"Steppe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loving, the diabolically cynical, the crawling, the high-bred, all in a universal salmagundi and lobster nightmare, mixing up the loveliest conceptions with croaking horrors, the eternal aurora with the everlasting nitschewo of the frozen, blinding steppe. Caricature! What ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... second case many desert and steppe-plants are covered with felty hairs, which serve to prevent too rapid evaporation and consequent loss ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... rare and singular wits, as from time to time myght still adde some amendment to the same. Among whom I think there is none that will gainsay, but Master John Lyly hath deservedly moste high commendations, as he hath stept one steppe further therein than any either before or since he first began the wyttie discourse of his Euphues, whose works, surely in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me now. Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams—such beams were brought at that epoch from the Zhizdrin pine forests; there is no trace ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of snow across from the endless, steppe-like plains, dotted here and there with skeleton trees, and lashed the little crowd of human ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Slavs and the slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... fashion), the offices and house-serfs' huts surrounded the manorial house on all sides, and the garden was close to it—a small garden, but containing fine fruit-trees, juicy apples, and pipless pears. The flat steppe of rich, black earth stretched for ten miles round. No lofty object for the eye; not a tree, nor even a belfry; somewhere, maybe, jutting up, a windmill, with rents in its sails; truly, well-named Suhodol, or Dry-flat! Inside the house the rooms were filled with ordinary, simple furniture; ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... melon-field was immersed in gloom, and only the foremost rows of melons shimmered white in the firelight, casting long shadows. The horse stood, snorting, beside the hut, where a bright little fire of dried steppe-grass burnt and crackled. They could hear men talking and women laughing, and one voice, mellow and cheery in ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... behind. Higher up the hill is the museum, in the style of a Grecian temple— circular, and surrounded with columns. The summit of the mountain ends in a fine group of rocks, between which stand some obelisks and monuments, which belong to the old burial-place. The country round is a steppe, covered with artificial earth-mounds, which make the graves of a very remote period. Besides the Mithridates, there is no hill or mountain to ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... all travel was on foot or on horseback. The wealthy and noble rode, the poor footed it. Great highways cut Europe from end to end; though there were tracts in Stanislaus' country where the roadway was only the broad steppe, where the grasses waved and tossed like the sea, where men were few and their dwellings scattered ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... blue background representing the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays soaring above a golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is a "national ornamentation" ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... are found plentifully in the drift, are now living in a country even more specialised than the African veldt. They are the creatures of the Tartar steppes and the cold plains of Central Asia. Their names are the suslik (a Central Asian prairie dog), the pika, a little steppe hare, and an extremely odd antelope, now found in Thibet. This is a singularly ugly beast with a high Roman nose, and wool almost as thick as that of a sheep when the winter coat is on. It must have been quite common in those parts, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... her heart to Victurnien after first giving her mind to a serious study of him. Any lover who should have caught the glance by which she expressed her gratitude to the Vidame might well have been jealous of such friendship. Women are like horses let loose on a steppe when they feel, as the Duchess felt with the Vidame de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments they are themselves; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, samples of their tenderness in intimacy in this way. It was a guarded glance, nothing was lost between eye and eye; there was ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... bears the vines Among the haunted Apennines. And he who treads the cobbled street To-day in the cold North may meet, Come month, come year, the dusky East, And share the Caliph's secret feast; Or in the toil of wind and sun Bear pilgrim-staff, forlorn, fordone, Till o'er the steppe, athwart the sand Gleam the far gates of Samarkand. The ringing quay, the weathered face Fair skies, dusk hands, the ocean race The palm-girt isle, the frosty shore, Gales and hot suns the wide world o'er Grey North, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the Countess protested. "As for me, I hate your mountains. I was born in the steppe where it is all level—level! Your mountains close me in. I am only here by order of my doctor. Your mountains get on my ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... plain, table-land, face of the country; open country, champaign country^; basin, downs, waste, weary waste, desert, wild, steppe, pampas, savanna, prairie, heath, common, wold^, veldt; moor, moorland; bush; plateau &c (level) 213; campagna^; alkali flat, llano; mesa, mesilla [U.S.], playa; shaking prairie, trembling prairie; vega [Sp.]. meadow, mead, haugh^, pasturage, park, field, lawn, green, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ancient Larissa. Having regard to the readings of the other MSS., there is no doubt that Latmin, the next stage on the way to Aleppo, is the correct name of the place. See M. Hartmann's articles, "Beitraege zur Kenntuis der Syrischen Steppe," Z.D.P.V., vols. XXII and XXIII, 1900 I. Cf. the article on the Boundaries of Palestine and Syria by M. Friedmann, Luncz's Jerusalem, ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... hour, out of the pass through which, skirting the base of Mount Gilead, they had journeyed since leaving Ramoth, the party came upon the barren steppe east of the sacred river. Opposite them they saw the upper limit of the old palm lands of Jericho, stretching off to the hill-country of Judea. Ben-Hur's blood ran quickly, for he knew the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... country pass this time? Walking? The landscape tires the eye In winter by its blank and dim And naked uniformity. On horseback gallop o'er the steppe! Your steed, though rough-shod, cannot keep His footing on the treacherous rime And may fall headlong any time. Alone beneath your rooftree stay And read De Pradt or Walter Scott!(47) Keep your accounts! You'd rather not? Then get mad drunk or wroth; ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Europe, a state of chaos existed and the separate tribes fought with one another constantly and for the most petty reasons. Mutual depredations were possible owing to the absence of mountain ranges; there were no natural barriers against sudden attack. The openness of the steppe made the people war-like. But this very openness made it possible later for Guedimin's pagan hosts, fresh from the fir forests of what is now White Russia, to make a clean sweep of the whole country between Lithuania and Poland, and thus give ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... from beginning to end; that moral and providential kingdom of God, which rules over the destiny of every kingdom, every nation, every tribe, every family, nay, over the destiny of each human being; ay, of each horde of Tartars on the furthest Siberian steppe, and each group of savages in the furthest island of the Pacific; rendering to each man according to his works, rewarding the good, punishing the bad, and exterminating evildoers, even wholesale and seemingly without discrimination, when the measure of their iniquity ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... budo, stalo. stammer : balbuti. stamp : stampi; posxtmarko; piedfrapi. starch : amelo. starling : sturno. state : stato; Sxtato; esprimi, diri, aserti. station : stacio, stacidomo. steak : bifsteko. steel : sxtalo. steep : kruta; trempi. steer : direkti, piloti. step : sxtupo; pasxi. steppe : stepo. steward : intendanto. stick : bastono, glui,(—"bills") afisxi. stiff : rigida. still : kvieta; ankoraux, tamen. stimulate : stimuli. sting : piki. stipulate : kondicxi. stock : provizi. stocks : rentoj. stocking : ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... This immense chain of mountains, which has never even been named, stretches from the fifty-first to the sixtieth degree of latitude in one almost continuous ridge, and at last breaks off abruptly into the Okhotsk Sea, leaving to the northward a high level steppe called the "dole" or desert, which is the wandering ground of the Reindeer Koraks. The central and southern parts of the peninsula are broken up by the spurs and foot-hills of the great mountain range into deep sequestered valleys of the wildest ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... and at early dawn the old woman took her distaff, and drove the straw ox out into the steppe to graze, and she herself sat down behind a hillock, and began spinning ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... to civilize and instruct them, but without success. One missionary pursued the work so far as to feed and clothe the children, and collect them for instruction, which they received for a while, but all at once and with one consent it was at an end. When I see the Tartar galloping over the steppe as if riding on the wind, it constantly makes me think of the wild Arabs. When we are anxious to find a well of water where we may take our meal, and when we see travellers assembled to water their cattle and flocks, and the camels running loose on the steppes—which they do ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... them. It is beautiful even to watch a fine horse gallop, the long stride, the rush of the wind as he passes—my heart beats quicker to the thud of the hoofs, and I feel his strength. Gladly would I have the strength of the Tartar stallion roaming the wild steppe; that very strength, what vehemence of soul-thought would accompany it. But I should like it, too, for itself. For I believe, with all my heart, in the body and the flesh, and believe that it should be increased and made more beautiful by every means. I believe—I do more than think—I believe it ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... difficult to discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and blood-lust) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic—a pathos which recalls Balzac's Pere Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding—than The End of the Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... boundary formed by the deep trough of the Jordan, we find a very different country. It rises abruptly from the Jordan Valley, and is in itself a plateau. It is at first fertile, but, at distances ranging from 40 to 60 miles inland, it merges into steppe and then into sheer desert. Thus it is a country apart, difficult of access from Jerusalem and Western Palestine, more easy of access from Damascus or from Arabia. Through it, from north to south, runs the Hejaz railway, on ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... slightly modified forms such as Dara, Maidari (Tara, Maitreya). The same practice is found in the old Uigur translations. See Bibl. Buddh. XII. Tisastvustik. For an interesting account of contemporary Lamaism in Mongolia see Binstead, "Life in a Khalkha Steppe Monastery," J.R.A.S. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... steamer and with the fading lights of Cape Town, while the memory of the exhilarating air, the freedom, the stirring adventure lurking in every dip and donga of that wind-swept, sun-dried, war-racked expanse of steppe, will live with us for ever. Who can forget those autumn mornings, when the horse, influenced by the same exhilaration as his rider, races across the spongy soil; playfully shies at a half-hidden ant-heap; with cat-like ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... for the gratification of her ever-raging appetite. She has several young and handsome daughters whom she keeps in a deep well beneath her izbushka or cabin, which has neither door nor window, and stands upon the wildest part of the steppe upon crow's feet and is continually turning round. Whenever Baba Yaga meets a person she is in the ...
— The Story of Yvashka with the Bear's Ear • Anonymous
... broken down; but the carriages, like those of most Russian railways, were beautifully warmed, and we slept soundly, undisturbed by the howling of the wind and shouting of railway officials. When I awoke, we were swiftly rattling through the dreary monotonous steppe country that separates Tiflis from ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... rectangular territory of two thousand ells square should be measured off as pasture for the Levites around each city (which at the same time is itself regarded only as a point; Numbers xxxv. 4) might, to speak with Graf, be very well carried out perhaps in a South Russian steppe or in newly founded townships in the western States of America, but not in a mountainous country like Palestine, where territory that can be thus geometrically portioned off does not exist, and where it is by no means left to arbitrary legal enactments to determine what pieces ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Terek, from which it is separated by a dense forest. On one side of the road which runs through the village is the river; on the other, green vineyards and orchards, beyond which are seen the driftsands of the Nogay Steppe. The village is surrounded by earth-banks and prickly bramble hedges, and is entered by tall gates hung between posts and covered with little reed-thatched roofs. Beside them on a wooden gun-carriage stands an unwieldy cannon captured by the ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... to south, while intervening valleys invite the introduction of telegraphs and roads. The Pacific coast of Russian America is mainly level. The portion of Siberia which lies between East Cape and the head of the Sea of Okhotsk is, for a large extent, a steppe or plain, with gentle elevations occasionally rising into mountainous ridges. At the head of the Sea of Okhotsk a range of mountains must be crossed; and the region lying between that range and the mouth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the passing equipage, at the long strips of turf between the cultivated sections, overgrown with artemisia, wormwood, and wild tansy; he gazed ... and that fresh, fertile nakedness and wildness of the steppe, that verdure, those long hillocks, the ravines with stubby oak bushes, the grey hamlets, the flexible birch-trees,—this whole Russian picture, which he had not seen for a long time, wafted into his soul sweet and, at the same time, painful sensations, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... waved his hands and ran into the yard. Shiryaev's house stood alone on a ravine which ran like a furrow for four miles along the steppe. Its sides were overgrown with oak saplings and alders, and a stream ran at the bottom. On one side the house looked towards the ravine, on the other towards the open country, there were no fences nor hurdles. Instead there were farm-buildings ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... off into outlying country, to the steppe. For some ten miles you make your way over cross-roads, and here at last is the high-road. Past endless trains of waggons, past wayside taverns, with the hissing samovar under a shed, wide-open gates and a well, from one hamlet to another; across endless fields, alongside green hempfields, a long, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... the Altai to the Caspian. This occupation was limited to a line of outposts along the Ural, the Irtish, and in the intervening district. During Catharine's reign the frontier nomads became reduced in numbers, by the departure from the steppe between the Ural and Volga of the Calmucks, who fled into Djungaria, and were nearly destroyed on ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... species, which inhabits Siberia, measures about twelve centimetres in length, but during summer and autumn Voles accomplish an amount of work which is surprising having regard to their size. The moment having arrived to think about winter, the Voles spread themselves about the steppe. Each hollows little pits around the roots he wishes to extract. After having bared them he cleans them while still in position, so as not to encumber his storehouses with useless earth. This preparatory labour having been completed, he divides the root into slices of a weight ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... to the same port infected the cattle of the East Riding of Yorkshire, but this outbreak was checked before much damage had been done, and since 1877 there has been no trace of this dreaded disease in the kingdom. The cattle plague, rinderpest, or steppe murrain, is said[659] to have first appeared in England in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, and reappeared in 1714, when it came from Holland, but did little damage, being chiefly confined to the neighbourhood of London. The next outbreak was in 1745, and lasted ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... the aspect of the landscape changed; we entered a rolling prairie, quite low, marshy, bare as a Russian steppe, and extending on both sides of the road; the sound of the wheels on the causeway assumed a hollow and vibrating sonority; dark-colored reeds and tall, unhealthy-looking grass covered, as far as the eye could reach, the blackish surface of the marsh. I noticed in the ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... pieces. And assone as thei espie the beaste, thei come costing together rounde aboute and enclose her. And when euery manne hath throwen his darte, or shotte his arrowe: whilest the beast is troubled and amased with the stripes, thei steppe in to her and slea her. Thei neither vse breade ne bakyng: table clothe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... ancient city, a citadel girdled with high ramparts and a succession of long porticos extending over fifteen hundred yards. Running over a few embankments, necessitated by the inequalities of the sandy ground, the train reaches the horizontal steppe. ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... stirring population of human beings on it during the Magdalenian cold. We may, with many of the authorities, look to this temperate and fertile region for the slight advance made by early Neolithic man beyond his predecessor. As the cold relaxed, and the southern fringe of dreary steppe w as converted once more into genial country, the race would push north. There is evidence that there were still land bridges across the Mediterranean. From Spain and the south of France this early Neolithic race ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... continue on to the bluffs rising beyond, and ascend these through a lateral ravine, the channel of a watercourse—which affords a practicable pass to the plain. On reaching its summit they behold a steppe to all appearance; illimitable, almost as sterile as Saara itself. Treeless save a skirting of dwarf cedars along the cliff's edge, with here and there a motte of black-jack oaks, a cluster of cactus plants, or a solitary yucca of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... were, still did not understand. "Tell me why it is those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss? Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don't they feed ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more to see her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen her every day until then, but he could no longer do it. He could not, any more than a man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the mist and taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has once recognized it to be a tuft of grass. She was terribly close to him. She already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any barrier ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland in which our spirits have, from the beginning, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... these two places. I had to give up the intention however on account of the great difficulty attending the journey and the little fruit that it promised. In that country they travel only with small vehicles drawn by great dogs. For the steppe is covered with ice, and the feet of men or the shoes of horses would slip, whereas the dogs having claws their paws don't slip upon the ice. The only travellers across this wilderness are rich merchants, each of whom owns about 100 of these vehicles, which are loaded with meat, drink, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... gives relief to the whole picture. Efface one and you efface the other. Originality is made up of such things. Genius is necessarily uneven. There are no high mountains without deep ravines. Fill up the valley with the mountain and you will have nothing but a steppe, a plateau, the plain of Les Sablons instead of the Alps, swallows and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... II. The Kirghiz Steppe. This is a country of plains, unfit for agriculture and still inhabited by nomads who live in tents and wander with their flocks over the 755,793 square miles of territory. They are divided into three hordes or families, one of which surrendered to Anne Ivanovna in 1734. In 1869 the Kirghiz, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... misdirected industry, which is seen vigorously thrashing mere straw, there can nothing defensive be said. In so far as the Germans are chargeable with such, let them take the consequence. Nevertheless, be it remarked, that even a Russian steppe has tumuli and gold ornaments; also many a scene that looks desert and rock-bound from the distance, will unfold itself, when visited, into rare valleys. Nay, in any case, would Criticism erect not only finger-posts ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... masse on the morrow, for my sowl, Mr. Kneysworth's sowl, my lady sowl, and al Christen sowls." One George Wyngar, by his will, dated September 13, 1521, ordered to be buried in the church of Woolchurch, "besyde the Stocks, in London, under a stone lying at my Lady Wyngar's pew dore, at the steppe comyng up to the chappel. Item. I bequeath to pore maids' mariages L13 6s. 8d; to every pore householder of this my parish, 4d. a pece to the sum of 40s. Item. I bequeath to the high altar of S. Nicolas Chapel L10 for an altar-cloth of velvet, with my name brotheryd thereupon, with ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the huge steppe, covered with waving grass and gleaming with a vivid green in the sun, stretched away as level and as unbroken as the sea, to the eastern horizon. Simon Melas stared ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or after the first in time, it suits me to speak of him in second place—was the man who was the potential ancestor of the whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making it draw—presumably by its tail—a fashion which endured long in Ireland, and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century. A great aristocrat ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... are nearly always found in Tells, or artificial mounds, which are the sites of ancient towns or temples. The surrounding plain for a distance of several hundred yards out, whether steppe-desert or untilled land, will usually be found to be productive of antiquities, either a few inches or few feet deep or, in the case of the dessert, actually lying upon the surface. These are usually the result of rainstorms washing out antiquities from the tell itself. Each tell or ganglion ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... forms the most extensive forest in the world, this flower-steppe forms the world's greatest cultivable field, in all probability unequalled in extent and fertility. Without manure and with an exceedingly small amount of labour expended on cultivation, man will year by year draw forth from its black soil the most abundant harvests. For the present, however, this ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... whenever some quick and sure hop test shall have been found, appearance and aroma will still be most important factors in any estimate of the value of hops. Here a question arises as to whether hops from a warm or even a steppe climate, like that of South Russia, contain the same proportion of ethereal oil—that is, of aroma—as those from a cooler climate, like Bavaria and Bohemia, or like certain other fruit species ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... Diademe on his head: our men being placed ouer against him, sit downe: in the middes of the roome stoode a mightie Cupboord vpon a square foote, whereupon stoode also a round boord, in manner of a Diamond, broade beneath, and towardes the toppe narrowe, and euery steppe rose vp more narrowe then another. Vpon this Cupboorde was placed the Emperours plate, which was so much, that the very Cupboord it selfe was scant able to sustaine the waight of it: the better part of all the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... phantom, who is described as hurrying along the puszta, or steppe, in a mortar, pounding with a pestle at a tremendous rate, and leaving a long trace on the ground behind her with her tongue, which is three yards long, and with which she seizes any men and horses coming in her way, swallowing them down into her capacious ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... which this cavern occurs is a small green oasis on the undulating steppe, lying on a vast bed of rock-salt, which extends over an area of two versts in length, and a mile in breadth, with a thickness of more than 100 feet. When the thin cover of red sand and marl is removed, the white salt is exposed, and is found ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... Many of the wives started off immediately in pursuit of their errant husbands, and it took the Government a considerable time and much trouble to reclaim them from their fruitless quests along the banks of the Oxus, the Gobi Desert, the Orenburg steppe, and other outlandish places. One of them, I believe, is still lost ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... more, it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... manhood he could bear any amount of cold, heat, hunger, thirst, or fatigue. Like the Yakout of the northern countries, he was made of iron. He could go four-and-twenty hours without eating, ten nights without sleeping, and could make himself a shelter in the open steppe where others would have been frozen to death. Gifted with marvelous acuteness, guided by the instinct of the Delaware of North America, over the white plain, when every object is hidden in mist, or even in higher latitudes, where the polar night is prolonged ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... 4,900,429. The tributary states are noticed separately below. The Chota Nagpur plateau is an offshoot of the great Vindhyan range, and its mean elevation is upwards of 2000 ft. above the sea-level. In the W. it rises to 3600 ft., and to the E. and S. its lower steppe, from 800 to 1000 ft. in elevation, comprises a great portion of the Manbhum and Singhbhum districts. The whole is about 14,000 sq. m. in extent, and forms the source of the Barakhar, Damodar, Kasai, Subanrekha, Baitarani, Brahmani, Ib and other rivers. Sal forests abound. The principal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... dense throng; they crowd together, grow and increase; new marvels! They gain curved necks, send forth manes, shoot out rows of legs, and over the vault of the skies they fly like a herd of chargers across the steppe. All are white as silver; they have fallen into confusion; suddenly masts grow from their necks, and from their manes broad sails; the herd changes into a ship, and majestically floats slowly and quietly across the blue ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... but forbeare your food a little while: Whiles (like a Doe) I go to finde my Fawne, And giue it food. There is an old poore man, Who after me, hath many a weary steppe Limpt in pure loue: till he be first suffic'd, Opprest with two weake euils, age, and hunger, I ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... reconciliation, the gates were closed by command of the magistracy, all the Romans residing in Asculum were put to death, and their property was plundered. The revolt ran through the peninsula like the flame through the steppe. The brave and numerous people of the Marsians took the lead, in connection with the small but hardy confederacies in the Abruzzi—the Paeligni, Marrucini, Frentani, and Vestini. The brave and sagacious Quintus Silo, already mentioned, was here the soul of the movement. The Marsians were the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... logs by the shed and began gazing at the wide deserted river. From the high bank a broad landscape opened before him, the sound of singing floated faintly audible from the other bank. In the vast steppe, bathed in sunshine, he could just see, like black specks, the nomads' tents. There there was freedom, there other men were living, utterly unlike those here; there time itself seemed to stand still, as though the age of Abraham and his ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays above a soaring golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is a "national ornamentation" ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... own matchless horses, are carried across the open border with as much facility as the drifts of desert sand so much dreaded by travellers. The rest of the country is left to nature's own devices and, wherever it is not cut up by mountains or rocky ranges, offers the well-known twofold character of steppe-land: luxuriant grassy vegetation during one-third of the year and a parched, arid waste the rest of the time, except during the winter ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... fifteen years before when his brother Nicolai died. Then he fell ill and conjectured the presence of the complaint that killed his brother—consumption. He had constant pain in his chest and side. He had to go and try to cure himself in the Steppe by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure himself. Formerly these recurrent attacks of spiritual or physical weakness were cured in him, not by any mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his vitality, its exuberance ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... after having studied the facts most thoroughly, I find in them a direct proof of the creation of all these species. It must not be forgotten that the genus Anguis belongs to Europe, the Ophisaurus to North America, the Pseudopus to Dalmatia and the Caspian steppe, the Sepo to Italy, etc. Now, I ask how portions of the earth so absolutely distinct could have combined to form a continuous zoological series, now so strikingly distributed, and whether the idea of this development could have started from any other source than a creative ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... by nature, and the life he was made to lead by circumstances. And all this was the result in the first instant of a girl's caprice, of her fancy for another man, so little different from himself that a Western woman could hardly have told the two apart. For this, he had left the steppe, had wandered westward to the Dnieper and southward to Odessa, northward again to Kiew, to Moscow, to Nizni-Novgorod, back again to Poland, to Krakau, to Prague, to Munich at last. Who could remember his wanderings, or trace the route of his endless journeyings? Not ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... Count von Tottleben, rode by the side of the officer of the Cossacks. He pranced his pony about, and was cheerful and jolly like his comrades, the merry sons of the steppe. As they reached the gate they halted their horses, and gazed with evident pleasure on the desert, wild, sandy plain, which stretched ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... vigorous; of good blood and strong brain; turbulent somewhat in the pride of their strength, and intractable in the force of their native powers; wanting polish, wanting consideration, wanting docility, but sound, spirited, and true-bred as the eagle on the cliff or the steed in the steppe. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... thy sweet love, my only blessedness, Swayed by Boris? Nay, nay. Indifferently I now regard his throne, his kingly power. Thy love—without it what to me is life, And glory's glitter, and the state of Russia? On the dull steppe, in a poor mud hut, thou— Thou wilt requite me for ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... with it some portion of his wasted strength; and that if death should overtake him with his labor uncompleted his name and memory must perish from the world. So, like one who flies across a Russian steppe pursued by starving wolves, Gabriel sped on his task, seeking to out-distance the grim and noiseless wolf that followed ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... some ancient sea. Occasional oases of life appeared here and there, a few wheat-fields and a wretched mud-built village, or a picturesque scene of smoke-browned tents, gayly dressed nomads, and grazing flocks and herds. At night we had passed through a grassy steppe, a facsimile of the rolling prairies of the West. Though but the 6th of June, the country was parched, and the grass dried, as it stood, into hay by the heat and drought. We saw at one point a wide sweep of flame that set the darkening ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... guage they had one / & nothyng was diffe- rent / for bothe Tuscains & Romains were [C.v.v] all of Italye / as in tymes past / Englande hathe had many kynges / though the lan- guage & people were on. And thus beynge in doubt whether of them he myght steppe vnto / by chaunce he strake the chaunceller in stede of the kynge / and slew hym / wher- fore whan he was taken and brought be- fore the kynge / for to punysshe his hande that had failed in takyng one for an other / and agayn to shew the kynge how litle he cared for his menaces ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... Lavretsky went out into the garden, and was well pleased with it. It was all overgrown with steppe grass, with dandelions, and with gooseberry and raspberry bushes; but there was plenty of shade in it, a number of old lime-trees growing there, of singularly large stature, with eccentrically ordered branches. ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... this impassible country of the Meuse and the Argonne lies the plain of Champagne-Pouilleuse, which is almost a steppe, bare and open, only slightly undulating, overgrown with heath, and studded here and there by small copses of planted firs, naught but a small portion of the whole being under cultivation. Between the Forest of the Argonne ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... velvet purse, which was halfe put vnder his girdle: which I warrant you the resolute fellow that would not depart without some thing, had quicklye espyed. A game, quote hee to his fellows, marke the stand, and so separating themselves walked aloofe, the Gentleman going to the nether steppe of the staires that ascend vp into the Quire, and there he walked still with his client. Oft this crew of mates met together, and said there was no hope of nipping the bong because he held open his gowne so wide, and walked in ...
— The Third And Last Part Of Conny-Catching. (1592) - With the new deuised knauish arte of Foole-taking • R. G.
... not bear to say, "Sail forth, my mariners, and slay The liegemen of my foe." Meanwhile on Russian steppe and lake Are women weeping for the sake Of them ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Province of Samara, in Russia, at the request of Dr. Asher (son of the great Berlin publisher) who farmed for some years in the province. The specimen marked Kubanka is a very valuable kind, but which keeps true only when cultivated in fresh steppe-land in Samara, and in Saratoff. After two years it degenerates into the variety Saxonica, or its synonym Ghirca. The latter alone is imported into this country. Dr. Asher says that it is universally known, and he has himself witnessed the fact, that if grain of the Kubanka is sown ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... wildly sweeping Past the cliffs, so swift and strong; Like a tempest is his weeping, Flies his spray like tears along. O'er the steppe now slowly veering— Calm but faithless looketh he— With a voice of love endearing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... black reveries; for he was in the throes of his second severe attack of "Tosca"—the Herzeleide of the Russians: that national melancholy, borne of barren steppe and dreary waste, to which every giant intellect that race has known, has sooner or later become a prey, from the great Peter down to the littlest Romanoff; and from which more than the first Alexander ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ever-fresh tribes of gaudy flowers. Behind us, dark: lines of living beings streamed down the mountain slopes; around us, dark lines crawled along the plains—westward, westward ever. Who could stand against us? We met the wild asses on the steppe, and tamed them, and made them our slaves. We slew the bison herds, and swam broad rivers on their skins. The Python snake lay across our path; the wolves and wild dogs snarled at us out of their coverts; we slew them and went on. The forests rose ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... point, but of a district. It literally means 'the dry,' and is applied to the arid stretch of land between the more cultivated southern parts of Canaan and the northern portion of the desert which runs down to Sinai. It is a great chalky plateau, and might almost be called a steppe or prairie. Passing through this, the explorers next would come to Hebron, the first town of importance, beside which Abraham had lived, and where the graves of their ancestors were. But they were in no mood ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... mine at Chal, S.E. or S.S.E. of Talikan and within the same province. There are also mines of rock-salt near the famous "stone bridge" in Kulab, north of the Oxus, and again on the south of the Alai steppe. (Papers by Manphul and by Faiz Baksh; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa |
