Word: downwards
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...Divining" with rods or twigs or arrows goes back to earliest history. But "dowsing" in its modern form, using the forked stick, seems to have started in 16th-Century Germany. Even educated men like Melanchthon believed that the twigs of trees above mineral veins drooped downward, attracted by the deposit below. Miners in the Harz Mountains put this principle to hopeful use, searching for minerals with forked, ore-seeking twigs...
...Part II events move downward, and the drama becomes muffled and intermittent. Hotspur lies slain by Hal; the rebels are betrayed and broken; guilt-laden Henry, who had usurped Richard II's crown, sickens and dies; Falstaff roisters now without his Prince, "Who-when he becomes his King-brutally dismisses him. Only for Hal does glory lie ahead...
Similes and metaphors romp hither & yon ("Here I am like a crow, circling, circling around and around, circling and cawing, cawing as I swoop in a downward arc to sink my teeth into the same old dilemma"). And, as ever, at the dip of a rambling pen, the characteristic Farrell brashness melts into oleomargarine
...Downward Spiral. The Potsdam agreement had provided that Germany be administered as an economic whole. But even at that time the Russians were running their zone along lines the Western powers could not accept. Rather than face up to the tough problem of coordinated administration, the U.S. and Britain half welcomed French obstructionism, which made unification impossible...
...occupation of Germany was costing U.S. taxpayers $1 billion a year and British taxpayers $300 million. There was no prospect of reducing that burden unless the British and Americans found a way of putting Germans to work. In the western zones, production was in a slow downward spiral which might become a rapid decline within six months. Some figures from the British-administered Ruhr told the story. On March 3 the average miner there was producing 2.76 tons of coal a day. On March 4, the British cut his rations by 15.5%. The miner's productivity dropped on March...