The melodic line is bitter-sweet; the rhythms lift their heavy limbs in frenetic dance; the piled-up fourths pierce the ear with their cruel brilliance. The texture and timbre of the sounds are eastern; eastern not with the sugary orientalism of Rimsky and his fellowship, but with a pungence, a wildness, a subtlety which evokes the desert and the tropical swamp, the lushness and terribleness of the forests of the night, the spice and heat of the straits. The white-robed prophet and the hairy ape both speak. / And the work is more complex and developed a conception than any of Bloch’s earlier compositions, the quartet not expected. A grimacing irony and a light irresponsible gayety hitherto absent from his moods manifest themselves for the first time in the suite; the four movements, homogeneous although they are, show four distinct faces. The first, after the introductory page, with its corkscrew shrilling of fifes, its grave bitter brooding of the solo instrument, its many lamentful tones of blindly groping, bleeding life, is a sort of gigue triste. Something dances in relentless activity; something at once an insect swarm in May, and a tribe of little brown men at a phallic feast, and steel bobbins and shuttles. The second movement, the allegro ironico, is a variation on the well-known theme “Je m’en fous.” An ape-like mockery whinnies through it. Cocoanuts are shied at all the four corners of the world. Some of them display a mysterious tendency to fall near the spot where the apess sits weeping over the children.

The Zhongsha Qundao, or Macclesfield Bank area, is actually entirely underwater, and not an archipelago, experts say.

In the New Testament, the substantive αιων, and αιωνιος the adjective derived from it, occur more than two hundred times. The adjective, which strictly might be rendered “full of ages” or “ageful,” is generally translated eternal or everlasting, and I believe correctly; […]

[…] a doddling old grandfather to act as sheep-dog, as a toothless, barkless, harmless guardian.