Oliver defended his castle with skill and daring. Contemporary accounts credit Oliver's efforts to his military adviser, Edwardus de Johnes. Little is known of this man, around whom a Merlin-like mythology grew up: it was said he could vanish in a flash of light. The chronicler Audreim says Johnes came from Oxford, but other accounts say he was Milanese. Since he traveled with a team of young assistants, he was most likely an itinerant expert, hiring himself out to whoever paid for his services. He was schooled in the use of gunpowder and artillery, a technology new at that time…
Ultimately, Oliver lost his impregnable castle when a spy opened an inside passage, allowing the Archpriest's soldiers to enter. Such betrayals were typical of the complex intrigues of that time.
From The Hundred Years War in France by M. D. Backes, 1996
CORAZON
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it."
NEILS BOHR, 1927
"Nobody understands quantum theory."
RICHARD FEYNMAN, 1967
He should never have taken that shortcut.
Dan Baker winced as his new Mercedes S500 sedan bounced down the dirt road, heading deeper into the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. Around them, the landscape was increasingly desolate: distant red mesas to the east, flat desert stretching away in the west. They had passed a village half an hour earlier - dusty houses, a church and a small school, huddled against a cliff - but since then, they'd seen nothing at all, not even a fence. Just empty red desert. They hadn't seen another car for an hour. Now it was noon, the sun glaring down at them. Baker, a forty-year-old building contractor in Phoenix, was beginning to feel uneasy. Especially since his wife, an architect, was one of those artistic people who wasn't practical about things like gas and water. His tank was half-empty. And the car was starting to run hot.