"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drowned. The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination by whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence. Besides, the children's kindred ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... with droughts, and winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms—he had lived so long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature, that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he must remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... voiceless, trackless Roof of the World, they were met by a desolating wind; the feathered snow-flakes changed to a storm of sleet,—stinging, saturating; and only the knowledge that twenty-four hours delay might mean a blocked pass and another six months of isolation from his kind, induced Lenox to urge his ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen, No more the windows ranged in long array (Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between Thick ivy twines) ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... your guide, your mentor, we shall go forth into the open, to seek out the bosky dell; to pierce the wildwood tangle; to penetrate the trackless wilderness. Our tents shall be spread alongside the purling brook, hard by some larger body of water. There, in my mind's eye, I see us as we practise archery and the use of the singlestick, both noble sports and much favoured by the early Britons. There we cull the flowers of the ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... little ribbon of gold, what shall I do with thee? Shall I cast thee from me, and bid farewell with longing eyes, as the mariner bids adieu to the last low streak of misty land ere he launches out on the trackless deep? or shall I wear thee on my breast, hid from the vulgar gaze, in memory of whom—of whom? Saronia? Perchance 'twas her! It shall remain. It cannot harm, and shall be near me until I ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... band of explorers led by Captain Fremont as day after day they made their way across what was then a trackless waste, and see what troubles they encountered because of the inaccuracy of the maps of ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... by her toe: or,—had my staff and self been here ten days ago, we could have already got well forward with our plans and orders, as well as with the laying of our hands upon the thousand odds and ends demanded by the invasion of a barren, trackless extremity of an Empire—odds and ends never thought of by anyone until the spur of reality brought them galloping to the front. Then the moment the Fleet cried off, we might have had a dash in, right away, with what we have here. The onslaught could have been supported from Egypt and the 29th ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... is nothing in the empty space between the Sun and Mercury with which time is at all concerned. Far less is there meaning in time wherever the spirits of men are under stress. A few minutes' bombardment in a trench, a few hours in a battle, a few weeks' travelling in a trackless country; these minutes, these hours, these weeks can ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... among nomadic tribes, the hunters whose courage coped victoriously with the wild and ferocious denizens of the forest became the idols of those who witnessed and were preserved by such sylvan exploits. When men came at length to venture in ships over the trackless deep in pursuit of commerce and its gains, the mariner grew important in [195] public estimation. The pursuit of commerce and its gains led naturally to the possession of wealth. This, from the ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... To plough the tide where wintry tempests roar? Or shall a youth approach their hallow'd fane, Stranger to Phoebus, and the tuneful train? Far from the Muses' academic grove 'Twas his the vast and trackless deep to rove; Alternate change of climates has he known, And felt the fierce extremes of either zone: Where polar skies congeal the eternal snow, Or equinoctial suns for ever glow, 50 Smote by the freezing, or the scorching blast, 'A ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,' ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... he thought; night would bring the journey to an end, and then he should know all. So he did not follow the skipper, but kept his seat, while a great many shadowy forebodings crept into his heart, and he began to look back over the trackless waste which they had come, and wish, almost, that he was back in dear old Hastings—in the old home where papa and he had spent so many happy hours—and that Culm Rock was a myth. The sun rose royally up to noon, ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... He dreamt that an evil spirit, with a face he knew but could not name, was pursuing him over trackless mountains. He fled like the wind; but the spirit was close behind him, and wherever he turned his head, he saw the familiar face grinning a devilish mockery. A precipice lay before him. He leapt wildly, and knew at once that he had ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... lay due north, away from the lake, across trackless fields covered with round basaltic stones. The Kurd's horse was a better one than ours, and it was all we could do to keep him in sight. The sun was hot. What would it have been on those hills in midsummer? We threw off our heavy coats, that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... oblivion of that time in those distant regions. The men who went out to the North-west as voyageurs and servants in the employment of the rival companies from Canada and from Scotland hardly ever returned to their native lands. The wild roving life in the great prairie or the trackless pine forest, the vast solitudes of inland lakes and rivers, the chase, and the camp-fire had too much of excitement in them to allow the voyageur to return again to the narrow limits of civilization. Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife, and although ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... whose conquest is not conquered again, into whose conquest no one in this world enters, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the trackless? ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... there will generally not be much difficulty in obtaining a certain amount of information as to this 6 or 12 months in advance. But inasmuch as total eclipses of the Sun, and often the best of them, are visible only in uncivilised countries or over trackless wastes, the problem becomes a complicated and anxious one. In such cases it is exceedingly desirable, where competent observers (including money) are available, that preliminary notes of weather should be made for a year or even two years in advance. There is in one sense no difficulty ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... sparse settlement, soon opened up the greater part of the Americas south of the latitude of the present city of San Francisco. Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness, only a few were financially repaying; the majority were a drain on the resources of the mother country. In every place where the Spaniard set foot the native quailed and, after at most one desperate ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... great In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart! Confusion but more dark confusion bred, Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said, 'Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled, No sign upon the forehead of the skies, No beacon, and no chart Are given to him, and the inscrutable world But mocks his scars and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... with their lengthened labours, past long plains of stone and sand, Down those trackless wilds they wandered, travellers from a far-off land, Seeking now to join their brothers, struggling on with faltering feet, For a glorious work was finished, and a noble task complete. And they dreamt of welcome faces—dreamt that soon unto their ears ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the bare mountain-tops loomed bleakly through the piles of cloudy haze. White waves curled dismally at the base of the Pao de Assucar, and the weird shrieks of the sea-gulls on the rocks that jutted around it made the dreariness more desolate. Far out in the trackless waste the sky lowered gloomily over the weary waters. Fit emblem of her path through life—dark was the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... entirely unexplored. Except that the direction was west, he had no knowledge whatever. He had often inquired of the shepherds, but they were perfectly ignorant. Anker's Gate was the most westerly of all their settlements, which chiefly extended eastwards. Beyond Anker's Gate was the trackless forest, of which none but the Bushmen knew anything. They did not understand what he meant by a map; all they could tell him was that the range of mountainous hills continued westerly and southerly for an unascertained distance, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... several tumuli of stones, more than eight feet high, evidently placed to direct the caravans over the trackless portions of Sahara. I wonder what the people of Europe will say when I tell them, that The Desert—pictured in such frightful colours by the ancients, as teeming with monsters and wild beasts, and every unearthly and uncouth ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... with his great machete and uncovered a dim trail, which led to a ramshackle, thatch-covered hut a few yards beyond. It was the tumbled vestige of a shelter which Don Nicolas had erected years before while hunting wild pigs through this trackless region. An hour later the little group lay asleep on the damp ground, wrapped in the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... good, is it heaven's will as that is. Is that a good war, which against the emperor Thou wagest with the emperor's own army? O God of heaven! what a change is this. Beseems it me to offer such persuasion To thee, who like the fixed star of the pole Wert all I gazed at on life's trackless ocean? O! what a rent thou makest in my heart! The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obediency, Must I pluck life asunder from thy name? Nay, do not turn thy countenance upon me— It always was as a god looking upon me! Duke Wallenstein, its ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... discovering any traces either of the natives or of him. On returning however at sunset, we had the satisfaction to find that he had reached the camp about an hour before us, having during the whole day been unable to find his way back to our camp through the trackless forest. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the Kwadocha there were no human beings. Nothing but the unbroken peace of the mountains, in which they were safe. He had ceased to fear their immensity—was no longer disturbed by the thought that in their vast and trackless solitude he might lose himself forever. After what had passed, their gleaming peaks were beckoning to him, and he was confident that he could find his way back to the Finley and down to Hudson's Hope. What a surprise it would ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Adam and Eve in general, but in particular she claimed descent from those ancient heroes of the Northland, the Vikings. These daring rovers of the seas were really a right jolly set of men. In their small galleys they roamed the trackless seas, undaunted alike by the terrors of the hurricane as by the perils of unknown shores. On whatever coast they chanced—finding it inhabited, they landed, fought off the men and captured their women. They sacked ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... fire of tamarack, and we lay before it on a couch of spruce boughs and ate tough boiled venison and drank the broth; and, feeling we had made some progress, we were happy, despite the fact that we were in the midst of a trackless wilderness with our way to Michikamau and the Indians as uncertain ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... passed and a generation of men have come and gone since the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer Beaver, whose sale was chronicled yesterday, floated with the tide down the River Thames, through the British Channel, and went out into the open, trackless sea, rounded Cape Horn, clove the placid waters of the Pacific Ocean, and anchored at length, after a passage that lasted one hundred and sixty-three days, at Astoria on the Columbia River, then the chief 'town' on the Pacific Coast. ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... Persians, and to the history of Cyrus. After spending some time in these countries, he went on by land still further to the eastward, into the heart of Asia. The country of Scythia was considered as at "the end of the earth" in this direction. Herodotus penetrated for some distance into the almost trackless wilds of this remote land, until he found that he had gone as far from the great center of light and power on the shores of the AEgean Sea as he could expect the curiosity of his countrymen to follow him. He passed thence round toward the north, and came down through the countries north of the ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... yards. The Battalion spent the next three days in an uneasy reserve, changing their quarters every 24 hours, continuously soaked by the rain, which again fell pitilessly. On 7th October they regained the front line, pulling one another out of the trackless mire as they crawled up through the dripping night, plentifully sprinkled with gas on their way. Next night was even worse; the 7th Worcesters came up to relieve us under shell-fire; most of the guides we sent down to them ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... the three adventurers followed their strange guide in silence through the dense, trackless woods. He walked very rapidly, looking neither to the right nor to the left, finding his way apparently by an intuitive sense of direction. Occasionally he glanced back over his shoulder ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... for some time in the same position, looking fixedly up into the trackless darkness above him, drinking in the sounds which—alternately rising and sinking—still floated round him. The trembling gleam of his lantern fell red and wild upon his livid countenance. His shaggy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... or ten miles, I found my ammunition expended, and not a single blesbok bagged, although at least a dozen must have been wounded. It was now high time to retrace my steps and seek my wagons. I accordingly took a point, and rode across the trackless country in the direction ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, educate them for their pursuits in life. It requires not the same education to hold a plough, or drive an ox, that it does to direct the course of a ship through a trackless sea, or to calculate an eclipse; and what is essential to the one is useless to the other.—But I am wandering away from the purpose of this work. Turning back upon the memories of fifty years ago, and calling up the lives and the histories of men, and women too, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... leaving his master's house, and hid himself in a thick forest, which was at some miles' distance from the city. But here the unhappy man found that he had only escaped from one kind of misery to experience another. He wandered about all day through a vast and trackless wood, where his flesh was continually torn by thorns and brambles; he grew hungry, but could find no food in this dreary solitude! At length he was ready to die with fatigue, and lay down in despair in a large cavern which ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... they crown'd him King, Roving the trackless realms of Lyonnesse, Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn. A horror lived about the tarn, and clave Like its own mists to all the mountain side: For here two brothers, one a king, had met And fought together; ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of the greatest part, 100 pounds, to their mother, on the first eligible opportunity of forwarding it. On our way back we paid a visit to the Bendigo diggings. William here evinced his skill as an explorer by leading us, with the aid of his compass, through a trackless bush, by which we saved a circuit of several miles. At Matthison's hotel, on the Campaspe river, where we halted for the night, an amusing conversation occurred. In the evening there was a great gathering of all nations in the parlour. I undertook to ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... Resht, Tabriz, Meshed, Kerman, and the Persian Gulf port, Bushire. These so-called roads are, however, often mere caravan-tracks, sometimes totally hidden by drifting sand or snow. In the interior of the country the hard sun-baked soil is usually trackless, so that the aid of a "Shagird Chapar," ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... appealed to her, when she stood, all ready for bed in her foolish nightgown—a mere veil of chiffon—becomingly guarded by a Japanese kimono of the softest silk. She visualized the timeless desert outside her tent, the trackless ocean of silence, the uninhabited primitive world. She felt like a queen, travelling in state through a ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... place called the "Buck Pens." Ko-nip-ha-tco said he could. Under his guidance we started in the twilight, the sky covered with clouds. The night which followed was starless, and soon we were splashing through a country which, to my eyes, was trackless. There were visible to me no landmarks. But our Indian, following a trail made by his own people, about nine o'clock brought us to the object of our search. A black mass suddenly appeared in the darkness. It was the pine island we ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... a scene that required familiarity with a border life to be looked on, at any moment, with indifference. The broad, nearly interminable, and seemingly trackless forest lay about them, bounding the view to the narrow limits of the valley, as though it were some straitened oasis amidst an ocean of wilderness. Within the boundaries of the cleared land, objects were less indistinct; though even those nearest and ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... second infancy, Rise in some distant clime, and then, perchance, Some bold adventurer, fill'd with golden dreams, Steering his bark through trackless solitudes, Where, to his wandering thoughts, no daring prow Hath ever ploughed before,—espies the cliffs Of fallen Albion.—To the land unknown He journeys joyful; and perhaps descries Some vestige of her ancient stateliness: Then he, with vain conjecture, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... had been the prospect that, when Richard descended and pursued his trackless way again along the moor, he half doubted whether that fair vision had not been a mere figment of his brain; the more so, since what view there was about him seemed now to contract rather than to expand; the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... was it that I loved so well about my childhood's home? It was the wide and wave-lashed shore, the black rocks crowned with foam! It was the sea-gull's flapping wing, all trackless in its flight, Its screaming note, that welcomed on the fierce and stormy night! The wild heath had its flowers and moss, the forest had its trees, Which, bending to the evening wind, made music in the breeze; But earth,—ha! ha! I laugh e'en now,—earth ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... end of those hard but interesting years in California, rumors drifted to me of golden possibilities in upper Canada, and I decided to try my luck in the new field. The region was, at that time, practically a trackless wilderness, and to brave it at all was considered the limit of folly. That, however, far from deterring me, attracted me only the more. I got together an outfit, and bade a long farewell to even the rough civilization ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... felt she could not endure the confines of that little rock. It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. Surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... in my bosom at such a sight as this are beyond the power of words to express. When I view these immense plains, these mountain tops fading away in the distance, these wild and weird torrents rushing over the rocks, and these trackless forests with often not a human abode in ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... during these weeks was like the face of a man lost in a trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life. Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope. But it was not now with him the mere bewildered grief ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... to muse o'er flood and fell, To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been; To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, With the wild flock that never needs a fold; Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;— This is not solitude; 't is but to hold Converse with nature's charms, and view her ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... as you know, is eastward from Haddon Hall a distance of the fourth part of a mile, and the gate is east of the hill about the same distance or less. A wall is built upon the east line of the Haddon estate, and east of the wall lies a great trackless forest belonging to the house of Devonshire. In olden times there had been a road from Bakewell to Rowsley along the east side of the wall; but before Sir George's seizin the road had been abandoned ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... against the sunset sky or moon I watched that moving zigzag of spread wings In unforgotten Autumns gone too soon, In unforgotten Springs! Creatures of desolation, far they fly Above all lands bound by the curling foam; In misty lens, wild moors and trackless sky These wild things have their home. They know the tundra of Siberian coasts. And tropic marshes by the Indian seas; They know the clouds and night and starry hosts From Crux to Pleiades. Dark flying rune against the western glow— It tells the sweep and loneliness of things, Symbol ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... it is that flourishes where once your rose-trees grew. But you must have learned to study the stars to some purpose before you dare to neglect your roses, and omit to fill the air with their cultivated fragrance. You must know your way through the trackless air, and from thence to the pure ether; you must be ready to lift the bar of the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the fence absorbing the night sounds—the claque of the frogs, the burring of the crickets, the hum of the water on the mill-dam far down the valley, and the occasional call of some human voice, ringing like a golden bell in the hush of the night. It was after nine and the boy was deep in his trackless revery. ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... that was before him, although the poor brute was little aware of it. About sunset an unfortunate emu came to water, and unconsciously approached us so near that Flood shot it with his fusee. This was a solitary wanderer, for we had seen very few either of these birds or kangaroos in these trackless solitudes. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... about this meeting of ours. Miss Barb, my finding you and your friendship is as if I'd been lost at midnight in a trackless forest and had all at once found a road. I only wish"—he gnawed his lip—"I only wish these three last days had come to me years ago. You might have ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... been enforced on them by capital, the stigma of human inferiority is attached to the wage-earners by the legislature. But I must not be led away from my theme by the bitter reflections which arise in one who lives in the Iron Age and knows it is Iron, who feels at times like the lost wanderer on trackless fields of ice, which never melt and will not until earth turns from ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... land, planting corn, and fighting Indians. Sir Benjamin West was President of the Royal Academy while America was still revelling in chromos. The artists who remained chose such objects as Davy Crockett in the trackless forest, or made pictures ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Roblez heartily joined, was still echoing on the air as the two horsemen entered a pass leading through the mountains. It was the depression in the sierra, seen shortly after parting with the Horned Lizard and his band. It was a pass rugged with rock, and almost trackless, here and there winding about, and sometimes continued through canons or clefts barely wide enough to give way to the mules with the loads ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... idea for your lordship's comprehension. I would therefore recommend to you, to make the cracker the model of your conduct. You should snap and bounce at regular intervals; at one moment you should seem a blazing star, and the next be lost in trackless darkness. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... of his mates; was never more bent on following his own views than when all hands grumbled and opposed him; was daring by nature, decided from use and long self-reliance, and was every way a man fitted to steer his bark through the trackless ways of life, as well as those of the ocean. It was fortunate for one in his particular position, that nature had made the possessor of so much self-will and temporary authority, cool and sarcastic rather than hot-headed and violent; and for this circumstance ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... construct military roads and protect harbors of refuge. To appropriations by Congress for such objects no sound objection can be raised. Happily for our country, its peaceful policy and rapidly increasing population impose upon us no urgent necessity for preparation, and leave but few trackless deserts between assailable points and a patriotic people ever ready and generally able to protect them. These necessary links the enterprise and energy of our people are steadily and boldly struggling to supply. All experience affirms that wherever private enterprise will avail it is most wise ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... one of the great railroad kings, not one of your Western bounders, but the real Eastern, New York patriotic brand, one of the brave, daring pioneers who risked all to push great transcontinental railroads through the trackless deserts of the West—with millions furnished by the government—which they dumped into their own pockets while the world was shouting their praises for developing ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... heard this, and resolved at once to go and try and find out where the wretches had buried the captain. We ascertained the direction they had taken and pursued them. We should soon have been at fault in that trackless part of the country, but we fell in with a little negro boy to whom I had been kind on more than one occasion, and he told us that he had followed the men at a distance, and undertook to show us the spot where our countryman ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... discovers a broad space, firm and wellnigh unimpresslonable. The barefooted traveller may walk for miles and be trackless, so tough and elastic the moist sand. It is not an officious thoroughfare, made formal and precise by coarse hands working to plans correct to a hair, but subject to economic deviations of some soulless contractor. It was not laid with the foundation of the earth, and compacted by heat and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... which had once echoed to his father's horn: for miles and miles they extended in trackless mazes of underwood, swamp, and brake; and report already credited them with being ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the little black box with her that I wrote Elsa she had demanded from her husband. Whether she found in it what she wanted no one will ever know. But her death ended one of those strange, feverish life dramas that this trackless desert is always turning up. Next they found Von Minden, alone except for Peter. (You must meet Peter, Papa.) He probably died of heart failure. We don't know how she got the box away from him. Maybe she poisoned him. And next Felicia,—Felicia was exactly as Charley was, Mamma, when she used to ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... The trackless ways are untravelled of sail or bird; The hoar wave hardly recedes from the soundless beach. The silence of instant noon goes nigh to be heard, The viewless void to be visible: all and each, A closure of calm no clamour of storm can breach Concludes and confines and absorbs them on either side, ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... weary way, the Voice replied, A trackless way of danger and of care; And from thy cheek, ere tho the Headland find, The rose will yield its petals to the wind; And from thy heart an adverse cruel tide Will steal the ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outside the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap. But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that great trackless ocean the Eastern Roman history. Now under either shape, this work traverses so much ground, that by mere multiplicity of details it denies to us the opportunity of reporting on its merits with ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... travels have been upon the wide, open prairie, the trackless plain of sand, the frozen lake, the thin scattering woods of the North, or the treeless snow-clad "Barrens." Now we are about to enter a great forest,—a forest where the leaves never fade, where the flowers are always in bloom,—a forest where the woodman's axe has not yet ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Labor!—it diveth deep To dim sea-caves where bright treasures sleep, And dareth with curious quest explore The ancient wonders of Ocean's floor. It fearless roams over Deserts vast, Where destruction rides on the Simoom's blast, And trackless sands have for ages frowned O'er cities in ancient song renowned. It climbs where the dazzling glaciers lie, Changeless and cold, 'neath a glowing sky, And leaves the trace of its triumphs proud Above the regions of ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... means that the men aren't to wear brogans, or the girls shirtwaists," he explained, as they whizzed down what seemed invisible tracks in a trackless forest. "Smell the pines—aren't ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut,—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Soon the night train arrived, and soon was James in one of our large cities—and inquiring for the wharf of a steamer about to sail for California; and when the next Sabbath sun rose upon the home of his youth, he was tossing rapidly over the waves of the wide, deep, trackless ocean, one moment longing to be again amid scenes so long dear and familiar, and the next writhing, as he thought of the anger of his father, the reproaches of his mother. On he went, often vexed at the services he was called to perform, in working his passage out, for which his previous habits ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... guarded wall, Thou saw'st him pass and sail away, To thread the trackless, distant sea. Where rides the good "St. George" to-day. That brings not back my ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney
... leave me not, my children, seek ye not the trackless way, Stay but one, if one child only, as your mother's ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... we quitted the wood, and having descended a deep ravine, we climbed a barren moor, over which we had proceeded half way, when to my unutterable joy, we discovered the far-off fane of Rievaulx, whose wan towers just peered from out of the hanging woods. Pursuing our way we soon exchanged the trackless moor for a much more grateful domain. A sloping wood on each side of us opened into a wider expanse, and the turrets of Byland abbey appeared in the distance. At this moment we forgot the toil of threading harassing woods and crossing wide ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... Sweet odors faint; and far stars trembling peep. When through its bowers cool the breezes creep. Strong, indeed, thy boat, well builded! I wis There be yet other craft as firm, Eblis, That o'er these trackless waters boldly glide. Brave Nautilus afar, doth fearless ride, With sails of gossamer. So, too, doth spread, To summer airs, his silken gleaming thread, The water-spider fleet, free sailor true That in the sunshine floats, beneath the blue, Glad skies. And through the deep, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... I, "there is the cause of many of your troubles! You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there often must be cut through a trackless waste of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... far from land. Yet his movements are as carefully governed as those of the sea-birds, and though many days in the open water he never forgets the direct course to his favorite haunts. How marvelous the instinct that guides with unerring certainty over the trackless waters! ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Beneath thee is the boundless earth, above thee is the boundless heaven, an iron soil and brazen sky. Speed, swiftly speed, thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Ah! dost thou ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... to-night, the loss of the twin-sister who had been as his second and better self. He had not realised till he sat alone in the place, where as a boy he had never known solitude, how utterly flat and undesirable was the future that stretched out like a trackless desert at ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... pioneers of the fur trade, who conducted these early expeditions, and first broke their way through a wilderness where everything was calculated to deter and dismay them. They had to traverse the most dreary and desolate mountains, and barren and trackless wastes, uninhabited by man, or occasionally infested by predatory and cruel savages. They knew nothing of the country beyond the verge of their horizon, and had to gather information as they wandered. They beheld volcanic plains stretching around them, and ranges of mountains piled up to ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... in London. One of the works most largely laid under contribution in this manner was of the sort to interest Allan: it was a highly spiced narrative of Traveling Adventures in the wilds of Australia. Pouncing on an extract which described the sufferings of the traveling-party, lost in a trackless wilderness, and in danger of dying by thirst, Allan announced that he had found something to make his friend's flesh creep, and began eagerly to ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... exultation at his escape from their enemies had given way to a settled despair. From descriptions he had heard, he recognized this mighty floating forest as the fringe which surrounds that greatest of all mysterious, trackless swamps, the Everglades. Before him lay the mighty unknown, unexplored morass, reeking with fever, and infested with serpents; behind him waited sure death at the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... lights, and presently even these are gone, and I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river passes—London passes, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... forest of masts. Beyond lay the sea, like a flat pavement of sapphire, scarcely a ripple varying its sunny surface, that stretched out leagues away till it blended with the softened azure of the sky. On this blue trackless water floated scores of white-sailed fishing boats, apparently motionless, unless you measured their progress by some land-mark; but still, and silent, and distant as they seemed, the consciousness that ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and shining merpussy, during one deep dive into the under-world of trackless waters, had had time to recollect an appointment with a friend, and had settled in her mind that, as soon as she was once more in upper air, she would mention it to the crew of the boat she had dived from. She was long enough under for that. Then up she came into the rise and fall and ripple overhead ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... is liable to attack on either of its flanks, unless the nature of the country through which it is passing provides security for one or the other in the form of an impenetrable feature (such as a wide, {115} trackless marsh), or an impassable barrier (such as a neutral frontier). The outer columns of a force moving on parallel routes will have an exposed flank, while their inner flank is protected by maintaining ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... And all at once he started up out of the snow with surprising strength and agility, and sat on the horse behind Sintram, clasping him tight in his long arms. The horse, startled by the rattling of the bones, and as if seized with madness, rushed away through the most trackless passes. The boy soon found himself alone with his strange companion; for Rolf, breathless with fear, spurred on his horse in vain, and remained far behind them. From a snowy precipice the horse slid, without falling, ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first I ask not; but unless God send His Hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time, His good time!—I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... fact that he was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of all, that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... horse squarely around and faced the long, gray levels of the darkening desert. As his eye swept over that forbidding, waterless, almost trackless waste, a sudden fear of its horrors smote through his anger and chilled his resolution. Haney spurred his ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... river and plunged into the trackless forest. No roads had yet scarred its virgin soil. Only the blazed trail for the first ten miles—the trail Tom had marked with his own hatchet—and then the magnificent woods without a mark. Five miles further ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... was laid upon his hip in close proximity to a pistol-pocket, and Persimmon Sneed remembered suddenly that his own pistol was in its holster on his saddle, he could not say how far distant in these wild, trackless woods, and that this man was a notorious offender against the law, sundry warrants for his arrest for horse-stealing having been issued at divers times and places. There had been much talk of an organized band who had assisted in these and similar exploits in secluded districts of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... His mind was not upon his work, however, but was completely filled with thoughts of the girl at his side. The intervals between his comments became longer and longer until they were standing in silence, both staring with unseeing eyes out into the trackless void. But it was in no sense their usual companionable silence. Crane was fighting back the words he longed to say. This lovely girl was not here of her own accord—she had been torn forcibly from her home and from her friends, and he would not, could not, make her already ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... still foul in the alien atmosphere. The small, darting creatures were here too, foraging in the alleys and the outskirts of the town, where the streets ended in garbage heaps and new cemeteries or faded into the trackless flat where the ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... of Paradise That desolate region, overgrown with thorn And thistle rank—a trackless waste forlorn, Unblessed by God, o'erarched by sullen skies, There stand that guilty pair, now sadly wise, Their hearts with grief, their feet with briers torn, Vainly their faded innocence they mourn, And toward the gates of Eden turn their eyes. No more to see the beauty and ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... seemed to point several degrees too far to the left. I boxed the truant thing again and again, but could not bring the needle to point in any other direction. So I concluded, if the mountain would not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. Out upon the trackless wilds, absolutely without any other guide, it would not do to ignore the compass. But now a new question arose. If the needle tells the truth, I must have been going in the wrong direction for, perhaps, some considerable distance. In such case, it is impossible to conjecture how ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In his ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... not easily forgotten. It belonged to the great preacher, Mr. McAlpine, the man who years before had come to the Glen, and with his message from the Eternal roused the place to a better life. But he was an old man now, and retired from his labours, and how came he to be wandering in this trackless ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... bow-oar, where he had better control over the boat's nose; lamp and compass on the floor between us. Twilight thickened into darkness—a choking, pasty darkness—and still we sped unfalteringly over that trackless waste, sitting and swinging in our little pool of stifled orange light. To drown fatigue and suspense I conned over my clues, and tried to carve into my memory every ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen, above the illimitable plain, 385 Morning on night and night on morning rise, Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea, Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves So long have mingled with the ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life, must still pursue Your happiness, for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own; From Prospero's enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o'er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon, In her interlunar swoon Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel; When you live again on earth, Like an unseen Star of birth Ariel ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... sustained. His sword was broken by a slash from a brown bill, and he was borne to the ground. He expected immediate death, but such did not seem to be the intention of the ruffians who had captured him. He was placed upon the back of his own charger and borne, bound hand and foot, over the trackless moor, in the fastnesses of ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... invisible to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern charcoal-burner with interest. He ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... account given by Livy (xxi, 35) of Hannibal reaching the top of the pass over the Alps and pointing out the fair prospect of Italy to his soldiers. We may thus render the passage: "On the ninth day the ridge of the Alps was reached, over ground generally trackless and by roundabout ways.... The order for marching being given at break of day, the army were sluggishly advancing over ground wholly covered with snow, listlessness, and despair depicted on the features of all, Hannibal ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... in upon us. We plucked some ears as we passed, and found them ripe and well filled. The plain seemed as trackless as a forest, and our postboy suspected, from time to time, that he had lost his way among the narrow roads. A few peasant men whom we encountered at close quarters took off their hats, but without servility, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... rest of the way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking back, but through tears, and with a reverence and tenderness far deeper ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... school boy days, in merry old England, ere he had sighed for a sword and feather or longed to seek the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth, or dreamed of scenes by flood and field, beneath the scorching suns, over the arid plains, or amid the wild trackless ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... of the latter suggested much and minute advice respecting the youth's journey through the trackless forest. Upon this subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as if he were sending Reuben to the battle or the chase while he himself remained secure at home, and not as if the human countenance that was about to leave him were the last he would ever behold. But his firmness was shaken ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the quantity of gold and silver, of great stores of hidden treasures, of the quantities of precious gems and priceless crystals was fully discounted when, from the Florida coast and the explorers of the Lower Mississippi, men returned with the tale that in the everglades and in the trackless forests, intersected by navigable sloughs, there dwelt a people half of whom were hermaphrodites. Neither the explorers nor their European historiographers seem able to have grasped the true state of affairs. Many believed in the actual existence of such numbers of these ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino |
