Going Solo

                    -Going Solo
                                                               Author: Roald Dahl
                                                       Number of pages: 205
                                     Number of pages that I've read:80

My favorite quote is: '' A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones. An autobiography must there-fore, unless it is to become tedious, be extremely selective, discarding all the inconsequential incidents in one's life and concentrating upon those that have remained vivid in the memory.'' This quote is on the start of the book- which means page 1.
 - I already re-tell you 40 pages of the book in my previous blog, now i will tell you my other 40 pages! :)


* Snakes were the only fearful thing about Tanganyika, and a newcomer very quickly learnt to identify most of them and to know which were deadly and which were simply poisonous.
One Sunday  evening he was invited to go and have a sundowner at the house of an Englishman called Fuller who worked in the Customs office in Dar es Salaam.  While he was in the house he spotted Green Mamba in the living room. Everybody got out. But the dog stayed in. The children jumped as well and all of them started calling the dog. But no dog came out of the open front door. He was bitten by the snake.
They called snake-man to kill the snake. The snake-man was small and very old, probably over 70. His eyes were pale blue, deep-set in a face round and dark and wrinkled as a walnut. When he saw a snake, the snake-man began working his way very very slowly to the back wall of the room so as to get a view of the snake behind the sofa. He never walked on his toes as most of you have done.
There was no way he could catch hold of that madly twisting flailing length of green muscle with his hands, and even if he could have done so, the head would surely have flashed around and bitten him in the face. Very very slowly he did it, pushing the rubber prongs forward over the snake's flailing body, keeping the snake pinned down all the time and pushing, pushing, pushing the long wooed rod forward millimetre by millimetre.
Breakfast in Dar es Salaam never  varied. On a morning towards the end of August 1939, he was breakfasting on his pawpaw and thinking a great deal, like everyone else, about the war that everybody knew will come soon. Over in Europe which is ten times as far away as  from here to Kilimanjaro, the Germans had a leader called Bwana Hitler!!! He had wished  to conquer the world. \
A few days after that, thing started hotting up in Dar es Salaam. War was clearly imminet, and elaborate plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar es Salaam and upcountry as soon as war was declared.
Just outside the Dar es Salaam they stopeed by a small hut and two signallers jumped out and unlocked the door and connected up their telephone cable to a plug inside. Then they drove on and the signallers fed the telephone cable out on to the grass verge as they went slowly forward/ The road ran right along the edge of the Indian Ocean, and the water out there was calm and clear and pale green. They hung around  though the afternoon waiting for the field telephone to ting. He sat on the ground in a shady place near the phone and smoked his pipe.
At the night he borrowed an army blanket from the Sergeant and settled down for the night beside the telephone.
Shortly after 11 o'clock the tinkle of the field telephone made everybody jump. The voice on the other end said : '' Great Britain has declared war on Germany, you are now on full alert. ''
Then suddenly, away in the distance he saw a cloud of dust. A little leater, he could make out the first car, then close behind it the second, third, fourth, fifth... The lead car was a large Chervolet station-wagon driven by a man who had two more men beside him in a front seat. The rest of the car was filled with baggage.  The man shouted with a heavy German accent. He was middle-aged and he was also bold. He got slowly out of the car. He was very angry and his movements were full of menace. The two man with him also got out. The bold man turned and signalled with his arm to the fifty odd cars that were lined up behind him, and immediately a man, and sometimes two, got out of each car and came walking towards them.
On some way the didn't let them in,and they on some way won the first ''battle'' !