he stumbled into a basement room where gardening implements¹⁴⁸ were  stored. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for  this, he discovered a Bondel male, face down and naked, the back and  buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent  wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles. Hardening  himself the weakling Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for  breathing or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked  at him from one long opening.

"Don't touch him." Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe  hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. "He  doesn't want you to help. Even to sympathize. He doesn't want anything but  the sjambok." Raising his voice till it found the hysterical-bitch level  Foppl always affected¹⁵⁰ with Bondels: "You like the sjambok, don't you,  Andreas."

Andreas moved his head feebly and whispered; "Baas . . ."

"Your people have defied the Government," Foppl continued, "they've  rebelled, they have sinned. General yon Trotha will have to come back to  punish you all. He'll have to bring his soldiers with the beards and the  bright eyes, and his artillery¹⁵¹ that speaks with a loud voice. How you will  enjoy it, Andreas. Like Jesus returning to earth, yon Trotha is coming to  deliver you. Be joyful¹⁵²; sing hymns¹⁵³ of thanks. And until then love me as your  parent, because I am yon Trotha's arm, and the agent of his will."

As van Wijk had bade him do, Mondaugen remembered to ask Foppl about 1904  and the "days of yon Trotha." If Foppl's response was sick, it was sick of  more than simple enthusiasm; not only did he yarn¹⁵⁴ about the past - first  there in the cellar as both stood watching a Bondelswaartz whose face  Mondaugen was never to see continue to die; later at riotous¹⁵⁵ feasting, on  watch or patrol, to ragtime¹⁵⁶ accompaniment in the grand ballroom¹⁵⁷; even up in  the turret, as deliberate interruption to the experiment - but he also  seemed under compulsion somehow to recreate the Deutsch-Sudwestafrika of  nearly twenty years ago, in word and perhaps in deed. "Perhaps" because as  the siege party progressed it became more and more difficult to make the  distinction.

One midnight Mondaugen stood on a small balcony just under the eaves,  officially on watch, though little could be seen in the uncertain  illumination. The moon, or half of it, had risen above the house: his  antennas cut like rigging dead-black across its face. As he swung his rifle  idly by its shoulder strap¹⁵⁸, gazing out across the ravine at nothing in  particular, someone stepped on to the balcony beside him: it was an old  Englishman named Godolphin, tiny in the moonlight. Small scrubland noises  now and again rose to them from the outside.

"I hope I don't disturb you," Godolphin said. Mondaugen shrugged¹⁵⁹, keeping  his eyes in a constant sweep over what he guessed to be the horizon. "I  enjoy it on watch," the Englishman continued, "it's the only peace there is  to this eternal celebration." He was a retired¹⁶⁰ sea captain; in his  seventies, Mondaugen would guess. "I was in Cape Town, trying to raise a  crew for the Pole."

Mondaugen's eyebrows¹⁶¹ went up. Embarrassed, he began to pick at his nose.  "The South Pole?"

"Of course. Rather awkward if it were the other, haw-haw.

"And I'd heard of a stout¹⁶² boat in Swakopmund. But of course she was too  small. Hardly do for the pack ice. Foppl was in town, and invited me out for  a weekend. I imagine I needed the rest."

"You sound cheerful. In the face of what must be frequent disappointment."

"They leave the sting out. Treat the doddering old fool with sympathy. He's  living in the past. Of course I'm living in the past. I was there."

"At the Pole."

"Certainly. Now I have to go back, it's that simple. I'm beginning to think  that if I get through our siege party I shall be quite ready for anything  the Antarctic has for me."

Mondaugen was inclined to agree. "Though I don't plan on any little  Antarctic."

The old sea dog chuckled¹⁶³. "Oh there will be. You wait. Everyone has an  Antarctic."

Which it occurred to Mondaugen, was as far South as one could get. At first  he'd plunged¹⁶⁴ eagerly into the social life that jittered¹⁶⁵ all over the  sprawling¹⁶⁶ plantation house, usually leaving his Scientific duties until the  early afternoon, when everyone but the watch was asleep. He had even begun a  dogged pursuit of Hedwig Vogelsang, but somehow kept running into Vera  Meroving instead. Southsickness in its tertiary stage, whispered that  adenoidal Saxon youth who was Mondaugen's doubleganger: beware, beware.

The woman, twice as old as he, exerted a sexual fascination¹⁶⁷ he found  impossible to explain away. He'd meet her head-on in corridors, or rounding  some salient of cabinetwork, or on the roof, or simply in the night, always  unlooked for. He would make no advances, she no response; but despite all  efforts to hold it in check, their conspiracy grew.

As if it were a real affair, Lieutenant Weissmann cornered him in the  billiard room. Mondaugen quivered and prepared to flee: but it proved to be  something else entirely¹⁶⁸.

"You're from Munich," Weissmann established. "Ever been around the Schwabing  quarter?" On occasion. "The Brennessel cabaret?" Never. "Ever heard of  D'Annunzio?" Then: Mussolini? Fiume? Italia irredenta? Fascisti? National  Socialist¹⁶⁹ German Workers' Party? Adolf Hitler? Kautsky's Independents?

"So many capital letters," Mondaugen protested.

"From Munich, and never heard of Hitler," said Weissmann, as if "Hitler"  were the name of an avant-garde play. "What the hell's wrong with young  people." Light from the green overhead lamp turned his spectacles to twin,  tender leaves, giving him a gentle look.

"I'm an engineer, you see. Politics isn't my line."

"Someday we'll need you," Weissmann told him, "for something or other, I'm  sure. Specialized¹⁷⁰ and limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable. I  didn't mean to get angry."

"Politics is a kind of engineering, isn't it. With people as your raw  material."

"I don't know," Weissmann said. "Tell me, how long are you staying in this  part of the world."

"No longer than I have to. Six months? it's indefinite."

"If I could put you in the way of something, oh, with a little authority to  it, not really involving much of your time . . ."

"Organizing, you'd call it?"

"Yes, you're sharp. You knew right away, didn't you. Yes. You are my man.  The young people especially, Mondaugen because you see - I know this won't  be repeated - we could be getting it back."

"The Protectorate? But it's under the League of Nations."

Weissmann threw back his head and began to laugh, and would say no more.  Mondaugen shrugged, took down a cue, dumped the three balls from their  velvet bag and practiced draw shots till well into the morning.

He emerged from the billiard room to hot jazz from somewhere overhead.  Blinking, he made his way up marble steps to the grand ballroom and found  the dance floor empty. Clothing of both sexes was littered about; the music,  which came from a Gramophone in the corner, roared gay and hollow under the  electric chandelier. But no one was there, no one at all. He plodded¹⁷¹ up to  his turret room with its ludicrous circular bed and found that a typhoon of  sferics had been bombarding the earth. He fell asleep and dreamed, for the  first time since he'd left it, of Munich.

In the dream it was Fasching, the mad German Carnival¹⁷² or Mardi Gras that  ends the day before Lent begins. The season in Munich, under the Weimar  Republic and the inflation, had followed since the war a constantly rising  curve, taking human depravity as ordinate. Chief reason being that no one in  the city knew if he'd be alive or well come next Fasching. Any windfall -  food, firewood, coal - was consumed as quickly as possible. Why hoard¹⁷³, why  ration¹⁰? Depression hung in the gray strata¹⁷⁴ of clouds, looked at you out of  faces waiting in bread queues and dehumanized by the bitter cold. Depression  stalked the Liebigstrasse, where Mondaugen had had an attic¹⁷⁵ room in a  mansarde: a figure with an old woman's face, bent¹⁷⁶ against the wind off the  Isar and wrapped tightly in a frayed¹⁷⁷ black coat; who might, like some angel  of death, mark in pink spittle the doorsteps of those who'd starve tomorrow.

It was dark. He was in an old cloth jacket, a stocking cap tugged¹⁷⁸ down over  his ears, arms linked with a number of young people he didn't know but  suspected were students, all singing a death-song and weaving side to side  in a chain, broadside to the street's centerline. He could hear bands of  other rollickers, drunk and singing lustily in other streets. Beneath a  tree, near one of the infrequent street lights, he came upon a boy and girl,  coupled, one of the girl's fat and aging thighs¹⁷⁹ exposed to the still-winter  wind. He stooped and covered them with his old jacket, his tears fell and  froze in mid-air, and rattled¹⁸⁰ like sleet¹⁸¹ on the couple, who'd turned to  stone.

He was in a beer hall. Young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers,  adolescent girls drank, sang, cried, fondled blindly after same and  different-sexed alike. Someone had set a blaze in the fireplace and was  roasting a cat he'd found in the street. The black oak clock above the  fireplace ticked terribly loud in strange waves of silence that swept  regularly over the company. Girls appeared out of the confusion of moving  faces, sat on his lap while he squeezed breasts and thighs and tweaked  noses; beer spilled at the far end of the table and swept the table's length  in a great foam¹⁸² cascade¹⁸³. The fire that had been roasting the cat spread to a  number of tables and had to be doused¹⁸⁴ with more beer; fat and charred-black,  the cat itself was snatched from the hands of its unfortunate cook and  tossed about the room like a football, blistering¹⁸⁵ the hands that passed it  on, till it disintegrated¹⁸⁶ among roars of laughter. Smoke hung like winter  fog in the beer hall, changing the massed weaving of bodies to more a  writhing¹⁸⁷ perhaps of damned in some underworld. Faces all had the same  curious whiteness: concave cheeks, highlighted temples, bone of the starved  corpse¹⁸⁸ there just tinder the skin.

Vera Meroving appeared (why Vera? her black mask covered the entire head) in  black sweater and black dancer's tights. "Come," she whispered; led him by  the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but thronged¹⁸⁹ with celebrants who  sang and cheered in tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms,  bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard,  to pay homage¹⁹⁰ at an important burial.

At dawn she came in through the stained-glass window to tell him that  another Bondel had been executed, this time by hanging.

"Come and see," she urged him. "In the garden."

"No, no." It had been a popular form of killing¹⁹¹ during the Great Rebellion  of 1904-07, when the Hereros and Hottentots, who usually fought one another,  staged a simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an incompetent¹⁹² German  administration. General Lothar von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin  during his Chinese and East African campaigns a certain expertise¹⁹³ at  suppressing pigmented populations, was brought in to deal with the Hereros.  In August 1904, von Trotha issued his "Vernichtungs Befehl," whereby the  German forces were ordered to exterminate¹⁹⁴ systematically¹⁹⁵ every Herero man,  woman and child they could find. He was about 80 per cent successful. Out of  the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official  German census¹⁹⁶ taken seven years later set the Herero population at only  15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were  reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000.  Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural¹⁹⁷ years, von Trotha, who  stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000  people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good.

Foppl had first come to Sudwestafrika as a young Army recruit. It didn't  take him long to find out how much he enjoyed it all. He'd ridden out with  von Trotha that August, that inverted¹⁹⁸ spring. "You'd find them wounded, or  sick, by the side of the road," he told Mondaugen, "but you didn't want to  waste the ammunition¹⁹⁹. Logistics at the time were sluggish²⁰⁰. Some you  bayoneted, others you hanged. Procedure was simple: one led the fellow or  woman to the nearest tree, stood him on an ammunition box, fashioned a noose²⁰¹  of rope (failing that, telegraph or fencing wire), slipped it round his  neck, ran the rope through a fork in the tree and secured it to the trunk,  kicked the box away. It was slow strangulation, but then these were summary  courts-martial. Field expedients²⁰² had to be used when you couldn't put up a  scaffold each time."

"Of course not," said Mondaugen in his nit-picking engineer's way, "but with  so much telegraph wire and so many ammunition boxes lying around, logistics  couldn't have been all that sluggish."

"Oh," Foppl said. "Well. You're busy."

As it happened, Mondaugen was. Though it may have been only because of  bodily exhaustion²⁰³ from too much partying, he'd begun to notice something  unusual in the sferic signals. Having dexterously²⁰⁴ scavenged a motor from one  of Foppl's phonographs, a pen and rollers and several long sheets of paper,  the resourceful Mondaugen had fashioned a crude sort of oscillograph to  record signals in his absence. The project hadn't seen fit to provide him  with one and he'd had nowhere to go at his former station, making one up  till now unnecessary. As he looked now at the cryptic²⁰⁵ pen-scrawls, he  detected a regularity²⁰⁶ or patterning which might almost have been a kind of  code. But it took him weeks even to decide that the only way to see if it  were a code was to try to break it. His room became littered with tables,  equations, graphs; he appeared to labor²⁰⁷ to the accompaniment of twitterings,  hisses²⁰⁸, clicks and carolings but in reality he dawdled²⁰⁹. Something kept him  off. Events intimidated²¹⁰ him: one night during another "typhoon" the  oscillograph broke, chattering²¹¹ and scratching away madly. The difficulty was  minor and Mondaugen was able to fix it. But he wondered if the malfunction  had been quite an accident.

He took to roaming the house at odd hours, at loose ends. Like the "eye" in  his dream of Fasching he now found he had a gift of visual serendipity²¹²: a  sense of timing²¹³, a perverse²¹⁴ certainty about not whether but when to play the  voyeur. A taming, possibly, of the original heat with which he'd watched  Vera Meroving in the earlier days of the siege party. For example, leaning  in bleak²¹⁵ winter sunlight against a Corinthian column, Mondaugen could hear  her voice not far away.

"No. Non-military it may be, but a false siege it is not."

Mondaugen lit a cigarette and peered around the column. She was sitting in  the rockery with old Godolphin, beside a goldfish pool.

"Do you remember," she began. But then noticed perhaps the pain of a return  home choking him more than any noose of memory she could provide, because  she let him interrupt:

"I have done believing in siege as anything more than military technic. That  was well over with twenty years ago, before even your beloved 1904."

Condescending²¹⁶, she explained that she'd been off in another country in 1904,  and that a year and place don't have to include the physical person for  there to be a certain ownership.

It was beyond Godolphin. "I was advising the Russian Fleet in 1904," he  remembered. "They didn't take my advice, the Japanese you'll remember  bottled us up in Port Arthur. Good God. It was a siege in the great  tradition, it lasted a year. I remember frozen hillsides, and the ghastly  nagging²¹⁷ of those field-mortars, coughing away day in and day out. And white  spotlights²¹⁸, moving over the positions at night. Blinding you. A devout  junior officer with an arm gone and the empty sleeve pinned across like a  sash said they looked like the fingers of God, seeking soft throats to  strangle."

"Lieutenant Weissmann and Herr Foppl have given me my 1904," she told him,  like a schoolgirl enumerating²¹⁹ birthday gifts. "Just as you were given your  Vheissu."

Hardly any time at all passed before he cried, "No! No, I was there." Then,  his head moving with difficulty to face her, "I didn't tell you about  Vheissu. Did I?"

"Of course you did."

"I hardly remember Vheissu myself."

"I do. I have remembered for us."

"'Have remembered,'" with a sudden canny²²⁰ tilt²²¹ to one eye. But it relaxed,  and he rambled²²² off:

"If anything gave me my Vheissu it was the time, the Pole, the service . . .  But it's all been taken away, I mean the leisure and the sympathy. It's  fashionable to say the War did it. Whatever you choose. But Vheissu is gone  and impossible to bring back, along with so many other old jokes, songs,  'rages.' And the sort of beauty one had in Cleo de Merode, or Eleonora Duse.  The way those eyes turned down at the corners; the incredible expanse of  eyelid²²³ above, like old vellum . . . But you're too young, you wouldn't  remember."

"I'm past forty," smiled Vera Meroving, "and of course I remember. I was  given the Duse too, by the man in fact who gave her to Europe, over twenty  years ago, in Il Fuoco. We were in Fiume. Another siege. The Christmas  before last, he called it the Christmas of blood. He gave her to me as  memories, in his palace, while the Andrea Doria dropped shells on us."

"They'd go to the Adriatic on holiday," Godolphin said with a foolish smile,  as if the memory were his own; "he, naked, rode his sorrel into the sea  while she waited on the strand²²⁴ . . ."

"No," suddenly and only for the moment vicious, "not selling her jewels to  suppress the novel about her, nor using a virgin's skull²²⁵ for a loving cup,  none of that's true. She was past forty and in love, and he hurt her. Went  out of his way to hurt her. That's all there was to it.

"Weren't we both in Florence then? While he was writing the novel about  their affair; how could we have avoided them! Yet it seemed always that I  was just missing him. First in Florence, then in Paris just before the war,  as if I'd been condemned²²⁶ to wait until he reached his supreme²²⁷ moment, his  peak of virtu: Fiume!"

"In Florence . . . we . . ." quizzical, weak.

She leaned forward, as if hinting she'd like to be kissed. "Don't you see?  This siege. It's Vheissu. It's finally happened."

Abruptly²²⁸ then occurred one of those ironic²²⁹ reversals in which the weakling  for a short while gains the upper hand, and the attacker is forced, at best,  into a holding operation. Mondaugen, watching, credited this less to any  internal logic²³⁰ in their discussion than to a latent virility²³¹ in the old man,  hidden against contingencies²³² like this from the cormorant²³³ graspings of age.

Godolphin laughed at her. "There's been a war, Fraulein. Vheissu was a  luxury, an indulgence. We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu."

"But the need," she protested, "its void. What can fill that?"

He cocked his head and grinned at her. "What is already filling it. The real  thing. Unfortunately. Take your friend D'Annunzio. Whether we like it or not  that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream.  Committed us like him to work out three-o'clock anxieties, excesses of  character, political hallucinations on a live mass, a real human population.  The discretion²³⁴, the sense of comedy about the Vheissu affair are with us no  more, our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of  friends; they're public property, God knows how much of it the world will  see, or what lengths it will be taken to. It's a pity; and I'm only glad I  don't have to live in it too much longer."

"You're remarkable²³⁵," was all she'd say; and after braining an inquisitive  goldfish with a rock, she left Godolphin.

Alone, he said: "We simply grow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a  brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found  dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty,  I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The  world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to,  utilized²³⁶, exploited. No time for pranks²³⁷. No more Vheissus. Ah, well." And to  a catchy²³⁸, rather syncopated fox-trot tune²³⁹, he sang:

 Once we could flirt²⁴⁰ and spoon,

   Down by the summertime sea.

   Your aunt Iphigenia found it terribly odd

   To see us stealing a kiss there on the Promenade²⁴¹, oh

   You weren't past seventeen,

   Parasol-pretty for me;

   Ah, could we but return to that season of light,

   With our puppy-love soaring like a gay summer kite,

   When it wasn't yet time to think of autumn, or night;

   Down by the summertime sea.

(Here Eigenvalue made his single interruption: "They spoke²⁴² in German?  English? Did Mondaugen know English then?" Forestalling²⁴³ a nervous outburst  by Stencil²⁴⁴: "I only think it strange that he should remember an unremarkable  conversation, let alone in that much detail, thirty-four years later. A  conversation meaning nothing to Mondaugen but everything to Stencil."

Stencil, silenced puffed²⁴⁵ his pipe and watched the psychodontist, a quirk²⁴⁶ to  one side of his mouth revealed now and again, enigmatic, through the white  fumes²⁴⁸. Finally: "Stencil called it serendipity, not he. Do you understand?  Of course you do. But you want to hear him say it."

"I understand only," Eigenvalue drawled, "that your attitude toward V. must  have more sides to it than you're ready to admit. It's what the  psychoanalysts used to call ambivalence²⁴⁹, what we now call simply a  heterodont configuration²⁵⁰."

Stencil made no answer; Eigenvalue shrugged and let him continue.)

In the evening a roasted veal²⁴⁷ was set out on a long table in the dining  hall. Guests fell upon it drunkenly, tearing away choice pieces of flesh  with their hands, staining what clothes they wore with gravy²⁵¹ and grease.  Mondaugen was feeling his usual reluctance²⁵² to return to work. He padded  along crimson-carpeted passageways, mirrored, unpopulated, ill-lit, without  echoes. He was, tonight, a bit upset and depressed²⁵³ without being able to say  exactly why. Perhaps because he'd begun to detect the same desperation in  Foppl's siege party as there'd been in Munich during Fasching; but without  any clear reason, for here after all was abundance not depression, luxury  not a daily struggle for life; above all, possibly, breasts and buttocks  that could be pinched.

Somehow he'd wandered by Hedwig's room. Her door was open. She sat before  her vanity mirror making up her eyes. "Come in," she called, "don't stand  there leering."

"Your little eyes look so antiquated²⁵⁴."

"Herr Foppl has ordered all the ladies to dress and make up as they would  have done in 1904." She giggled²⁵⁵. "I wasn't even born in 1904, so I really  shouldn't be wearing anything." She sighed. "But after all the trouble I'd  gone to to pluck my eyebrows to look like Dietrich's. Now I must draw them  in again like great dark wings, and point them at either end; and so much  mascara!" She pouted²⁵⁶, "Pray no one breaks my heart, Kurt, for tears would  ruin these old-fashioned eyes."

"Oh, you have a heart then."

"Please, Kurt, I said don't make me cry. Come: you may help me arrange my  hair."

When he lifted the heavy, pale locks from her nape he saw two parallel rings  of recently chafed²⁵⁷ skin running round the neck, about two inches apart. If  surprise was communicated through her hair by any movement his hands may  have made, Hedwig gave no sign. Together they put up her hair in an  elaborate curly bun, securing it with a black satin band. Round her neck, to  cover each abrasion²⁵⁸, she wound a thin string of little onyx beads²⁵⁹, letting  three more loops or so drop progressively looser down between her breasts,

He bent to kiss one shoulder. "No," she moaned, then went berserk; picked up  a flacon of Cologne water, inverted it on his head arose from her vanity,  hitting Mondaugen in the jaw²⁶⁰ with the shoulder he'd been trying to kiss. He,  felled, lost consciousness for a fraction of a minute, woke to see her  cakewalking out the door, singing Auf dem Zippel-Zappel-Zeppelin, a tune  popular at the turn of the century.

He staggered to the corridor: she'd vanished. Feeling rather a sexual  failure, Mondaugen set out for his turret and oscillograph, and the comforts  of Science, which are glacial and few.

He got as far as a decorative²⁶¹ grotto²⁶², located in the very guts²⁶³ of the house.  There Weissmann, in full uniform, lunged at him from behind a stalagmite.  "Upington!" he screamed.

"Ah?" inquired Mondaugen, blinking.

"You're a cool one. Professional traitors²⁶⁴ are always so cool." His mouth  remaining open, Weissmann sniffed²⁶⁵ the air. "Oh, my. Don't we smell nice."  His eyeglasses blazed.

Mondaugen, still groggy²⁶⁶ and enveloped²⁶⁷ in a miasma²⁶⁸ of cologne, wanted only to  sleep. He tried to push past the piqued²⁶⁹ lieutenant, who barred his path with  the butt¹⁴⁹ end of a sjambok.

"Whom have you been in contact with at Upington?"

"Upington."

"It has to be, it's the nearest large town in the union. You can't expect  English operatives to give up the comforts of civilization."

"I don't know anyone in the union."

"Careful how you answer, Mondaugen."

It finally came to him that Weissmann was talking about the sferic  experiment. "It can't transmit," he yelled. "If you knew anything at all  you'd see that immediately. It's for receiving only, stupid."

Weissmann favored him with a smile. "You just convicted yourself. They send  you instructions. I may not know electronics, but I can recognize the  scrawlings of a bad cryptanalyst."

If you can do any better you're welcome," Mondaugen sighed. He told  Weissmann about his whim¹²⁷, the "code."

"You mean that?" abruptly almost childlike. "You'll let me see what you've  received?"

"You've obviously seen everything. But it'll put us that much closer to a  solution."

Quite soon he had Weissmann laughing shyly. "Oh. Oh, I see. You're  ingenious. Amazing. Ja. Stupid of me, you see. I do apologize."

Struck by an inspiration, Mondaugen whispered, "I'm monitoring their little  broadcasts."

Weissmann frowned. "That's what I just said."

Mondaugen shrugged. The lieutenant lit a whale-oil lamp and they set out for  the turret. As they ascended²⁷⁰ a sloping hallway, the great villa was filled  with a single, deafening²⁷¹ pulse of laughter. Mondaugen became numb⁴², the  lantern went smash behind him. He turned to see Weissmann standing²⁷² among  little blue flames and shiny fragments of glass.

"The strand wolf," was all Weissmann could manage.

In his room Mondaugen had brandy, but Weissmann's face remained the color of  cigar smoke. He wouldn't talk. He got drunk and presently feel asleep in a  chair.

Mondaugen worked on the code into the early morning, getting, as usual,  nowhere. He kept dozing²⁷³ off and being brought awake by brief chuckling  sounds from the loudspeaker. They sounded to Mondaugen, half in dream, like  that other chilling laugh, and made him reluctant to go back to sleep. But  he continued to, fitfully.

Somewhere out in the house (though he may have dreamed that too) a chorus  had begun singing a Dies Irae in plainsong. It got so loud it woke  Mondaugen. Irritated, he lurched to the door and went out to tell them to  keep quiet.

Once past the storage rooms, he found the adjoining corridors brilliantly  lit. On the whitewashed²⁷⁴ floor he saw a trail of blood-spatters, still wet.  Intrigued²⁷⁵, he followed. The blood led him perhaps fifty yards through drapes  and around corners to what may have been a human form, lying covered with a  piece of old canvas sail, blocking further passage. Beyond it the floor of  the corridor gleamed white and bloodless.

Mondaugen broke into a sprint²⁷⁶, jumped neatly²⁷⁷ over whatever it was and  continued on at a jogging pace. Eventually he found himself at the head of a  portrait gallery he and Hedwig Vogelsang had once danced down. His head  still reeled with her cologne. Halfway²⁷⁸ along, illuminated²⁷⁹ by a nearby  sconce, he saw Foppl, dressed in his old private-soldier's uniform and  standing on tiptoe to kiss one of the portraits. When he'd gone, Mondaugen  looked at the brass²⁸⁰ plate on the frame to verify his suspicion. It was  indeed von Trotha.

"I loved the man," he'd said. "He taught us not to fear. It's impossible to  describe the sudden release; the comfort, the luxury; when you knew you  could safely forget all the rote-lessons you'd had to learn about the value  and dignity of human life. I had the same feeling once in the Realgymnasium  when they told us we wouldn't be responsible in the examination for all the  historical dates we'd spent weeks memorizing ....

"Till we've done it, we're taught that it's evil. Having done it, then's  the struggle: to admit to yourself that it's not really evil at all. That  like forbidden sex it's enjoyable."

Shuffling²⁸¹ sounds behind him. MondaugEn turned; it was Godolphin. "Evan," the  old man whispered.

"I beg your pardon."

"It's I, son. Captain Hugh."

Mondaugen came closer, thinking possibly Godolphin's eyes were troubling  him. But worse troubled him and there was nothing remarkable about the eyes  save tears.

"Good morning, Captain."

"You don't have to hide any more, son. She told me; I know; it's all right.  You can be Evan again. Father's here." The old man gripped his arm above the  elbow and smiled bravely. "Son. It's time we went home. God, we've been so  long away. Come."

Trying to be gentle, Mondaugen let the sea captain steer²⁸² him along the  corridor. "Who told you? You said 'she.'"

Godolphin had gone vague. "The girl. Your girl. What's-her-name."

A minute passed before Mondaugen remembered enough of Godolphin to ask, with  a certain sense of shock: "What has she done to you."

Godolphin's little head nodded, brushed Mondaugen's arm. "I'm so tired."

Mondaugen stooped and picked up the old man, who seemed to weigh less than a  child, and bore him along the white ramps²⁸³, between mirrors and past  tapestries²⁸⁴, among scores of separate lives brought to ripeness by this siege  and hidden each behind its heavy door; up through the enormous house to his  own turret. Weissmann still snored in the chair. Mondaugen laid the old man  on the circular bed, covered him with a black satin comforter. And stood  over him, and sang:

 Dream tonight of peacock tails,

   Diamond fields and spouter²⁸⁵ whales.

   Ills are many, blessings²⁸⁶ few,

   But dreams tonight will shelter you.

   Let the vampire's creaking wing

   Hide the stars while banshees sing;

   Let the ghouls gorge²⁸⁷ all night long;

   Dreams will keep you safe and strong.

   Skeletons with poison teeth,

   Risen from the world beneath,

   Ogre, troll, and loup-garou,

   Bloody²⁸⁸ wraith²⁸⁹ who looks like you,

   Shadow on the window shade,

   Harpies in a midnight raid,

   Goblins seeking tender prey²⁹⁰,

   Dreams will chase them all away.

   Dreams are like a magic cloak

   Woven by the fairy folk,

   Covering from top to toe,

   Keeping you from winds and woe²⁹¹.

   And should the Angel come this night

   To fetch your soul away from light,

   Cross yourself, and face the wall:

   Dreams will help you not at all.

Outside the strand wolf screamed again. Mondaugen pounded a bag of dirty  laundry into a pillow, doused the light, and lay down trembling on the rug  to sleep.

 

III

 But his own musical commentary on dreams had not included the obvious and  perhaps for him indispensable: that if dreams are only waking sensation  first stored and later operated on, then the dreams of a voyeur can never be  his own. This soon showed up, not too surprisingly, as an increasing  inability to distinguish Godolphin from Foppl: it may or may not have been  helped along by Vera Meroving, and some of it could have been dreamed.  There, precisely, was the difficulty. He'd no idea, for instance, where this  had come from:

. . . so much rot spoken about their inferior kultur-position and our  herrenschaft - but that was for the Kaiser and the businessmen at home; no  one, not even our gay Lothario (as we called the General), believed it out  here. They may have been as civilized²⁹² as we, I'm not an anthropologist²⁹³, you  can't compare anyway - they were an agricultural, pastoral people. They  loved their cattle as we perhaps love toys from childhood. Under Leutwein's  administration the cattle were taken away and given to white settlers. Of  course the Hereros revolted, though the Bondelswaartz Hottentots actually  started it because their chief Abraham Christian had been shot in Warmbad.  No one is sure who fired first. It's an old dispute: who knows, who cares?  The flint had been struck, and we were needed, and we came.

Foppl. Perhaps.

Except that the shape of Mondaugen s "conspiracy" with Vera Meroving was  finally beginning to come clear to him. She apparently wanted Godolphin, for  reasons he could only guess at, though her desire seemed to arise out of a  nostalgic sensuality whose appetites knew nothing at all of nerves, or heat,  but instead belonged entirely to the barren touchlessness of memory. She had  obviously needed Mondaugen only to be called (he might assume cruelly) a  long-ago son, to weaken her prey.

Not unreasonably²⁹⁴ then she would also have used Foppl, perhaps to replace the  father as she thought she'd replaced the son, Foppl the siege party's demon,  who was in fact coming more and more to define his guests assembled, to  prescribe their common dream. Possibly Mondaugen alone among them was  escaping it, because of his peculiar habits of observation. So in a passage  (memory, nightmare, yarn, maundering, anything) ostensibly his host's  Mondaugen could at least note that though the events were Foppl's, the  humanity could easily have been Godolphin's.

Again one night he heard the Dies Irae, or some organized foreign chant,  approach to the verge of his buffer¹⁰⁷ zone of empty rooms. Feeling invisible  he glided²⁹⁶ out to look and not be seen. His neighbor, an elderly merchant  from Milan, had in recent days it seemed collapsed²⁹⁷ from a heart attack,  lingered, died. The others, roisterers, had organized a wake. With ceremony  they wrapped his body in silk sheets stripped from his bed: but before the  last brightness of dead flesh had been covered Mondaugen saw in a quick sly  look its decoration of furrows²⁹⁸ and poor young scar tissue cut down in its  prime. Sjambok, makoss, donkey whip . . . something long that could cut.

They took the cadaver²⁹⁹ off to a ravine to toss it in. One stayed behind.

"He remains³⁰¹ in your room, then," she began.

"By choice."

"He has no choice. You'll make him go."

"You'll have to make him go, Fraulein."

"Then bring me to him?" almost importunate³⁰². Her eyes, rimmed³⁰³ in black after  Foppl's 1904, needed something less hermetic than this empty corridor to  frame them: palazzo's facade³⁰⁴, provincial³⁰⁵ square, esplanade in the winter -  yet more human, perhaps only more humorous than, say, the Kalahari. It was  her inability to come to rest anywhere inside plausible³⁰⁶ extremes, her  nervous, endless motion, like the counter-crepitating of the ball along its  roulette spokes³⁰⁷, seeking a random compartment³⁰⁸ but finally making, having  made, sense only as precisely the dynamic uncertainty³⁰⁹ she was, this that  upset Mondaugen enough to scowl³¹⁰ quietly and say with a certain dignity no,  turn, leave her there and, return to his sferics. They both knew he'd done  nothing decisive.

Having found the sad imitation of a strayed son, Godolphin wouldn't think of  returning to his own room. One of them had taken the other in. The old  officer slept, drowsed, talked. Because he'd "found" Mondaugen only after  she'd well begun some program of indoctrination on him that Mondaugen would  rather not guess at, there was no way to say for certain, later, whether  Foppl himself might not have come in to tell tales of when he'd been a  trooper, eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years ago everyone was in better condition. You were shown how his  upper arms and thighs had become flabby; and the roll of fat around his  middle. His hair was beginning to fall out. He was developing breasts; even  they reminded him of when he first arrived in Africa. They'd all had their  inoculations on route: for bubonic plague the ship's medic jabbed you with a  tremendous needle in the muscle by the left breast, and for a week or so it  puffed up. In the way troops have when there's not much else to do, they  amused themselves by unbuttoning the tops of their shirts and coyly exposing  these new female acquisitions.

Later, when it had got into deep winter, the sun bleached³¹¹ their hair white  and browned their skins. The standing joke was "Don't walk up on me unless  you're in uniform, I might mistake you for a nigger." The "mistake" was made  more than once. Around Waterberg especially, he remembered, when they were  chasing Hereros into the bush and the desert, there were a few unpopular  soldiers - reluctant? humanitarian³¹². Their bitching got so bad you found  yourself hoping . . . How much of a "mistake" it was was open to question,  that's all be meant. By him bleeding hearts like that weren't much better  than the natives.

Most of the time, thank God, you were with your own kind: comrades who all  felt the same way, who weren't going to give you any nonsense no matter what  you did. When a man wants to appear politically moral he speaks of human  brotherhood³¹³. In the field you actually found it. You weren't ashamed. For  the first time in twenty years of continuous education-to-guilt, a guilt  that had never really had meaning, that the Church and the secular  entrenched³¹⁴ had made out of whole cloth; after twenty years, simply not to he  ashamed. Before you disemboweled or whatever you did with her to be able to  take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior officer, and stay  potent³¹⁵. And talk with them before you killed them without the sheep's eye,  the shuffling, the prickly-heat of embarrassment³¹⁶ . . .

His efforts at the code, such as they were, didn't succeed in keeping back  the nightfall of ambiguity³¹⁷ that filled his room progressively as time - such  as it was - went by. When Weissmann came in and asked if he could help,  Mondaugen turned surly. "Out," he snarled³¹⁸.

"But we were to collaborate³¹⁹."

"I know what your interest is," Mondaugen said mysteriously. "I know what  'code' you're after."

"It's part of my job." Putting on his sincere farm-lad face, removing the  eyeglasses and cleaning them mock-distracted on his necktie.

"Tell her it won't, it didn't work," Mondaugen said.

The lieutenant ground his teeth solicitously³²⁰. "I can't indulge your whims  much longer," he tried to explain; "Berlin is impatient, I'm not going to  make excuses forever."

"I am working for you?" Mondaugen screamed. "Scheisse." But this woke up  Godolphin, who began to sing splinters of sentimental³²¹ ballads³²² and to call  for his Evan. Weissmann regarded the old man with wide eyes and only his two  front teeth showing.

"My God," he said finally, tonelessly; about-faced and left.

But when Mondaugen found the first oscillograph roll missing he was  charitable enough to ask, "Lost or taken?" out loud to his inert³²³ equipment  and a faraway old skipper, before putting the blame on Weissmann.

"He must have come in when I was asleep." Not even Mondaugen knew when that  was. And was the roll all he'd taken? Shaking Godolphin: "Do you know who I  am, where we are," and other elementary questions that we shouldn't ask,  that only prove how afraid we are to a hypothetical anybody.

Afraid he was and as it turned out with good reason. For, half an hour  later, the old man still sat on the edge of the bed, making friends with  Mondaugen, whom he was seeing for the first time. With the Weimar Republic's  bitter breed of humor (but none of his own) Mondaugen stood at his  stained-glass window and asked that evening's veld: was I being that  successful a voyeur? As his days at the siege party became less current and  more numbered (though not by him) he was to wonder with exponential  frequency who in fact had seen him. Anyone at all? Being cowardly and thus a  gourmet³²⁴ of fear, Mondaugen prepared himself for an unprecedented³²⁵, exquisite  treat. This unglimpsed item on his menu of anxieties took the form of a very  German question: if no one has seen me then am I really here at all; and as  a sort of savory³²⁶, if I am not here then where are all these dreams coming  from, if dreams is what they are.

He was given a lovely mare²⁹⁵ named Firelily: how he adored that animal! You  couldn't keep her from prancing³²⁷ and posturing³²⁸; she was a typical woman. How  her deep sorrel flanks and hindquarters would flash in the sun! He was  careful to have his Bastard³²⁹ servant keep her always curried³³⁰ and clean. He  believed the first time the General ever addressed him directly was to  compliment him on Firelily.

He rode her all over the territory. From the coastal³³¹ desert to the Kalahari,  from Warmbad to the Portuguese frontier Firelily and he, and his good  comrades Schwach and Fleische, they dashed madcap over sand, rock, bush;  forded streams that could go from a trickle³³² to a mile-wide flood in half an  hour. Always, no matter which region it was through those ever-dwindling  herds³³³ of blacks. What were they chasing? What youthful dream?

For it was hard to avoid a feeling of impracticality³³⁴ about their adventure.  Idealism, fatedness. As if first the missionaries³³⁵, then the merchants and  miners, and lately the settlers and bourgeoisie had all had their chance at  something and had failed, and now it was the army's turn. To go in and chase  about that silly wedge of German earth two tropics away for no other reason,  apparently, than to give the warrior³³⁶ class equal time with God, Mammon,  Freyr. Certainly not for the usual soldatesque reasons-young as they were  they could see that. Next to nothing to plunder³³⁷; and as for glory, what was  there to hanging, clubbing, bayoneting something that did not resist? It had  been a terribly unequal show from the start: Hereros were simply not the  adversaries³³⁸ a young warrior expects. He felt cheated out of the army life  the posters had shown. Only a pitiful minority of the niggers were even  armed, and then only a fraction of those had rifles that worked, or  ammunition. The army had Maxim³³⁹ and Krupp guns, and little howitzers. Often  they never even saw the natives before they killed them; merely stood off on  a kopje and bombarded the village, then went in afterward³⁴⁰ to finish any  they'd missed.

His gums ached, he felt tired and possibly slept mare than normal, whatever  normal was. But this had modulated³⁴¹ at some paint into yellow skin, high  thirst, flat purple spots on his legs; and his own breath sickened him.  Godolphin in one of his lucid³⁴² moments diagnosed this as scurvy³⁴³, the cause  being simply had (in fact hardly any) diet: he'd lost twenty pounds since  the beginning of the siege.

"You want fresh vegetables," the sea dog informed him, fretting³⁴⁴. "There must  be something in the larder³⁴⁵."

"No. For God's sake," Mondaugen raved³⁴⁶, "don't leave the room. Hyenas³⁴⁷ and  jackals are padding up and down those little corridors."

"Try to lie quietly," Godolphin told him. "I can handle myself. I won't be a  moment."

Mondaugen lunged off the bed, but flaccid muscles betrayed him. Nimble  Godolphin vanished, the door swung to. Far the first time since hearing  about the Treaty of Versailles in detail, Mondaugen found himself crying.

They'll drain his juices, he thought; caress¹²⁵ his bones with their paw-pads,  gag on his fine white hair.

Mondaugen's own father had died not so many years ago, somehow involved in  the Kiel revolt. That the son should think of him at this point indicated  perhaps that Godolphin hadn't been the only one in that room to be  "visited." As the partying rushed in phantasmagoria at and around their  supposedly insulated turret, into blur³⁴⁹, there had grown increasingly more  visible one unwavering projection³⁵⁰ on the wall of night: Evan Godolphin, whom  Mondaugen had never seen save by the dubious³⁵¹ fluorescence of nostalgia³⁵² he  didn't want, nostalgia forced on him by something he was coming to look on  as a coalition³⁵³.

Presently, heavy footsteps approached through the outer regions of his  Versuchsstelle. Too heavy, he decided³⁵⁴, to be Godolphin's returning: so  craftily³⁵⁵ Mondaugen wiped his gums once more on the bedsheets and allowed  himself to fall off the bed and roll back under an arras of satin comforter,  into that cool, dusty world of old burlesque³⁵⁶ jokes and so many  unhappy-go-accident-prone lovers in this real life. He made a little  peephole in the coverlet and looked out: his view was directly into a high  mirror that commanded, say, a third of the circular room. The knob turned,  the door opened and Weissmann, draped in an ankle-length white dress with  ruffled³⁵⁷ neck, bodice and sleeves, circa 1904, tiptoed into the room,  crossing between the mirror's frontiers and vanishing again near the sferic  equipment. All at once a dawn chorus burst from the loudspeaker, chaotic³⁵⁸ at  first but resolving eventually into a deep-space madrigal³⁵⁹ for three or four  voices. To which the intruder Weissmann, out of sight, added still another,  in falsetto, to a minor-keyed Charleston:

   Now that the twilight's just beginning,

   World, stop

   Spinning;

   Cuckoo's in his clock with laryngitis,

   So he can't tell us what night tonight is.

   No one among the other dancers has

   Any

   Answers, just

   You, I, the night

   And a little black sjambok . . .

When Weissmann came back into the mirror he was carrying another  oscillograph roll. Mondaugen lay among dust babies, feeling too impotent to  yell stop, thief. The transvestite lieutenant had parted his hair in the  middle and larded his eyelashes with mascara; these, batting against his  lenses, left dark parallel streaks³⁶⁰ so that each eye looked out from its own  prison window. As he passed the imprint³⁶¹ on the coverlet of the scurvified  body which had lately occupied it, Weissmann gave it (so Mondaugen fancied)  a coy, sidewise smile. Then he vanished. Not too long after that Mondaugen's  retinae withdrew, for a time from light. Or it is presumed they did; either  that or Under-the-Bed is even stranger country than neurasthenic children  have dreamt it to be.

One could as well have been a stonemason. It dawned on you slowly, but the  conclusion was irresistible³⁶²: you were in no sense killing. The voluptuous  feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you went into the extermination³⁶³  with was sooner or later replaced by a very curious-not emotion because part  of it was obviously a lack of what we commonly call "feeling" - "functional  agreement" would come closer to it; operational sympathy.

The first clear instance of it he could remember came one day during a trek⁴⁰  from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop. His outfit³⁶⁴ were moving consignments³⁶⁵ of  Hottentot prisoners for some reason which doubtless made sense to the upper  echelons³⁶⁶. It was 140 miles and took generally a week or ten days to do, and  none of them liked the detail much. A lot of prisoners died on route, and  that meant stopping the whole trek, finding the sergeant with the keys, who  it seemed was always miles back under a kameeldoorn tree, dead drunk or well  on the way, then riding back, unlocking the neck-ring of the fellow who'd  died; sometimes rearranging the line so the weight of the extra chain would  be more evenly distributed. Not to make it easier on them, exactly, but so  one wouldn't wear out any more blacks than one had to.

It was a glorious day, December and hot, a bird somewhere gone mad with the  season. Firelily, under him, seemed sexually aroused, she curveted and  frolicked so about the line of march, covering five miles to the prisoners'  one. From the side it always looked medieval, the way the chain hung down in  bights between their neck-rings, the way the weight pulled them constantly  toward earth, the force only just overcome as long as they managed to keep  their legs moving. Behind them came army oxcarts, driven by loyal Rehoboth  Bastards³⁶⁷. How many can understand the resemblance he saw? In his village  church in the Palatinate was a mural of the Dance of Death, led by a rather  sinuous³⁶⁸, effeminate Death in his black cloak, carrying his scythe³⁶⁹ and  followed by all ranks of society from prince to peasant. Their own African  progress was hardly so elegant: they could only boast a homogeneous string  of suffering Negroes and a drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a  Mauser. Yet that association, which most of them shared, was enough to give  the unpopular chore an atmosphere of ceremony.

The trek hadn't been under way more than an hour before one of the blacks  began to complain about his feet. They were bleeding, he said. His overseer  brought Firelily close in and looked: so they were. Hardly would the blood  soak into the sand than the prisoner behind would kick it invisible. Not  long after that the same prisoner complained that the sand was working its  way into the cuts on his feet and the pain was making it difficult for him  to walk. No doubt this was also true. He was told either to be quiet or  forfeit³⁷⁰ his share of water when they outspanned for the noon rest. The  soldiers had learned on previous treks³⁷¹ that if one native was allowed to  complain the others soon enough took it up and this for some reason slowed  everyone. They wouldn't sing or chant; that perhaps could have been borne.  But the wailing³⁷³, self-indulgent babel that would go up - God, it was awful.  Silence, for practical reasons, was the rule and was enforced.

But this Hottentot would not keep silent. He was only limping slightly, he  didn't stumble. But he bitched more than the most malcontent³⁷⁴ of infantry³⁷⁵.  The young trooper edged Firelily toward him in her sensual strut³⁷⁶ and flicked  him once or twice with a sjambok. From the height of a man on horseback a  good rhinoceros³⁷⁷ sjambok used properly can quiet a nigger in less time and  with less trouble than it takes to shoot him. But it had no effect on this  one. Fleische saw what was happening and brought his black gelding up from  the other side. Together the troopers sjamboked the Hottentot on the  buttocks and thighs, forcing him into a queer little dance. It took a  certain talent to make a prisoner dance that way without slowing down the  rest of the trek because of the way they were all chained together. They  were doing quite well until through some stupid misjudgment, Fleische's  sjambok caught in the chain and he was pulled from his horse and under the  feet of the prisoners.

Their reflexes are fast, they're like animals. Before the other trooper had  really taken it in the fellow they'd been sjamboking leaped on Fleische,  trying to get his bight of chain around Fleische's neck. The rest of the  line, realizing through some extra sense what had happened - anticipating  murder - had come to a halt.

Fleische managed to roll away. The two of them got the key from the  sergeant, unlocked and removed their Hottentot from the trek, and brought  him off to the side. After Fleische, with the tip of his sjambok, had had  the obligatory³⁷⁸ sport with the black's genitals, they clubbed him to death  with the butts³⁷⁹ of their rifles and tossed what was left behind a rock for  the vultures and flies.

But as they did this thing - and Fleische said later that he'd felt  something like it too - there came over him for the first time an odd sort  of peace, perhaps like what the black was feeling as he gave up the ghost.  Usually the most you felt was annoyance; the kind of annoyance you have for  an insect that's buzzed around you far too long. You have to obliterate³⁸⁰ its  life, and the physical effort, the obviousness of the act, the knowledge  that this is only one unit in a seemingly infinite series, that killing this  one won't end it won't relieve you from having to kill more tomorrow, and  the day after, and on, and on . . . the futility³⁸¹ of it irritates you and so  to each individual act you bring something of the savagery³⁸² of military  boredom³⁸³, which as any trooper knows is mighty³⁸⁴ indeed.

This time it wasn't like that. Things seemed all at once to fall into a  pattern: a great cosmic fluttering in the blank, bright sky and each grain  of sand, each cactus spine³⁸⁵, each feather of the circling vulture above them  and invisible molecule³⁸⁶ of heated air seemed to shift imperceptibly so that  this black and he, and he and every other black he would henceforth have to  kill slid into alignment³⁸⁸, assumed a set symmetry, a dancelike poise³⁸⁹. It  finally meant something different: different from the recruiting poster, the  mural in the church and the natives already exterminated³⁹⁰ - sleeping and lame  burned en masse in their pontoks, babies tossed in the air and caught on  bayonets, girls approached with organ at the ready, their eyes filming over  in anticipated pleasure or possibly only an anticipated five more minutes of  life, only to be shot through the head first and then ravished, after of  course being made aware at the last moment that this would happen to  them - different from the official language of yon Trotha's orders and  directives, different from the sense of function and the delightful,  powerless languor³⁹¹ that are both part of following a military order that's  filtered like spring rain down countless³⁹² levels before reaching you;  different from colonial policy, international finagling, hope of advancement  within the army or enrichment out of it.

It had  only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which  united them, and it had never been that way before. Returning from the  Waterberg with von Trotha and his staff, they came upon an old woman digging  wild onions at the side of the road. A trooper named Konig jumped down off  his horse and shot her dead: but before he pulled the trigger he put the  muzzle³⁹³ against her forehead and said, "I am going to kill you." She looked  up and said, "I thank you." Later, toward dusk, there was one Herero girl,  sixteen or seventeen years old, for the platoon; and Firelily's rider was  last. After he'd had her he must have hesitated a moment between sidearm and  bayonet. She actually smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her  hips³⁹⁴ lazily in the dust. He used both.

When through some levitation³⁹⁵ he again found himself on top of the bed,  Hedwig Vogelsang was just entering the room astride a male Bondel who  crawled on all fours. She wore only a pair of black tights and had let her  long hair down.

"Good evening, poor Kurt." She rode the Bondel as far as the bed and  dismounted. "You may go, Firelily. I call it Firelily," she smiled at  Mondaugen, "because of its sorrel skin."

Mondaugen attempted a greeting, found himself too weak to talk. Hedwig was  slithering out of the tights. "I made up only my eyes," she told him in a  decadent³⁹⁶ whisper: "my lips can redden with your blood as we kiss." She began  making love to him. He tried to respond but the scurvy had weakened him. How  long it went on he didn't know. It seemed to go on for days. The light in  the room kept changing, Hedwig seemed to be everywhere at once in this black  satin circle the world had shrunk to: either she was inexhaustible or  Mondaugen had lost all sense of duration. They seemed wound into a cocoon³⁹⁷ of  blond hair and ubiquitous, dry kisses: once or twice she may have brought in  a Bondel girl to assist.

"Where is Godolphin," he cried.

"She has him."

"O God . . ."

Sometimes impotent, sometimes aroused despite his lassitude, Mondaugen  stayed neutral, neither enjoying her attentions nor worrying about her  opinion of his virility. At length she grew frustrated³⁹⁸. He knew what she was  looking for.

"You hate me," her lip quivering unnaturally³⁹⁹ as a forced vibrato.

"But I have to recuperate⁴⁰⁰."

In through the window came Weissmann with his hair combed in bangs, wearing  white silk lounging pajamas⁴⁰¹, rhinestone⁴⁰² pumps, and black eyeholes and lips,  to steal another oscillograph roll. The loudspeaker blithered at him as if  it were angry.

Later Foppl appeared in the door with Vera Meroving, held her hand, and sang  to a sprightly⁴⁰³ waltz melody:

   I know what you want,

   Princess of coquettes:

   Deviations⁴⁰⁴, fantasies and secret amulets⁴⁰⁵.

   Only try to go

   Further than you've gone

   If you never want to live to see another dawn.

   Seventeen is cruel,

   Yet at forty-two,

   Purgatory⁴⁰⁶ fires burn no livelier than you.

   So, come away from him,

   Take my hand instead,

   Let the dead get to the task of burying their dead;

   Through that hidden door again,

   Bravo for '04 again; I'm a

   Deutschesudwestafrikaner in love . . .

Once mustered⁴⁰⁷ out, those who stayed either drifted west to work at mines  like the Khan or homesteaded their own land where the farming was good. He  was restless. After doing what he'd been doing for three years a man doesn't  settle down, at least not too quickly. So he went to the coast.

Just as its own loose sand was licked away by the cold tongue of a current  from the Antarctic south, that coast began to devour¹¹¹ time the moment you  arrived. It offered life nothing: its soil was arid⁴⁰⁸; salt-bearing winds,  chilled by the great Benguela, swept in off the sea to blight⁴⁰⁹ anything that  tried to grow. There was constant battle between the fog, which wanted to  freeze your marrow⁴¹⁰, and the sun: which, once having burned off the fog,  sought you. Over Swakopmund the sun often seemed to fill the entire sky, so  diffracted was it by the sea fog. A luminous⁴¹¹ gray tending to yellow, that  hurt the eyes. You learned soon enough to wear tinted⁴¹² glasses for the sky:  If you stayed long enough you came to feel it was almost an affront⁴¹³ for  humans to be living there at all. The sky was too large, the coastal  settlements under it too mean. The harbor at Swakopmund was slowly,  continuously filling with sand, men were felled mysteriously by the  afternoon's sun, horses went mad and were lost in the tenacious⁴¹⁴ ooze⁴¹⁵ down  along the beaches. It was a brute⁴¹⁶ coast, and survival for white and black  less a matter of choice than anywhere else in the Territory.

He'd been deceived, that was his first thought: it wasn't to be like the  army. Something had changed. The blacks mattered even less. You didn't  recognize their being there in the same way you once had. Objectives were  different, that may simply have been all. The harbor needed dredging;  railroads had to be built inland from the seaports⁴¹⁷, which couldn't thrive by  themselves any more than the interior could survive without them. Having  legitimized their presence in the Territory the colonists⁴¹⁸ were now obliged  to improve what they had taken.

There were compensations, but they were not the luxuries army life had  offered. As Schachtmeister you got a house to yourself and first look at  girls who came in from the bush to surrender. Lindequist, who'd succeeded  von Trotha, had canceled the extermination order, asking all the natives  who'd fled to return, promising⁴¹⁹ that no one would be hurt. It was cheaper  than sending out search expeditions and rounding them up. Because they were  starving out in the bush, promises of mercy included promises of food. After  being fed they were taken into custody⁴²⁰ and sent out to the mines, or the  coast, or the Cameroons. Their laagers, under military escort, arrived from  the interior almost daily. Mornings he'd go down to the staging area and  assist in the sorting-out. The Hottentots were mostly women. Among the few  Hereros they got, the proportion was of course more nearly equal.

After three years of ripe, Southern indulgence to come upon this ash plain  impregnated with a killer⁴²¹ sea may have needed a strength not really found in  nature: sustained necessarily by illusion. Not even whales could skirt that  strand with impunity⁴²²: walking along what served for an esplanade you might  see one of the rotting creatures, beached, covered by feeding gulls⁴²³ who with  the coming of night would be relieved at the giant carrion⁴²⁴ by a pack of  strand wolves. And in a matter of days there would be left only the portals  of great jaws⁴²⁵ and a picked, architectural web of bone, mellowing⁴²⁶ eventually  to false ivory in the sun and fog.

The barren islets off Luderitzbucht were natural concentration camps.  Walking among huddled⁴²⁷ forms in the evening, distributing blankets, food and  occasional kisses from the sjambok, you felt like the father colonial policy  wanted you to be when it spoke of Vaterliche Zuchtigung; fatherly  chastisement⁴²⁸, an inalienable right. Their bodies, so terribly thin and slick  with cloud, lay drawn⁴²⁹ together to pool what marginal warmth was left to  them. Here and there a torch of bound reeds soaked in whale oil hissed⁴³⁰  bravely in the fog. A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like  that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp⁴³¹, it was  baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever  sideways along the strand, viscous⁴³², reverberating⁴³³; then seltzering back to  sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And  only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait,  aver³⁰⁰ on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the  fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human  it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product  of alien secretions⁴³⁴, boiling over into blood already choked and heady;  causing ganglia to twitch⁴³⁵, the field of night-vision to be grayed into  shapes that threatened, putting an itch²⁷ into every fiber⁴³⁶, an unbalance, a  general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous  paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx,  counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing  the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was  the cry of the brown hyena³⁴⁸ called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach  singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh  and unmoving.

And so, as you moved among them, you were forced to look at them as a  collection: knowing from statistics that twelve to fifteen of them died per  day, but eventually unable even to wonder which twelve to fifteen: in the  dark they differed only in size, and that made it easier not to care as you  once had. But every time the strand wolf howled across the water, as,  perhaps, you were stooping down to examine a prospective⁴³⁷ concubine missed in  the first winnowing⁴³⁸, it was only by suppressing memories of the three years  just passed that you kept from wondering if it was this particular girl the  beast waited far.

As a civilian⁴³⁹ Schachtmeister drawing government pay this was one among many  luxuries he'd had to abandon: the luxury of being able to see them as  individuals. This extended even to one's concubines; one had several, some  purely⁴⁴⁰ for housework, others for pleasure, domesticity too having become a  massed affair. They were the exclusive possession of no one save the  high-ranking officers. Subalterns, enlisted⁴⁴¹ men and gangers like himself  shared them out of a common pool, housed in a barbed-wire compound near the  B.O.Q.

It was problematical who among the females had the better time of it in the  way of creature comfort; the courtesans who lived inside the barbed wire or  the workers who were housed in a great thorn enclosure nearer the beach.  They had to rely on primarily female labor, there simply being, for obvious  reasons, a severe shortage of males. They found the distaff side useful for  a number of functions. Women could be inspanned to the heavy-duty carts to  pull loads of silt⁴⁴² dredged from the floor of the harbor; or to carry the  rails for the road of iron being driven across the Namib toward  Keetmanshoop. That destination naturally enough reminded him of the old days  when he'd helped march blacks there. Often, under the hazed-out sun, he'd  daydream⁴⁴³; remembering water holes filled to the brim with black corpses⁴⁴⁴,  their ears, nostrils and mouths bejeweled green, white, black, iridescent  with flies and their offspring; human pyres whose flames seemed to leap high  as the Southern Cross; the frangibility of bone, the splitting-open of body  sacs, the sudden heaviness of even a frail⁴⁴⁵ child. But here there could be  none of that: they were organized, made to perform en masse - you'd have to  supervise not a chained trek but a long double line of women, carrying rails  with iron ties attached; if one woman fell it meant only a fractional  increase in the force required per carrier, not the confusion and paralysis  resulting from a single failure in one of the old treks. Only once could he  remember anything like that happening, and it may have been because the fog  and cold the previous week had been worse than usual, so that their sockets  and joints⁴⁴⁶ may have become inflamed⁴⁴⁷ - that day his own neck ached and he had  trouble turning it to see what had happened - but a sudden wail³⁷² went up and  he saw that one of the women had stumbled and fallen and brought the whole  line down. His heart rose, the wind off the ocean turned balmy; here was a  fragment of the old past, revealed as if by a parting in the fog. He went  back to her, ascertained⁴⁴⁸ that the falling rail had broken her leg; dragged  her out from under it without bothering to lift it, rolled her down the  embankment and left her to die. It did him good, he thought; it took him  temporarily away from nostalgia, which on that coast was a kind of  despondency.

But if physical labor exhausted⁴⁵⁰ those who lived inside thorns, sexual labor  could as easily fatigue⁴⁵¹ those who lived inside steel. Some of the military  had brought with them curious ideas. One sergeant, too far down the chain of  command to rate a young boy (young boys being rare), did the best he could  with pre-adolescent, breastless girls whose heads he shaved and whom he kept  naked except for shrunken army leggings. Another made his partners he still,  like corpses; any sexual responses, sudden breaths or involuntary jerks were  reprimanded with an elegant jeweled sjambok he'd had designed for him in  Berlin. So if the women thought about any of this at all there couldn't have  been much to choose between thorns and steel.

Himself, he could have been happy in that new corporative life; could have  made a career out of construction work, except for one of his concubines, a  Herero child named Sarah. She brought his discontent to a focus; perhaps  even became one reason finally why he quit it all and headed inland to try  to regain⁴⁵² a little of the luxury and abundance that had vanished (he feared)  with von Trotha.

He found her first a mile out in the Atlantic, on a breakwater they were  building of sleek⁴⁵³ dark rocks that the women carried out by hand, deep-sixed  and slowly, painfully stacked into a tentacle⁴⁵⁵ crawling along the sea. That  day gray sheets were tacked⁴⁵⁴ to the sky, and a black cloud remained all day  at the western horizon. It was her eyes he saw first, whites reflecting  something of the sea's slow turbulence⁴⁵⁶; then her back, beaded with old  sjambok scars. He supposed it was simple lust⁶⁸ that made him go over and  motion to her to put down the rock she'd begun to lift: scribble⁴⁵⁷ and give  her a note for her compound supervisor⁴⁵⁸. "Give it to him," he warned her,  "or - " and he made the sjambok whistle in the salt wind. In earlier days  you hadn't had to warn them: somehow, because of that "operational  sympathy," they always delivered notes, even when they knew the note might  well be a death warrant.

She looked at the chit, then at him. Clouds moved across those eyes; whether  reflected or transmitted he'd never know. Brine slapped at their feet,  carrion birds wheeled in the sky. The breakwater stretched behind them back  to land and safety; but it could take only a word; any, the most  inconsequential, to implant⁴⁵⁹ in each of them the perverse notion that their  own path lay the other way, on the invisible mole³⁸⁷ not yet built; as if the  sea were pavement for them, as for our Redeemer.

Here was another like the woman pinned under the rail, another piece of  those soldiering days. He knew he didn't want to share this girl; he was  feeling again the pleasure of making a choice whose consequences, even the  most terrible, he could ignore.

He asked her name, she answered Sarah, eyes never having left him. A squall,  cold as Antarctica, came rushing across the water, drenched⁴⁶⁰ them, continued  on toward the north, though it would die without ever seeing the Congo's  mouth or the Bight of Benin. She shivered, his hand in apparent reflex went  to touch her but she avoided it and stooped to pick up the rock. He tapped  her lightly on the rear with his sjambok and the moment, whatever it had  meant, was over.

That night she didn't come. Next morning he caught her on the breakwater,  made her kneel, placed his boot on her nape and pushed her head under the  sea until his sense of timing told him to let her up for air. He noticed  then how long and snakelike her thighs were; how clearly the musculature of  her hips stood under the skin, skin with a certain glow, but finely striated  because of her long fast in the bush. That day he'd sjambok her on any least  pretense⁴⁶¹. At dusk he wrote out another chit and handed it to her. "You have  an hour." She watched him, nothing about her at all of the animal he'd seen  in other nigger women. Only eyes giving back the red sun, and the white  stalks of fog that had already begun to rise off the water.

He didn't eat supper. He waited alone in his house near the barbed-wire  compound, listening to the drunks selecting their mates for the night. He  couldn't stay off his feet and perhaps he'd caught a chill. The hour passed;  she didn't come. He walked out without a coat into low clouds and made his  way to her thorn compound. It was pitch-black out. Wet gusts slapped his  cheeks, he stumbled. Once at the enclosure he took up a torch and went  looking for her. Perhaps they thought he was mad, perhaps he was. He didn't  know how long he looked. He couldn't find her. They all looked alike.

The next morning she appeared as usual. He chose two strong women, bent her  back over a rock and while they held her he first sjamboked, then took her.  She lay in a cold rigor⁴⁶²; and when it was over he was astonished to find that  at same point during it the women had, like goodnatured duennas, released  her and gone about their morning's labor.

And that night, long after he'd turned in, she came to his house and slid  into the bed next to him. Woman's perversity! She was his.

Yet how long could he have had her to himself? During the day he manacled  her to the bed, and he continued to use the woman-pool at night so he  wouldn't arouse suspicion. Sarah might have cooked, cleaned, comforted, been  the closest thing to a wife he'd ever had. But on that foggy, sweating,  sterile⁴⁶³ coast there were no owners, nothing owned. Community may have been  the only solution possible against such an assertion of the Inanimate. Soon  enough his neighbor the pederast had discovered her and become enchanted. He  requested Sarah; this was answered by the lie that she'd come from the pool  and the pederast could wait his turn. But it could only get them a reprieve⁴⁶⁴.  The neighbor visited his house during the day, found her manacled and  helpless, took her his own way and then decided, like a thoughtful sergeant,  to share this good fortune with his platoon. Between noon and suppertime, as  the fog's glare shifted in the sky, they took out an abnormal distribution  of sexual preferences on her, poor Sarah, "his" Sarah only in a way that  poisonous strand could never support.

He came home to find her drooling, her eyes drained for good of all weather.  Not thinking, probably not having taken it all in, he unlocked her shackles  and it was as if like a spring she'd been storing the additive⁴⁶⁵ force that  convivial⁴⁶⁶ platoon had expended⁴⁶⁷ in amusing themselves; for with an incredible  strength she broke out of his embrace and fled, and that was how he saw her,  alive, for the last time.

The next day her body was washed up on the beach. She had perished in a sea  they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten  her breasts. It seemed then that something had at last been brought to  consummation since his arrival centuries ago on the troop ship Habicht, that  had only as obviousness and immediacy to do with the sergeant-pederast's  preference as to women or that old bubonic plague injection. If it were  parable⁴⁶⁸ (which he doubted) it probably went to illustrate⁴⁶⁹ the progress of  appetite or evolution of indulgence, both in a direction he found unpleasant  to contemplate⁴⁷⁰. If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again,  he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of  picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best  furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable  perversity of the heart, that substituted capability⁴⁷¹ for character,  deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for  Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop,  the taut⁴⁷² haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled⁴⁷³ on a thorn tree  in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his  soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him  rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to  backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design  for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming  reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years  later, couldn't even find adequate parables⁴⁷⁴ for, but a design whose first  fumbling⁴⁷⁵ sketches⁴⁷⁶ he thought must have been done the year after Jacob  Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht  and the cemetery⁴⁷⁷ was actually littered each morning with a score of  identical female corpses, an agglomeration⁴⁷⁸ no more substantial-looking than  seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more  a mass migration⁴⁷⁹ across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left  alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple  integration⁴⁸⁰ with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single  line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable  iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was  reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost  believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a  confrontation⁴⁸¹ the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to  make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted⁴⁸², forever inadequate⁴⁸³ but  indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently  minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no  shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed  wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never  cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia⁴⁸⁴ of rock, the  frailty⁴⁸⁵ of flesh, the structural⁴⁸⁶ unreliability of thorns; the unheard  whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand  wolf in the fog.

 

IV

 "Kurt, why do you never kiss me any more?"

"How long have I been sleeping," he wanted to know. Heavy blue drapes had at  some point been drawn across the window.

"It's night."

He grew aware of an absence in the room: located this eventually as an  absence of background noise from the loudspeaker, and was off the bed and  tottering⁴⁸⁷ toward his receivers before realizing he'd recovered enough to be  walking at all. His mouth tasted vile⁴⁸⁸ but his joints no longer ached, gums  no longer felt as sore or spongy. The purple spots on his legs had gone.

Hedwig giggled. "They made you look like a hyena."

The mirror had nothing encouraging to show hint. He batted his eyes at  himself and the lashes⁴ of the left one promptly⁴⁸⁹ stuck together.

"Don't squint, darling." She had a toe pointed toward the ceiling and was  adjusting a stocking. Mondaugen leered at her crookedly⁴⁹⁰ and began  trouble-shooting his equipment. Behind him he heard someone enter the room  and Hedwig begin to moan. Chains tinkled⁴⁹¹ in the heavy sickroom air,  something whistled and impacted with a loud report against what might have  been flesh. Satin tore, silk hissed, French heels beat a tattoo⁴⁹² against the  parquetry. Had the scurvy changed him from voyeur to ecouteur, or was it  deeper and part of a general change of heart? The trouble was a burned-out  tube in the power amplifier. He replaced it with a spare and turned and saw  that Hedwig had vanished.  Mondaugen stayed alone in the turret for a few  dozen visitations from the sferics, this being the only link remaining with  the kind of time that continued to pass outside Foppl's. He was awakened⁴⁹³  from a light sleep by the sound of explosions to the east. When he finally  decided to climb out the stained-glass window to investigate, he found that  everyone had rushed to the roof. A battle, a real one, was in progress  across the ravine. Such was their elevation⁴⁹⁴ that they could see everything  spread out in panorama⁴⁹⁵, as if for their amusement. A small group of Bondels  huddled among some rocks: men, women, children and a few starved-looking  goats. Hedwig inched her way across the roof's shallow slope to Mondaugen  and held his hand. "How exciting," she whispered, eyes huger than he'd ever  seen them, blood crusted on her wrists and ankles. Declining sunlight  stained the bodies of the Bondels to a certain orange. Thin wisps of cirrus  floated diaphanous⁴⁹⁶ in a late afternoon sky. But soon the sun had turned them  blinding white.

Surrounding the besieged⁴⁹⁷ Bondels, in a ragged⁴⁴⁹ noose, were whites, closing,  mostly volunteer except for a cadre of union officers and noncoms. They  exchanged occasional gunfire with the natives, who seemed to have only  half-a-dozen rifles among them. Doubtless there were human voices down  there, uttering cries of command, triumph, pain; but at this distance only  the tiny pop-pop of gunshots could be heard. To one side was a singed⁴⁹⁸ area,  streaked⁴⁹⁹ with the gray of pulverized⁵⁰⁰ rock and littered with bodies and parts  of bodies which had once belonged to Bondels.

"Bombs," Foppl commented. "That's what woke us up." Someone had come up from  below with wine and glasses, and cigars. The accordionist⁵⁰¹ had brought his  instrument, but after a few bars was silenced: no one on the roof wanted to  miss any sound of death that should reach them. They leaned toward the  battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray  and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons⁵⁰² the  sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets⁵⁰³; lips blackened with yesterday's  wine, nicotine⁵⁰⁴, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the  original hue⁵⁰⁵ only showed in cracks. Aging women shifted their legs  frequently, makeup⁵⁰⁶ they'd not cleaned away clinging in blotches⁵⁰⁷ to  pore-riddled cheeks.

Over the horizon from the direction of the union came two biplanes, flying  low and lazy, like birds wandered away from a flock. "That's where the bombs  came from," announced Foppl to his company. So excited now that he slopped  wine on the roof. Mondaugen watched it flow in twin streams all the way to  the eaves. It reminded him somehow of his first morning at Foppl's, and the  two streaks of blood (when had he began to call it blood?) in the courtyard.  A kite lit lower down on the roof and began to peck at the wine. Soon it  took wing again. When had he begun to call it blood?

The planes looked as if they would come no nearer, only hang forever in the  sky. The sun was going down. The clouds had been blown terribly thin, and  begun to glow red, and seemed to ribbon the sky its entire length, filmy and  splendid, as if it were they that held it all together. One of the Bondels  suddenly appeared to run amok: stood upright, waving a spear, and began to  run toward the nearest part of the advancing cordon⁵⁰⁸. The whites there  bunched together and fired at him in a flurry of pops, echoed by the pop of  corks⁵⁰⁹ on Foppl's roof. He had almost reached them before he fell.

Now the planes could be heard: a snarling⁵¹⁰, intermittent⁵¹¹ sound. They swooped  clumsy in a dive toward the Bondelswaartz position: the sun caught suddenly  the three canisters dropped from each, turned them to six drops of orange  fire. They seemed to take a century to fall. But soon, two bracketing the  rocks, two among the Bondels and two in the area where the corpses lay,  there bloomed at last six explosions, sending earth, stone and flesh  cascading⁵¹² toward the nearly black sky with its scarlet⁵¹³ overlay of cloud.  Seconds later the loud, coughing blasts, overlapping⁵¹⁴, reached the roof. How  the watchers cheered. The cordon moved rapidly then, through what was now a  pall⁵¹⁵ of thin smoke, killing the still-active and wounded, sending bullets  into corpses, into women and children, even into the one goat that had  survived. Then abruptly the crescendo⁵¹⁶ of cork-pops ceased and night fell.  And after a few minutes someone lit a campfire out on the battlefield. The  watchers on the roof retired inside for a night of more than usually riotous  celebration.

Had a new phase of the siege party begun with that dusk's intrusion from the  present year, 1922, or was the change internal and Mondaugen's: a shift in  the configuration of sights and sounds he was now filtering out, choosing  not to notice? No way to tell; no one to say. Whatever it arose from, health  returning or simple impatience⁵¹⁷ with the hermetic, he was starting to feel  those first tentative glandular⁵¹⁸ pressures that one day develop into moral  outrage⁵¹⁹. At least he was to experience a for him rare Achphenomenon: the  discovery that his voyeurism⁵²⁰ had been determined⁵²¹ purely by events seen, and  not by any deliberate choice, or preexisting set of personal psychic⁵²² needs.

No one saw any more battles. From time to time a body of horse-soldiers  might be noted⁵²³ in the distance, tearing desperate across the plateau,  raising a little dust; there would be explosions, miles away in the  direction of the Karas mountains. And they heard a Bondel one night, lost in  the dark, scream the name of Abraham Morris as he stumbled and fell into a  ravine. In the last weeks of Mondaugen's stay everyone remained in the  house, getting only a few hours' sleep per twenty-four-hour period. Easily a  third of their number were bedridden: several, besides Foppl's Bondels, had  died. It had become an amusement to visit an invalid⁵²⁴ each night to feed him  wine and arouse him sexually.

Mondaugen remained up in his turret, working diligently⁵²⁵ at his code, taking  occasional breaks to stand out alone on the roof and wonder if he would ever  escape a curse that seemed to have been put on him one Fasching: to become  surrounded by decadence⁵²⁶ no matter what exotic region, north or south, he  wandered into. It couldn't be only Munich, he decided at some point: nor  even the fact of economic depression. This was a soul-depression which must surely infest⁵²⁷ Europe as it infested⁵²⁸ this house.

 

One night he was awakened by a disheveled Weissmann, who could scarcely  stand still for excitement. "Look, look," he cried, waving a sheet of paper  under Mondaugen's s slowly blinking eyes. Mondaugen read:

DIGEWOELDTIMSTEALALENSWTASNDEURFUALRLIKST

"So," he yawned.

"It's your code. I've broken it. See: I remove every third letter and  obtain: GODMEANTNUURK. This rearranged spells Kurt Mondaugen."

"Well, then," Mondaugen snarled. "And who the hell told you you could read  my mail."

"The remainder of the message," Weissmann continued, "now reads:  DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST."

"The world is all that the case is," Mondaugen said. "I've heard that  somewhere before." A smile began to spread. "Weissmann, for shame. Resign  your commission, you're in the wrong line of work. You'd make a fine  engineer: you've been finagling."

"I swear," Weissmann protested, hurt.

Later on, finding the turret oppressive, Mondaugen exited through the window  and wandered the gables, corridors and stairways of the villa till the moon  was down. Early in the morning, with only the nacreous beginnings of a dawn  visible out over the Kalahari, he came around a brick wall and entered a  small hopyard. Hanging over the rows, each wrist attached to a different  stringing-wire, feet dangling⁵²⁹ over young hops⁵³⁰ already sick with downy  mildew⁵³¹, was another Bondel, perhaps Foppl's last. Below, dancing about the  body and flicking⁵³² its buttocks with a sjambok, was old Godolphin. Vera  Meroving stood by his side and they appeared to have exchanged clothing.  Godolphin, keeping time with the sjambok, launched quaveringly into a  reprise of Down by the Summertime Sea.

Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at last neither to watch nor to  listen. Instead he returned to the turret and gathered up his log books,  oscillograms and a small knapsack of clothing and toilet articles. He  sneaked⁵³³ downstairs and went out by a French window; located a long plank at  the rear of the house and dragged it to the ravine. Foppl and guests had  been somehow alerted to his departure. They crowded the windows; some sat  out on the balconies and roof, some came to the veranda⁵³⁴ to watch. With a  final grunt⁵³⁵ Mondaugen dropped the plank across a narrow part of the ravine.  As he was working his way gingerly across, trying not to look down at the  tiny stream two hundred feet below, the accordion began a slow sad tango, as  if piping him ashore⁵³⁶. This soon modulated into a rousing valediction⁵³⁷, which  they all sang in chorus:

   Why are you leaving the party so early,

   Just when it was getting good?

   Were the crowds and the laughter just a little too tame,

   Did the girl you had your eye on go and forfeit the game?

 

   O tell me

   Where is there music any gayer than ours, and tell me

   Where are wine and ladies in such ample supply?

   If you know a better party in the Southwest Protectorate,

   Tell us and we'll drop on by

   (Right after this one)

   Tell us and we'll drop on by.

He reached the other side, adjusted the knapsack and began to trudge⁵³⁸ toward  a distant clump⁵³⁹ of trees. After a few hundred yards he decided to look back  after all. They still watched him and their hush⁵⁴⁰ now was a part of the same  that hung over all the scrubland. The morning's sun bleached their faces a  Fasching-white he remembered seeing in another place. They gazed across the  ravine dehumanized and aloof⁵⁴¹, as if they were the last gods on earth.

Two miles further on at a fork in the road he met a Bondel riding on a  donkey. The Bondel had lost his right arm. "All over," he said. "Many  Bondels dead, baases dead, van Wijk dead. My woman, younkers dead." He let  Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn't know where they  were going. As the sun climbed he dozed⁵⁴² on and off, his cheek against the  Bondel's scarred back. They seemed the only three animate objects on the  yellow road which led, he knew, sooner or later, to the Atlantic. The  sunlight was immense, the plateau country wide, and Mondaugen felt little  and lost in the dun-colored waste. Soon as they trotted⁵⁴³ along the Bondel  began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest  Ganna bush. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't  understand it.

1 villa   

n.别墅，城郊小屋

参考例句：

• We rented a villa in France for the summer holidays.我们在法国租了一幢别墅消夏。
• We are quartered in a beautiful villa.我们住在一栋漂亮的别墅里。

2 voluptuous   

adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的

参考例句：

• The nobility led voluptuous lives.贵族阶层过着骄奢淫逸的生活。
• The dancer's movements were slow and voluptuous.舞女的动作缓慢而富挑逗性。

3 lash   

v.系牢；鞭打；猛烈抨击；n.鞭打；眼睫毛

参考例句：

• He received a lash of her hand on his cheek.他突然被她打了一记耳光。
• With a lash of its tail the tiger leaped at her.老虎把尾巴一甩朝她扑过来。

4 lashes   

n.鞭挞( lash的名词复数 )；鞭子；突然猛烈的一击；急速挥动v.鞭打( lash的第三人称单数 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥

参考例句：

• Mother always lashes out food for the children's party. 孩子们聚会时，母亲总是给他们许多吃的。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Never walk behind a horse in case it lashes out. 绝对不要跟在马后面，以防它突然猛踢。 来自《简明英汉词典》

5 enchanted   

adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• She was enchanted by the flowers you sent her. 她非常喜欢你送给她的花。
• He was enchanted by the idea. 他为这个主意而欣喜若狂。

6 aged   

adj.年老的，陈年的

参考例句：

• He had put on weight and aged a little.他胖了，也老点了。
• He is aged,but his memory is still good.他已年老，然而记忆力还好。

7 cape   

n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风

参考例句：

• I long for a trip to the Cape of Good Hope.我渴望到好望角去旅行。
• She was wearing a cape over her dress.她在外套上披着一件披肩。

8 minor   

adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修

参考例句：

• The young actor was given a minor part in the new play.年轻的男演员在这出新戏里被分派担任一个小角色。
• I gave him a minor share of my wealth.我把小部分财产给了他。

9 extremity   

n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度

参考例句：

• I hope you will help them in their extremity.我希望你能帮助在穷途末路的他们。
• What shall we do in this extremity?在这种极其困难的情况下我们该怎么办呢？

10 ration   

n.定量(pl.)给养，口粮；vt.定量供应

参考例句：

• The country cut the bread ration last year.那个国家去年削减面包配给量。
• We have to ration the water.我们必须限量用水。

11 petulance   

n.发脾气，生气，易怒，暴躁，性急

参考例句：

• His petulance made her impatient.他的任性让她无法忍受。
• He tore up the manuscript in a fit of petulance.他一怒之下把手稿撕碎了。

12 verge   

n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临

参考例句：

• The country's economy is on the verge of collapse.国家的经济已到了崩溃的边缘。
• She was on the verge of bursting into tears.她快要哭出来了。

13 tardy   

adj.缓慢的，迟缓的

参考例句：

• It's impolite to make a tardy appearance.晚到是不礼貌的。
• The boss is unsatisfied with the tardy tempo.老板不满于这种缓慢的进度。

14 peculiar   

adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的

参考例句：

• He walks in a peculiar fashion.他走路的样子很奇特。
• He looked at me with a very peculiar expression.他用一种很奇怪的表情看着我。

15 diminutive   

adj.小巧可爱的，小的

参考例句：

• Despite its diminutive size,the car is quite comfortable.尽管这辆车很小，但相当舒服。
• She has diminutive hands for an adult.作为一个成年人，她的手显得非常小。

16 animate   

v.赋于生命，鼓励；adj.有生命的，有生气的

参考例句：

• We are animate beings,living creatures.我们是有生命的存在，有生命的动物。
• The girls watched,little teasing smiles animating their faces.女孩们注视着，脸上挂着调皮的微笑，显得愈加活泼。

17 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

18 irony   

n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄

参考例句：

• She said to him with slight irony.她略带嘲讽地对他说。
• In her voice we could sense a certain tinge of irony.从她的声音里我们可以感到某种讥讽的意味。

19 horrid   

adj.可怕的；令人惊恐的；恐怖的；极讨厌的

参考例句：

• I'm not going to the horrid dinner party.我不打算去参加这次讨厌的宴会。
• The medicine is horrid and she couldn't get it down.这种药很难吃，她咽不下去。

20 perversity   

n.任性；刚愎自用

参考例句：

• She's marrying him out of sheer perversity.她嫁给他纯粹是任性。
• The best of us have a spice of perversity in us.在我们最出色的人身上都有任性的一面。

21 melancholy   

n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的

参考例句：

• All at once he fell into a state of profound melancholy.他立即陷入无尽的忧思之中。
• He felt melancholy after he failed the exam.这次考试没通过，他感到很郁闷。

22 atmospheric   

adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的

参考例句：

• Sea surface temperatures and atmospheric circulation are strongly coupled.海洋表面温度与大气环流是密切相关的。
• Clouds return radiant energy to the surface primarily via the atmospheric window.云主要通过大气窗区向地表辐射能量。

23 disturbance   

n.动乱，骚动；打扰，干扰；(身心)失调

参考例句：

• He is suffering an emotional disturbance.他的情绪受到了困扰。
• You can work in here without any disturbance.在这儿你可不受任何干扰地工作。

24 disturbances   

n.骚乱( disturbance的名词复数 )；打扰；困扰；障碍

参考例句：

• The government has set up a commission of inquiry into the disturbances at the prison. 政府成立了一个委员会来调查监狱骚乱事件。
• Extra police were called in to quell the disturbances. 已调集了增援警力来平定骚乱。

25 allied   

adj.协约国的；同盟国的

参考例句：

• Britain was allied with the United States many times in history.历史上英国曾多次与美国结盟。
• Allied forces sustained heavy losses in the first few weeks of the campaign.同盟国在最初几周内遭受了巨大的损失。

26 descending   

n. 下行 adj. 下降的

参考例句：

• The results are expressed in descending numerical order . 结果按数字降序列出。
• The climbers stopped to orient themselves before descending the mountain. 登山者先停下来确定所在的位置，然后再下山。

27 itch   

n.痒，渴望，疥癣；vi.发痒，渴望

参考例句：

• Shylock has an itch for money.夏洛克渴望发财。
• He had an itch on his back.他背部发痒。

28 latitudes   

纬度

参考例句：

• Latitudes are the lines that go from east to west. 纬线是从东到西的线。
• It was the brief Indian Summer of the high latitudes. 这是高纬度地方的那种短暂的晚秋。

29 stuffy   

adj.不透气的，闷热的

参考例句：

• It's really hot and stuffy in here.这里实在太热太闷了。
• It was so stuffy in the tent that we could sense the air was heavy with moisture.帐篷里很闷热，我们感到空气都是潮的。

30 citizenship   

n.市民权，公民权，国民的义务(身份)

参考例句：

• He was born in Sweden,but he doesn't have Swedish citizenship.他在瑞典出生，但没有瑞典公民身分。
• Ten years later,she chose to take Australian citizenship.十年后，她选择了澳大利亚国籍。

31 boisterous   

adj.喧闹的，欢闹的

参考例句：

• I don't condescend to boisterous displays of it.我并不屈就于它热热闹闹的外表。
• The children tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play.孩子们经常是先静静地聚集在一起，不一会就开始吵吵嚷嚷戏耍开了。

32 plantation   

n.种植园，大农场

参考例句：

• His father-in-law is a plantation manager.他岳父是个种植园经营者。
• The plantation owner has possessed himself of a vast piece of land.这个种植园主把大片土地占为己有。

33 well-being   

n.安康，安乐，幸福

参考例句：

• He always has the well-being of the masses at heart.他总是把群众的疾苦挂在心上。
• My concern for their well-being was misunderstood as interference.我关心他们的幸福，却被误解为多管闲事。

34 doorway   

n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径

参考例句：

• They huddled in the shop doorway to shelter from the rain.他们挤在商店门口躲雨。
• Mary suddenly appeared in the doorway.玛丽突然出现在门口。

35 parched   

adj.焦干的；极渴的；v.（使）焦干

参考例句：

• Hot winds parched the crops.热风使庄稼干透了。
• The land in this region is rather dry and parched.这片土地十分干燥。

36 antennas   

[生] 触角，触须（antenna的复数形式）

参考例句：

• Marconi tied several antennas to kites. 马可尼在风筝上系了几根天线。 来自超越目标英语 第3册
• Radio astronomy today is armed with the largest antennas in the world. 射电天文学拥有世界上最大的天线。

37 annoyance   

n.恼怒，生气，烦恼

参考例句：

• Why do you always take your annoyance out on me?为什么你不高兴时总是对我出气？
• I felt annoyance at being teased.我恼恨别人取笑我。

38 intestinal   

adj.肠的；肠壁；肠道细菌

参考例句：

• A few other conditions are in high intestinal obstruction. 其它少数情况是高位肠梗阻。 来自辞典例句
• This complication has occasionally occurred following the use of intestinal antiseptics. 这种并发症偶而发生在使用肠道抗菌剂上。 来自辞典例句

39 Christian   

adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒

参考例句：

• They always addressed each other by their Christian name.他们总是以教名互相称呼。
• His mother is a sincere Christian.他母亲是个虔诚的基督教徒。

40 trek   

vi.作长途艰辛的旅行；n.长途艰苦的旅行

参考例句：

• We often go pony-trek in the summer.夏季我们经常骑马旅行。
• It took us the whole day to trek across the rocky terrain.我们花了一整天的时间艰难地穿过那片遍布岩石的地带。

41 trekking   

v.艰苦跋涉，徒步旅行( trek的现在分词 )；（尤指在山中）远足，徒步旅行，游山玩水

参考例句：

• She can't come pony trekking after all because she's in a delicate condition. 她结果还是不能坐小马车旅行，因为她已怀孕。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• We spent the summer trekking in the foothills of the Himalayas. 我们整个夏天都在喜马拉雅山的山麓艰难跋涉。 来自互联网

42 numb   

adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木

参考例句：

• His fingers were numb with cold.他的手冻得发麻。
• Numb with cold,we urged the weary horses forward.我们冻得发僵，催着疲惫的马继续往前走。

43 monotonous   

adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的

参考例句：

• She thought life in the small town was monotonous.她觉得小镇上的生活单调而乏味。
• His articles are fixed in form and monotonous in content.他的文章千篇一律，一个调调儿。

44 superintendent   

n.监督人，主管，总监；(英国)警务长

参考例句：

• He was soon promoted to the post of superintendent of Foreign Trade.他很快就被擢升为对外贸易总监。
• He decided to call the superintendent of the building.他决定给楼房管理员打电话。

45 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

46 sergeant   

n.警官，中士

参考例句：

• His elder brother is a sergeant.他哥哥是个警官。
• How many stripes are there on the sleeve of a sergeant?陆军中士的袖子上有多少条纹？

47 Portuguese   

n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语

参考例句：

• They styled their house in the Portuguese manner.他们仿照葡萄牙的风格设计自己的房子。
• Her family is Portuguese in origin.她的家族是葡萄牙血统。

48 smelt   

v.熔解，熔炼；n.银白鱼，胡瓜鱼

参考例句：

• Tin is a comparatively easy metal to smelt.锡是比较容易熔化的金属。
• Darby was looking for a way to improve iron when he hit upon the idea of smelting it with coke instead of charcoal.达比一直在寻找改善铁质的方法，他猛然想到可以不用木炭熔炼，而改用焦炭。

49 poetic   

adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的

参考例句：

• His poetic idiom is stamped with expressions describing group feeling and thought.他的诗中的措辞往往带有描写群体感情和思想的印记。
• His poetic novels have gone through three different historical stages.他的诗情小说创作经历了三个不同的历史阶段。

50 sprouted   

v.发芽( sprout的过去式和过去分词 )；抽芽；出现；（使）涌现出

参考例句：

• We can't use these potatoes; they've all sprouted. 这些土豆儿不能吃了，都出芽了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The rice seeds have sprouted. 稻种已经出芽了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

51 fortress   

n.堡垒，防御工事

参考例句：

• They made an attempt on a fortress.他们试图夺取这一要塞。
• The soldier scaled the wall of the fortress by turret.士兵通过塔车攀登上了要塞的城墙。

52 delusions   

n.欺骗( delusion的名词复数 )；谬见；错觉；妄想

参考例句：

• the delusions of the mentally ill 精神病患者的妄想
• She wants to travel first-class: she must have delusions of grandeur. 她想坐头等舱旅行，她一定自以为很了不起。 来自辞典例句

53 prevailing   

adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的

参考例句：

• She wears a fashionable hair style prevailing in the city.她的发型是这个城市流行的款式。
• This reflects attitudes and values prevailing in society.这反映了社会上盛行的态度和价值观。

54 chaos   

n.混乱，无秩序

参考例句：

• After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后，城市一片混乱。
• The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。

55 flipped   

轻弹( flip的过去式和过去分词 )； 按（开关）； 快速翻转； 急挥

参考例句：

• The plane flipped and crashed. 飞机猛地翻转，撞毁了。
• The carter flipped at the horse with his whip. 赶大车的人扬鞭朝着马轻轻地抽打。

56 salute   

vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮

参考例句：

• Merchant ships salute each other by dipping the flag.商船互相点旗致敬。
• The Japanese women salute the people with formal bows in welcome.这些日本妇女以正式的鞠躬向人们施礼以示欢迎。

57 cactus   

n.仙人掌

参考例句：

• It was the first year that the cactus had produced flowers.这是这棵仙人掌第一年开花。
• The giant cactus is the vegetable skycraper.高大的仙人掌是植物界巨人。

58 jolted   

（使）摇动， （使）震惊( jolt的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The truck jolted and rattled over the rough ground. 卡车嘎吱嘎吱地在凹凸不平的地面上颠簸而行。
• She was jolted out of her reverie as the door opened. 门一开就把她从幻想中惊醒。

59 dismantled   

拆开( dismantle的过去式和过去分词 )； 拆卸； 废除； 取消

参考例句：

• The plant was dismantled of all its equipment and furniture. 这家工厂的设备和家具全被拆除了。
• The Japanese empire was quickly dismantled. 日本帝国很快被打垮了。

60 scurrying   

v.急匆匆地走( scurry的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• We could hear the mice scurrying about in the walls. 我们能听见老鼠在墙里乱跑。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• We were scurrying about until the last minute before the party. 聚会开始前我们一直不停地忙忙碌碌。 来自辞典例句

61 merge   

v.(使)结合，(使)合并，(使)合为一体

参考例句：

• I can merge my two small businesses into a large one.我可以将我的两家小商店合并为一家大商行。
• The directors have decided to merge the two small firms together.董事们已决定把这两家小商号归并起来。

62 twilight   

n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期

参考例句：

• Twilight merged into darkness.夕阳的光辉融于黑暗中。
• Twilight was sweet with the smell of lilac and freshly turned earth.薄暮充满紫丁香和新翻耕的泥土的香味。

63 tightened   

收紧( tighten的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧

参考例句：

• The rope holding the boat suddenly tightened and broke. 系船的绳子突然绷断了。
• His index finger tightened on the trigger but then relaxed again. 他的食指扣住扳机，然后又松开了。

64 giggle   

n.痴笑，咯咯地笑；v.咯咯地笑着说

参考例句：

• Both girls began to giggle.两个女孩都咯咯地笑了起来。
• All that giggle and whisper is too much for me.我受不了那些咯咯的笑声和交头接耳的样子。

65 swelled   

增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情）

参考例句：

• The infection swelled his hand. 由于感染，他的手肿了起来。
• After the heavy rain the river swelled. 大雨过后，河水猛涨。

66 plank   

n.板条，木板，政策要点，政纲条目

参考例句：

• The plank was set against the wall.木板靠着墙壁。
• They intend to win the next election on the plank of developing trade.他们想以发展贸易的纲领来赢得下次选举。

67 arabesques   

n.阿拉伯式花饰( arabesque的名词复数 )；错综图饰；阿拉伯图案；阿拉贝斯克芭蕾舞姿（独脚站立，手前伸，另一脚一手向后伸）

参考例句：

68 lust   

n.性(淫)欲；渴(欲)望；vi.对…有强烈的欲望

参考例句：

• He was filled with lust for power.他内心充满了对权力的渴望。
• Sensing the explorer's lust for gold, the chief wisely presented gold ornaments as gifts.酋长觉察出探险者们垂涎黄金的欲念，就聪明地把金饰品作为礼物赠送给他们。

69 disperse   

vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散

参考例句：

• The cattle were swinging their tails to disperse the flies.那些牛甩动着尾巴驱赶苍蝇。
• The children disperse for the holidays.孩子们放假了。

70 winking   

n.瞬眼，目语v.使眼色( wink的现在分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮

参考例句：

• Anyone can do it; it's as easy as winking. 这谁都办得到，简直易如反掌。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The stars were winking in the clear sky. 星星在明亮的天空中闪烁。 来自《简明英汉词典》

71 lewdly   

参考例句：

• He rubbed his forehead harshly with his knuckles, like stupor, and snickered lewdly. 他用指关节使劲擦了擦自己的额头，象个醉鬼一样，一面色迷迷地嘻嘻笑着。 来自互联网

72 slaughtered   

v.屠杀，杀戮，屠宰( slaughter的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The invading army slaughtered a lot of people. 侵略军杀了许多人。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Hundreds of innocent civilians were cruelly slaughtered. 数百名无辜平民遭残杀。 来自《简明英汉词典》

73 affluent   

adj.富裕的，富有的，丰富的，富饶的

参考例句：

• He hails from an affluent background.他出身于一个富有的家庭。
• His parents were very affluent.他的父母很富裕。

74 pointed   

adj.尖的，直截了当的

参考例句：

• He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
• She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。

75 conclave   

n.秘密会议，红衣主教团

参考例句：

• Signore,I ask and I prey,that you break this conclave.各位阁下，我请求，并祈祷，你们能停止这次秘密会议。
• I met my partner at that conclave and my life moved into a huge shift.我就是在那次大会上遇到了我的伴侣的，而我的生活就转向了一个巨大的改变。

76 eventual   

adj.最后的，结局的，最终的

参考例句：

• Several schools face eventual closure.几所学校面临最终关闭。
• Both parties expressed optimism about an eventual solution.双方对问题的最终解决都表示乐观。

77 amplified   

放大，扩大( amplify的过去式和过去分词 )； 增强； 详述

参考例句：

• He amplified on his remarks with drawings and figures. 他用图表详细地解释了他的话。
• He amplified the whole course of the incident. 他详述了事件的全过程。

78 illuminate   

vt.照亮，照明；用灯光装饰；说明，阐释

参考例句：

• Dreams kindle a flame to illuminate our dark roads.梦想点燃火炬照亮我们黑暗的道路。
• They use games and drawings to illuminate their subject.他们用游戏和图画来阐明他们的主题。

79 blues   

n.抑郁，沮丧；布鲁斯音乐

参考例句：

• She was in the back of a smoky bar singing the blues.她在烟雾弥漫的酒吧深处唱着布鲁斯歌曲。
• He was in the blues on account of his failure in business.他因事业失败而意志消沉。

80 squint   

v. 使变斜视眼, 斜视, 眯眼看, 偏移, 窥视; n. 斜视, 斜孔小窗; adj. 斜视的, 斜的

参考例句：

• A squint can sometimes be corrected by an eyepatch. 斜视有时候可以通过戴眼罩来纠正。
• The sun was shinning straight in her eyes which made her squint. 太阳直射着她的眼睛,使她眯起了眼睛。

81 fumbled   

（笨拙地）摸索或处理（某事物）( fumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 乱摸，笨拙地弄； 使落下

参考例句：

• She fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief. 她在她口袋里胡乱摸找手帕。
• He fumbled about in his pockets for the ticket. 他（瞎）摸着衣兜找票。

82 crouched   

v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He crouched down beside her. 他在她的旁边蹲了下来。
• The lion crouched ready to pounce. 狮子蹲下身，准备猛扑。

83 wrought   

v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的

参考例句：

• Events in Paris wrought a change in British opinion towards France and Germany.巴黎发生的事件改变了英国对法国和德国的看法。
• It's a walking stick with a gold head wrought in the form of a flower.那是一个金质花形包头的拐杖。

84 vertical   

adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置

参考例句：

• The northern side of the mountain is almost vertical.这座山的北坡几乎是垂直的。
• Vertical air motions are not measured by this system.垂直气流的运动不用这种系统来测量。

85 enigma   

n.谜，谜一样的人或事

参考例句：

• I've known him for many years,but he remains something of an enigma to me.我与他相识多年，他仍然难以捉摸。
• Even after all the testimonies,the murder remained a enigma.即使听完了所有的证词，这件谋杀案仍然是一个谜。

86 slates   

（旧时学生用以写字的）石板( slate的名词复数 )； 板岩； 石板瓦； 石板色

参考例句：

• The contract specifies red tiles, not slates, for the roof. 合同规定屋顶用红瓦，并非石板瓦。
• They roofed the house with slates. 他们用石板瓦做屋顶。

87 vaulted   

adj.拱状的

参考例句：

• She vaulted over the gate and ran up the path. 她用手一撑跃过栅栏门沿着小路跑去。
• The formal living room has a fireplace and vaulted ceilings. 正式的客厅有一个壁炉和拱形天花板。

88 lavish   

adj.无节制的；浪费的；vt.慷慨地给予，挥霍

参考例句：

• He despised people who were lavish with their praises.他看不起那些阿谀奉承的人。
• The sets and costumes are lavish.布景和服装极尽奢华。

89 spectral   

adj.幽灵的，鬼魂的

参考例句：

• At times he seems rather ordinary.At other times ethereal,perhaps even spectral.有时他好像很正常，有时又难以捉摸，甚至像个幽灵。
• She is compelling,spectral fascinating,an unforgettably unique performer.她极具吸引力，清幽如鬼魅，令人着迷，令人难忘，是个独具特色的演员。

90 rustling   

n. 瑟瑟声，沙沙声 adj. 发沙沙声的

参考例句：

• the sound of the trees rustling in the breeze 树木在微风中发出的沙沙声
• the soft rustling of leaves 树叶柔和的沙沙声

91 exterior   

adj.外部的，外在的；表面的

参考例句：

• The seed has a hard exterior covering.这种子外壳很硬。
• We are painting the exterior wall of the house.我们正在给房子的外墙涂漆。

92 crimson   

n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色

参考例句：

• She went crimson with embarrassment.她羞得满脸通红。
• Maple leaves have turned crimson.枫叶已经红了。

93 mutual   

adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的

参考例句：

• We must pull together for mutual interest.我们必须为相互的利益而通力合作。
• Mutual interests tied us together.相互的利害关系把我们联系在一起。

94 constraint   

n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物

参考例句：

• The boy felt constraint in her presence.那男孩在她面前感到局促不安。
• The lack of capital is major constraint on activities in the informal sector.资本短缺也是影响非正规部门生产经营的一个重要制约因素。

95 conspiracy   

n.阴谋，密谋，共谋

参考例句：

• The men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder.这些人被裁决犯有阴谋杀人罪。
• He claimed that it was all a conspiracy against him.他声称这一切都是一场针对他的阴谋。

96 lieutenant   

n.陆军中尉，海军上尉；代理官员，副职官员

参考例句：

• He was promoted to be a lieutenant in the army.他被提升为陆军中尉。
• He prevailed on the lieutenant to send in a short note.他说动那个副官，递上了一张简短的便条进去。

97 venality   

n.贪赃枉法，腐败

参考例句：

98 swollen   

adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀

参考例句：

• Her legs had got swollen from standing up all day.因为整天站着，她的双腿已经肿了。
• A mosquito had bitten her and her arm had swollen up.蚊子叮了她，她的手臂肿起来了。

99 fiscal   

adj.财政的，会计的，国库的，国库岁入的

参考例句：

• The increase of taxation is an important fiscal policy.增税是一项重要的财政政策。
• The government has two basic strategies of fiscal policy available.政府有两个可行的财政政策基本战略。

100 translucent   

adj.半透明的；透明的

参考例句：

• The building is roofed entirely with translucent corrugated plastic.这座建筑完全用半透明瓦楞塑料封顶。
• A small difference between them will render the composite translucent.微小的差别,也会使复合材料变成半透明。

101 socket   

n.窝，穴，孔，插座，插口

参考例句：

• He put the electric plug into the socket.他把电插头插入插座。
• The battery charger plugs into any mains socket.这个电池充电器可以插入任何类型的电源插座。

102 microscopic   

adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的

参考例句：

• It's impossible to read his microscopic handwriting.不可能看清他那极小的书写字迹。
• A plant's lungs are the microscopic pores in its leaves.植物的肺就是其叶片上微细的气孔。

103 flecks   

n.斑点，小点( fleck的名词复数 )；癍

参考例句：

• His hair was dark, with flecks of grey. 他的黑发间有缕缕银丝。
• I got a few flecks of paint on the window when I was painting the frames. 我在漆窗框时，在窗户上洒了几点油漆。 来自《简明英汉词典》

104 annular   

adj.环状的

参考例句：

• It was reported that there would be an annular eclipse tomorrow.据报道说，明天有日环食。
• The annular markings on a tree indicate its age.树的环形纹理显示其年龄。

105 iris   

n.虹膜，彩虹

参考例句：

• The opening of the iris is called the pupil.虹膜的开口处叫做瞳孔。
• This incredible human eye,complete with retina and iris,can be found in the Maldives.又是在马尔代夫，有这样一只难以置信的眼睛，连视网膜和虹膜都刻画齐全了。

106 turret   

n.塔楼，角塔

参考例句：

• This ancient turret has attracted many visitors.这座古老的塔楼吸引了很多游客。
• The soldier scaled the wall of the fortress by turret.士兵通过塔楼攀登上了要塞的城墙。

107 buffer   

n.起缓冲作用的人(或物)，缓冲器；vt.缓冲

参考例句：

• A little money can be a useful buffer in time of need.在急需时，很少一点钱就能解燃眉之急。
• Romantic love will buffer you against life's hardships.浪漫的爱会减轻生活的艰辛。

108 buffered   

[医]缓冲的

参考例句：

• The drug buffered his pain. 药物减轻了他的病痛。
• The reaction should be buffered to a pH of between 6 and 11. 应使反应缓冲到pH值为6～11。

109 portraying   

v.画像( portray的现在分词 )；描述；描绘；描画

参考例句：

• The artist has succeeded in portraying my father to the life. 那位画家把我的父亲画得惟妙惟肖。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Ding Ling was good at portraying figures through careful and refined description of human psychology. 《莎菲女士的日记》是丁玲的成名作，曾引起强烈的社会反响。 来自汉英文学 - 中国现代小说

110 martyr   

n.烈士，殉难者；vt.杀害，折磨，牺牲

参考例句：

• The martyr laid down his life for the cause of national independence.这位烈士是为了民族独立的事业而献身的。
• The newspaper carried the martyr's photo framed in black.报上登载了框有黑边的烈士遗像。

111 devour   

v.吞没；贪婪地注视或谛听，贪读；使着迷

参考例句：

• Larger fish devour the smaller ones.大鱼吃小鱼。
• Beauty is but a flower which wrinkle will devour.美只不过是一朵，终会被皱纹所吞噬。

112 devoured   

吞没( devour的过去式和过去分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光

参考例句：

• She devoured everything she could lay her hands on: books, magazines and newspapers. 无论是书、杂志，还是报纸，只要能弄得到，她都看得津津有味。
• The lions devoured a zebra in a short time. 狮子一会儿就吃掉了一匹斑马。

113 auxiliary   

adj.辅助的，备用的

参考例句：

• I work in an auxiliary unit.我在一家附属单位工作。
• The hospital has an auxiliary power system in case of blackout.这家医院装有备用发电系统以防灯火管制。

114 generator   

n.发电机，发生器

参考例句：

• All the while the giant generator poured out its power.巨大的发电机一刻不停地发出电力。
• This is an alternating current generator.这是一台交流发电机。

115 disorder   

n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调

参考例句：

• When returning back,he discovered the room to be in disorder.回家后，他发现屋子里乱七八糟。
• It contained a vast number of letters in great disorder.里面七零八落地装着许多信件。

116 precisely   

adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地

参考例句：

• It's precisely that sort of slick sales-talk that I mistrust.我不相信的正是那种油腔滑调的推销宣传。
• The man adjusted very precisely.那个人调得很准。

117 voyeur   

n.窥淫狂者，窥隐私者

参考例句：

• The media has made unfeeling voyeurs of all of us.媒体把我们所有人都变成了无情刺探他人隐私的人。
• A voyeur was seen lurking around the girl's dormitory.有人看到一位偷窥狂躲藏在女生宿舍附近。

118 captions   

n.标题，说明文字，字幕( caption的名词复数 )v.给（图片、照片等）加说明文字( caption的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• I stared, trying to grasp the point of the picture and the captions. 我目不转睛地看着漫画，想弄清楚漫画和解说词的意思。 来自辞典例句
• Indicates whether the user or the system paints the captions. 指示是由用户还是由系统来绘制标题。 来自互联网

119 curiously   

adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地

参考例句：

• He looked curiously at the people.他好奇地看着那些人。
• He took long stealthy strides. His hands were curiously cold.他迈着悄没声息的大步。他的双手出奇地冷。

120 accordion   

n.手风琴；adj.可折叠的

参考例句：

• The accordion music in the film isn't very beautiful.这部影片中的手风琴音乐不是很好。
• The accordion music reminds me of my boyhood.这手风琴的乐声让我回忆起了我的少年时代。

121 fiddle   

n.小提琴；vi.拉提琴；不停拨弄，乱动

参考例句：

• She plays the fiddle well.她小提琴拉得好。
• Don't fiddle with the typewriter.不要摆弄那架打字机了。

122 eerie   

adj.怪诞的；奇异的；可怕的；胆怯的

参考例句：

• It's eerie to walk through a dark wood at night.夜晚在漆黑的森林中行走很是恐怖。
• I walked down the eerie dark path.我走在那条漆黑恐怖的小路上。

123 gall   

v.使烦恼，使焦躁，难堪；n.磨难

参考例句：

• It galled him to have to ask for a loan.必须向人借钱使他感到难堪。
• No gall,no glory.没有磨难，何来荣耀。

124 caresses   

爱抚，抚摸( caress的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• A breeze caresses the cheeks. 微风拂面。
• Hetty was not sufficiently familiar with caresses or outward demonstrations of fondness. 海蒂不习惯于拥抱之类过于外露地表现自己的感情。

125 caress   

vt./n.爱抚，抚摸

参考例句：

• She gave the child a loving caress.她疼爱地抚摸着孩子。
• She feasted on the caress of the hot spring.她尽情享受着温泉的抚爱。

126 genuflect   

v.屈膝，跪拜（之态度）

参考例句：

• He genuflected in front of the altar.他在祭坛前跪拜。
• They refrained from genuflecting to the laws of political economy.他们拒不向政治经济学定律顶礼膜拜。

127 whim   

n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想

参考例句：

• I bought the encyclopedia on a whim.我凭一时的兴致买了这本百科全书。
• He had a sudden whim to go sailing today.今天他突然想要去航海。

128 tantalize   

vt.使干着急，逗弄

参考例句：

• The boy would come into the room and tantalize the dog with his feed.那个男孩会到房间里拿狗食逗弄狗。
• He tried to tantalize me by revealing that the Soviet Union was prepared to discuss a package deal.他想要逗弄我，于是就露出口风说，苏联愿意讨论一揽子交易。

129 raving   

adj.说胡话的；疯狂的，怒吼的；非常漂亮的；令人醉心[痴心]的v.胡言乱语(rave的现在分词)n.胡话；疯话adv.胡言乱语地；疯狂地

参考例句：

• The man's a raving lunatic. 那个男子是个语无伦次的疯子。
• When I told her I'd crashed her car, she went stark raving bonkers. 我告诉她我把她的车撞坏了时，她暴跳如雷。

130 alcove   

n.凹室

参考例句：

• The bookcase fits neatly into the alcove.书架正好放得进壁凹。
• In the alcoves on either side of the fire were bookshelves.火炉两边的凹室里是书架。

131 scent   

n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉

参考例句：

• The air was filled with the scent of lilac.空气中弥漫着丁香花的芬芳。
• The flowers give off a heady scent at night.这些花晚上散发出醉人的芳香。

132 musk   

n.麝香, 能发出麝香的各种各样的植物，香猫

参考例句：

• Musk is used for perfume and stimulant.麝香可以用作香料和兴奋剂。
• She scented her clothes with musk.她用麝香使衣服充满了香味。

133 puff   

n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气

参考例句：

• He took a puff at his cigarette.他吸了一口香烟。
• They tried their best to puff the book they published.他们尽力吹捧他们出版的书。

134 nostrils   

鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Her nostrils flared with anger. 她气得两个鼻孔都鼓了起来。
• The horse dilated its nostrils. 马张大鼻孔。

135 intervals   

n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息

参考例句：

• The forecast said there would be sunny intervals and showers. 预报间晴，有阵雨。
• Meetings take place at fortnightly intervals. 每两周开一次会。

136 daggers   

匕首，短剑( dagger的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• I will speak daggers to her, but use none. 我要用利剑一样的话刺痛她的心，但绝不是真用利剑。
• The world lives at daggers drawn in a cold war. 世界在冷战中剑拨弩张。

137 rhythmic   

adj.有节奏的，有韵律的

参考例句：

• Her breathing became more rhythmic.她的呼吸变得更有规律了。
• Good breathing is slow,rhythmic and deep.健康的呼吸方式缓慢深沉而有节奏。

138 gusts   

一阵强风( gust的名词复数 )； （怒、笑等的）爆发； （感情的）迸发； 发作

参考例句：

• Her profuse skirt bosomed out with the gusts. 她的宽大的裙子被风吹得鼓鼓的。
• Turbulence is defined as a series of irregular gusts. 紊流定义为一组无规则的突风。

139 velvet   

n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的

参考例句：

• This material feels like velvet.这料子摸起来像丝绒。
• The new settlers wore the finest silk and velvet clothing.新来的移民穿着最华丽的丝绸和天鹅绒衣服。

140 planetarium   

n.天文馆；天象仪

参考例句：

• The planetarium staff also prepared talks for radio broadcast.天文馆的工作人员还要准备讲稿给电台广播。
• It landed in a shallow basin fifty yards from the planetarium.它降落在离天文馆五十码处的一个浅盆地中。

141 pinions   

v.抓住[捆住]（双臂）( pinion的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• These four pinions act as bridges between the side gears. 这四组小齿轮起到连接侧方齿轮组的桥梁作用。 来自互联网
• Tough the sword hidden among pinions may wound you. 虽然那藏在羽翼中间的剑刃也许会伤毁你们。 来自互联网

142 treadmill   

n.踏车；单调的工作

参考例句：

• The treadmill has a heart rate monitor.跑步机上有个脉搏监视器。
• Drugs remove man from the treadmill of routine.药物可以使人摆脱日常单调的工作带来的疲劳。

143 vestiges   

残余部分( vestige的名词复数 )； 遗迹； 痕迹； 毫不

参考例句：

• the last vestiges of the old colonial regime 旧殖民制度最后的残余
• These upright stones are the vestiges of some ancient religion. 这些竖立的石头是某种古代宗教的遗迹。

144 whining   

n. 抱怨，牢骚 v. 哭诉，发牢骚

参考例句：

• That's the way with you whining, puny, pitiful players. 你们这种又爱哭、又软弱、又可怜的赌棍就是这样。
• The dog sat outside the door whining (to be let in). 那条狗坐在门外狺狺叫着（要进来）。

145 rattling   

adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词

参考例句：

• This book is a rattling good read. 这是一本非常好的读物。
• At that same instant,a deafening explosion set the windows rattling. 正在这时，一声震耳欲聋的爆炸突然袭来，把窗玻璃震得当当地响。

146 shuddering   

v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动

参考例句：

• 'I am afraid of it,'she answered, shuddering. “我害怕，”她发着抖，说。 来自英汉文学 - 双城记
• She drew a deep shuddering breath. 她不由得打了个寒噤，深深吸了口气。 来自飘（部分）

147 parody   

n.打油诗文，诙谐的改编诗文，拙劣的模仿；v.拙劣模仿，作模仿诗文

参考例句：

• The parody was just a form of teasing.那个拙劣的模仿只是一种揶揄。
• North Korea looks like a grotesque parody of Mao's centrally controlled China,precisely the sort of system that Beijing has left behind.朝鲜看上去像是毛时代中央集权的中国的怪诞模仿，其体制恰恰是北京方面已经抛弃的。

148 implements   

n.工具( implement的名词复数 )；家具；手段；[法律]履行（契约等）v.实现( implement的第三人称单数 )；执行；贯彻；使生效

参考例句：

• Primitive man hunted wild animals with crude stone implements. 原始社会的人用粗糙的石器猎取野兽。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• They ordered quantities of farm implements. 他们订购了大量农具。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

149 butt   

n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶

参考例句：

• The water butt catches the overflow from this pipe.大水桶盛接管子里流出的东西。
• He was the butt of their jokes.他是他们的笑柄。

150 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。

151 artillery   

n.(军)火炮，大炮；炮兵(部队)

参考例句：

• This is a heavy artillery piece.这是一门重炮。
• The artillery has more firepower than the infantry.炮兵火力比步兵大。

152 joyful   

adj.欢乐的，令人欢欣的

参考例句：

• She was joyful of her good result of the scientific experiments.她为自己的科学实验取得好成果而高兴。
• They were singing and dancing to celebrate this joyful occasion.他们唱着、跳着庆祝这令人欢乐的时刻。

153 hymns   

n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌( hymn的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• At first, they played the hymns and marches familiar to them. 起初他们只吹奏自己熟悉的赞美诗和进行曲。 来自英汉非文学 - 百科语料821
• I like singing hymns. 我喜欢唱圣歌。 来自辞典例句

154 yarn   

n.纱，纱线，纺线；奇闻漫谈，旅行轶事

参考例句：

• I stopped to have a yarn with him.我停下来跟他聊天。
• The basic structural unit of yarn is the fiber.纤维是纱的基本结构单元。

155 riotous   

adj.骚乱的；狂欢的

参考例句：

• Summer is in riotous profusion.盛夏的大地热闹纷繁。
• We spent a riotous night at Christmas.我们度过了一个狂欢之夜。

156 ragtime   

n.拉格泰姆音乐

参考例句：

• The most popular music back then was called ragtime.那时最流行的音乐叫拉格泰姆音乐。
• African-American piano player Scott Joplin wrote many ragtime songs.非裔美国钢琴家ScottJoplin写了许多拉格泰姆歌曲。

157 ballroom   

n.舞厅

参考例句：

• The boss of the ballroom excused them the fee.舞厅老板给他们免费。
• I go ballroom dancing twice a week.我一个星期跳两次交际舞。

158 strap   

n.皮带，带子；v.用带扣住，束牢；用绷带包扎

参考例句：

• She held onto a strap to steady herself.她抓住拉手吊带以便站稳。
• The nurse will strap up your wound.护士会绑扎你的伤口。

159 shrugged   

vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• Sam shrugged and said nothing. 萨姆耸耸肩膀，什么也没说。
• She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. 她耸耸肩，装出一副无所谓的样子。 来自《简明英汉词典》

160 retired   

adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的

参考例句：

• The old man retired to the country for rest.这位老人下乡休息去了。
• Many retired people take up gardening as a hobby.许多退休的人都以从事园艺为嗜好。

161 eyebrows   

眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Eyebrows stop sweat from coming down into the eyes. 眉毛挡住汗水使其不能流进眼睛。
• His eyebrows project noticeably. 他的眉毛特别突出。

163 chuckled   

轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She chuckled at the memory. 想起这件事她就暗自发笑。
• She chuckled softly to herself as she remembered his astonished look. 想起他那惊讶的表情，她就轻轻地暗自发笑。

164 plunged   

v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降

参考例句：

• The train derailed and plunged into the river. 火车脱轨栽进了河里。
• She lost her balance and plunged 100 feet to her death. 她没有站稳，从100英尺的高处跌下摔死了。

165 jittered   

v.紧张不安，战战兢兢( jitter的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• I jittered when the headmaster came in. 当校长进来的时候，我一阵紧张。 来自辞典例句

166 sprawling   

adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着）

参考例句：

• He was sprawling in an armchair in front of the TV. 他伸开手脚坐在电视机前的一张扶手椅上。
• a modern sprawling town 一座杂乱无序拓展的现代城镇

167 fascination   

n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋

参考例句：

• He had a deep fascination with all forms of transport.他对所有的运输工具都很着迷。
• His letters have been a source of fascination to a wide audience.广大观众一直迷恋于他的来信。

168 entirely   

ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
• His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。

169 socialist   

n.社会主义者；adj.社会主义的

参考例句：

• China is a socialist country,and a developing country as well.中国是一个社会主义国家，也是一个发展中国家。
• His father was an ardent socialist.他父亲是一个热情的社会主义者。

170 specialized   

adj.专门的，专业化的

参考例句：

• There are many specialized agencies in the United Nations.联合国有许多专门机构。
• These tools are very specialized.这些是专用工具。

171 plodded   

v.沉重缓慢地走（路）( plod的过去式和过去分词 )；努力从事；沉闷地苦干；缓慢进行（尤指艰难枯燥的工作）

参考例句：

• Our horses plodded down the muddy track. 我们的马沿着泥泞小路蹒跚而行。
• He plodded away all night at his project to get it finished. 他通宵埋头苦干以便做完专题研究。 来自《简明英汉词典》

172 carnival   

n.嘉年华会，狂欢，狂欢节，巡回表演

参考例句：

• I got some good shots of the carnival.我有几个狂欢节的精彩镜头。
• Our street puts on a carnival every year.我们街的居民每年举行一次嘉年华会。

173 hoard   

n./v.窖藏，贮存，囤积

参考例句：

• They have a hoard of food in the basement.地下室里有他们贮藏的食物。
• How many curios do you hoard in your study?你在你书房里聚藏了多少古玩？

174 strata   

n.地层（复数）；社会阶层

参考例句：

• The older strata gradually disintegrate.较老的岩层渐渐风化。
• They represent all social strata.他们代表各个社会阶层。

175 attic   

n.顶楼，屋顶室

参考例句：

• Leakiness in the roof caused a damp attic.屋漏使顶楼潮湿。
• What's to be done with all this stuff in the attic?顶楼上的材料怎么处理？

176 bent   

n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的

参考例句：

• He was fully bent upon the project.他一心扑在这项计划上。
• We bent over backward to help them.我们尽了最大努力帮助他们。

177 frayed   

adj.磨损的v.（使布、绳等）磨损，磨破( fray的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• His shirt was frayed. 他的衬衫穿破了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The argument frayed their nerves. 争辩使他们不快。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

178 tugged   

v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She tugged at his sleeve to get his attention. 她拽了拽他的袖子引起他的注意。
• A wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. 他的嘴角带一丝苦笑。 来自《简明英汉词典》

179 thighs   

n.股，大腿( thigh的名词复数 )；食用的鸡（等的）腿

参考例句：

• He's gone to London for skin grafts on his thighs. 他去伦敦做大腿植皮手术了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The water came up to the fisherman's thighs. 水没到了渔夫的大腿。 来自《简明英汉词典》

180 rattled   

慌乱的，恼火的

参考例句：

• The truck jolted and rattled over the rough ground. 卡车嘎吱嘎吱地在凹凸不平的地面上颠簸而行。
• Every time a bus went past, the windows rattled. 每逢公共汽车经过这里，窗户都格格作响。

181 sleet   

n.雨雪；v.下雨雪，下冰雹

参考例句：

• There was a great deal of sleet last night.昨夜雨夹雪下得真大。
• When winter comes,we get sleet and frost.冬天来到时我们这儿会有雨夹雪和霜冻。

182 foam   

v./n.泡沫，起泡沫

参考例句：

• The glass of beer was mostly foam.这杯啤酒大部分是泡沫。
• The surface of the water is full of foam.水面都是泡沫。

183 cascade   

n.小瀑布，喷流；层叠；vi.成瀑布落下

参考例句：

• She watched the magnificent waterfall cascade down the mountainside.她看着壮观的瀑布从山坡上倾泻而下。
• Her hair fell over her shoulders in a cascade of curls.她的卷发像瀑布一样垂在肩上。

184 doused   

v.浇水在…上( douse的过去式和过去分词 )；熄灯[火]

参考例句：

• The car was doused in petrol and set alight. 这辆汽车被浇上汽油点燃了。
• He doused the lamp,and we made our way back to the house. 他把灯熄掉，我们就回到屋子里去。 来自《简明英汉词典》

185 blistering   

adj.酷热的；猛烈的；使起疱的；可恶的v.起水疱；起气泡；使受暴晒n.[涂料] 起泡

参考例句：

• The runners set off at a blistering pace. 赛跑运动员如脱缰野马般起跑了。
• This failure is known as preferential wetting and is responsible for blistering. 这种故障称为优先吸湿，是产生气泡的原因。 来自辞典例句

186 disintegrated   

v.（使）破裂[分裂，粉碎]，（使）崩溃( disintegrate的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The plane disintegrated as it fell into the sea. 飞机坠入大海时解体了。
• The box was so old;it just disintegrated when I picked it up. 那箱子太破旧了，我刚一提就散了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

187 writhing   

（因极度痛苦而）扭动或翻滚( writhe的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• She was writhing around on the floor in agony. 她痛得在地板上直打滚。
• He was writhing on the ground in agony. 他痛苦地在地上打滚。

188 corpse   

n.尸体，死尸

参考例句：

• What she saw was just an unfeeling corpse.她见到的只是一具全无感觉的尸体。
• The corpse was preserved from decay by embalming.尸体用香料涂抹以防腐烂。

189 thronged   

v.成群，挤满( throng的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Mourners thronged to the funeral. 吊唁者蜂拥着前来参加葬礼。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The department store was thronged with people. 百货商店挤满了人。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

190 homage   

n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬

参考例句：

• We pay homage to the genius of Shakespeare.我们对莎士比亚的天才表示敬仰。
• The soldiers swore to pay their homage to the Queen.士兵们宣誓效忠于女王陛下。

191 killing   

n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财

参考例句：

• Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
• Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。

192 incompetent   

adj.无能力的，不能胜任的

参考例句：

• He is utterly incompetent at his job.他完全不能胜任他的工作。
• He is incompetent at working with his hands.他动手能力不行。

193 expertise   

n.专门知识(或技能等)，专长

参考例句：

• We were amazed at his expertise on the ski slopes.他斜坡滑雪的技能使我们赞叹不已。
• You really have the technical expertise in a new breakthrough.让你真正在专业技术上有一个全新的突破。

194 exterminate   

v.扑灭，消灭，根绝

参考例句：

• Some people exterminate garden insects by spraying poison on the plants.有些人在植物上喷撒毒剂以杀死花园内的昆虫。
• Woodpeckers can exterminate insect pests hiding in trees.啄木鸟能消灭躲在树里的害虫。

195 systematically   

adv.有系统地

参考例句：

• This government has systematically run down public services since it took office.这一屆政府自上台以来系统地削减了公共服务。
• The rainforest is being systematically destroyed.雨林正被系统地毀灭。

196 census   

n.(官方的)人口调查，人口普查

参考例句：

• A census of population is taken every ten years.人口普查每10年进行一次。
• The census is taken one time every four years in our country.我国每四年一次人口普查。

197 unnatural   

adj.不自然的；反常的

参考例句：

• Did her behaviour seem unnatural in any way?她有任何反常表现吗？
• She has an unnatural smile on her face.她脸上挂着做作的微笑。

198 inverted   

adj.反向的，倒转的v.使倒置，使反转( invert的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Only direct speech should go inside inverted commas. 只有直接引语应放在引号内。
• Inverted flight is an acrobatic manoeuvre of the plane. 倒飞是飞机的一种特技动作。 来自《简明英汉词典》

199 ammunition   

n.军火，弹药

参考例句：

• A few of the jeeps had run out of ammunition.几辆吉普车上的弹药已经用光了。
• They have expended all their ammunition.他们把弹药用光。

200 sluggish   

adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的

参考例句：

• This humid heat makes you feel rather sluggish.这种湿热的天气使人感到懒洋洋的。
• Circulation is much more sluggish in the feet than in the hands.脚部的循环比手部的循环缓慢得多。

201 noose   

n.绳套，绞索（刑）；v.用套索捉；使落入圈套；处以绞刑

参考例句：

• They tied a noose round her neck.他们在她脖子上系了一个活扣。
• A hangman's noose had already been placed around his neck.一个绞刑的绳圈已经套在他的脖子上。

202 expedients   

n.应急有效的，权宜之计的( expedient的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• He is full of [fruitful in] expedients. 他办法多。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Perhaps Calonne might return too, with fresh financial expedients. 或许卡洛纳也会回来，带有新的财政机谋。 来自辞典例句

203 exhaustion   

n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述

参考例句：

• She slept the sleep of exhaustion.她因疲劳而酣睡。
• His exhaustion was obvious when he fell asleep standing.他站着睡着了，显然是太累了。

204 dexterously   

adv.巧妙地，敏捷地

参考例句：

• He operates the machine dexterously. 他操纵机器动作非常轻巧。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• How dexterously he handled the mite. 他伺候小家伙，有多么熟练。 来自辞典例句

205 cryptic   

adj.秘密的，神秘的，含义模糊的

参考例句：

• She made a cryptic comment about how the film mirrored her life.她隐晦地表示说这部电影是她人生的写照。
• The new insurance policy is written without cryptic or mysterious terms.新的保险单在编写时没有隐秘条款或秘密条款。

206 regularity   

n.规律性，规则性；匀称，整齐

参考例句：

• The idea is to maintain the regularity of the heartbeat.问题就是要维持心跳的规律性。
• He exercised with a regularity that amazed us.他锻炼的规律程度令我们非常惊讶。

207 labor   

n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦

参考例句：

• We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
• He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后，他已经疲惫不堪了。

208 hisses   

嘶嘶声( hiss的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The speaker was received with a mixture of applause and hisses. 那演说者同时得到喝彩声和嘘声。
• A fire hisses if water is thrown on it. 把水浇到火上，火就发出嘶嘶声。

209 dawdled   

v.混（时间）( dawdle的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Billy dawdled behind her all morning. 比利整个上午都跟在她后面闲混。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He dawdled away his time. 他在混日子。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

210 intimidated   

v.恐吓；威胁adj.害怕的；受到威胁的

参考例句：

• We try to make sure children don't feel intimidated on their first day at school. 我们努力确保孩子们在上学的第一天不胆怯。
• The thief intimidated the boy into not telling the police. 这个贼恫吓那男孩使他不敢向警察报告。 来自《简明英汉词典》

211 chattering   

n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• The teacher told the children to stop chattering in class. 老师叫孩子们在课堂上不要叽叽喳喳讲话。
• I was so cold that my teeth were chattering. 我冷得牙齿直打战。

212 serendipity   

n.偶然发现物品之才能；意外新发现

参考例句：

• "It was serendipity all the way,"he says.用他的话说是“一直都很走运”。
• Some of the best effects in my garden have been the result of serendipity.我园子里最珍贵的几件物品是机缘巧合之下意外所得。

213 timing   

n.时间安排，时间选择

参考例句：

• The timing of the meeting is not convenient.会议的时间安排不合适。
• The timing of our statement is very opportune.我们发表声明选择的时机很恰当。

214 perverse   

adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的

参考例句：

• It would be perverse to stop this healthy trend.阻止这种健康发展的趋势是没有道理的。
• She gets a perverse satisfaction from making other people embarrassed.她有一种不正常的心态，以使别人难堪来取乐。

215 bleak   

adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的

参考例句：

• They showed me into a bleak waiting room.他们引我来到一间阴冷的会客室。
• The company's prospects look pretty bleak.这家公司的前景异常暗淡。

216 condescending   

adj.谦逊的,故意屈尊的

参考例句：

• He has a condescending attitude towards women. 他对女性总是居高临下。
• He tends to adopt a condescending manner when talking to young women. 和年轻女子说话时，他喜欢摆出一副高高在上的姿态。

217 nagging   

adj.唠叨的，挑剔的；使人不得安宁的v.不断地挑剔或批评（某人）( nag的现在分词 )；不断地烦扰或伤害（某人）；无休止地抱怨；不断指责

参考例句：

• Stop nagging—I'll do it as soon as I can. 别唠叨了—我会尽快做的。
• I've got a nagging pain in my lower back. 我后背下方老是疼。 来自《简明英汉词典》

218 spotlights   

n.聚光灯（的光）( spotlight的名词复数 )；公众注意的中心v.聚光照明( spotlight的第三人称单数 )；使公众注意，使突出醒目

参考例句：

• The room was lit by spotlights. 房间被聚光灯照亮。
• The dazzle of the spotlights made him ill at ease. 聚光灯的耀眼强光使他局促不安。 来自辞典例句

219 enumerating   

v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• There is no enumerating the evils of dishonesty here. 欺诈的罪恶在这里难以（无法）一一列举。 来自互联网
• What she used to be most adept at was enumerating. 从前，她最拿手的是数落。 来自互联网

220 canny   

adj.谨慎的，节俭的

参考例句：

• He was far too canny to risk giving himself away.他非常谨慎，不会冒险暴露自己。
• But I'm trying to be a little canny about it.但是我想对此谨慎一些。

221 tilt   

v.(使)倾侧；(使)倾斜；n.倾侧；倾斜

参考例句：

• She wore her hat at a tilt over her left eye.她歪戴着帽子遮住左眼。
• The table is at a slight tilt.这张桌子没放平，有点儿歪.

222 rambled   

（无目的地）漫游( ramble的过去式和过去分词 )； （喻）漫谈； 扯淡； 长篇大论

参考例句：

• We rambled through the woods. 我们漫步走过树林。
• She rambled on at great length but she didn't get to the heart of the matter. 她夹七夹八地说了许多话也没说到点子上。

223 eyelid   

n.眼睑，眼皮

参考例句：

• She lifted one eyelid to see what he was doing.她抬起一只眼皮看看他在做什么。
• My eyelid has been tumid since yesterday.从昨天起，我的眼皮就肿了。

224 strand   

vt.使（船）搁浅，使（某人）困于（某地）

参考例句：

• She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ears.她把一缕散发夹到了耳后。
• The climbers had been stranded by a storm.登山者被暴风雨困住了。

225 skull   

n.头骨；颅骨

参考例句：

• The skull bones fuse between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.头骨在15至25岁之间长合。
• He fell out of the window and cracked his skull.他从窗子摔了出去，跌裂了颅骨。

226 condemned   

adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• He condemned the hypocrisy of those politicians who do one thing and say another. 他谴责了那些说一套做一套的政客的虚伪。
• The policy has been condemned as a regressive step. 这项政策被认为是一种倒退而受到谴责。

227 supreme   

adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的

参考例句：

• It was the supreme moment in his life.那是他一生中最重要的时刻。
• He handed up the indictment to the supreme court.他把起诉书送交最高法院。

228 abruptly   

adv.突然地，出其不意地

参考例句：

• He gestured abruptly for Virginia to get in the car.他粗鲁地示意弗吉尼亚上车。
• I was abruptly notified that a half-hour speech was expected of me.我突然被通知要讲半个小时的话。

229 ironic   

adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的

参考例句：

• That is a summary and ironic end.那是一个具有概括性和讽刺意味的结局。
• People used to call me Mr Popularity at high school,but they were being ironic.人们中学时常把我称作“万人迷先生”，但他们是在挖苦我。

230 logic   

n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性

参考例句：

• What sort of logic is that?这是什么逻辑？
• I don't follow the logic of your argument.我不明白你的论点逻辑性何在。

231 virility   

n.雄劲，丈夫气

参考例句：

• He wanted his sons to become strong,virile,and athletic like himself.他希望他的儿子们能长得像他一样强壮、阳刚而又健美。
• He is a tall,virile man with rugged good looks.他是个身材高大、体魄健壮、相貌粗犷英俊的男子。

232 contingencies   

n.偶然发生的事故，意外事故( contingency的名词复数 )；以备万一

参考例句：

• We must consider all possible contingencies. 我们必须考虑一切可能发生的事。
• We must be prepared for all contingencies. 我们要作好各种准备，以防意外。 来自辞典例句

233 cormorant   

n.鸬鹚，贪婪的人

参考例句：

• The cormorant is a large,long-necked,dark-colored bird which lives near sea coasts and eats fish.鸬鹚是一种长脖子黑颜色的大鸟，生活在海滨而且以吃鱼为生。
• The exciting cormorant fishing performance is over there.那边有令人刺激的鱼鹰捕鱼表演。

234 discretion   

n.谨慎；随意处理

参考例句：

• You must show discretion in choosing your friend.你择友时必须慎重。
• Please use your best discretion to handle the matter.请慎重处理此事。

235 remarkable   

adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的

参考例句：

• She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
• These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。

236 utilized   

v.利用，使用( utilize的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• In the19th century waterpower was widely utilized to generate electricity. 在19世纪人们大规模使用水力来发电。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The empty building can be utilized for city storage. 可以利用那栋空建筑物作城市的仓库。 来自《简明英汉词典》

237 pranks   

n.玩笑，恶作剧( prank的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Frank's errancy consisted mostly of pranks. 法兰克错在老喜欢恶作剧。 来自辞典例句
• He always leads in pranks and capers. 他老是带头胡闹和开玩笑。 来自辞典例句

238 catchy   

adj.易记住的，诡诈的，易使人上当的

参考例句：

• We need a new slogan.The old one's not catchy enough.我们需要新的口号，旧的不够吸引人。
• The chorus is very catchy to say the least.副歌部分很容易上口。

239 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

240 flirt   

v.调情，挑逗，调戏；n.调情者，卖俏者

参考例句：

• He used to flirt with every girl he met.过去他总是看到一个姑娘便跟她调情。
• He watched the stranger flirt with his girlfriend and got fighting mad.看着那个陌生人和他女朋友调情，他都要抓狂了。

241 promenade   

n./v.散步

参考例句：

• People came out in smarter clothes to promenade along the front.人们穿上更加时髦漂亮的衣服，沿着海滨散步。
• We took a promenade along the canal after Sunday dinner.星期天晚饭后我们沿着运河散步。

242 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

243 forestalling   

v.先发制人，预先阻止( forestall的现在分词 )

参考例句：

244 stencil   

v.用模版印刷；n.模版；复写纸，蜡纸

参考例句：

• He then stencilled the ceiling with a moon and stars motif.他随后用模版在天花板上印上了月亮和繁星图案。
• Serveral of commonly used methods are photoprinting,photoengraving,mechnical engraving,and stencil.通常所采用的几种储存方法是：影印法、照相蚀刻、机械雕刻和模板。

245 puffed   

adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧

参考例句：

• He lit a cigarette and puffed at it furiously. 他点燃了一支香烟，狂吸了几口。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He felt grown-up, puffed up with self-importance. 他觉得长大了，便自以为了不起。 来自《简明英汉词典》

246 quirk   

n.奇事，巧合；古怪的举动

参考例句：

• He had a strange quirk of addressing his wife as Mrs Smith.他很怪，把自己的妻子称作史密斯夫人。
• The most annoying quirk of his is wearing a cap all the time.他最令人感到厌恶的怪癖就是无论何时都戴著帽子。

247 veal   

n.小牛肉

参考例句：

• She sauteed veal and peppers,preparing a mixed salad while the pan simmered.她先做的一道菜是青椒煎小牛肉，趁着锅还在火上偎着的机会，又做了一道拼盘。
• Marinate the veal in white wine for two hours.把小牛肉用白葡萄酒浸泡两小时。

248 fumes   

n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体

参考例句：

• The health of our children is being endangered by exhaust fumes. 我们孩子们的健康正受到排放出的废气的损害。
• Exhaust fumes are bad for your health. 废气对健康有害。

249 ambivalence   

n.矛盾心理

参考例句：

• She viewed her daughter's education with ambivalence.她看待女儿的教育问题态度矛盾。
• She felt a certain ambivalence towards him.她对他的态度有些矛盾。

250 configuration   

n.结构，布局，形态，(计算机)配置

参考例句：

• Geographers study the configuration of the mountains.地理学家研究山脉的地形轮廓。
• Prices range from $119 to $199,depending on the particular configuration.价格因具体配置而异，从119美元至199美元不等。

251 gravy   

n.肉汁；轻易得来的钱，外快

参考例句：

• You have spilled gravy on the tablecloth.你把肉汁泼到台布上了。
• The meat was swimming in gravy.肉泡在浓汁之中。

252 reluctance   

n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿

参考例句：

• The police released Andrew with reluctance.警方勉强把安德鲁放走了。
• He showed the greatest reluctance to make a reply.他表示很不愿意答复。

253 depressed   

adj.沮丧的，抑郁的，不景气的，萧条的

参考例句：

• When he was depressed,he felt utterly divorced from reality.他心情沮丧时就感到完全脱离了现实。
• His mother was depressed by the sad news.这个坏消息使他的母亲意志消沉。

254 antiquated   

adj.陈旧的，过时的

参考例句：

• Many factories are so antiquated they are not worth saving.很多工厂过于陈旧落后，已不值得挽救。
• A train of antiquated coaches was waiting for us at the siding.一列陈旧的火车在侧线上等着我们。

255 giggled   

v.咯咯地笑( giggle的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The girls giggled at the joke. 女孩子们让这笑话逗得咯咯笑。
• The children giggled hysterically. 孩子们歇斯底里地傻笑。 来自《简明英汉词典》

256 pouted   

v.撅（嘴）( pout的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Her lips pouted invitingly. 她挑逗地撮起双唇。
• I pouted my lips at him, hinting that he should speak first. 我向他努了努嘴，让他先说。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

257 chafed   

v.擦热（尤指皮肤）( chafe的过去式 )；擦痛；发怒；惹怒

参考例句：

• Her wrists chafed where the rope had been. 她的手腕上绳子勒过的地方都磨红了。
• She chafed her cold hands. 她揉搓冰冷的双手使之暖和。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

258 abrasion   

n.磨（擦）破，表面磨损

参考例句：

• Diamonds have extreme resistance to abrasion.钻石极抗磨损。
• This analysis is helpful to the research of derailment and abrasion machenism.该分析有助于脱轨和磨耗机理的探讨。

259 beads   

n.（空心）小珠子( bead的名词复数 )；水珠；珠子项链

参考例句：

• a necklace of wooden beads 一条木珠项链
• Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. 他的前额上挂着汗珠。

260 jaw   

n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训

参考例句：

• He delivered a right hook to his opponent's jaw.他给了对方下巴一记右钩拳。
• A strong square jaw is a sign of firm character.强健的方下巴是刚毅性格的标志。

261 decorative   

adj.装饰的，可作装饰的

参考例句：

• This ware is suitable for decorative purpose but unsuitable for utility.这种器皿中看不中用。
• The style is ornate and highly decorative.这种风格很华丽，而且装饰效果很好。

262 grotto   

n.洞穴

参考例句：

• We reached a beautiful grotto,whose entrance was almost hiden by the vine.我们到达了一个美丽的洞穴，洞的进口几乎被藤蔓遮掩著。
• Water trickles through an underground grotto.水沿着地下岩洞流淌。

263 guts   

v.狼吞虎咽，贪婪地吃，飞碟游戏（比赛双方每组5人，相距15码，互相掷接飞碟）；毁坏（建筑物等）的内部( gut的第三人称单数 )；取出…的内脏n.勇气( gut的名词复数 )；内脏；消化道的下段；肠

参考例句：

• I'll only cook fish if the guts have been removed. 鱼若已收拾干净，我只需烧一下即可。
• Barbara hasn't got the guts to leave her mother. 巴巴拉没有勇气离开她妈妈。 来自《简明英汉词典》

264 traitors   

卖国贼( traitor的名词复数 )； 叛徒； 背叛者； 背信弃义的人

参考例句：

• Traitors are held in infamy. 叛徒为人所不齿。
• Traitors have always been treated with contempt. 叛徒永被人们唾弃。

265 sniffed   

v.以鼻吸气，嗅，闻( sniff的过去式和过去分词 )；抽鼻子（尤指哭泣、患感冒等时出声地用鼻子吸气）；抱怨，不以为然地说

参考例句：

• When Jenney had stopped crying she sniffed and dried her eyes. 珍妮停止了哭泣，吸了吸鼻子，擦干了眼泪。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog sniffed suspiciously at the stranger. 狗疑惑地嗅着那个陌生人。 来自《简明英汉词典》

266 groggy   

adj.体弱的；不稳的

参考例句：

• The attack of flu left her feeling very groggy.她患流感后非常虚弱。
• She was groggy from surgery.她手术后的的情况依然很不稳定。

267 enveloped   

v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She was enveloped in a huge white towel. 她裹在一条白色大毛巾里。
• Smoke from the burning house enveloped the whole street. 燃烧着的房子冒出的浓烟笼罩了整条街。 来自《简明英汉词典》

268 miasma   

n.毒气；不良气氛

参考例句：

• A miasma rose from the marsh.沼泽地里冒出了瘴气。
• The novel spun a miasma of death and decay.小说笼罩着死亡和腐朽的气氛。

269 piqued   

v.伤害…的自尊心( pique的过去式和过去分词 )；激起（好奇心）

参考例句：

• Their curiosity piqued, they stopped writing. 他们的好奇心被挑起，停下了手中的笔。 来自辞典例句
• This phenomenon piqued Dr Morris' interest. 这一现象激起了莫里斯医生的兴趣。 来自辞典例句

270 ascended   

v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He has ascended into heaven. 他已经升入了天堂。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The climbers slowly ascended the mountain. 爬山运动员慢慢地登上了这座山。 来自《简明英汉词典》

271 deafening   

adj. 振耳欲聋的, 极喧闹的 动词deafen的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• The noise of the siren was deafening her. 汽笛声震得她耳朵都快聋了。
• The noise of the machine was deafening. 机器的轰鸣声震耳欲聋。

272 standing   

n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的

参考例句：

• After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
• They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。

273 dozing   

v.打瞌睡,假寐 n.瞌睡

参考例句：

• The economy shows no signs of faltering. 经济没有衰退的迹象。
• He never falters in his determination. 他的决心从不动摇。

274 whitewashed   

粉饰，美化，掩饰( whitewash的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The wall had been whitewashed. 墙已粉过。
• The towers are in the shape of bottle gourds and whitewashed. 塔呈圆形，状近葫芦，外敷白色。 来自汉英文学 - 现代散文

275 intrigued   

adj.好奇的，被迷住了的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的过去式)；激起…的兴趣或好奇心；“intrigue”的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• You've really intrigued me—tell me more! 你说的真有意思—再给我讲一些吧！
• He was intrigued by her story. 他被她的故事迷住了。

276 sprint   

n.短距离赛跑；vi. 奋力而跑，冲刺；vt.全速跑过

参考例句：

• He put on a sprint to catch the bus.他全速奔跑以赶上公共汽车。
• The runner seemed to be rallied for a final sprint.这名赛跑者似乎在振作精神作最后的冲刺。

277 neatly   

adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地

参考例句：

• Sailors know how to wind up a long rope neatly.水手们知道怎样把一条大绳利落地缠好。
• The child's dress is neatly gathered at the neck.那孩子的衣服在领口处打着整齐的皱褶。

278 halfway   

adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途

参考例句：

• We had got only halfway when it began to get dark.走到半路，天就黑了。
• In study the worst danger is give up halfway.在学习上，最忌讳的是有始无终。

279 illuminated   

adj.被照明的；受启迪的

参考例句：

• Floodlights illuminated the stadium. 泛光灯照亮了体育场。
• the illuminated city at night 夜幕中万家灯火的城市

280 brass   

n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器

参考例句：

• Many of the workers play in the factory's brass band.许多工人都在工厂铜管乐队中演奏。
• Brass is formed by the fusion of copper and zinc.黄铜是通过铜和锌的熔合而成的。

281 shuffling   

adj. 慢慢移动的, 滑移的 动词shuffle的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• Don't go shuffling along as if you were dead. 别像个死人似地拖着脚走。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹
• Some one was shuffling by on the sidewalk. 外面的人行道上有人拖着脚走过。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹

282 steer   

vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶

参考例句：

• If you push the car, I'll steer it.如果你来推车，我就来驾车。
• It's no use trying to steer the boy into a course of action that suits you.想说服这孩子按你的方式行事是徒劳的。

283 ramps   

resources allocation and multiproject scheduling 资源分配和多项目的行程安排

参考例句：

• Ramps should be provided for wheelchair users. 应该给轮椅使用者提供坡道。
• He has the upper floor and ramps are fitted everywhere for his convenience. 他住在上面一层，为了他的方便着想，到处设有坡道。

284 tapestries   

n.挂毯( tapestry的名词复数 )；绣帷，织锦v.用挂毯（或绣帷）装饰( tapestry的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• The wall of the banqueting hall were hung with tapestries. 宴会厅的墙上挂有壁毯。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The rooms were hung with tapestries. 房间里都装饰着挂毯。 来自《简明英汉词典》

285 spouter   

喷油井；捕鲸船；说话滔滔不绝的人；照管流出槽的工人

参考例句：

286 blessings   

n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福

参考例句：

• Afflictions are sometimes blessings in disguise. 塞翁失马，焉知非福。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• We don't rely on blessings from Heaven. 我们不靠老天保佑。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

287 gorge   

n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃

参考例句：

• East of the gorge leveled out.峡谷东面地势变得平坦起来。
• It made my gorge rise to hear the news.这消息令我作呕。

288 bloody   

adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染

参考例句：

• He got a bloody nose in the fight.他在打斗中被打得鼻子流血。
• He is a bloody fool.他是一个十足的笨蛋。

289 wraith   

n.幽灵；骨瘦如柴的人

参考例句：

• My only question right now involves the wraith.我唯一的问题是关于幽灵的。
• So,what you're saying is the Ancients actually created the Wraith?照你这么说，实际上是古人创造了幽灵？

290 prey   

n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨

参考例句：

• Stronger animals prey on weaker ones.弱肉强食。
• The lion was hunting for its prey.狮子在寻找猎物。

291 woe   

n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌

参考例句：

• Our two peoples are brothers sharing weal and woe.我们两国人民是患难与共的兄弟。
• A man is well or woe as he thinks himself so.自认祸是祸，自认福是福。

292 civilized   

a.有教养的，文雅的

参考例句：

• Racism is abhorrent to a civilized society. 文明社会憎恶种族主义。
• rising crime in our so-called civilized societies 在我们所谓文明社会中日益增多的犯罪行为

293 anthropologist   

n.人类学家，人类学者

参考例句：

• The lecturer is an anthropologist.这位讲师是人类学家。
• The anthropologist unearthed the skull of an ancient human at the site.人类学家在这个遗址挖掘出那块古人类的颅骨。

294 unreasonably   

adv. 不合理地

参考例句：

• He was also petty, unreasonably querulous, and mean. 他还是个气量狭窄，无事生非，平庸刻薄的人。
• Food in that restaurant is unreasonably priced. 那家饭店价格不公道。

295 mare   

n.母马，母驴

参考例句：

• The mare has just thrown a foal in the stable.那匹母马刚刚在马厩里产下了一只小马驹。
• The mare foundered under the heavy load and collapsed in the road.那母马因负载过重而倒在路上。

296 glided   

v.滑动( glide的过去式和过去分词 )；掠过；（鸟或飞机 ） 滑翔

参考例句：

• The President's motorcade glided by. 总统的车队一溜烟开了过去。
• They glided along the wall until they were out of sight. 他们沿着墙壁溜得无影无踪。 来自《简明英汉词典》

297 collapsed   

adj.倒塌的

参考例句：

• Jack collapsed in agony on the floor. 杰克十分痛苦地瘫倒在地板上。
• The roof collapsed under the weight of snow. 房顶在雪的重压下突然坍塌下来。

298 furrows   

n.犁沟( furrow的名词复数 )；（脸上的）皱纹v.犁田，开沟( furrow的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• I could tell from the deep furrows in her forehead that she was very disturbed by the news. 从她额头深深的皱纹上，我可以看出她听了这个消息非常不安。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Dirt bike trails crisscrossed the grassy furrows. 越野摩托车的轮迹纵横交错地布满条条草沟。 来自辞典例句

299 cadaver   

n.尸体

参考例句：

• Examination of a cadaver is to determine the cause of death.尸体解剖是为了确认死亡原因。
• He looked down again at the gaping mouth of the cadaver.他的眼光不由自主地又落到了死人张大的嘴上。

300 aver   

v.极力声明；断言；确证

参考例句：

• I aver it will not rain tomorrow.我断言明天不会下雨。
• In spite of all you say,I still aver that his report is true.不管你怎么说，我还是断言他的报告是真实的。

301 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

302 importunate   

adj.强求的；纠缠不休的

参考例句：

• I would not have our gratitude become indiscreet or importunate.我不愿意让我们的感激变成失礼或勉强。
• The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation.萦绕在心头的这个回忆对当前的情景来说，是个具有讽刺性的对照。

303 rimmed   

adj.有边缘的，有框的v.沿…边缘滚动；给…镶边

参考例句：

• Gold rimmed spectacles bit deep into the bridge of his nose. 金边眼镜深深嵌入他的鼻梁。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Trees rimmed the pool. 水池的四周树木环绕。 来自《简明英汉词典》

304 facade   

n.(建筑物的)正面，临街正面；外表

参考例句：

• The entrance facade consists of a large full height glass door.入口正面有一大型全高度玻璃门。
• If you look carefully,you can see through Bob's facade.如果你仔细观察，你就能看穿鲍勃的外表。

305 provincial   

adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人

参考例句：

• City dwellers think country folk have provincial attitudes.城里人以为乡下人思想迂腐。
• Two leading cadres came down from the provincial capital yesterday.昨天从省里下来了两位领导干部。

306 plausible   

adj.似真实的，似乎有理的，似乎可信的

参考例句：

• His story sounded plausible.他说的那番话似乎是真实的。
• Her story sounded perfectly plausible.她的说辞听起来言之有理。

307 spokes   

n.（车轮的）辐条( spoke的名词复数 )；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动

参考例句：

• Her baby caught his fingers in the spokes of the pram wheel. 她宝宝的手指被婴儿车轮的辐条卡住了。 来自辞典例句
• The new edges are called the spokes of the wheel. 新的边称为轮的辐。 来自辞典例句

308 compartment   

n.卧车包房，隔间；分隔的空间

参考例句：

• We were glad to have the whole compartment to ourselves.真高兴，整个客车隔间由我们独享。
• The batteries are safely enclosed in a watertight compartment.电池被安全地置于一个防水的隔间里。

309 uncertainty   

n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物

参考例句：

• Her comments will add to the uncertainty of the situation.她的批评将会使局势更加不稳定。
• After six weeks of uncertainty,the strain was beginning to take its toll.6个星期的忐忑不安后，压力开始产生影响了。

310 scowl   

vi.(at)生气地皱眉，沉下脸，怒视；n.怒容

参考例句：

• I wonder why he is wearing an angry scowl.我不知道他为何面带怒容。
• The boss manifested his disgust with a scowl.老板面带怒色，清楚表示出他的厌恶之感。

311 bleached   

漂白的，晒白的，颜色变浅的

参考例句：

• His hair was bleached by the sun . 他的头发被太阳晒得发白。
• The sun has bleached her yellow skirt. 阳光把她的黄裙子晒得褪色了。

312 humanitarian   

n.人道主义者，博爱者，基督凡人论者

参考例句：

• She has many humanitarian interests and contributes a lot to them.她拥有很多慈善事业，并作了很大的贡献。
• The British government has now suspended humanitarian aid to the area.英国政府现已暂停对这一地区的人道主义援助。

313 brotherhood   

n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊

参考例句：

• They broke up the brotherhood.他们断绝了兄弟关系。
• They live and work together in complete equality and brotherhood.他们完全平等和兄弟般地在一起生活和工作。

314 entrenched   

adj.确立的，不容易改的(风俗习惯)

参考例句：

• Television seems to be firmly entrenched as the number one medium for national advertising.电视看来要在全国广告媒介中牢固地占据头等位置。
• If the enemy dares to attack us in these entrenched positions,we will make short work of them.如果敌人胆敢进攻我们固守的阵地，我们就消灭他们。

315 potent   

adj.强有力的，有权势的；有效力的

参考例句：

• The medicine had a potent effect on your disease.这药物对你的病疗效很大。
• We must account of his potent influence.我们必须考虑他的强有力的影响。

316 embarrassment   

n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫

参考例句：

• She could have died away with embarrassment.她窘迫得要死。
• Coughing at a concert can be a real embarrassment.在音乐会上咳嗽真会使人难堪。

317 ambiguity   

n.模棱两可；意义不明确

参考例句：

• The telegram was misunderstood because of its ambiguity.由于电文意义不明确而造成了误解。
• Her answer was above all ambiguity.她的回答毫不含糊。

318 snarled   

v.（指狗）吠，嗥叫， （人）咆哮( snarl的过去式和过去分词 )；咆哮着说，厉声地说

参考例句：

• The dog snarled at us. 狗朝我们低声吼叫。
• As I advanced towards the dog, It'snarled and struck at me. 我朝那条狗走去时，它狂吠着向我扑来。 来自《简明英汉词典》

319 collaborate   

vi.协作，合作；协调

参考例句：

• The work gets done more quickly when we collaborate.我们一旦合作，工作做起来就更快了。
• I would ask you to collaborate with us in this work.我们愿意请你们在这项工作中和我们合作。

320 solicitously   

adv.热心地，热切地

参考例句：

• Eyeing Hung-chien he said solicitously, "Hung-chien, you've lost a lot of weight." 他看了鸿渐一眼，关切的说：“鸿渐兄，你瘦得多了。” 来自汉英文学 - 围城
• To their surprise Hung-chien merely asked Jou-chia solicitously, "Can the wine stains be washed out? 谁知道鸿渐只关切地问柔嘉：“酒渍洗得掉么？ 来自汉英文学 - 围城

321 sentimental   

adj.多愁善感的，感伤的

参考例句：

• She's a sentimental woman who believes marriage comes by destiny.她是多愁善感的人，她相信姻缘命中注定。
• We were deeply touched by the sentimental movie.我们深深被那感伤的电影所感动。

322 ballads   

民歌，民谣，特别指叙述故事的歌( ballad的名词复数 )； 讴

参考例句：

• She belted out ballads and hillbilly songs one after another all evening. 她整晚一个接一个地大唱民谣和乡村小调。
• She taught him to read and even to sing two or three little ballads,accompanying him on her old piano. 她教他读书，还教他唱两三首民谣，弹着她的旧钢琴为他伴奏。

323 inert   

adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的

参考例句：

• Inert gas studies are providing valuable information about other planets,too.对惰性气体的研究，也提供了有关其它行星的有价值的资料。
• Elemental nitrogen is a very unreactive and inert material.元素氮是一个十分不活跃的惰性物质。

324 gourmet   

n.食物品尝家；adj.出于美食家之手的

参考例句：

• What does a gourmet writer do? 美食评论家做什么？
• A gourmet like him always eats in expensive restaurants.像他这样的美食家总是到豪华的餐馆用餐。

325 unprecedented   

adj.无前例的，新奇的

参考例句：

• The air crash caused an unprecedented number of deaths.这次空难的死亡人数是空前的。
• A flood of this sort is really unprecedented.这样大的洪水真是十年九不遇。

326 savory   

adj.风味极佳的，可口的，味香的

参考例句：

• She placed a huge dish before him of savory steaming meat.她将一大盘热气腾腾、美味可口的肉放在他面前。
• He doesn't have a very savory reputation.他的名誉不太好。

327 prancing   

v.（马）腾跃( prance的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The lead singer was prancing around with the microphone. 首席歌手手执麦克风，神气地走来走去。
• The King lifted Gretel on to his prancing horse and they rode to his palace. 国王把格雷特尔扶上腾跃着的马，他们骑马向天宫走去。 来自辞典例句

328 posturing   

做出某种姿势( posture的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• She was posturing a model. 她正在摆模特儿的姿势。
• She says the President may just be posturing. 她说总统也许只是在做样子而已。

329 bastard   

n.坏蛋，混蛋；私生子

参考例句：

• He was never concerned about being born a bastard.他从不介意自己是私生子。
• There was supposed to be no way to get at the bastard.据说没有办法买通那个混蛋。

330 curried   

adj.加了咖喱（或咖喱粉的），用咖哩粉调理的

参考例句：

• She curried favor with the leader by contemptible means. 她用卑鄙的手段博取领导的欢心。 来自互联网
• Fresh ham, curried beef? 鲜火腿？咖喱牛肉？ 来自互联网

331 coastal   

adj.海岸的，沿海的，沿岸的

参考例句：

• The ocean waves are slowly eating away the coastal rocks.大海的波浪慢慢地侵蚀着岸边的岩石。
• This country will fortify the coastal areas.该国将加强沿海地区的防御。

332 trickle   

vi.淌，滴，流出，慢慢移动，逐渐消散

参考例句：

• The stream has thinned down to a mere trickle.这条小河变成细流了。
• The flood of cars has now slowed to a trickle.汹涌的车流现在已经变得稀稀拉拉。

333 herds   

兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众

参考例句：

• Regularly at daybreak they drive their herds to the pasture. 每天天一亮他们就把牲畜赶到草场上去。
• There we saw herds of cows grazing on the pasture. 我们在那里看到一群群的牛在草地上吃草。

334 impracticality   

n.不切实际, 办不到

参考例句：

• I resent comments on the impracticality of small cars. 我反对说小骄车不实用的说法。

335 missionaries   

n.传教士( missionary的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Some missionaries came from England in the Qing Dynasty. 清朝时，从英国来了一些传教士。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The missionaries rebuked the natives for worshipping images. 传教士指责当地人崇拜偶像。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

336 warrior   

n.勇士，武士，斗士

参考例句：

• The young man is a bold warrior.这个年轻人是个很英勇的武士。
• A true warrior values glory and honor above life.一个真正的勇士珍视荣誉胜过生命。

337 plunder   

vt.劫掠财物，掠夺；n.劫掠物，赃物；劫掠

参考例句：

• The thieves hid their plunder in the cave.贼把赃物藏在山洞里。
• Trade should not serve as a means of economic plunder.贸易不应当成为经济掠夺的手段。

338 adversaries   

n.对手，敌手( adversary的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• That would cause potential adversaries to recoil from a challenge. 这会迫使潜在的敌人在挑战面前退缩。 来自辞典例句
• Every adversaries are more comfortable with a predictable, coherent America. 就连敌人也会因有可以预料的，始终一致的美国而感到舒服得多。 来自辞典例句

339 maxim   

n.格言，箴言

参考例句：

• Please lay the maxim to your heart.请把此格言记在心里。
• "Waste not,want not" is her favourite maxim.“不浪费则不匮乏”是她喜爱的格言。

340 afterward   

adv.后来；以后

参考例句：

• Let's go to the theatre first and eat afterward. 让我们先去看戏，然后吃饭。
• Afterward,the boy became a very famous artist.后来，这男孩成为一个很有名的艺术家。

341 modulated   

已调整[制]的，被调的

参考例句：

• He carefully modulated his voice. 他小心地压低了声音。
• He had a plump face, lemur-like eyes, a quiet, subtle, modulated voice. 他有一张胖胖的脸，狐猴般的眼睛，以及安详、微妙和富于抑扬顿挫的嗓音。

342 lucid   

adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的

参考例句：

• His explanation was lucid and to the point.他的解释扼要易懂。
• He wasn't very lucid,he didn't quite know where he was.他神志不是很清醒，不太知道自己在哪里。

343 scurvy   

adj.下流的，卑鄙的，无礼的；n.坏血病

参考例句：

• Vitamin C deficiency can ultimately lead to scurvy.缺乏维生素C最终能道致坏血病。
• That was a scurvy trick to play on an old lady.用那样的花招欺负一个老太太可真卑鄙。

344 fretting   

n. 微振磨损 adj. 烦躁的, 焦虑的

参考例句：

• Fretting about it won't help. 苦恼于事无补。
• The old lady is always fretting over something unimportant. 那位老妇人总是为一些小事焦虑不安。

345 larder   

n.食物贮藏室，食品橱

参考例句：

• Please put the food into the larder.请将您地食物放进食物柜内。
• They promised never to raid the larder again.他们答应不再随便开食橱拿东西吃了。

346 raved   

v.胡言乱语( rave的过去式和过去分词 )；愤怒地说；咆哮；痴心地说

参考例句：

• Andrew raved all night in his fever. 安德鲁发烧时整夜地说胡话。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• They raved about her beauty. 他们过分称赞她的美。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

347 hyenas   

n.鬣狗( hyena的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• These animals were the prey of hyenas. 这些动物是鬣狗的猎物。 来自辞典例句
• We detest with horror the duplicity and villainy of the murderous hyenas of Bukharinite wreckers. 我们非常憎恨布哈林那帮两面三刀、杀人破坏，干尽坏事的豺狼。 来自辞典例句

348 hyena   

n.土狼，鬣狗

参考例句：

• African hyena noted for its distinctive howl.非洲鬣狗，以其特别的嚎叫而闻名。
• The hyena's public image is not aided by its ridiculous appearance.鬣狗滑稽的外表无助于改善它在公众心中的形象。

349 blur   

n.模糊不清的事物；vt.使模糊，使看不清楚

参考例句：

• The houses appeared as a blur in the mist.房子在薄雾中隐隐约约看不清。
• If you move your eyes and your head,the picture will blur.如果你的眼睛或头动了，图像就会变得模糊不清。

350 projection   

n.发射，计划，突出部分

参考例句：

• Projection takes place with a minimum of awareness or conscious control.投射在最少的知觉或意识控制下发生。
• The projection of increases in number of house-holds is correct.对户数增加的推算是正确的。

351 dubious   

adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的

参考例句：

• What he said yesterday was dubious.他昨天说的话很含糊。
• He uses some dubious shifts to get money.他用一些可疑的手段去赚钱。

352 nostalgia   

n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧

参考例句：

• He might be influenced by nostalgia for his happy youth.也许是对年轻时幸福时光的怀恋影响了他。
• I was filled with nostalgia by hearing my favourite old song.我听到这首喜爱的旧歌，心中充满了怀旧之情。

353 coalition   

n.结合体，同盟，结合，联合

参考例句：

• The several parties formed a coalition.这几个政党组成了政治联盟。
• Coalition forces take great care to avoid civilian casualties.联盟军队竭尽全力避免造成平民伤亡。

354 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

355 craftily   

狡猾地，狡诈地

参考例句：

• He craftily arranged to be there when the decision was announced. 在决议宣布之时，他狡猾地赶到了那里。
• Strengthen basic training of calculation, get the kids to grasp the radical calculating ability craftily. 加强计算基本训练，通过分、小、百互化口算的练习，使学生熟练地掌握基本的计算技能。

356 burlesque   

v.嘲弄，戏仿；n.嘲弄，取笑，滑稽模仿

参考例句：

• Our comic play was a burlesque of a Shakespearean tragedy.我们的喜剧是对莎士比亚一出悲剧的讽刺性模仿。
• He shouldn't burlesque the elder.他不应模仿那长者。

357 ruffled   

adj. 有褶饰边的, 起皱的 动词ruffle的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• She ruffled his hair affectionately. 她情意绵绵地拨弄着他的头发。
• All this talk of a strike has clearly ruffled the management's feathers. 所有这些关于罢工的闲言碎语显然让管理层很不高兴。

358 chaotic   

adj.混沌的，一片混乱的，一团糟的

参考例句：

• Things have been getting chaotic in the office recently.最近办公室的情况越来越乱了。
• The traffic in the city was chaotic.这城市的交通糟透了。

359 madrigal   

n.牧歌；（流行于16和17世纪无乐器伴奏的）合唱歌曲

参考例句：

• You look like a melodious madrigal,beautiful snowy mountain,beautiful prairie.你象一只悠扬的牧歌，美了雪山，美了草原。
• The madrigal that writes to you still sings.写给你的情歌还在唱。

360 streaks   

n.（与周围有所不同的）条纹( streak的名词复数 )；（通常指不好的）特征（倾向）；（不断经历成功或失败的）一段时期v.快速移动( streak的第三人称单数 )；使布满条纹

参考例句：

• streaks of grey in her hair 她头上的绺绺白发
• Bacon has streaks of fat and streaks of lean. 咸肉中有几层肥的和几层瘦的。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

361 imprint   

n.印痕，痕迹；深刻的印象；vt.压印，牢记

参考例句：

• That dictionary is published under the Longman imprint.那本词典以朗曼公司的名义出版。
• Her speech left its imprint on me.她的演讲给我留下了深刻印象。

362 irresistible   

adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的

参考例句：

• The wheel of history rolls forward with an irresistible force.历史车轮滚滚向前，势不可挡。
• She saw an irresistible skirt in the store window.她看见商店的橱窗里有一条叫人着迷的裙子。

363 extermination   

n.消灭，根绝

参考例句：

• All door and window is sealed for the extermination of mosquito. 为了消灭蚊子，所有的门窗都被封闭起来了。 来自辞典例句
• In doing so they were saved from extermination. 这样一来却使它们免于绝灭。 来自辞典例句

364 outfit   

n.（为特殊用途的）全套装备，全套服装

参考例句：

• Jenney bought a new outfit for her daughter's wedding.珍妮为参加女儿的婚礼买了一套新装。
• His father bought a ski outfit for him on his birthday.他父亲在他生日那天给他买了一套滑雪用具。

365 consignments   

n.托付货物( consignment的名词复数 )；托卖货物；寄售；托运

参考例句：

• Police have seized several consignments of pornography. 警方没收了好几批运来的色情物品。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I want you to see for yourself how our consignments are cleared in London. 我要你亲自去看看我们的货物在伦敦是怎样结关的。 来自辞典例句

366 echelons   

n.（机构中的）等级，阶层( echelon的名词复数 )；（军舰、士兵、飞机等的）梯形编队

参考例句：

• Officers were drawn largely from the top echelons of society. 这些官员大都来自社会上层。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Except in the higher echelons, extensive classification has no place in the classification of vegetation. 除高阶类级之外，外延分类在植物分类中还是没有地位的。 来自辞典例句

367 bastards   

私生子( bastard的名词复数 )； 坏蛋； 讨厌的事物； 麻烦事 （认为别人走运或不幸时说）家伙

参考例句：

• Those bastards don't care a damn about the welfare of the factory! 这批狗养的，不顾大局！ 来自子夜部分
• Let the first bastards to find out be the goddam Germans. 就让那些混账的德国佬去做最先发现的倒霉鬼吧。 来自演讲部分

368 sinuous   

adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的

参考例句：

• The river wound its sinuous way across the plain.这条河蜿蜒曲折地流过平原。
• We moved along the sinuous gravel walks,with the great concourse of girls and boys.我们沿着曲折的石径,随着男孩女孩汇成的巨流一路走去。

369 scythe   

n. 长柄的大镰刀，战车镰； v. 以大镰刀割

参考例句：

• He's cutting grass with a scythe.他正在用一把大镰刀割草。
• Two men were attempting to scythe the long grass.两个人正试图割掉疯长的草。

370 forfeit   

vt.丧失；n.罚金，罚款，没收物

参考例句：

• If you continue to tell lies,you will forfeit the good opinion of everyone.你如果继续撒谎，就会失掉大家对你的好感。
• Please pay for the forfeit before you borrow book.在你借书之前请先付清罚款。

371 treks   

n.远距离行走 ( trek的名词复数 )；长途跋涉，艰难的旅程（尤指在山区）v.艰苦跋涉，徒步旅行( trek的第三人称单数 )；（尤指在山中）远足，徒步旅行，游山玩水

参考例句：

• And visiting companies and completing job treks are becoming much more important in the job search. 参观公司、进行实地考察在找工作中变得重要得多。 来自互联网
• These range from treks around Mont an ascent of North Africa's highest mountain, Mount Toubkal. 参与者是徒步绕勃朗峰，然后攀登北非最高峰托布卡尔山。 来自互联网

372 wail   

vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸

参考例句：

• Somewhere in the audience an old woman's voice began plaintive wail.观众席里，一位老太太伤心地哭起来。
• One of the small children began to wail with terror.小孩中的一个吓得大哭起来。

373 wailing   

v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱

参考例句：

• A police car raced past with its siren wailing. 一辆警车鸣着警报器飞驰而过。
• The little girl was wailing miserably. 那小女孩难过得号啕大哭。

374 malcontent   

n.不满者，不平者；adj.抱不平的，不满的

参考例句：

• The malcontent is gunning for his supervisor.那个心怀不满的人在伺机加害他的上司。
• Nevertheless,this kind of plan brings about partial player is malcontent.不过，这种方案招致部分玩家不满。

375 infantry   

n.[总称]步兵(部队)

参考例句：

• The infantry were equipped with flame throwers.步兵都装备有喷火器。
• We have less infantry than the enemy.我们的步兵比敌人少。

376 strut   

v.肿胀，鼓起；大摇大摆地走；炫耀；支撑；撑开；n.高视阔步；支柱，撑杆

参考例句：

• The circulation economy development needs the green science and technology innovation as the strut.循环经济的发展需要绿色科技创新生态化作为支撑。
• Now we'll strut arm and arm.这会儿咱们可以手挽着手儿，高视阔步地走了。

377 rhinoceros   

n.犀牛

参考例句：

• The rhinoceros has one horn on its nose.犀牛鼻子上有一个角。
• The body of the rhinoceros likes a cattle and the head likes a triangle.犀牛的形体像牛，头呈三角形。

378 obligatory   

adj.强制性的，义务的，必须的

参考例句：

• It is obligatory for us to obey the laws.我们必须守法。
• It is obligatory on every citizen to safeguard our great motherland.保卫我们伟大的祖国是每一个公民应尽的义务。

379 butts   

笑柄( butt的名词复数 )； （武器或工具的）粗大的一端； 屁股； 烟蒂

参考例句：

• The Nazis worked them over with gun butts. 纳粹分子用枪托毒打他们。
• The house butts to a cemetery. 这所房子和墓地相连。

380 obliterate   

v.擦去，涂抹，去掉...痕迹，消失，除去

参考例句：

• Whole villages were obliterated by fire.整座整座的村庄都被大火所吞噬。
• There was time enough to obliterate memories of how things once were for him.时间足以抹去他对过去经历的记忆。

381 futility   

n.无用

参考例句：

• She could see the utter futility of trying to protest. 她明白抗议是完全无用的。
• The sheer futility of it all exasperates her. 它毫无用处，这让她很生气。

382 savagery   

n.野性

参考例句：

• The police were shocked by the savagery of the attacks.警察对这些惨无人道的袭击感到震惊。
• They threw away their advantage by their savagery to the black population.他们因为野蛮对待黑人居民而丧失了自己的有利地位。

383 boredom   

n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊

参考例句：

• Unemployment can drive you mad with boredom.失业会让你无聊得发疯。
• A walkman can relieve the boredom of running.跑步时带着随身听就不那么乏味了。

384 mighty   

adj.强有力的；巨大的

参考例句：

• A mighty force was about to break loose.一股巨大的力量即将迸发而出。
• The mighty iceberg came into view.巨大的冰山出现在眼前。

385 spine   

n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊

参考例句：

• He broke his spine in a fall from a horse.他从马上跌下摔断了脊梁骨。
• His spine developed a slight curve.他的脊柱有点弯曲。

386 molecule   

n.分子，克分子

参考例句：

• A molecule of water is made up of two atoms of hygrogen and one atom of oxygen.一个水分子是由P妈̬f婘̬ 妈̬成的。
• This gives us the structural formula of the molecule.这种方式给出了分子的结构式。

387 mole   

n.胎块；痣；克分子

参考例句：

• She had a tiny mole on her cheek.她的面颊上有一颗小黑痣。
• The young girl felt very self- conscious about the large mole on her chin.那位年轻姑娘对自己下巴上的一颗大痣感到很不自在。

388 alignment   

n.队列；结盟，联合

参考例句：

• The church should have no political alignment.教会不应与政治结盟。
• Britain formed a close alignment with Egypt in the last century.英国在上个世纪与埃及结成了紧密的联盟。

389 poise   

vt./vi. 平衡，保持平衡；n.泰然自若，自信

参考例句：

• She hesitated briefly but quickly regained her poise.她犹豫片刻，但很快恢复了镇静。
• Ballet classes are important for poise and grace.芭蕾课对培养优雅的姿仪非常重要。

390 exterminated   

v.消灭，根绝( exterminate的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• It was exterminated root and branch. 它被彻底剪除了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The insects can be exterminated by spraying DDT. 可以用喷撒滴滴涕的方法大量杀死这种昆虫。 来自《用法词典》

391 languor   

n.无精力，倦怠

参考例句：

• It was hot,yet with a sweet languor about it.天气是炎热的，然而却有一种惬意的懒洋洋的感觉。
• She,in her languor,had not troubled to eat much.她懒懒的，没吃多少东西。

392 countless   

adj.无数的，多得不计其数的

参考例句：

• In the war countless innocent people lost their lives.在这场战争中无数无辜的人丧失了性命。
• I've told you countless times.我已经告诉你无数遍了。

393 muzzle   

n.鼻口部；口套；枪(炮)口；vt.使缄默

参考例句：

• He placed the muzzle of the pistol between his teeth.他把手枪的枪口放在牙齿中间。
• The President wanted to muzzle the press.总统企图遏制新闻自由。

394 hips   

abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的

参考例句：

• She stood with her hands on her hips. 她双手叉腰站着。
• They wiggled their hips to the sound of pop music. 他们随着流行音乐的声音摇晃着臀部。 来自《简明英汉词典》

395 levitation   

n.升空，漂浮；浮起

参考例句：

• We are particularly interested in phenomena such as telepathy and levitation. 我们对心灵感应及空中漂浮这样的现象特别有兴趣。 来自辞典例句
• This paper presents a magnetic levitation system control using the gain-scheduling controller. 本文以增益程序控制器针对磁浮系统进行控制。 来自互联网

396 decadent   

adj.颓废的，衰落的，堕落的

参考例句：

• Don't let decadent ideas eat into yourselves.别让颓废的思想侵蚀你们。
• This song was once banned, because it was regarded as decadent.这首歌曾经被认定为是靡靡之音而被禁止播放。

397 cocoon   

n.茧

参考例句：

• A cocoon is a kind of silk covering made by an insect.蚕茧是由昆虫制造的一种由丝组成的外包层。
• The beautiful butterfly emerged from the cocoon.美丽的蝴蝶自茧中出现。

398 frustrated   

adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• It's very easy to get frustrated in this job. 这个工作很容易令人懊恼。
• The bad weather frustrated all our hopes of going out. 恶劣的天气破坏了我们出行的愿望。 来自《简明英汉词典》

399 unnaturally   

adv.违反习俗地；不自然地；勉强地；不近人情地

参考例句：

• Her voice sounded unnaturally loud. 她的嗓音很响亮，但是有点反常。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Her eyes were unnaturally bright. 她的眼睛亮得不自然。 来自《简明英汉词典》

400 recuperate   

v.恢复

参考例句：

• Stay in the hospital for a few more days to recuperate.再住院几天，好好地恢复。
• He went to the country to recuperate.他去乡下养病去了。

401 pajamas   

n.睡衣裤

参考例句：

• At bedtime,I take off my clothes and put on my pajamas.睡觉时，我脱去衣服，换上睡衣。
• He was wearing striped pajamas.他穿着带条纹的睡衣裤。

402 rhinestone   

n.水晶石，莱茵石

参考例句：

• She often wears that cheap showy rhinestone bracelet.她经常戴那个廉价艳丽的水晶手镯。
• Some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the stones missing,当她发现一个缺了几颗人造钻石的手镯时，有些孩子鄙笑起来。

403 sprightly   

adj.愉快的，活泼的

参考例句：

• She is as sprightly as a woman half her age.她跟比她年轻一半的妇女一样活泼。
• He's surprisingly sprightly for an old man.他这把年纪了，还这么精神，真了不起。

404 deviations   

背离，偏离( deviation的名词复数 )； 离经叛道的行为

参考例句：

• Local deviations depend strongly on the local geometry of the solid matrix. 局部偏离严格地依赖于固体矩阵的局部几何形状。
• They were a series of tactical day-to-day deviations from White House policy. 它们是一系列策略上一天天摆脱白宫政策的偏向。

405 amulets   

n.护身符( amulet的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Amulets,\"guards,\" as they are popularly called, intended to ward off evil spirits. 护身符――或者象他们普遍的叫法：“警卫”用来抵御妖魔鬼怪。 来自辞典例句
• However, all oval amulets in a single game are the same. 当然，所有的魔法用品也有类似的情形。 来自互联网

406 purgatory   

n.炼狱；苦难；adj.净化的，清洗的

参考例句：

• Every step of the last three miles was purgatory.最后3英里时每一步都像是受罪。
• Marriage,with peace,is this world's paradise;with strife,this world's purgatory.和谐的婚姻是尘世的乐园，不和谐的婚姻则是人生的炼狱。

407 mustered   

v.集合，召集，集结（尤指部队）( muster的过去式和过去分词 )；（自他人处）搜集某事物；聚集；激发

参考例句：

• We mustered what support we could for the plan. 我们极尽所能为这项计划寻求支持。
• The troops mustered on the square. 部队已在广场上集合。 来自《简明英汉词典》

408 arid   

adj.干旱的；(土地)贫瘠的

参考例句：

• These trees will shield off arid winds and protect the fields.这些树能挡住旱风,保护农田。
• There are serious problems of land degradation in some arid zones.在一些干旱地带存在严重的土地退化问题。

409 blight   

n.枯萎病；造成破坏的因素；vt.破坏，摧残

参考例句：

• The apple crop was wiped out by blight.枯萎病使苹果全无收成。
• There is a blight on all his efforts.他的一切努力都遭到挫折。

410 marrow   

n.骨髓；精华；活力

参考例句：

• It was so cold that he felt frozen to the marrow. 天气太冷了，他感到寒冷刺骨。
• He was tired to the marrow of his bones.他真是累得筋疲力尽了。

411 luminous   

adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的

参考例句：

• There are luminous knobs on all the doors in my house.我家所有门上都安有夜光把手。
• Most clocks and watches in this shop are in luminous paint.这家商店出售的大多数钟表都涂了发光漆。

412 tinted   

adj. 带色彩的 动词tint的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• a pair of glasses with tinted lenses 一副有色镜片眼镜
• a rose-tinted vision of the world 对世界的理想化看法

413 affront   

n./v.侮辱，触怒

参考例句：

• Your behaviour is an affront to public decency.你的行为有伤风化。
• This remark caused affront to many people.这句话得罪了不少人。

414 tenacious   

adj.顽强的，固执的，记忆力强的，粘的

参考例句：

• We must learn from the tenacious fighting spirit of Lu Xun.我们要学习鲁迅先生韧性的战斗精神。
• We should be tenacious of our rights.我们应坚决维护我们的权利。

415 ooze   

n.软泥，渗出物；vi.渗出，泄漏；vt.慢慢渗出，流露

参考例句：

• Soon layer of oceanic ooze began to accumulate above the old hard layer.不久后海洋软泥层开始在老的硬地层上堆积。
• Drip or ooze systems are common for pot watering.滴灌和渗灌系统一般也用于盆栽灌水。

416 brute   

n.野兽，兽性

参考例句：

• The aggressor troops are not many degrees removed from the brute.侵略军简直象一群野兽。
• That dog is a dangerous brute.It bites people.那条狗是危险的畜牲，它咬人。

417 seaports   

n.海港( seaport的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Airports have joined seaports as ports of entry for the visiting foreigner. 机场和海港一样成为来访的外国人的入境关口。 来自互联网
• Sanya has 16 seaports, 10 islands and 180km of coastline. 三亚有16个港口、10个海岛和180公里的海岸线。 来自互联网

418 colonists   

n.殖民地开拓者，移民，殖民地居民( colonist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Colonists from Europe populated many parts of the Americas. 欧洲的殖民者移居到了美洲的许多地方。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Some of the early colonists were cruel to the native population. 有些早期移居殖民地的人对当地居民很残忍。 来自《简明英汉词典》

419 promising   

adj.有希望的，有前途的

参考例句：

• The results of the experiments are very promising.实验的结果充满了希望。
• We're trying to bring along one or two promising young swimmers.我们正设法培养出一两名有前途的年轻游泳选手。

420 custody   

n.监护，照看，羁押，拘留

参考例句：

• He spent a week in custody on remand awaiting sentence.等候判决期间他被还押候审一个星期。
• He was taken into custody immediately after the robbery.抢劫案发生后，他立即被押了起来。

421 killer   

n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者

参考例句：

• Heart attacks have become Britain's No.1 killer disease.心脏病已成为英国的头号致命疾病。
• The bulk of the evidence points to him as her killer.大量证据证明是他杀死她的。

422 impunity   

n.(惩罚、损失、伤害等的)免除

参考例句：

• You will not escape with impunity.你不可能逃脱惩罚。
• The impunity what compulsory insurance sets does not include escapement.交强险规定的免责范围不包括逃逸。

423 gulls   

n.鸥( gull的名词复数 )v.欺骗某人( gull的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• A flock of sea gulls are hovering over the deck. 一群海鸥在甲板上空飞翔。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The gulls which haunted the outlying rocks in a prodigious number. 数不清的海鸥在遥远的岩石上栖息。 来自辞典例句

424 carrion   

n.腐肉

参考例句：

• A crow of bloodthirsty ants is attracted by the carrion.一群嗜血的蚂蚁被腐肉所吸引。
• Vultures usually feed on carrion or roadkill.兀鹫通常以腐肉和公路上的死伤动物为食。

425 jaws   

n.口部；嘴

参考例句：

• The antelope could not escape the crocodile's gaping jaws. 那只羚羊无法从鱷鱼张开的大口中逃脱。
• The scored jaws of a vise help it bite the work. 台钳上有刻痕的虎钳牙帮助它紧咬住工件。

426 mellowing   

软化，醇化

参考例句：

• Sticking small needles into the hammer's felt creates mellowing. 在琴槌的毛毡上粘上小针以使音色圆润。

427 huddled   

挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• We huddled together for warmth. 我们挤在一块取暖。
• We huddled together to keep warm. 我们挤在一起来保暖。

428 chastisement   

n.惩罚

参考例句：

• You cannot but know that we live in a period of chastisement and ruin. 你们必须认识到我们生活在一个灾难深重、面临毁灭的时代。 来自辞典例句
• I think the chastisement to him is too critical. 我认为对他的惩罚太严厉了。 来自互联网

429 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

430 hissed   

发嘶嘶声( hiss的过去式和过去分词 )； 发嘘声表示反对

参考例句：

• Have you ever been hissed at in the middle of a speech? 你在演讲中有没有被嘘过？
• The iron hissed as it pressed the wet cloth. 熨斗压在湿布上时发出了嘶嘶声。

431 cramp   

n.痉挛；[pl.](腹)绞痛；vt.限制，束缚

参考例句：

• Winston stopped writing,partly because he was suffering from cramp.温斯顿驻了笔，手指也写麻了。
• The swimmer was seized with a cramp and had to be helped out of the water.那个在游泳的人突然抽起筋来，让别人帮着上了岸。

432 viscous   

adj.粘滞的，粘性的

参考例句：

• Gases are much less viscous than liquids.气体的粘滞性大大小于液体。
• The mud is too viscous.You must have all the agitators run.泥浆太稠，你们得让所有的搅拌机都开着。

433 reverberating   

回响，回荡( reverberate的现在分词 )； 使反响，使回荡，使反射

参考例句：

• The words are still ringing [reverberating] in one's ears. 言犹在耳。
• I heard a voice reverberating: "Crawl out! I give you liberty!" 我听到一个声音在回荡：“爬出来吧，我给你自由！”

434 secretions   

n.分泌（物）( secretion的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Lysozyme is an enzyme found in egg white, tears, and other secretions. 溶菌酶是存在于卵白、泪和其他分泌物中的一种酶。 来自辞典例句
• Chest percussion and vibration are used with postural drainage to help dislodge secretions. 在做体位引流时要敲击和振动胸部帮助分泌物松动排出。 来自辞典例句

435 twitch   

v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛

参考例句：

• The smell made my dog's nose twitch.那股气味使我的狗的鼻子抽动着。
• I felt a twitch at my sleeve.我觉得有人扯了一下我的袖子。

436 fiber   

n.纤维，纤维质

参考例句：

• The basic structural unit of yarn is the fiber.纤维是纱的基本结构单元。
• The material must be free of fiber clumps.这种材料必须无纤维块。

437 prospective   

adj.预期的，未来的，前瞻性的

参考例句：

• The story should act as a warning to other prospective buyers.这篇报道应该对其他潜在的购买者起到警示作用。
• They have all these great activities for prospective freshmen.这会举办各种各样的活动来招待未来的新人。

438 winnowing   

v.扬( winnow的现在分词 )；辨别；选择；除去

参考例句：

• The petrel came winnowing in from afar on the sea. 海燕从遥远的地方振翼飞来。 来自辞典例句
• He is winnowing wheat now. 他现在正在簸小麦。 来自辞典例句

439 civilian   

adj.平民的，民用的，民众的

参考例句：

• There is no reliable information about civilian casualties.关于平民的伤亡还没有确凿的信息。
• He resigned his commission to take up a civilian job.他辞去军职而从事平民工作。

440 purely   

adv.纯粹地，完全地

参考例句：

• I helped him purely and simply out of friendship.我帮他纯粹是出于友情。
• This disproves the theory that children are purely imitative.这证明认为儿童只会单纯地模仿的理论是站不住脚的。

441 enlisted   

adj.应募入伍的v.（使）入伍， （使）参军( enlist的过去式和过去分词 )；获得（帮助或支持）

参考例句：

• enlisted men and women 男兵和女兵
• He enlisted with the air force to fight against the enemy. 他应募加入空军对敌作战。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

442 silt   

n.淤泥，淤沙，粉砂层，泥沙层；vt.使淤塞；vi.被淤塞

参考例句：

• The lake was almost solid with silt and vegetation.湖里几乎快被淤泥和植物填满了。
• During the annual floods the river deposits its silt on the fields.每年河水泛滥时都会在田野上沉积一层淤泥。

443 daydream   

v.做白日梦，幻想

参考例句：

• Boys and girls daydream about what they want to be.孩子们遐想着他们将来要干什么。
• He drifted off into another daydream.他飘飘然又做了一个白日梦。

444 corpses   

n.死尸，尸体( corpse的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The living soldiers put corpses together and burned them. 活着的战士把尸体放在一起烧了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Overhead, grayish-white clouds covered the sky, piling up heavily like decaying corpses. 天上罩满了灰白的薄云，同腐烂的尸体似的沉沉的盖在那里。 来自汉英文学 - 中国现代小说

445 frail   

adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的

参考例句：

• Mrs. Warner is already 96 and too frail to live by herself.华纳太太已经九十六岁了，身体虚弱，不便独居。
• She lay in bed looking particularly frail.她躺在床上，看上去特别虚弱。

446 joints   

接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语）

参考例句：

• Expansion joints of various kinds are fitted on gas mains. 各种各样的伸缩接头被安装在煤气的总管道上了。
• Expansion joints of various kinds are fitted on steam pipes. 各种各样的伸缩接头被安装在蒸气管道上了。

447 inflamed   

adj.发炎的，红肿的v.（使）变红，发怒，过热( inflame的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• His comments have inflamed teachers all over the country. 他的评论激怒了全国教师。
• Her joints are severely inflamed. 她的关节严重发炎。 来自《简明英汉词典》

448 ascertained   

v.弄清，确定，查明( ascertain的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The previously unidentified objects have now been definitely ascertained as being satellites. 原来所说的不明飞行物现在已证实是卫星。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I ascertained that she was dead. 我断定她已经死了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

449 ragged   

adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的

参考例句：

• A ragged shout went up from the small crowd.这一小群人发出了刺耳的喊叫。
• Ragged clothing infers poverty.破衣烂衫意味着贫穷。

450 exhausted   

adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的

参考例句：

• It was a long haul home and we arrived exhausted.搬运回家的这段路程特别长，到家时我们已筋疲力尽。
• Jenny was exhausted by the hustle of city life.珍妮被城市生活的忙乱弄得筋疲力尽。

451 fatigue   

n.疲劳，劳累

参考例句：

• The old lady can't bear the fatigue of a long journey.这位老妇人不能忍受长途旅行的疲劳。
• I have got over my weakness and fatigue.我已从虚弱和疲劳中恢复过来了。

452 regain   

vt.重新获得，收复，恢复

参考例句：

• He is making a bid to regain his World No.1 ranking.他正为重登世界排名第一位而努力。
• The government is desperate to regain credibility with the public.政府急于重新获取公众的信任。

453 sleek   

adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢

参考例句：

• Women preferred sleek,shiny hair with little decoration.女士们更喜欢略加修饰的光滑闪亮型秀发。
• The horse's coat was sleek and glossy.这匹马全身润泽有光。

454 tacked   

用平头钉钉( tack的过去式和过去分词 )； 附加，增补； 帆船抢风行驶，用粗线脚缝

参考例句：

• He tacked the sheets of paper on as carefully as possible. 他尽量小心地把纸张钉上去。
• The seamstress tacked the two pieces of cloth. 女裁缝把那两块布粗缝了起来。

455 tentacle   

n.触角，触须，触手

参考例句：

• Each tentacle is about two millimeters long.每一个触手大约两毫米长。
• It looked like a big eyeball with a long tentacle thing.它看上去像一个有着长触角的巨大眼球。

456 turbulence   

n.喧嚣，狂暴，骚乱，湍流

参考例句：

• The turbulence caused the plane to turn over.空气的激流导致飞机翻转。
• The world advances amidst turbulence.世界在动荡中前进。

457 scribble   

v.潦草地书写，乱写，滥写；n.潦草的写法，潦草写成的东西，杂文

参考例句：

• She can't write yet,but she loves to scribble with a pencil.她现在还不会写字，但她喜欢用铅笔乱涂。
• I can't read this scribble.我看不懂这种潦草的字。

458 supervisor   

n.监督人，管理人，检查员，督学，主管，导师

参考例句：

• Between you and me I think that new supervisor is a twit.我们私下说，我认为新来的主管人是一个傻瓜。
• He said I was too flighty to be a good supervisor.他说我太轻浮不能成为一名好的管理员。

459 implant   

vt.注入，植入，灌输

参考例句：

• A good teacher should implant high ideals in children.好教师应该把高尚理想灌输给孩子们。
• The operation to implant the artificial heart took two hours.人工心脏植入手术花费了两小时。

460 drenched   

adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体）

参考例句：

• We were caught in the storm and got drenched to the skin. 我们遇上了暴雨，淋得浑身透湿。
• The rain drenched us. 雨把我们淋得湿透。 来自《简明英汉词典》

461 pretense   

n.矫饰，做作，借口

参考例句：

• You can't keep up the pretense any longer.你无法继续伪装下去了。
• Pretense invariably impresses only the pretender.弄虚作假欺骗不了真正的行家。

462 rigor   

n.严酷，严格，严厉

参考例句：

• Their analysis lacks rigor.他们的分析缺乏严谨性。||The crime will be treated with the full rigor of the law.这一罪行会严格依法审理。

463 sterile   

adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的

参考例句：

• This top fits over the bottle and keeps the teat sterile.这个盖子严实地盖在奶瓶上，保持奶嘴无菌。
• The farmers turned the sterile land into high fields.农民们把不毛之地变成了高产田。

464 reprieve   

n.暂缓执行（死刑）；v.缓期执行；给…带来缓解

参考例句：

• He was saved from the gallows by a lastminute reprieve.最后一刻的缓刑令把他从绞架上解救了下来。
• The railway line, due for closure, has been granted a six-month reprieve.本应停运的铁路线获准多运行6 个月。

465 additive   

adj.附加的；n.添加剂

参考例句：

• Colour is often an additive in foods.颜料经常是各种食物中的添加物。
• Strict safety tests are carried out on food additives.对食品添加剂进行了严格的安全检测。

466 convivial   

adj.狂欢的，欢乐的

参考例句：

• The atmosphere was quite convivial.气氛非常轻松愉快。
• I found it odd to imagine a nation of convivial diners surrendering their birthright.我发现很难想象让这样一个喜欢热热闹闹吃饭的民族放弃他们的习惯。

467 expended   

v.花费( expend的过去式和过去分词 )；使用（钱等）做某事；用光；耗尽

参考例句：

• She expended all her efforts on the care of home and children. 她把所有精力都花在料理家务和照顾孩子上。
• The enemy had expended all their ammunition. 敌人已耗尽所有的弹药。 来自《简明英汉词典》

468 parable   

n.寓言，比喻

参考例句：

• This is an ancient parable.这是一个古老的寓言。
• The minister preached a sermon on the parable of the lost sheep.牧师讲道时用了亡羊的比喻。

469 illustrate   

v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图

参考例句：

• The company's bank statements illustrate its success.这家公司的银行报表说明了它的成功。
• This diagram will illustrate what I mean.这个图表可说明我的意思。

470 contemplate   

vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视

参考例句：

• The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate.战争的可能性太可怕了，真不堪细想。
• The consequences would be too ghastly to contemplate.后果不堪设想。

471 capability   

n.能力；才能；(pl)可发展的能力或特性等

参考例句：

• She has the capability to become a very fine actress.她有潜力成为杰出演员。
• Organizing a whole department is beyond his capability.组织整个部门是他能力以外的事。

472 taut   

adj.拉紧的，绷紧的，紧张的

参考例句：

• The bowstring is stretched taut.弓弦绷得很紧。
• Scarlett's taut nerves almost cracked as a sudden noise sounded in the underbrush near them. 思嘉紧张的神经几乎一下绷裂了，因为她听见附近灌木丛中突然冒出的一个声音。

473 impaled   

钉在尖桩上( impale的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She impaled a lump of meat on her fork. 她用叉子戳起一块肉。
• He fell out of the window and was impaled on the iron railings. 他从窗口跌下去，身体被铁栏杆刺穿了。

474 parables   

n.（圣经中的）寓言故事( parable的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Jesus taught in parables. 耶酥以比喻讲道。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• In the New Testament are the parables and miracles. 《新约》则由寓言利奇闻趣事构成。 来自辞典例句

475 fumbling   

n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理

参考例句：

• If he actually managed to the ball instead of fumbling it with an off-balance shot. 如果他实际上设法拿好球而不是fumbling它。50-balance射击笨拙地和迅速地会开始他的岗位移动，经常这样结束。
• If he actually managed to secure the ball instead of fumbling it awkwardly an off-balance shot. 如果他实际上设法拿好球而不是fumbling它。50-50提议有时。他从off-balance射击笨拙地和迅速地会开始他的岗位移动，经常这样结束。

476 sketches   

n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概

参考例句：

• The artist is making sketches for his next painting. 画家正为他的下一幅作品画素描。
• You have to admit that these sketches are true to life. 你得承认这些素描很逼真。 来自《简明英汉词典》

477 cemetery   

n.坟墓，墓地，坟场

参考例句：

• He was buried in the cemetery.他被葬在公墓。
• His remains were interred in the cemetery.他的遗体葬在墓地。

478 agglomeration   

n.结聚，一堆

参考例句：

• The Guangxi's sugar industry has the characters of industrial agglomeration.广西糖业在发展过程中体现出了产业集聚特征。
• This agglomeration of funds resolves a number of problems.这种集资的办法解决了以下几个问题。

479 migration   

n.迁移，移居，（鸟类等的）迁徙

参考例句：

• Swallows begin their migration south in autumn.燕子在秋季开始向南方迁移。
• He described the vernal migration of birds in detail.他详细地描述了鸟的春季移居。

480 integration   

n.一体化，联合，结合

参考例句：

• We are working to bring about closer political integration in the EU.我们正在努力实现欧盟內部更加紧密的政治一体化。
• This was the greatest event in the annals of European integration.这是欧洲统一史上最重大的事件。

481 confrontation   

n.对抗，对峙，冲突

参考例句：

• We can't risk another confrontation with the union.我们不能冒再次同工会对抗的危险。
• After years of confrontation,they finally have achieved a modus vivendi.在对抗很长时间后，他们最后达成安宁生存的非正式协议。

482 disquieted   

v.使不安，使忧虑，使烦恼( disquiet的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• People are disquieted [on tenterhooks]. 人心惶惶。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The bad news disquieted him. 恶讯使他焦急不安。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

483 inadequate   

adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的

参考例句：

• The supply is inadequate to meet the demand.供不应求。
• She was inadequate to the demands that were made on her.她还无力满足对她提出的各项要求。

484 inertia   

adj.惰性，惯性，懒惰，迟钝

参考例句：

• We had a feeling of inertia in the afternoon.下午我们感觉很懒。
• Inertia carried the plane onto the ground.飞机靠惯性着陆。

485 frailty   

n.脆弱；意志薄弱

参考例句：

• Despite increasing physical frailty,he continued to write stories.尽管身体越来越虛弱，他仍然继续写小说。
• He paused and suddenly all the frailty and fatigue showed.他顿住了，虚弱与疲惫一下子显露出来。

486 structural   

adj.构造的，组织的，建筑（用）的

参考例句：

• The storm caused no structural damage.风暴没有造成建筑结构方面的破坏。
• The North American continent is made up of three great structural entities.北美大陆是由三个构造单元组成的。

487 tottering   

adj.蹒跚的，动摇的v.走得或动得不稳( totter的现在分词 )；踉跄；蹒跚；摇摇欲坠

参考例句：

• the tottering walls of the castle 古城堡摇摇欲坠的墙壁
• With power and to spare we must pursue the tottering foe. 宜将剩勇追穷寇。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

488 vile   

adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的

参考例句：

• Who could have carried out such a vile attack?会是谁发起这么卑鄙的攻击呢？
• Her talk was full of vile curses.她的话里充满着恶毒的咒骂。

489 promptly   

adv.及时地，敏捷地

参考例句：

• He paid the money back promptly.他立即还了钱。
• She promptly seized the opportunity his absence gave her.她立即抓住了因他不在场给她创造的机会。

490 crookedly   

adv. 弯曲地，不诚实地

参考例句：

• A crow flew crookedly like a shadow over the end of the salt lake. 一只乌鸦像个影子般地在盐湖的另一边鬼鬼祟祟地飞来飞去的。

491 tinkled   

（使）发出丁当声，（使）发铃铃声( tinkle的过去式和过去分词 )； 叮当响着发出，铃铃响着报出

参考例句：

• The sheep's bell tinkled through the hills. 羊的铃铛叮当叮当地响彻整个山区。
• A piano tinkled gently in the background. 背景音是悠扬的钢琴声。

492 tattoo   

n.纹身，(皮肤上的)刺花纹；vt.刺花纹于

参考例句：

• I've decided to get my tattoo removed.我已经决定去掉我身上的纹身。
• He had a tattoo on the back of his hand.他手背上刺有花纹。

493 awakened   

v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到

参考例句：

• She awakened to the sound of birds singing. 她醒来听到鸟的叫声。
• The public has been awakened to the full horror of the situation. 公众完全意识到了这一状况的可怕程度。 来自《简明英汉词典》

494 elevation   

n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高

参考例句：

• The house is at an elevation of 2,000 metres.那幢房子位于海拔两千米的高处。
• His elevation to the position of General Manager was announced yesterday.昨天宣布他晋升总经理职位。

495 panorama   

n.全景，全景画，全景摄影，全景照片[装置]

参考例句：

• A vast panorama of the valley lay before us.山谷的广阔全景展现在我们面前。
• A flourishing and prosperous panorama spread out before our eyes.一派欣欣向荣的景象展现在我们的眼前。

496 diaphanous   

adj.(布)精致的，半透明的

参考例句：

• She was wearing a dress of diaphanous silk.她穿着一件薄如蝉翼的绸服。
• We have only a diaphanous hope of success.我们只有隐约的成功希望。

497 besieged   

包围，围困，围攻( besiege的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Paris was besieged for four months and forced to surrender. 巴黎被围困了四个月后被迫投降。
• The community besieged the newspaper with letters about its recent editorial. 公众纷纷来信对报社新近发表的社论提出诘问，弄得报社应接不暇。

498 singed   

v.浅表烧焦( singe的过去式和过去分词 )；（毛发）燎，烧焦尖端[边儿]

参考例句：

• He singed his hair as he tried to light his cigarette. 他点烟时把头发给燎了。
• The cook singed the chicken to remove the fine hairs. 厨师把鸡燎一下，以便去掉细毛。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

499 streaked   

adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹

参考例句：

• The children streaked off as fast as they could. 孩子们拔脚飞跑 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• His face was pale and streaked with dirt. 他脸色苍白，脸上有一道道的污痕。 来自辞典例句

500 pulverized   

adj.[医]雾化的，粉末状的v.将…弄碎( pulverize的过去式和过去分词 )；将…弄成粉末或尘埃；摧毁；粉碎

参考例句：

• We pulverized the opposition. 我们彻底击败了对手。
• He pulverized the opposition with the force of his oratory. 他能言善辩把对方驳得体无完肤。 来自辞典例句

501 accordionist   

n.手风琴师

参考例句：

502 talons   

n.（尤指猛禽的）爪( talon的名词复数 )；（如爪般的）手指；爪状物；锁簧尖状突出部

参考例句：

• The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed on empty air. 他的指头弯得像鹰爪一样，可是抓了个空。 来自英汉文学 - 热爱生命
• The tiger has a pair of talons. 老虎有一对利爪。 来自辞典例句

503 goblets   

n.高脚酒杯( goblet的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence! 噢，乳房的杯盏！噢，失神的双眼！ 来自互联网
• Divide the digestive biscuit crumbs mixture between 6 goblets. 消化？底分成6双玻璃杯中。 来自互联网

504 nicotine   

n.(化)尼古丁，烟碱

参考例句：

• Many smokers who are chemically addicted to nicotine cannot cut down easily.许多有尼古丁瘾的抽烟人不容易把烟戒掉。
• Many smokers who are chemically addicted to nicotine cannot cut down easily.许多有尼古丁瘾的抽烟人不容易把烟戒掉。

505 hue   

n.色度；色调；样子

参考例句：

• The diamond shone with every hue under the sun.金刚石在阳光下放出五颜六色的光芒。
• The same hue will look different in different light.同一颜色在不同的光线下看起来会有所不同。

506 makeup   

n.组织；性格；化装品

参考例句：

• Those who failed the exam take a makeup exam.这次考试不及格的人必须参加补考。
• Do you think her beauty could makeup for her stupidity?你认为她的美丽能弥补她的愚蠢吗？

507 blotches   

n.（皮肤上的）红斑，疹块( blotch的名词复数 )；大滴 [大片]（墨水或颜色的）污渍

参考例句：

• His skin was covered with unsightly blotches. 他的皮肤上长满了难看的疹块。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• His face was covered in red blotches, seemingly a nasty case of acne. 他满脸红斑，像是起了很严重的粉刺。 来自辞典例句

508 cordon   

n.警戒线，哨兵线

参考例句：

• Police officers threw a cordon around his car to protect him.警察在他汽车周围设置了防卫圈以保护他。
• There is a tight security cordon around the area.这一地区周围设有严密的安全警戒圈。

509 corks   

n.脐梅衣；软木( cork的名词复数 )；软木塞

参考例句：

• Champagne corks were popping throughout the celebrations. 庆祝会上开香槟酒瓶塞的砰砰声不绝於耳。 来自辞典例句
• Champagne corks popped, and on lace tablecloths seven-course dinners were laid. 桌上铺着带装饰图案的网织的桌布，上面是七道菜的晚餐。 来自飘（部分）

510 snarling   

v.（指狗）吠，嗥叫， （人）咆哮( snarl的现在分词 )；咆哮着说，厉声地说

参考例句：

• "I didn't marry you," he said, in a snarling tone. “我没有娶你，"他咆哮着说。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹
• So he got into the shoes snarling. 于是，汤姆一边大喊大叫，一边穿上了那双鞋。 来自英汉文学 - 汤姆历险

511 intermittent   

adj.间歇的，断断续续的

参考例句：

• Did you hear the intermittent sound outside?你听见外面时断时续的声音了吗？
• In the daytime intermittent rains freshened all the earth.白天里，时断时续地下着雨，使整个大地都生气勃勃了。

512 cascading   

流注( cascade的现在分词 )； 大量落下； 大量垂悬； 梯流

参考例句：

• First of all, cascading menus are to be avoided at all costs. 首先，无论如何都要避免使用级联菜单。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Her sounds began cascading gently. 他的声音开始缓缓地低落下来。

513 scarlet   

n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的

参考例句：

• The scarlet leaves of the maples contrast well with the dark green of the pines.深红的枫叶和暗绿的松树形成了明显的对比。
• The glowing clouds are growing slowly pale,scarlet,bright red,and then light red.天空的霞光渐渐地淡下去了，深红的颜色变成了绯红，绯红又变为浅红。

514 overlapping   

adj./n.交迭（的）

参考例句：

• There is no overlapping question between the two courses. 这两门课程之间不存在重叠的问题。
• A trimetrogon strip is composed of three rows of overlapping. 三镜头摄影航线为三排重迭的象片所组成。

515 pall   

v.覆盖，使平淡无味；n.柩衣，棺罩；棺材；帷幕

参考例句：

• Already the allure of meals in restaurants had begun to pall.饭店里的饭菜已经不像以前那样诱人。
• I find his books begin to pall on me after a while.我发觉他的书读过一阵子就开始对我失去吸引力。

516 crescendo   

n.(音乐)渐强，高潮

参考例句：

• The gale reached its crescendo in the evening.狂风在晚上达到高潮。
• There was a crescendo of parliamentary and press criticism.来自议会和新闻界的批评越来越多。

517 impatience   

n.不耐烦，急躁

参考例句：

• He expressed impatience at the slow rate of progress.进展缓慢，他显得不耐烦。
• He gave a stamp of impatience.他不耐烦地跺脚。

518 glandular   

adj.腺体的

参考例句：

• Terry has been laid low with glandular fever for nearly a month now.特里由于功能性高烧已卧床近一个月了。
• A malignant tumor originating in glandular tissue.腺癌起源于腺性组织的恶性肿瘤。

519 outrage   

n.暴行，侮辱，愤怒；vt.凌辱，激怒

参考例句：

• When he heard the news he reacted with a sense of outrage.他得悉此事时义愤填膺。
• We should never forget the outrage committed by the Japanese invaders.我们永远都不应该忘记日本侵略者犯下的暴行。

520 voyeurism   

n.窥阴癖者

参考例句：

• Portraiture merges here with voyeurism and surveillance. 肖像拍摄中夹杂着偷窥和监视。 来自互联网
• And while Wife Swap was pure voyeurism, Boss Swap hints at some real issues. 《换妻》纯粹反映了一种偷窥心理，而《互换老板》则影射了一些真实的问题。 来自互联网

521 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

522 psychic   

n.对超自然力敏感的人；adj.有超自然力的

参考例句：

• Some people are said to have psychic powers.据说有些人有通灵的能力。
• She claims to be psychic and to be able to foretell the future.她自称有特异功能，能预知未来。

523 noted   

adj.著名的，知名的

参考例句：

• The local hotel is noted for its good table.当地的那家酒店以餐食精美而著称。
• Jim is noted for arriving late for work.吉姆上班迟到出了名。

524 invalid   

n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的

参考例句：

• He will visit an invalid.他将要去看望一个病人。
• A passport that is out of date is invalid.护照过期是无效的。

525 diligently   

ad.industriously;carefully

参考例句：

• He applied himself diligently to learning French. 他孜孜不倦地学法语。
• He had studied diligently at college. 他在大学里勤奋学习。

526 decadence   

n.衰落，颓废

参考例句：

• The decadence of morals is bad for a nation.道德的堕落对国家是不利的。
• His article has the power to turn decadence into legend.他的文章具有化破朽为神奇的力量。

527 infest   

v.大批出没于；侵扰；寄生于

参考例句：

• Several animals in sea water can infest wood.海水中有好多动物能侵害木材。
• A lame cat is better than a swift horse when rats infest the palace.宫殿有鼠患，瘸猫比快马强。

528 infested   

adj.为患的，大批滋生的（常与with搭配）v.害虫、野兽大批出没于( infest的过去式和过去分词 )；遍布于

参考例句：

• The kitchen was infested with ants. 厨房里到处是蚂蚁。
• The apartments were infested with rats and roaches. 公寓里面到处都是老鼠和蟑螂。

529 dangling   

悬吊着( dangle的现在分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口

参考例句：

• The tooth hung dangling by the bedpost, now. 结果，那颗牙就晃来晃去吊在床柱上了。
• The children sat on the high wall,their legs dangling. 孩子们坐在一堵高墙上，摇晃着他们的双腿。

530 hops   

跳上[下]( hop的第三人称单数 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花

参考例句：

• The sparrow crossed the lawn in a series of hops. 那麻雀一蹦一跳地穿过草坪。
• It is brewed from malt and hops. 它用麦精和蛇麻草酿成。

531 mildew   

n.发霉；v.（使）发霉

参考例句：

• The interior was dark and smelled of mildew.里面光线很暗，霉味扑鼻。
• Mildew may form in this weather.这种天气有可能发霉。

532 flicking   

（尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的现在分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等）

参考例句：

• He helped her up before flicking the reins. 他帮她上马，之后挥动了缰绳。
• There's something flicking around my toes. 有什么东西老在叮我的脚指头。

533 sneaked   

v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 )；偷偷溜走；（儿童向成人）打小报告；告状

参考例句：

• I sneaked up the stairs. 我蹑手蹑脚地上了楼。
• She sneaked a surreptitious glance at her watch. 她偷偷看了一眼手表。

534 veranda   

n.走廊；阳台

参考例句：

• She sat in the shade on the veranda.她坐在阳台上的遮荫处。
• They were strolling up and down the veranda.他们在走廊上来回徜徉。

535 grunt   

v.嘟哝；作呼噜声；n.呼噜声，嘟哝

参考例句：

• He lifted the heavy suitcase with a grunt.他咕噜着把沉重的提箱拎了起来。
• I ask him what he think,but he just grunt.我问他在想什麽，他只哼了一声。

536 ashore   

adv.在(向)岸上，上岸

参考例句：

• The children got ashore before the tide came in.涨潮前，孩子们就上岸了。
• He laid hold of the rope and pulled the boat ashore.他抓住绳子拉船靠岸。

537 valediction   

n．告别演说，告别词

参考例句：

• He gave a touching valediction at graduation.他在毕业典礼上发表了动人的告别辞。
• I came here just for a valediction.我来仅仅是向你告别。

538 trudge   

v.步履艰难地走；n.跋涉，费力艰难的步行

参考例句：

• It was a hard trudge up the hill.这趟上山是一次艰难的跋涉。
• The trudge through the forest will be tiresome.长途跋涉穿越森林会令人疲惫不堪。

539 clump   

n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走

参考例句：

• A stream meandered gently through a clump of trees.一条小溪从树丛中蜿蜒穿过。
• It was as if he had hacked with his thick boots at a clump of bluebells.仿佛他用自己的厚靴子无情地践踏了一丛野风信子。

540 hush   

int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静

参考例句：

• A hush fell over the onlookers.旁观者们突然静了下来。
• Do hush up the scandal!不要把这丑事声张出去！

541 aloof   

adj.远离的；冷淡的，漠不关心的

参考例句：

• Never stand aloof from the masses.千万不可脱离群众。
• On the evening the girl kept herself timidly aloof from the crowd.这小女孩在晚会上一直胆怯地远离人群。

542 dozed   

v.打盹儿，打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He boozed till daylight and dozed into the afternoon. 他喝了个通霄，昏沉沉地一直睡到下午。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• I dozed off during the soporific music. 我听到这催人入睡的音乐，便不知不觉打起盹儿来了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

543 trotted   

小跑，急走( trot的过去分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走

参考例句：

• She trotted her pony around the field. 她骑着小马绕场慢跑。
• Anne trotted obediently beside her mother. 安妮听话地跟在妈妈身边走。