Vertical Wall Quotes

Was the line between enemy and friend horizontal or vertical? Was it a great plain to lumber across or was it a high, high wall—either to be scaled or kicked down in one big blow?

You didn’t realize how much work everyone else put into holding themselves upright until you saw Levi leaning against a wall. He looked like he was leaning on something even when he wasn’t. He made standing look like vertical lying down.

I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same.

Fear envelops bones like new skin, envelops blood with night’s skin, the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet - it is not your hair but the terror in your head, like long hair made of vertical nails, and what you see are not shattered streets, but rather, within you, your own crushed walls, your frustrated infinity, again the city comes crashing down: in your silence, only water’s threat is heard, and in the water drowned horses gallop through your death.

Just as the people of the town had no horizontal curiosity about geography, they lacked any vertical curiosity about history.

Ledge Birds that love high trees and winds and riding flailing branches hate ledges as gripless and narrow, so that a tail is not just no advantage but ridiculous, mashed vertical against the wall. You will have seen the way a bird who falls on skimpy places lifts into the air again in seconds -- a gift denied the rest of us when our portion isn't generous.

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

I’m sorry. That was rude. You weren’t asking me to go to bed with you.” “No, I wasn’t.” I smile at her flustered state. “Not yet, anyway. I thought we could begin with dinner and go from there.” “As long as ‘going from there’ doesn’t involve a bedroom, I’d consider having dinner with you.” I’m far more relieved than I should be to know I’ll get to see her again. “I promise there’ll be no mention of bedrooms.” “Or sofas or backseats or any other horizontal surfaces.” “You forgot walls, stairwells and shower stalls. I do some of my best work vertically.

After New York City, where I lived and which I also loved, with its sharp right angles and hard surfaces and fast tempo and endless pavement and soaring vertical walls, a giant video game of the mind at the expense of the body,

The root of the trouble lies usually in the mistaken attitude of the beginner. Instead of looking at an easy scramble close to the ground and thinking "I could do that", he looks at some forbidding vertical wall which he knows has been climed, and feels "I could never do that". When told that an impossible-looking building is a field for climbers, he is apt to feel, like a child watching a conjurer, that there is magic in it and it is not for him. So he shies, and perhaps never makes a start.

I went first. The card I drew was "Watergate." "Oh, come on," I said. "This is ridiculous." "Don't whine," said Carter, his grin annoyingly smug. "We all take a random chance here." They started the timer. I drew some remedial waves that immediately got a "Water!" from Cody. That was promising. Then, I drew what I hoped looked like a wall with a door in it. Apparently, I did too good a job. "Wall," said Hugh. "Door," said Cody. I added some vertical lines to the door to emphasize the gate aspect. After a moment's thought, I drew a plus sign between the water and wall to show their connection. "Aqueduct," said Cody. "A bridge over troubled water," guessed Hugh. "Oh my God," I groaned. Unsurprisingly, my time ran out before my teammates could figure it out, though not before they guessed "Hoover Dam" and "Hans Brinker." With a groan, I flounced onto the couch. The other team then got a shot at it. "Watergate," said Carter right away. Hugh turned on me, face incredulous. "Why didn't you just draw a gate?

Quality isn’t a substance. Neither is it a method. It’s outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

Built-in bookshelves line the walls, spilling with books that are stuffed and stacked into every available space. Vertically, horizontally, on top of each other

He rode all night and in the first gray light with the horse badly drawn down he walked it out upon a rise beneath which he could make out the shape of the town, the yellow windows in the old mud walls where the first lamps were lit, the narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness.

As Jamie Shreeve of National Geographic describes it, this required going through a passageway known as Superman’s Crawl, which is less than ten inches high and can be traversed only if you hold one arm tight against your body and extend the other above your head, like Superman when he is flying; then climbing up a vertical wall of jagged rock called the Dragon’s Back; and then, after a number of other twists and turns, finally squeezing through a passage that at one point narrows to only seven and a half inches wide, before reaching the Dinaledi Chamber in which the bones lie.

wonder, she said, how you are supposed to stay warm when the rooms are open to the elements? I don’t know. Eragon examined the walls on either side of the breach, running his hands over abstract patterns that had been coaxed from the tree by the elves’ songs. He stopped when he felt a vertical ridge embedded in

Ralph stopped and studied the wall and a trail of smeared black footprints. They went up vertically, from the bottom to the ceiling, then across it and down the opposite wall. Someone had expended a lot of time and energy to make it look like Spiderman had dropped in for a visit. That, or someone figured out how to walk upside down. Pheasant

The sun is going down, and piled-up storm clouds the size of Wyoming and Japan are headed our way. It’s not like I have a window at work. All the outside walls are floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything where I work is floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything is vertical blinds. Everything is industrial low-pile gray carpet spotted with little tombstone monuments where the PCs plug into the network. Everything

The sun is going down, and piled-up storm clouds the size of Wyoming and Japan are headed our way. It’s not like I have a window at work. All the outside walls are floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything where I work is floor-to-ceiling glass. Everything is vertical blinds. Everything is industrial low-pile gray carpet spotted with little tombstone monuments where the PCs plug into the network. Everything is a maze of cubicles boxed in with fences of upholstered plywood.

The flickering shadows dissolve the outlines of things and break up the surfaces of the cube, the walls and ceiling move to and fro to the rhythm of the jagged flame, which by turns flares up and dies down as though about to go out. The yellow clay at the bottom of the cube rises like the floorboards of a sinking boat, then falls back into the darkness, as though flooded with muddy water. The whole room trembles, expands, contracts, moves a few centimeters to the right or left, up or down, all the while keeping its cubical shape. Horizontals and verticals intersect at several points, all in vague confusion, but governed by some higher law, maintaining an equilibrium that prevents the walls from collapsing and the ceiling from tilting or falling. This equilibrium is due no doubt to the regular movement of the crossbeams, for they, too, seem to glide from right to left, up and down, along with their shadows, without friction or effort, as lightly as over water. The waves of the night dash against the sides of the roomboat. Gusts of wind blow soft flakes and sharp icy crystals by turns against the windowpane. The square, embrasure-like window is stuffed with a disemboweled pillow; bits of cloth stick out and dangle like amorphous plants or creepers. It is hard to say whether they are trembling under the impact of the wind blowing through the cracks, or whether it is only their shadow that sways to the rhythm of the jagged flame.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

Jalal-ud-Din Rumi used to tell a story about a far distant country, somewhere to the north of Afghanistan. In this country there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of this city. ‘The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course, the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to the town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt. ‘The first man said: “An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!” The second man was indignant at hearing this: “What nonsense!” he said. “This man is misleading you. I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over.” The third man shook his head and said: “Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad pankah. It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it it wobbles around like the sail of a dhow.” All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives they refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth. ‘Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had part of the truth, but not one of them had even begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and meditated on the different facets of the elephant, they might have realized the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead they preferred to keep to their own half-truths. ‘So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Hindus have a different conception, and the Christians have a third. To us, all our different visions seem incompatible and irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total blackness ...

The day came: a Monday at the end of September. The night before he had realized that it was almost exactly a year since the beating, although he hadn’t planned it that way. He left work early that evening. He had spent the weekend organizing his projects; he had written Lucien a memo detailing the status of everything he had been working on. At home, he lined up his letters on the dining room table, and a copy of his will. He had left a message with Richard’s studio manager that the toilet in the master bathroom kept running and asked if Richard could let in the plumber the following day at nine – both Richard and Willem had a set of keys to his apartment – because he would be away on business. He took off his suit jacket and tie and shoes and watch and went to the bathroom. He sat in the shower area with his sleeves pushed up. He had a glass of scotch, which he sipped at to steady himself, and a box cutter, which he knew would be easier to hold than a razor. He knew what he needed to do: three straight vertical lines, as deep and long as he could make them, following the veins up both arms. And then he would lie down and wait. He waited for a while, crying a bit, because he was tired and frightened and because he was ready to go, he was ready to leave. Finally he rubbed his eyes and began. He started with his left arm. He made the first cut, which was more painful than he had thought it would be, and he cried out. Then he made the second. He took another drink of the scotch. The blood was viscous, more gelatinous than liquid, and a brilliant, shimmering oil-black. Already his pants were soaked with it, already his grip was loosening. He made the third. When he was done with both arms, he slumped against the back of the shower wall. He wished, absurdly, for a pillow. He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled against his legs – his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.

I kill it because we cannot stay in the same room. I kill it because we cannot stay in the same room with me sleeping. I kill it because I might look away and not see it there on the wall when I look back. I kill it because I might spend all night hunting it. I kill it because I am afraid to go near enough with glass and paper to carry it outside. I kill it because I have been told to. I kill it by slapping my shoe against the wall because I have been told to do it that way. I kill it standing as far away as possible and stretching my hand holding the shoe towards it. I kill it because it has been making me shake out the bedclothes, look inside my shoes, scan the walls at night. I kill it with two fast blows in case one isn’t enough. I kill it because I can. I kill it because it cannot stop me. I kill it because I know it is there. I kill it so that its remains are on the heel of my shoe. I kill it so that its outline with curved sting is on my wall. I kill it to feel sure I will live. I kill it to feel alive. I kill it because I am weaker than it is. I kill it because I am not good enough to let it live. I kill it out of the corner of my eye, remembering it is black, vertical, stock still on the white wall. I kill it because it will not speak to me.

At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a sin­gle great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rum­pled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.

Laura stands, in another photograph, wearing a two-piece gown, bodice and skirt, from centuries ago. The scarlet material is trimmed in gold brocade. From her waist the skirt billows outward, broad as a spinnaker, and grazes the floor in a huge circle. It fastens in front by a series of cobalt buttons, and she is about to start closing it, but for the moment it gapes open: a vertical window, eight or ten inches wide, runs from her waist to the floor. The gold brocade lines the opening like a ceremonial decoration, a veneration of what lies within. But nothing lies within. Inside the vast regal tent of the garment is darkness. Because of the lighting and pose, Laura’s body seems to end at the belly, to have no stumps at all. The opening exposes a pure emptiness. It is unclear how she is standing, what keeps her upright. The cavern beneath the skirt is illumined just enough to suggest that she isn’t wearing her prosthetics. She stands on no legs, suspended, magical. And that magic, along with her strong jawline turned in profile, endows her with omnipotence. The cavern is at once a universe and a womb. The vertical opening is a vaginal slit, and to slip through it, to slide the body inside the scarlet walls of the tent, to wait inside while she fastens the skirt and encloses you, swallows you, would be to live out the primal fantasy of entering the vagina not only with the penis but with everything from the skull to the toes: to be ensconced, to be consumed. The photograph’s viewer, not its subject, is at risk of disintegrating, coming apart, deliquescing in the lightless world he has longed for, turning to liquid in the womb. Laura, with her half-body, will remain more than intact, more than whole.

A beautiful child sat playing in the sand And finger-writing: Who? Where from? Where to? I answered, O beautiful child, tell me, is Interrupting me: I am two children, hand in hand, I wanted to know: O beautiful child who finds it so easy to talk, tell me, where does the grass-tree grow, where does the grass flower, the wind and the breath of the wind, the strawberry, the leaf of grass, the rose? Again, it broke in: I am not at one with myself, I am full of contraries, I talk about anything, I am a boy and a girl, one and two, and you, are you night and day? I said: I am a poor robber, a productive consumer looking for honest labour, I want to go back to where I was born, either/or or and/or the board-panelling of the outside walls either horizontal or vertical or/or not, I want to be silent, there. It shouted: But first you have to calm down the wind, the walking wind, the dense tree-growing wind! And l: O syntax, that has only a few exceptions. You, slyness of sincerity, you rule. It wanted to know: Why are you praising the language that rules? I would like to teach this poem a lesson, I said, I can' t get rid of it, this breath has grown trees. . . I came from there, I took the road through the forest, but oh, it was stormy weather, autumn weather... That child then said: But, if it gives way why shouldn't you try to be free, to walk through the night. and look for someone whom it would fit, . that uninhabited breath?

Elephanta caves, Mumbai-- I entered a world made of shadows and sudden brightness. The play of the light, the vastness of the space and its irregular form, the figures carved on the walls: all of it gave the place a sacred character, sacred in the deepest meaning of the word. In the shadows were the powerful reliefs and statues, many of them mutilated by the fanaticism of the Portuguese and the Muslims, but all of them majestic, solid, made of a solar material. Corporeal beauty, turned into living stone. Divinities of the earth, sexual incarnations of the most abstract thought, gods that were simultaneously intellectual and carnal, terrible and peaceful. ............................................................................ Gothic architecture is the music turned to stone; one could say that Hindu architecture is sculpted dance. The Absolute, the principle in whose matrix all contradictions dissolve (Brahma), is “neither this nor this nor this.” It is the way in which the great temples at Ellora, Ajanta, Karli, and other sites were built, carved out of mountains. In Islamic architecture, nothing is sculptural—exactly the opposite of the Hindu. The Red Fort, on the bank of the wide Jamuna River, is as powerful as a fort and as graceful as a palace. It is difficult to think of another tower that combines the height, solidity, and slender elegance of the Qutab Minar. The reddish stone, contrasting with the transparency of the air and the blue of the sky, gives the monument a vertical dynamism, like a huge rocket aimed at the stars. The mausoleum is like a poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers: strict meters that cross and recross in angles that are obvious but no less surprising rhymes. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres, and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into a collection of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air. There is nothing terrifying in these tombs: they give the sensation of infinity and pacify the soul. The simplicity and harmony of their forms satisfy one of the most profound necessities of the spirit: the longing for order, the love of proportion. At the same time they arouse our fantasies. These monuments and gardens incite us to dream and to fly. They are magic carpets. Compare Ellora with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two different visions of the world.

The trail wasn’t hard to follow. It had a pattern. An irregular patch of scattered spots that looked like spots of tar in the artificial light was interspersed every fourth or fifth step by a dark gleaming splash where blood had spurted from the wound. Now that all the soul people had been removed from the street, the five detectives moved swiftly. But they could still feel the presence of teeming people behind the dilapidated stone façades of the old reconverted buildings. Here and there the white gleams of eyes showed from darkened windows, but the silence was eerie. The trail turned from the sidewalk into an unlighted alleyway between the house beyond the rooming house, which described itself by a sign in a front window reading: Kitchenette Apts. All conveniences, and the weather-streaked red-brick apartment beyond that. The alleyway was so narrow they had to go in single file. The sergeant had taken the power light from his driver, Joe, and was leading the way himself. The pavement slanted down sharply beneath his feet and he almost lost his step. Midway down the blank side of the building he came to a green wooden door. Before touching it, he flashed his light along the sides of the flanking buildings. There were windows in the kitchenette apartments, but all from the top to the bottom floor had folding iron grilles which were closed and locked at that time of night, and dark shades were drawn on all but three. The apartment house had a vertical row of small black openings one above the other at the rear. They might have been bathroom windows but no light showed in any of them and the glass was so dirty it didn’t shine. The blood trail ended at the green door. “Come out of there,” the sergeant said. No one answered. He turned the knob and pushed the door and it opened inward so silently and easily he almost fell into the opening before he could train his light. Inside was a black dark void. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed flattened themselves against the walls on each side of the alley and their big long-barreled .38 revolvers came glinting into their hands. “What the hell!” the sergeant exclaimed, startled. His assistants ducked. “This is Harlem,” Coffin Ed grated and Grave Digger elaborated: “We don’t trust doors that open.” Ignoring them, the sergeant shone his light into the opening. Crumbling brick stairs went down sharply to a green iron grille. “Just a boiler room,” the sergeant said and put his shoulders through the doorway. “Hey, anybody down there?” he called. Silence greeted him. “You go down, Joe, I’ll light your way,” the sergeant said. “Why me?” Joe protested. “Me and Digger’ll go,” Coffin Ed said. “Ain’t nobody there who’s alive.

The automatic vertical warehouses use mechanical structures moving between 2 rows of racks to carry out the load AS/RS (storage/retrieval) operations. The stored containers are trays whose features and dimensions are determined by specific characteristics of the products. the entire structure is absolutely enclosed by walls and thus isolated from company surrounding atmosphere

Wall pink like sliced watermelon, right-angled verticality, rising one hundred feet above the graygreen talus of broken rock, scrub juniper, blackbrush, scarlet gilia, purple penstemon, golden prince’s plume. It is the season of spring in the mile-high tablelands of the canyon country. In America the still Beautiful.

Outside insects or maybe frogs were making the noise of phone calls. Vertical blinds drifted like bars being moved for a great escape. When you slapped a mosquito against the wall you shook the place.

The successive layers of occupation are known as ‘strata’. The careful digging of trenches or, more frequently recently, square ‘sections’ enables the successive strata of an occupied site to be examined and a relative chronology produced. The careful preservation of the baulks (the soil left between trenches or sections) allows the charting of the vertical ‘wall’ and the checking of the stratigraphy. (The development of this technique is associated particularly with Kathleen Kenyon.)

Single clean. The single clean is a natural progression from the swing and is the intermediary point between the swing and many of the overhead lifts. The clean introduces hand insertion, alignment points connected to the rack position, and positioning of the kettlebell in the hand in order to avoid injury and grip fatigue. It also teaches you how to use your legs to transmit vertical power from the lower to upper body. With practice, your clean becomes a smooth, rhythmic movement that you can sustain for extended lengths of time, although it may take hundreds of practice repetitions before it flows and becomes polished. Resting the kettlebell on the forearm is a distinguishing characteristic of kettlebells that makes them behave differently than dumbbells and makes them effective for developing the fitness that comes with high-repetition resistance training. By placing most of the load on the forearm, the muscles of the hand and grip are able to relax. It takes practice before the kettlebell will move smoothly in your hand and into position. Sometimes you will have bad repetitions and the kettlebell will crash into your forearm. To make this learning process a little kinder, you can wear wrist wraps or wristbands. In time your technique will become more polished and the kettlebell will just float into position on your arm in cleans and snatches, and at that point you may prefer to not use any wraps at all. However, it is an option for those with more tender arms—no sense giving yourself bruises if you do not need to. With the kettlebell on the floor, sit back with your hips and grip the handle with the fingers of one hand (see figure 7.11, a and b). Swing the kettlebell back through your legs as you did in the one-handed swing (see figure 7.11c), and as it swings forward, keep your forearm braced against your body (see figure 7.11d). During the swing, your arm comes away from the body as inertia pulls the kettlebell forward and up. During the clean, on the other hand, the arm does not disconnect from body, and at the point where the arm would disconnect during the swing, it instead moves vertically along the front of your body. Imagine you are standing inside a chimney. The walls of the chimney block you so that you cannot move out or to the side; you can only move the kettlebell up and down the chimney wall. When the hips reach forward extension, pull with the hip on the working side and give a gentle tug with your trapezius on the same side, pulling the kettlebell up the chimney (see figure 7.11e). Before the kettlebell settles to the chest, loosen your grip and open your hand to insert your fingers as deeply into the handle as you can at a curved angle until the medial portion of your forearm, the ulna, blocks you from inserting the hand any further (see figure 7.11f). Complete the vertical pull by letting the kettlebell rest on your chest and arm (see figure 7.11g) into what is called the rack position. This

GROUP FIFTEEN had its own private medical facilities attached to a well-known London teaching hospital. State-of-the-art facilities, the best doctors in the country, absolute discretion. Control watched through the window as the surgeon bent low to examine the damage that had been done to Twelve’s knee. The man—and his three colleagues—were wearing green smocks, their faces covered by surgical masks and latex gloves over their hands. Twelve had been anaesthetised and was laid out on the operating table, covered by a sheet with a long vertical slit that allowed easy access to his right leg. The surgeon had already sliced open his knee, a neat incision that began just below the quadriceps and curved around the line of his leg. The opening was held open by medical clips, and a miniature camera on an articulated arm had been positioned overhead, its feed visible on the large screen that was fixed to the wall in the observation suite.

In front of us, crenellations toothed the wall that overlooked the drop below. Behind us, the wall of the fort continued vertically, carved straight into the side of the mountain.

We were eighteen thousand vertical feet above sea level, in the mouth of Everest’s killer jaws. I noticed my hand was shaking as I fumbled with the ropes through thick mittens. It was pure fatigue. An hour later, it felt like we were still no closer to base camp, and it was starting to get late. I glanced nervously around the icefall. We should be meeting back up with Nima somewhere around here, as arranged. I scanned around but couldn’t see him. I dug my crampons into the snow, leaned back against the face to get my breath back, and waited for Mick behind me. He was still ten yards away, stepping carefully across the broken blocks of ice. We had been in this crevasse-ridden frozen death trap for more than nine hours, and we were both moving very laboriously. Watching him, I knew that if the mighty Mick was moving this slowly then we were indeed on a big mountain. I stood up and took a few more careful steps, testing the ice with each movement. I reached the end of one length of rope, unclipped, breathed hard, and grabbed the next rope. I held it loosely in my hand, looked around, took another deep breath, then clipped my karabiner into the line. Then all of a sudden, I felt the ground beneath me twitch. I looked down and saw a crack in the ice shoot between my feet, with a quiet, slicing sound. I didn’t dare move. The world seemed to stand still. The ice cracked once more behind me, then with no warning, it just dropped away beneath me, and I was falling. Falling down this lethal black scar in the glacier that had no visible bottom. Suddenly I smashed against the gray wall of the crevasse. The force threw me to the other side, crushing my shoulder and arm against the ice. Then I jerked to a halt as the thin rope that I had just clipped into held me. I am spinning round and round in free air. The tips of my crampons catch the edge of the crevasse wall. I can hear my screams echoing in the darkness below. Shards of ice keep raining down on me, and one larger bit smashes into my skull, jerking my head backward. I lose consciousness for a few precious seconds. I blink back into life to see the last of the ice falling away beneath me into the darkness. My body gently swings around on the end of the rope, and all is suddenly eerily silent. Adrenaline is coursing through my body, and I find myself shaking in waves of convulsions. I scream up at Mick, and the sound echoes around the walls. I looked up to the ray of light above, then down to the abyss below. I clutch frantically for the wall, but it is glassy smooth. I swing my ice axe at it wildly, but it doesn’t hold, and my crampons just screech across the ice. In desperation I cling to the rope above me and look up. I am twenty-three years old and about to die. Again.

It took ten minutes to get there. The cabin was in remarkably good shape. The ceiling and walls were all still standing, though the wooden steps leading to the door were little more than splinters. The Dolphin sign was still there, hanging vertically on one nail. Vines and moss and a mélange of vegetation I couldn’t name had not been dissuaded by the structure; they burrowed in, surrounded it, slithered through holes and windows, consumed the cabin so that it now looked like a natural part of the landscape.

The act of going up into Full Arm Balance combines elements of physics and biomechanics. Joint rhythm couples with momentum, so that the body floats up into the pose with control. Begin in Downward Facing Dog Pose. Then step one foot forward, keeping the knee bent. This shifts the center of gravity and brings the weight forward into the hands, taking the arms into a more vertical position. Pause here if you are new to the pose. Get used to positioning the arm bones so that the mechanical and anatomical axes align with one another. Start to rock the weight over the hands in a 1-2-3 type of rhythm; then engage the thigh, buttocks, and lower back muscles to lift the back leg straight up onto the wall. Combine the momentum generated by rocking forward and back with the force of the spinal extensor muscles to lift the other leg.

Shrago stayed on his feet for a long second, and then his knees got the message that the lights were out upstairs, and he went down in a vertical heap, like he had jumped off a wall.

trying to kick your buddy off the wall of a mineshaft for shits and giggles struck him as just plain dumb. He didn’t rate the actual climb itself much higher on the common sense scale, but the climb was a quarterly requirement. Who knows when they’d have to climb some rocky, vertical surface in order to achieve their goal? Eagle had pointed out, every time the test came up, that he flew their transport, the Snake. He could put them at the top of any cliff or wall they desired with no sweat. Such logic held little sway with Nada and Moms, neither of whom, Eagle noted, were currently with them.

Stars, Sam. We mucked it. I mean, I mucked it. And not just for us. Yet I recall pure joy: your bike hot between my legs, your arms locked ’round my waist. I recall poor Second’s chiding before I blinked it off. I recall laughter and all of those soldiers from someone else’s war standing on that terrace singing yet another Terran victory rag. You told me later that you didn’t know I’d make a run at the canyon wall ’til I torqued it, thumbing your bike’s twin throttles hard enough to singe our legs as the acceleration turned into an increasing roar. By the time we hit fifty, I couldn’t even hear you yelling at me to stop over the wind. I didn’t think you were serious. We’d climbed that mesa in daylight when we were younger, smaller, bendier. We’d done it with safety rails and belts, with hoverbikes that floated back down like carnival balloons when we failed; we’d done it with our parents cheering and a Grass Priest standing watch in case we needed healing. That run should’ve been a lark, Sam. But the night was dark as space, and our planet has no moon. You grabbed hard as I pulled the yoke. The engines screamed. I meant to pull up, climb that mesa vertically—see if we could rocket to the top before I gunned again like we’d done a hundred times as kids. But I timed it too late. I saw the mesa wall in our headlamps, and then everything went black. The next thing I recall is waking up on the Unity ship Ascendant with Ken’ri Mureen of Glos smiling down at me. Those big round eyes in her lovely, lying face. I thought I’d surely killed you, Sam, but Mureen swore you were fine. Mureen swore removing my Second was only temporary—swore surgery would fix the soup the crash had made of my brain. She made me sign forms, and then Ma came in with pastries. I still didn’t believe you’d made it out, but Ma swore it too. You know the gist after that—mostly—but there’s a lot I never told—

Except for the stock trail and that headwaters slot, in the whole length of Davis Gulch, I could find only three routes out. These were “Moqui steps”—ladders of hand- and toeholds gouged by some Anasazi daredevil with a quartzite pounding stone. I switched to rock-climbing shoes and started up one of these trails. Sixty feet up, I lost my nerve: yet above me, the holds continued on a parabolic wall that grew steeper every step, then made a wild traverse left before topping out on a vertical headwall. I thought of Everett’s boast: “Many times … I trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and angles little short of the perpendicular.

Don't have the ability to climb a vertical wall? If you have the ability to walk on a horizontal path, that's more than enough! Be proud of your current abilities, no matter how simple they may seem!

How Should I Structure My Pricing? Pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and almost no one gets it right out of the gate. Fortunately, you don’t need a PhD to structure your pricing well. Like most things in SaaS, finding the right pricing structure is one part theory, one part experimentation, and one part founder intuition. I wish I could tell you a single “correct” structure, but it varies based on your customer base, the value provided, and the competitive landscape. Most founders price their product too low or create confusing tiers that don’t align with the value a customer receives from the product. On the low end, if you have a product aimed at consumers, you can get away with charging $10 to $15 a month. The problem is at that price point, you’re going to be dealing with high churn, and you won’t have much budget to acquire customers. That can be brutal, but if you have a no-touch sign-up process with a product that sells itself, you can get away with it. Castos’s podcasting software and Snappa’s quick graphic design software are good examples of products that do well with a low average revenue per account (ARPA). You’ll have more breathing room (and less churn) if you aim for an ARPA of $50 a month or more. In niche markets—or where a demo is required or sales cycles are longer—aim higher (e.g., $250 a month and up). If you have a high-touch sales process that involves multiple calls, you need to charge enough to justify the cost of selling it. For example, $1,000 a month and up is a reasonable place to start. If you’re making true enterprise sales that require multiple demos and a procurement process, aim for $30,000 a year and up (into six figures). One of the best signals to guide your pricing is other SaaS tools, and I don’t just mean competition. Any SaaS tool a company in your space might replace you with, a complementary tool or a tool similar to yours in a different vertical can offer guidance, but make sure you don’t just compare features; compare how it’s sold. As mentioned above, the sales process has tremendous influence over how a product should be priced. There are so many SaaS tools out now that a survey of competitive and adjacent tools can give you a mental map of the range of prices you can charge. No matter where your business sits, one thing is true: “If no one’s complaining about your price, you’re probably priced too low.

The incline and height of the rocks increased sharply, making his climb more difficult. He needed his other hand totally free, as he knew his pursuers would as well. He holstered his pistol. He'd gotten more than three- quarters of the way to the top when even two free hands were barely enough to continue upward. The steps be- gan sloping on top, so that there was less and less to stand on. His legs pushed, toes searching for holds, arms pulling, fingers clutching, each new ascent more difficult than the last as the steps began to disappear altogether, until he found himself clinging to a nearly vertical slab of granite. Still he pushed upward, his chest and stomach in constant contact with the rock beneath, his hold growing more tenuous each moment. He looked up. Rock walls soared above him on both sides. He prayed there was somewhere to keep going, because he couldn't see it now. Up and up he climbed, every so often finding a small outcropping to grasp, but having to stretch more for each one, his legs almost dangling free as his boots sought purchase in the rock niches. Several times small rocks he tested for support broke free and clattered down the mountain. They fell, hit, split apart, and hit again, until they made a distant thud at the bottom. He shut his eyes, thinking he might sound like that, only softer. If it got any steeper, he knew, he couldn't hold on any longer.

a world characterized by a limited and vertical nervous system and by walls’. Instead we need to move to ‘networks – an open, fluid team of teams and continuous change making’ (quoted in Elkington and Braun, 2013: 38). This is echoed by Jon Katzenbach (2012): Today, with the ever-increasing necessity of working across organizational and geographical boundaries, and the growing complexity of daily business, more leaders at all levels are finding that it’s not always practical – or even best – to put together a team. Fortunately, we now have more options; in particular, consider the potential of focused networks, and sub-groups that can work more effectively in different modes than a ‘real team.

Adding Other Verticals Too Early Adding other verticals is the easiest siren song for me to justify. Sometimes it makes sense to pivot or expand to other niches. For example, if you have a product that’s working well for wedding photographers, chances are it will also serve wedding videographers. But unless you’re pivoting your product, you must be extremely careful about adding new markets. For example, if you add wedding coordinators to your wedding photography SaaS, you’re probably dealing with audiences that have different needs—even though they’re in the same industry. The danger of adding other verticals flippantly is that it can lead to a lot of complexity in your product. Unless you already dominate a particular niche and are moving into another or are making a full-blown pivot into the new space, be careful with this one.

Forty-six pages long, each one vertically stamped Secret, the report’s language was diplomatic, almost sterile, but its contents were anything but, each enumerated bullet another carefully worded indictment of the Navy’s Vietnam planners, all guilty of the peacetime military’s most predictable blunder: They had brought the fleet they wanted to the battlefield instead of the fleet the battlefield needed.

Flower of life: A figure composed of evenly-spaced, overlapping circles creating a flower-like pattern. Images of the Platonic solids and other sacred geometrical figures can be discerned within its pattern. FIGURE 3.14 FLOWER OF LIFE The Platonic solids: Five three-dimensional solid shapes, each containing all congruent angles and sides. If circumscribed with a sphere, all vertices would touch the edge of that sphere. Linked by Plato to the four primary elements and heaven. FIGURE 3.15 PENTACHORON The applications of these shapes to music are important to sound healing theory. The ancients have always professed a belief in the “music of the spheres,” a vibrational ordering to the universe. Pythagorus is famous for interconnecting geometry and math to music. He determined that stopping a string halfway along its length created an octave; a ratio of three to two resulted in a fifth; and a ratio of four to three produced a fourth. These ratios were seen as forming harmonics that could restore a disharmonic body—or heal. Hans Jenny furthered this work through the study of cymatics, discussed later in this chapter, and the contemporary sound healer and author Jonathan Goldman considers the proportions of the body to relate to the golden mean, with ratios in relation to the major sixth (3:5) and the minor sixth (5:8).100 Geometry also seems to serve as an “interdimensional glue,” according to a relatively new theory called causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), which portrays the walls of time—and of the different dimensions—as triangulated. According to CDT, time-space is divided into tiny triangulated pieces, with the building block being a pentachoron. A pentachoron is made of five tetrahedral cells and a triangle combined with a tetrahedron. Each simple, triangulated piece is geometrically flat, but they are “glued together” to create curved time-spaces. This theory allows the transfer of energy from one dimension to another, but unlike many other time-space theories, this one makes certain that a cause precedes an event and also showcases the geometric nature of reality.101 The creation of geometry figures at macro- and microlevels can perhaps be explained by the notion called spin, first introduced in Chapter 1. Everything spins, the term spin describing the rotation of an object or particle around its own axis. Orbital spin references the spinning of an object around another object, such as the moon around the earth. Both types of spin are measured by angular momentum, a combination of mass, the distance from the center of travel, and speed. Spinning particles create forms where they “touch” in space.

What to Do Tonight Spend private time with your child, ideally without electronics. Take turns with each child if you have more than one, so that the ratio is one-on-one. It is remarkably healing for kids and will help you to enjoy them. It also makes them feel like they are your number one priority. If you’re highly anxious, do something about it. Treating anxiety is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family. Consider participating in cognitive behavioral therapy: you can learn very effective strategies for identifying and “talking back to” the distorted and unproductive thoughts that contribute to high anxiety. Learn to meditate. Take a yoga class. Be very regular in your exercise routine. Spend time in nature. Get more sleep. Socialize more with friends if it helps you feel calm. Avoid making decisions for your child based on fear. If you find yourself thinking, “I’m afraid if I don’t do this now, then—” stop. Do what you feel is right now, not what you feel you have to because of what you’re afraid will happen if you don’t. If your child is struggling, schedule a short time every day for you to worry about his or her problems. Literally write it into your planner. This will let your brain know that it is safe not to worry all day long. Remember who’s responsible for what. It cannot be your responsibility to see that everything goes well for your children at all times. If you are very worried about your teenager and have talked through the issues together many times, write your child a short letter summarizing your concerns and offering any help the child might need. Then promise that you will not bring the issue up again for a month. When you break your promise (because you will) apologize and recommit to it. Get out a piece of paper and draw a vertical line in the middle. In the left-hand column, write statements such as the following: “It’s okay for Jeremy to have a learning disability,” “It’s okay that Sarah doesn’t have any friends right now,” “It’s okay for Ben to be depressed right now.” In the right-hand column, write down the automatic thoughts that come to your mind in response (likely rebuttal) to these statements. Then question these automatic thoughts. Ask questions such as, “Can I be absolutely sure that this thought is true?” “Who would I be if I didn’t believe this?” This kind of self-questioning exercise, developed by author and speaker Byron Katie and others, can serve as a useful tool for discovering the thoughts that trap you into negative judgments.18 Create a stress-reduction plan for yourself. Can you get more exercise? More sleep? What calms you down and how can you do more of it? Don’t make yourself available to your kids at the expense of your own well-being. Wall off some “me” time. Model self-acceptance and tell your kids what you’re doing.

To clean gutters, you will need to climb a ladder. Please review the ladder safety rules in Chapter 2. They’re important. If your gutters are higher than you can reach with a stepladder, you’ll need to use an extension ladder. If you are not afraid of heights, fine. Just follow these rules: * Make sure that the base of the ladder is firm and level. * The bottom of the ladder should be one foot away from the wall of your house for every four feet of its length. If the ladder is extended 12 feet up, for example, you’ll need to place the base of the ladder 3 feet from the wall of the house. * Do not stand on the top three steps of the ladder. * Keep your hips between the vertical rails of the ladder. Climb down and move the ladder; don’t extend your body beyond safety range. * Have a friend hold the ladder at its base.

I HAVEN’T HAD the Dream in a long time. But it’s back. And it’s changed. It does not begin as it always has, with the chase. The woods. The mad swooping of the griffins and the charge of the hose-beaked vromaski. The volcano about to erupt. The woman calling my name. The rift that opens in the ground before me. The fall into the void. The fall, where it always ends. Not this time. This time, these things are behind me. This time, it begins at the bottom. I am outside my own body. I am in a nanosecond frozen in time. I feel no pain. I feel nothing. I see someone below, twisted and motionless. The person is Jack. Jack of the Dream. But being outside it, I see that the body is not mine. Not the same face. As if, in these Dreams, I have been dwelling inside a stranger. I see small woodland creatures, fallen and motionless, strewn around the body. The earth shakes. High above, griffins cackle. Water trickles beneath the body now. It pools around the head and hips. And the nanosecond ends. The scene changes. I am no longer outside the body but in. Deep in. The shock of reentry is white-hot. It paralyzes every molecule, short-circuiting my senses. Sight, touch, hearing—all of them join in one huge barbaric scream of STOP. The water fills my ear, trickles down my neck and chest. It freezes and pricks. It soothes and heals. It is taking hold of the pain, drawing it away. Drawing out death and bringing life. I breathe. My flattened body inflates. I see. Smell. Hear. I am aware of the soil ground into my skin, the carcasses all around, the black clouds lowering overhead. The thunder and shaking of the earth. I blink the grit from my eyes and struggle to rise. I have fallen into a crevice. The cracked earth is a vertical wall before me. And the wall contains a hole, a kind of door into the earth. I see dim light within. I stand on shaking legs. I feel the snap of shattered bones knitting themselves together. One step. Two. With each it becomes easier. Entering the hole, I hear music. The Song of the Heptakiklos. The sound that seems to play my soul like a guitar. I draw near the light. It is inside a vast, round room, an underground chamber. I enter, lifted on a column of air. At the other side I see someone hunched over. The white lambda in his hair flashes in the reflected torch fire. I call to him and he turns. He looks like me. Beside him is an enormous satchel, full to bursting. Behind him is the Heptakiklos. Seven round indentations in the earth. All empty.

In a lifetime of crossing borders, I found this fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen—more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built six months before to replace a wall made of steel plates, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams was so amazing in its defiant conceit, you either want to see more of it or run in the opposite direction—just the sort of conflicting emotions many people feel when confronted by a peculiar piece of art.

1930s Functionalism/Modernism Exterior •Facade: Cube shapes and light-color plaster facades, or thin, standing wood panels. •Roof: Flat roof, sometimes clad in copper or sheet metal. •Windows: Long horizontal window bands often with narrow—or no—architraves; large panes of glass without mullions or transoms. Emphasis on the horizontal rather than on the vertical. Windows run around corners to allow more light and to demonstrate the new possibilities of construction and materials. •Outside door: Wooden door with circular glass window. •Typical period details: Houses positioned on plots to allow maximum access to daylight. Curving balconies, often running around the corner; corrugated-iron balcony frontage. Balcony flooring and fixings left visible. The lines of the building are emphasized. Interior •Floors: Parquet flooring in various patterns, tongue-and-groove floorboards, or linoleum. •Interior doors: Sliding doors and flush doors of lamella construction (vaulted, with a crisscross pattern). Masonite had a breakthrough. •Door handles: Black Bakelite, wood, or chrome. •Fireplaces: Slightly curved, brick/stone built. Light-color cement. •Wallpaper/walls: Smooth internal walls and light wallpapers, or mural wallpaper that from a distance resembled a rough, plastered wall. Internal wall and woodwork were light in color but rarely completely white—often muted pastel shades. •Furniture: Functionalism, Bauhaus, and International style influences. Tubular metal furniture, linear forms. Bakelite, chrome, stainless steel, colored glass. •Bathroom: Bathrooms were simple and had most of today’s features. External pipework. Usually smooth white tiles on the walls or painted plywood. Black-and-white chessboard floor. Lavatories with low cisterns were introduced. •Kitchen: Flush cupboard doors with a slightly rounded profile. The doors were partial insets so that only about a third of the thickness was visible on the outside—this gave them a light look and feel. Metal-sprung door latches, simple knobs, metal cup handles on drawers. Wall cabinets went to ceiling height but had a bottom section with smaller or sliding doors. Storage racks with glass containers for dry goods such as salt and flour became popular. Air vents were provided to deal with cooking smells.

the man vaulted over an embankment, rolled across a boat prow, and sprang up the side of a building, finding hand-and footholds on downspouts and window shutters. Even as he went vertical, his momentum barely slowed. That particular brand of obstacle-course discipline—parkouring—had come into popularity after Harville’s training, and he couldn’t help but watch with a touch of awe now. The man hauled himself through a third-story window, scaring a chinless woman smoking a cigarette back onto her heels. An instant later the man flew out of a neighboring window on Harville’s side of the waterway. Harville had lost precious seconds. He reversed, splashing through a puddle, and bolted. The narrow passages and alleys unfolded endlessly, a match for the thoughts racing in his head—Giovanna’s openmouthed laugh, their freestanding bathtub on the cracked marble floor, bedside candles mapping yellow light onto the walls of their humble apartment. Without a conscious thought, he was running away from home, leading his pursuer farther from everything he held dear. He sensed footfalls quickening behind him. Columns flickered past, lending the rain a strobe effect as he raced along the arcade bordering Piazza San Marco. The piazza was flooded, the angry Adriatic surging up the

Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls—otherwise, the world’s largest collection of closed and locked doors.

window. ‘If this is your way of getting me to quit, it’s not going to work.’ She could almost see her dad standing on the pavement next to the car, taking inhumanly long drags on a cigarette. He shrugged at her, like, what’re you gonna do? She rolled her own window up and killed the engine, getting out of the car to look at the shelter. The building was sixties brutalist. A slab of concrete that looked like it would have been a chic and modern looking community centre six decades ago. Now it just looked like a pebble-dashed breeze block with wire-meshed vertical windows that ran the length of the outside.  Wide steps with rusty white rails led up to the main doors, dark brown stained wooden things with square aluminium handles, the word ‘pull’ etched into each one.  There was a piece of paper taped to the right-hand one that said ‘All welcome, hot food inside’ written in hand-printed caps.  There were five homeless people on the steps — three of them smoking rolled cigarettes. Two of those were drinking something out of polystyrene cups. The fourth was hunched forward, reading the tattiest looking novel Jamie had ever seen cling to a spine. His eyes stared at it blankly, not moving, his pupils wide. He wasn’t even registering the words. The last one was curled up into a ball inside a bright blue sleeping bag, his arms and legs folding the polyester into his body, just a pockmarked forehead peeking out into the November morning. Had they slept there all night on that step waiting for the shelter to open? She couldn’t say. Jamie and Roper crossed the road and the folks on the steps looked up. They were of varying ages, in varying states of malnutrition and addiction. The smell of old booze and urine hung in the alcove. Jamie wasn’t sure if you could tell they were police by the way they looked or walked, but the homeless seemed to have a sixth sense about it. Two of the three who were smoking clocked them, lowered their heads, and turned to face the wall. The third kept looking and held his hand out. The one with the novel didn’t even register them. Jamie knew that if they searched the two that turned away, they would have something on them they shouldn’t — drugs, needles, a knife, something stolen. That’s why they’d done it — to become invisible. The one who held out a hand would be clean. Wouldn’t risk chancing it with a police officer otherwise. She’d worked enough uniformed time on the streets of London to know how their minds worked.  She took a deep breath of semi-clean air and mounted the steps, looking down at the mid-thirties guy with the stretched-out beanie and out-stretched hand.  ‘We’re on duty,’ Roper said coldly, breezing past. Jamie gave him a weak smile, knowing that opening her pockets in a place like this would get them mobbed. If they needed to question anyone

In those days, the ancient rainforests spread from Northern California to southeastern Alaska in a band between the mountains and the sea. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture-laden air from the pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world. Trees that were born before Columbus sailed. And trees are just the beginning. The numbers of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects are staggering. It's hard to write without running out of superlatives, for these were among the greatest forests on earth, forests peopled with centuries of past lives, enormous logs and snags that foster more life after their death than before. The canopy is a multi-layered sculpture of vertical complexity from the lowest moss on the forest floor to the wisps of lichen hanging high in the treetops, raggedy and uneven from the gaps produced by centuries of windthrow, disease, and storms. This seeming chaos belies the tight web of inter-connections between them all, stitched with filaments of fungi, silk of spiders, and silver threads of water. Alone is a word without meaning in this forest.

I observed, as I entered, that the office is designed to impress and intimidate. My eyes took in the blue presidential seal, embedded directly in the center of the oval rug. Rays of gold and bronze radiated out from it across the rug and projected onto the vertically striped walls. Between my meeting in May and my first President's Daily Brief in September, President Obama would swap out the radiant rug for a solid, cream colored one with a white presidential seal. His more muted color scheme projected a still confident but more relaxed commander in chief, one who embraced the power of the office but equally exhibited the humility inherent in his character ... When I was finally lead to the Oval Office entrance, I saw President Obama standing at a credenza in front of his scheduler's desk, casually looking over the front pages of a pile of newspapers. He looked up, gave me his patented smile, stepped over, and shook my hand. I have no doubt that his greeting was choreographed to put me at ease.

But as we all began to move, we heard that throaty rumble come surging up the mountain. Suddenly, the blizzard detonated all around us. It crescendoed into a deafening roar. A thick wall of clouds boiled across the South Col, wrapping us in white, blotting out every discernible feature until the only visible objects were our headlamps, which seemed to float in the maelstrom. Neal Beidleman later said it was like being lost in a bottle of milk. It quickly became incredibly cold. I grabbed Mike’s sleeve. He was my eyes. I dared not lose contact with him. We instinctively herded together; nobody wanted to get separated from the others as we groped along, trying to get the feel of the South Col’s slope, hoping for some sign of camp. We turned one way, and that wasn’t it. We turned again, and that wasn’t it. In the space of a few minutes, we lost all sense of direction; we had no idea where we were facing in the swirling wind and noise and cold and blowing ice. We continued to move as a group, until suddenly the hair stood up on the back of Neal’s neck. Experience and intuition told Beidleman that mortal danger lurked nearby. “Something is wrong here,” he shouted above the din. “We’re stopping.” It was a good decision. We were not twenty-five feet from the seven-thousand-foot vertical plunge off the Kangshung Face. From where we stopped the ice sloped away at a steep angle. A few more paces and the whole group would have just skidded off the mountain. When we stopped something else stopped, too—that internal furnace that keeps you alive. The only way to stay warm in those conditions is through constant activity. To stand still is to freeze to death, which already was happening to me.

Uses of Custom Blinds Customized blinds may also be used to control the temperature in any room. For example, if the room in a home is chilly during the day time, the owner of the house and their family members can simply open up the blinds so that they'll let the sunlight in. The daylight helps to heat up the room without changing the temperature on the wall. Additionally, when it will get too sizzling, the household can shut the blinds so that they can cool the room down as nicely. Whatever the scenario, these blinds can be utilized for a wide variety of various purposes. Out there, there are various kinds of window shades. Choosing the right window blind is usually a bit hectic if it’s your first time. Listed below are some various varieties of window shades that you can choose from. Venetian blinds are the commonest and in style at this time. They're constructed from horizontal slates connected to one another. They function on a change or pull string. Some are product of wooden, plastic or composites. They are appropriate for each houses and places of work. Vertical blinds are among the most unique varieties of window blinds you can get. They are good insulators and can be used to Custom Blinds utterly block daylight penetration. The vertical shades are also robust enough to stop any harm from strong winds. They are low cost but stylish. Some are constructed with the power to adjust themselves in response to the time of day. Customs blinds can be used for each casual and office settings. This innovative thought means that you can use pictures as blind. With regards to makes use of of custom blinds, there are different options. Using your individual imagination, customized blinds might be adorned with completely different colors, designs and patterns. If your window is of an additional ordinary size, there are basic window blinds which can be customized to slot in. These are the roller blinds. Attributable to know-how, they've been advanced to be extra reliable and durable than earlier than. They're now less likely to breakdown. You possibly can select from all kinds of colours and patterns. Before coming to a conclusion on the perfect kinds of window blinds, it is very important do some extensive research. The images can be printed on a high quality curler and you should utilize vertical blinds, that are fade resistant, easier to clean and final for a number of years. In case your home windows varies in sizes, contemplate the images that will look one of the best. For a big window, a large panorama image can be effective. If the window is kind of slim, you need to consider photos corresponding to flowers or bushes.

Uses of Customized Blinds Custom blinds will also be used to manage the temperature in any room. As an illustration, if the room in a home is cold through the day time, the owner of the home and their family members can easily open up the blinds so that they'll let the daylight in. The daylight helps to heat up the room with out altering the temperature on the wall. Additionally, when it gets too scorching, the family can shut the blinds in order that they can cool the room down as properly. Regardless of the scenario, these blinds can be utilized for all kinds of different purposes. Window blinds right now can be found in quite a few colours, materials and magnificence. Getting a perfect window blind will rely in your style. Aside from decoration, the window shades serve many functions in properties. They prevent excess light from coming through windows, they provide us with privateness and they're also appropriate to manage temperature. In cold seasons they forestall heat from getting out of the home. Buying the perfect varieties of window blinds can change your complete looks of your own home and make it attractive. Vertical blinds are among the most unique sorts of window blinds you can get. They're good insulators and can be utilized to utterly Blinds Sutherland Shire block daylight penetration. The vertical shades are also strong sufficient to prevent any damage from strong winds. They're low-cost however trendy. Some are constructed with the ability to adjust themselves according to the time of day. Customs blinds can be used for both informal and office settings. This innovative idea means that you can use images as blind. In the case of makes use of of customized blinds, there are different options. Using your personal creativeness, customized blinds will be embellished with completely different colours, designs and patterns. If your window is of an additional strange size, there are traditional window blinds which might be customized to slot in. These are the roller blinds. Resulting from technology, they have been superior to be extra dependable and sturdy than before. They're now less more likely to breakdown. You can select from all kinds of colours and patterns. Earlier than coming to a conclusion on one of the best kinds of window blinds, it is important to do some in depth analysis. Custom blinds act as a fantastic reward in your loved ones. It's a present that can be cherished and remembered for a number of years. It is unique from normal gifts, the recipient will be glad about the trouble and thought you will have invested into it. When you parents have passion for grandchildren, think about having your children printed onto a blind and giving it to them. They may merely adore the photograph of their grandchildren, as well as having a new blind to boost the look of their residence.

Confused, I followed Robin into the back room, where he began sorting through carefully wrapped canvases that hadn’t been stored in the vertical racks lining the wall yet. Finally he located three large portrait-sized ones and propped them against a wall, lined up in a row like a triptych. Then he stripped off the coverings. “Holy shit,” I breathed, staring at myself. Well, it was me, yet not really. I mean, clearly it was, but not anything like I’d ever seen myself.

Maybe that memory had been completely lost, like the shadows they had given up. Just as the people of the town had no horizontal curiosity about geography, they lacked any vertical curiosity about history.

But in this vertical city, in this compressed city where all voids tend to fill up and every block of cement tends to mingle with other blocks of cement, a kind of counter-city opens, a negative city, that consists of empty slices between wall and wall, and of the minimal distances ordained by the building regulations between two constructions, between the rear of one construction and the rear of the next; it is a city of cavities, wells, air conduits, driveways, inner yards, accesses to basements, like a network of dry canals on a planet of stucco and tar, and it is through this network, grazing the walls, that the ancient cat population still scurries.