About 120 children were killed daily at Auschwitz
About 120 children are killed every day by ISRAEL
Stop WAR CRIMES and GENOCIDE
About 120 children are killed every day by ISRAEL
Stop WAR CRIMES and GENOCIDE
Your Seeds Source...
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About 120 children were killed daily at Auschwitz
About 120 children are killed every day by ISRAEL Stop WAR CRIMES and GENOCIDE Your Seeds Source...
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The Andes, 3:34 in the morning
February 27th, 3:34 in the morning. The date and time many Chileans will not forget so easily... But then it was just one deep night at the end of the summer, for most Chileans these were the last days of vacations, and for me the end of seed harvesting season...
It was a moonlit night, with soft light bathing everything around, the road, the trees, the slopes, and the distant peaks towering to more than 5000 meters. I arrived from Talca well past 1 o’clock in the morning, and was eager to pass the night and to start collecting seeds during the next three days in the area of Santiago, the capital of Chile.
It took me half an hour to find a nice place to park the truck away from the road, away from steep slopes where unexpected things might happen, away from overhanging rocks. It was not the first time I was camping out in the truck and was quite used to this procedure. It was like second nature to scan the surroundings in search of potential dangers. Sometimes I even laughed at myself that I was too cautious... But this night, I was glad that I followed my instincts...
The tranquility of the night was suddenly broken... 3:34...
It was a very violent wake-up, and it felt as if an elephant or rhinoceros began making love to my jeep, two tons of metal were rocking back and forth, and at times it felt like the vehicle could turn over.
At first, I was not able to understand what was going on. There were sounds all around, the dull, rocket-like rumble of the earth shaking, the mumbling of the earth slides, the dry hits of the rocks far away, the squeaking of the car springs... all mixed into a strange simphony of incredible strength and seriousness... Bethoven style... only stronger...
I looked on my watch; it marked 3:39... Five minutes of sheer terror ended.
That must be how people woke up on the first night of the war when surprise attack occcurred, Pearl Harbour on 7th of December 1941, the German offensive on the Russian front, 21st of June 1941, the 37º parallel on 25th of June 1950... And now 27th of February, 2010, 3:34...
The rest of the night was interrupted by occassional aftershocks, which were shorter in duration, but some seemed to be as strong as the first barrage...
In the morning, the scenery around at first did not appear to be very different from that of a normal sunny day at the end of the summer, end of vacation season... Two things were very strange though… the yellow smog and the silence... All the mountains around seemed to be painted in pale yellow color and as if airbrushed to hide their distant details. It felt like smog, which is common in the capital of Chile, Santiago, but there it is bluish-grey, and it never penetrates that deep into the high Andean valleys. The whole atmosphere was very eerie.
Suddenly, far away some 5 km. on the other side of the valley, a tower of dust slowly began to rise above a steep ravine running from the top of a mountain down halfway… a rock fall. After several dozen of seconds a low rumble punctuated by short, louder hits began to break up the silence of the morning, getting stronger with each moment, in crescendo, until there was not the slightest doubt about the seriousness and the strength of the event. And only after one minute, which seemed like eternity, the sound began slowly do die off.
Looking around, one could see in the distance that all mountain peaks, rock walls, and even steep slopes were belching up towers of dust. The earthquake loosened up the rocks and now even imperceptible aftershocks were producing new avalanches of solid debris. Images of 9-11 immediately come to one's mind, mixed with burning Iraqi oil fields and black and white documentaries from Second World War. The sinister nature of the yellow smog began to dawn upon myself. It was dust raised by the unstoppable forces of nature.
I started the engine and began driving along the road, at first, there was nothing to indicate the seriousness of the situation, here and there occasional fist-sized rocks could be seen, which is really not so uncommon for unpaved roads. After a sharp turn of the road where the road approached a steep 45º slope suddenly football sized rocks began to appear, and just slightly further down some of these grew to a size of one meter and maybe two to three tons. One had to dodge the rocks and the small craters which they left when they hit the road surface.
Finally, the paved road began, but the presence of civilization only accentuated the devastation inflicted by the forces of nature. In the end, the mountains were used to earthquakes, to rock falls, to dust, they are the product of these cataclysms one rock less or more on the slope does not change anything; but for humans, this was the true crucible... a 2o ton rock on the paved road is defintiively out of place...
