"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appeared the vainest of all human endeavors. It seemed a veritable rainbow realm of the sun. At first only the beauty stirred Hare—he saw the copper belt close under the cliffs, the white beds of alkali and washes of silt farther out, the wind-ploughed canyons and dust-encumbered ridges ranging west and east, the scalloped slopes of the flat tableland rising low, the tips of volcanic peaks leading the eye beyond to veils and vapors hovering over blue clefts and dim line ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. Neco commenced excavations on a large scale, following the line of the old cutting, but greatly widening it, so that triremes might meet in it and pass each other, without shipping their oars. After a time, however, he felt compelled to desist, without effecting his ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... founded on the drift and silt of ages, through which water habitually percolates, to be increased by the pressure of the 85-foot lock when made, have been referred to by many of our technical advisers as another element of danger. The vast masses of earth piled on this alluvial ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... picture of desolation. Cities, once prosperous, were shown abandoned because the mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... then his story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... be compared to a dredger, which, gathers up all the silt of a harbour, and carries it out to sea, leaves it there and then returns to repeat the operation. If such an operation is necessary in a harbour, and if without it the best anchorages in the world would often get choked with rubbish and become useless, ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... interest to the common observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, as if it had sunk ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... a road to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... sight at all seasons. In autumn, the swollen waters pour down as from a cornucopia; in winter, folk from the town come driving over the frozen flood, racing one against another; in spring, the river overflows its banks, spreading silt on the meadows as in the land of the Nile; and in summer, the haymakers are lulled by the song of the grasshoppers and the scent of the hay to dream of paradise, where the children of men even now may enter in for some few days in ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... here, at any rate. Courtenay at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful current whose existence he suspected had cut out for itself a deep-water channel towards the land, and the ship had struck on the silt of its back-wash. Anyhow, the Kansas was still living. The lights were all burning steadily. He could detect the rhythmic throb of the donkey-engine. He felt it like the faint beat of a pulse. In her new position ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... current, running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the current o'er my ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume the silt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water. There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as first fixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... been before there was a wider and deeper creek, its sides cumbered with huge boulders and tree-trunks; and the mixture of silt and gravel which formed its cut banks already had set like cement. It was cement, the same natural concrete which Nature combines everywhere on the desert—gravel and lime and bone-dry clay, sluiced and mixed ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... body as it floated in water in a state of decomposition. The jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are as a record, the account of contemporaneous vital phenomena ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... aggregate of whatever character must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent will ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy gasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a halt ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... emission jet can be applied as a factor in giving motive power, the fact that no close-fitting parts are required for the places upon which the line of force impinges will alter the conditions of the whole problem. In the centrifugal sand pump, as now largely used for raising silt from rivers and harbours, the serious corrosive action of the jet of sand and water upon the inside of the pump has been successfully overcome by facing the metal with indiarubber; but nothing of the kind could have been done if the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand- reefs, a ferment of delta silt—if science guesses right—had lifted higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... elevated parts were overgrown with tall reeds that in the distance looked like fields of waving corn, and immense flocks of wild-fowl haunted them. Into this dismal swamp the rivers brought down their freshets, the waters mingling and winding by devious channels before they reached the sea. The silt with which they were laden became deposited in the basin of the Fens, and thus the river-beds were choked up, compelling the intercepted waters to force new channels through the ooze; hence there are numerous abandoned beds of old rivers still traceable amid the level of the Fens. This region ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a strip of gardens, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... flight, And swans be swifter than hawks of the tower, And wrens set gos-hawks by force and might, And muskets make verjuice of crabbes sour, And ships sail on dry land, silt give flower, And apes in Westminster give judgment and sentence, Then put women in trust ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... ship to completely unrecognizable debris might have to be accomplished eventually, but it certainly was not immediately possible. However, perception told him that the heavy vessel was already hidden beneath silt and stagnant water. It would be safe for a while from accidental discovery. The Challonari was self-sustaining and could survive untended for years, if necessary, serving to keep the area clear of wild life that ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... outscourings^; off scum; caput mortuum [Lat.], residuum, sprue, fecula [Lat.], clinker, draff^; scurf, scurfiness^; exuviae [Lat.], morphea; fur, furfur^; dandruff, tartar. riffraff; vermin, louse, flea, bug, chinch^. mud, mire, quagmire, alluvium, silt, sludge, slime, slush, slosh, sposh [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap [Vulg.], shit [Vulg.]; sewage, sewerage; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with it. The Rhine is charged with this matter, and by it has so silted up the Lake of Constance as to abolish it for a large fraction of its length. The Rhone is charged with it, and tens of thousands of acres of cultivable land are formed by the silt above ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the land suits it, irrigation by underflow from ditches on higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. For gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. The kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which will distribute water sufficiently to avoid saturation and air-exclusion. Both ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the lido along which the boat was ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath her ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Sluice owes its name to the Delaval who placed the large sluice gates upon the burn, in order to have a strong current which, in rushing down to the sea, would be able to wash the mouth of the stream clear from the silt and mud brought in by the incoming tide. A later baronet, Sir John Hussey Delaval, made the cutting through the solid rock which is so striking a feature of the harbour. It was ready for the entrance of vessels in ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... are natural reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential condition ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the river. Indeed the miners passed through the cellars of old houses and unearthed old water pipes; excavated through a depth of tipped rubbish on which these houses had evidently been built; and then came upon the former strand of the river, beneath which was the blue silt usually found; then a stratum of bowlder clay; and finally the red sandstone rock. Once begun, the works were pushed forward night and day, Sundays excepted, until January, 1884, when the last few feet of rock were cleared away by the boring ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... first place were grown by Mr. Duke Hughes, of Coal Run, Noble County, O. He states the tree is about 50 years old and stands in well-limed permanent pasture near the crest of a ridge, in Muskingum silt loam. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... supported upon a gravelly soil, intermixed with a peculiar shot clay which disintegrates with successive tillage so that when the forests are removed the soil becomes ready for all the grasses and grains and fruits. In the valleys more silt and humus make up the soil, and when the cottonwoods, alders and maples are gone there is left a soil deep and strong for the truck gardener and general farmer, which will endure successive tillings for ages. At the deltas of the rivers are large reaches of level lands, some of ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... in a deep ravine numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... approaching caravans were overlooked by legionaries brought from Gaul and Britain, quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at the city's southern limit. The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowed through, leaving their deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever- increasing. One quarter, walled off, hummed with foreign traders from as far away as India, who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted the temples, the wine-shops and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, there ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... river. The distance from Baghdad to Basra is about 300 miles, and the area traversed by the Shatt-el-Arab is slowly extending at the rate of a mile every thirty years or so, as a result of the steady accumulation of silt and mud carried down by the Tigris and Euphrates. When Sumeria was beginning to flourish, these two rivers had separate outlets, and Eridu, the seat of the cult of the sea god Ea, which now lies 125 miles inland, was a seaport ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main bottom ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... at its side. The loose filling of the trench should not be carried nearer than within six inches of the surface of the ground, and should be covered with fine and well-packed earth to prevent the entrance of surface-water which would soon carry in silt enough to stop its action. Whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. Concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... Moorish reservoirs the flushing gallery, piercing the lower part of the dam, was closed by iron doors on the down stream face and blocked with timber at the upper end. When required to be flushed out, laborers passed through the gallery and broke down the timber barrier, the silt forming a wall sufficiently thick to resist the pressure of the water for the time being, and allow of the retreat of the Forlorn Hope—if the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... these fissures water was ejected, carrying with it large quantities of sand and silt, and so abundantly that every stream-bed, even though generally dry in summer, was flooded. By the passage of the water, some part of the fissures was often enlarged into a round hole of considerable size, ending in a craterlet at the surface. Certain belts within ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... a fir-tree, a branch of holly, a curled leaf of broccoli, or any other vegetable production, is suspended by one end in a small cylinder of paper which is placed for support within a similarly formed tin case. The finest river silt, carefully separated from all the coarser particles, and mixed with water, so as to have the consistency of cream, is poured into the paper cylinder by small portions at a time, carefully shaking the plant ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... made it necessary for Japanese to wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a perfect tilth, had been ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... oscillation, which ended in the production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected during a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer. The interval of time may have been very great. But we have no scale on which to ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... perspective. And I must preserve my perspective, for I am studying the Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. I love my Bowery. It was ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of disconnected information—silt bands, crevasses were mentioned. Finally he put the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... consistency to receive it; if the soil is too soft, its several parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, Paul followed as fast as the cumbersome rubber pants would permit. Instead of ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the necessity for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river. Snowy peaks were on every side. Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river was hemmed in by shadowy canons with roaring cascades that compelled frequent portage. Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to lighten the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Banerjea's tales has been won from the sea by alluvial action. Its soil, enriched by yearly deposits of silt, yields abundantly without the aid of manure. A hothouse climate and regular rainfall made Bengal the predestined breeding-ground of mankind; the seat of an ancient and complex civilisation. But subsistence is too easily secured in those fertile ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus. The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous progress to ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... fordable at thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. This spot was probably the scene of the historic ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... Sweeping from west to east, it is deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass of gypsum on the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... that some of you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. The river ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... The main stream of the district is the Virgin, with a drainage area of 11,000 square miles, Muddy River and Santa Clara Creek being its main tributaries. It is a torrential stream, subject to sudden floods and carrying much silt. A section of its valley in the northwestern corner of the present Arizona, near Littlefield, is to be dammed in the near future for the benefit of small farms that have been cultivated for many years and for carrying out irrigation ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... drawing bit. The honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... blasted from the side of the canyon on which they were, and far below, between them and the hoisting house and the mill, ran a clear little mountain stream, undefiled for years by the silt of industry. The peak of the cross, lifting a needle point high above them, as if keeping watch over the Blue Mountains, the far-distant Idaho hills, the near-by forests of Oregon, and the puny, man-made ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the edge. Madeline heard the rattle of loosened gravel and earth sliding into the gully. The wash widened and opened out into a sandy flat. Link crossed this and turned up on the opposite side. Rocks impeded the progress of the car, and these had to be rolled out of the way. The shelves of silt, apparently ready to slide with the slightest weight, the little tributary washes, the boulder-strewn stretches of slope, the narrow spaces allowing no more than a foot for the outside wheels, the spear-pointed ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... the two Rockley girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their lives and disliked ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... adaptation for deposit soils, such as are made by the settling of silt held in solution by waters that overflow. In these it will grow with vigor, though they rest upon coarse sand or even upon gravel not too near the surface. Irrigating waters to some extent are necessary to grow the plants in best form, although, as previously ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... victorious, and is bent on deeds equal to the gods. For I think that neither his strength will defend him, nor his beauty at all, nor those beautiful arms, which shall lie everywhere in the very bottom of my gulf, covered with mud. Himself also will I involve in sand, pouring vast abundant silt around him; nor shall the Greeks know where to gather his bones, so much slime will I spread over him. And there forthwith shall be[683] his tomb, nor shall there be any want to him of entombing, when the Greeks ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... judged upon the principle of opposing most strongly anything that was supposed to find favour with the Government. Last session a strong wish to do SOMETHING caused the Legislature to advocate a scheme which many persons think would cause the mouth of the River Swan to silt up, and expose the town of Fremantle to danger, lest the river in flood should burst out (as no doubt it did formerly) into the South Bay over the town site. The question, however, is referred to the Victorian Government engineer, and the Melbourne Government have been asked to ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with suddenly widened vision beheld the lake's sapphire expanse and the distant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that there was not more than five feet of water over her conning-tower, so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it. And in due time that boat got home with everybody's hair of just ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... opportunities for fishing and trading; for this river, which in the North divides the two states of Vermont and New Hampshire, flows through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where it pours rich deposits of silt into the ocean. ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... block and tackle. When the pile was ready to be sunk, a 2 in iron pipe was let down the centre, and coupled to a force-pump by means of a hose; a jet of water was then forced down this pipe, driving the sand and silt away from below the pile. The pile was then rotated backwards and forwards about a quarter of a turn, by men pulling on the arms; the pile, of course, sank by its own weight, the water-jet driving the sand up through the hollow centre and into the trench, ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... immense peat bog of about twelve square miles in extent. Unlike the bogs or swamps of Cambridge and Lincolnshire, which consist principally of soft mud or silt, this bog is a vast mass of spongy vegetable pulp, the result of the growth and decay of ages. The spagni, or bog-mosses, cover the entire area; one year's growth rising over another,—the older growths not entirely decaying, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... last to the Modern or Superficial Formation, of which the best specimen is the great Bedford level, that spreads over the lower lands of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire, consisting of accumulations of silt, drifted matter, and bog-earth, some of which began before the earliest periods of British history. When these accumulations are removed by artificial means, we find below sometimes shells of recent species, and the remains of an old estuary, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... soon driven by the waves up the shore, and beyond the reach of further wear;[2] and "the rivers carry only silt ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... now the Country's King That, at his beck, the blood for Freedom spilt Shall be accursed, and I, then, for the guilt Of dropping not with thud, as he with ring At Darkness' feet, be shut in mud and silt Forever and with stars, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared of silt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the underground aqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli's Italian word, though this was proving considerably easier than anticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must have anticipated a time when their descendants would ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... been carried out to sea and heaped into a break-water three miles long, which runs out from the Panama or southern end of the Canal, and will check a coast-ways current that might, if uncontrolled, silt up the approach. The Canal is a triumph, not of man's hands, but of machinery. Regiments of steam shovels attack the banks, exhibiting a grotesque appearance of animal intelligence in their behavior. An iron grabber is lowered by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... course and ran along parallel with the coast. Charmian was at the wheel. Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller. A narrow silt of an opening showed up suddenly. Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across. Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did Tehei, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... result was that those soils tired and thinned and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence that had grown up there, for production and prosperity moved inland and west. And another result was that the Potomac estuary itself grew shallower and different with the silt that washed down off the land, and many a tributary bay that once served as harbor for oceangoing ships is now a rich, reedy marsh with a single narrow gut of shoal water wandering down across ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... are in private grounds belonging to Mrs Law. They have probably been created by the action of water, and when discovered were filled with the bones of wild animals (many of them now extinct) embedded in silt, which had been washed into them. In one of them there is now stacked a quantity of these bones, whilst a selection of them is deposited in Taunton Museum. The caves are shown by some of the outdoor servants of the house. Unlike the caves at Cheddar and Burrington, they open upon the ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... life in a single day. Southern streams are not perennial. On the Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in their season. When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of silt and dries the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... filled with the tall graceful plant, named by the Jesuits 'folle avoine,' and by the English 'wild rice.' The long drooping ears filled with very large grains, black outside and white within, shook down their contents into the silt at bottom with every movement which waved their seven-feet stems. Arthur knew it as a noted haunt of wild duck, a cloud of ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... heights they saw the waters Of the Bay of San Francisco Lying crystal-clear and purple. Then no Sacramento River Poured its flood of silt into it, For a range of hills continued, All unbroken, from Diablo To the distant smoking mountain Which is now ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments, obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so completely. For what are all these myths but fragments of that great metaphysic idea, which, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... regions, and then a much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes of water than usual rush into the valley. This continues until it gradually becomes autumn again, the waters grow less, and one day a gray continuous gentle rain spreads over all the valley. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed falls to ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... discharge themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... aquamarine, emerald, etc. The cleavage is parallel to the basal plane. Its lustre is sometimes resinous, sometimes vitreous, and it crystallises in the 2nd (hexagonal) system. It occurs in somewhat long, hexagonal prisms, with smooth, truncated planes, and is often found in granite and the silt brought down by rivers from granite, gneiss, and similar rocks. It is found in Great Britain and in many parts of Europe, Asia, and America, in crystals of all sizes, from small to the weight of several tons. The common kinds are too opaque and colourless to be used as gems and are somewhat ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... affected, a far greater amount of wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, whilst the sand, being heavier, bulk for bulk, and also consisting of grains larger ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... generally prevails that flooding returns to the soil the needed fertility. This may be true if the flooding-water deposits much silt, but if the water be clear it is untrue, and fertilizers or leguminous crops are needed to keep up fertility. Cowpeas replace the lost soil-elements and keep down ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form deposits of great thickness, and of considerable superficial extent. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... the resuscitation of the old waterways of Babylonia. The banks of this channel here take almost a mountainous character for so flat a country. This piling up of mounds has been caused by clearing the silt from the entrance to the intake of ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... miles from Ponce, in a hollow among limestone hills, now environed by a coffee plantation. Here are found three basins—results of erosion, most likely—that are described as natural bath-tubs. The middle and largest of these pools is partly filled with silt, probably occluding the entrance to a cavern which formerly opened into it, a fathom or so below the water-surface. This cave was the hiding-place of a native woman whose father had discovered her love for one of Ponce de Leon's soldiers. He forbade her to have anything to ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... hole, and hurled it up into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... formerly flowed through a fertile valley. During countless ages it has stripped from the plateau and carried into the Gulf of California a deposit of rock waste from the land surface of its basin many feet deep, and abraded billions of tons of material from its channel. All this silt and detritus have served to fill up the northern part of the gulf, the result of the deposit being an immense land area. At length a great bar was formed across the northern part of the gulf, making a sort of inland ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... soil of the Cecil silt loam consists of 12 inches of a light gray or white silt loam. This material is underlain by a subsoil of yellow silt loam slightly heavier than the soil. The type is locally termed "white land," and is closely related to the Penn loam and ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... port, which sea and river have both deserted, is now a city of the dead, a Pompeii above ground, whose avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still. It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the sea: the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires among the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the soil along the lower reaches of the river. River water, impounded for the purpose, provided the means of irrigating an all but rainless desert countryside. Skillful engineering drained the swamps, adding to the cultivable ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... because in the efforts that are now being made to restore some of its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and never once thought of contending with them at their sources, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... square blocks of the warehouses, past the tall chimneys and the docks with their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of Holderness. Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand. Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey gleam on the crests of its furrows. When the grey days come, water and earth and sky are one, and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... a rebellious confederation; but this city was too near the east coast—an impossible position for a pioneer of Italian dominion. Italy looks west, not east; almost all her natural harbours are on her western side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount of silt carried down by the Tiber, has never been a good one, it is the only port which can be said to command an entrance into the centre of ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... my best belief 'Twas almost anything but brief— A wide survey, in which the earth Was seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom Lighted the heavy-curtained room. Hypatia—ah, what lovely ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... gentleness; the subduing force Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course Gliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt, Impetuous, o'er Himalah's rifted side, To ravage blind and wide, And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;— Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea In tranquil ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... quail fluttered along the hillside under the stately surveillance of the mother bird. Wild cats prowled boldly on the southern slopes. Cotton-tails huddled beneath the greasewood brush and nibbled at the grasses. The canon stream ran clear again now that the storm-washed silt had settled. On the peaks the high winds were cold and cutting, but on the slopes and in the valleys the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... spot the boys betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the tide ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall and vinegar ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... its advocates do not mean splashing and lifting the feet above the surface, sending the water hither and yon on to the banks, into the pools, with the soil of silt or mud or fine gravel from the bottom, polluting the stream many yards ahead, and causing every fish to scurry to the shelter of a hole in the bank or under a shelving rock. They intend that the rodster ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... flood refers to the valley of the Nene and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats. So I went ashore with three or four Malays, and the Old Boy's time we had poking in and out over the silt to find fairway, even for the gig. At last we could make round toward a little clearing in the bamboos, with a big canary tree in the middle. All was going well, when suddenly the mate grunted, pointing dead ahead. That man Sidin has the most magnificent ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... of the Arizona "desert" is not barren sand, but fertile silt and adobe, needing only water to make of it the best possible soil for farming purposes. Favored by a mild winter climate the Salt River Valley can be made to produce crops of some kind each month in the year—fruits ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... rose higher, leaving a damp hollow behind it where ice-plants grew green and rank; and as he crept along the thunder of his exhaust started tons of sliding silt. His wheels raced and burrowed as he struck a soft spot, and then abruptly they sank. He dug them out carefully and backed away, but a mound of drifted sand barred his way. Twist and turn as he would he could not get around it and at last he climbed to its summit. The sun was ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... foundation—still less a foundation of Dionysius I. of Syracuse. Imported vases of the second half of the 5th century B.C. prove the existence of trade with Greece at that period; and the town was famous in Aristotle's day for a special breed of fowls. Even at that period, however, the silt brought down by the rivers rendered access to the harbour difficult, and the historian Philistus excavated a canal to give free access to the sea. This was still open in the imperial period, and the town, which was a municipium, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Nile a turbid convection was taking place, as if the river silt had been stirred up, but the fuming current was assuming a dull red tinge. The action had been rapid. Already the stain had predominated, streaks of clear water, only here and there, clarifying the opaque coloring. The boat rode half its depth in red, the paddle dripped red, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... (Grieving 'twas all she had) the head and neck Of Pentheus massacred. The lake set free Flowed forth in many rivers: to the west Aeas, (18) a gentle stream; nor stronger flows The sire of Isis ravished from his arms; And Achelous, rival for the hand Of Oeneus' daughter, rolls his earthy flood (19) To silt the shore beside the neighbouring isles. Evenus (20) purpled by the Centaur's blood Wanders through Calydon: in the Malian Gulf Thy rapids fall, Spercheius: pure the wave With which Amphrysos (21) irrigates the meads Where once Apollo served: Anaurus (22) flows Breathing no vapour ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... OF STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; and often by placing his ear close to the bottom ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... of this river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... ground should be plowed deep and thoroughly pulverized. Plant the nuts 6 to 12 inches apart in rows about 3 feet apart. Put a handful of the sand from the boxes around each walnut. Our soil will appreciate the sand or silt from the drifts along the valley streams, as it has proven to be one of the best fertilizers known. If anyone doubts this let him try a quantity of it ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... quite as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a half metres of silt and slime,—representative, let us hold, of from five to six thousand years,—rest, you say, on "a foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; I had not even thought of that. But ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... apart from the city on a spit of sand which splays out into two flanges, and so embraces in two hooks a lagoon of scummy ooze, of weeds and garbage, of all the waste and silt of a slack water. In front of it only is the tidal sea, which there flows languidly with a half-foot rise; on the other is the causeway running up to the city wall. Above and all about this dead marsh you hear day and night the buzzing of innumerable great flies, and ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... fathoms deep in what is now The King's Basin and extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... when the river is at its highest level and overflows the banks for miles, it is no pleasure excursion to steer ungainly boats between banks of sand and silt without pilots. On the second day a strong southerly storm arose, and the dangerous waves in the whirlpools of the current capsized many vessels and damaged others. Alexander made for the bank to look for fishermen who might act as pilots, and under their guidance ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... journey to the sea. But Fairchild failed to notice either that or the fact that ancient, age-whitened water wheels had begun to appear here and there, where gulch miners, seekers after gold in the silt of the creek's bed, had abandoned them years before; that now and then upon the hills showed the gaunt scars of mine openings,—reminders of dreams of a day long past; or even the more important fact that in the distance, softened by the mellowing rays of a dying sun, a ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... white-crested roller, higher than the rest. The drenching rains which fall each year have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed. The silt and sediment have filled the valleys which lie between, and made their surface sandy, level and broad. Again the rain has cut wide, deep and constantly-changing channels through this soft deposit; great gutters, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of the ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... in which the McKinster tree is growing, taken at a depth of 6 inches, was tested in July 1950. The results specify that the soil is mostly silt with an average amount of organic matter and that evidence indicates it to contain ashes. The acidity is specified as "neutral", potash "high", and phosphate "low". No mention is made of available nitrogen; however, the dark green color of the leaves and vigorousness of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... has elsewhere fixed between land and water. For the Station which, if I can allow myself an apparent Irishism, is a moveable one, has to be pushed forward almost day by day as the sands of the Volga silt up far beyond the choked-up lands of the Delta, encroaching with a steady inroad on the depths of the waves; the Steppe everywhere widening as the sea dwindles, and suggesting the thought that the whole region that is now Steppe must in remote ages have been sea, and that whatever ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... they decided that Vizcaino's description must have been too highly colored, or else that the Bay of Monterey must, since his time, have been filled up with silt or destroyed by some earthquake. At any rate, the bay between Santa Cruz and the Point of Pines was the only Monterey they could find. According to Washburn, Vizcaino's account was far from a correct one. It was no fault of Portola and Crespi that, after spending a month on its ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... of strange little gully, where the silt had washed down more heavily during the period of erosion than at any other place. Looking up, the boys could see that it afforded a steep but accessible avenue by means of which an agile person could ascend the otherwise impregnable ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... is studded with isolated rocky crags, which are crowned with the ruins of ancient strongholds, and broken by the low hills that border the plain of Issus. The plain is watered by the Cydnus (Tarsus Chai), the Sarus (Sihun) and the Pyramus (Jihun), each of which brings down much silt. The Sarus now enters the sea almost due south of Tarsus, but there are clear indications that at one period it joined the Pyramus, and that the united rivers ran to the sea west of Kara-tash. Such appears to have been the case when Alexander's army crossed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... torrents of water came rolling through the cave. We know this to be so, because in places it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed that they were of a higher form and ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... napping, with his cattle still afield; in which case they had to be driven home over the ice, and numbers were at times “screeved,” i.e., “split up,” in the process, and had to be slaughtered. The fen soil is a mass of decayed vegetation, chiefly moss, interlarded with silt, deposited by the sea, which formerly made its oozy way as far as Lincoln. Large trees of bog oak and other kinds are found in the soil. These, it is supposed, became rotted at their base by the accumulating peat; and the strong south-west winds, prevailing then as they ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... The merchant paid the money and then went home and called his family together and said that they would first improve the tank and then find wives for all his sons. The sons agreed and they collected coolies and drained off the water and began to dig out the silt. When they had drained off the water they found in the bed of the tank a number of big fish of unknown age: which they caught and two of them they sent to the Raja as a present. When the fish were carried into the ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... was hard at work forcing the water back in the caissons, the pulsometer pumps were sucking up streams of water that flowed without ceasing into the settling tank and off into the city sewers, the men in the caissons were sending up buckets full of silt-like gruel. The lawyer watched operations for a few minutes, then he asked for the owners' boring plan. When he had examined this he grunted twice, twitched his lower lip humorously, and said: 'I'll put you out of this. If the owners wanted a deep-water lighthouse they should have specified one—not ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... crews were dressed in the same colour—like our present khaki. These vessels were large open boats rowing twenty oars a side, and also used sails. The very scientifically constructed vessels which have been found in the silt of the Clyde estuary may have been Picts. ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the alkali ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the loose, loamy material usually found in the front chambers of large caverns. It is made up of roof dust, sand, and silt washed from the interior, outside dust and vegetable matter blown in by the wind, with minute amounts of clay or soil ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... was a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting. The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White |
