"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dogged as does it!" I replied cheerfully in the words of Nelson, who also had learned what it meant to hunt an enemy over trackless wastes, although his ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Izzy coherent at first. He certainly had trouble with his vocal chords, poor fellow. There was one of those African explorer men used to come to Geisenheimer's a lot when he was home from roaming the trackless desert, and he used to tell me about tribes he had met who didn't use real words at all, but talked to one another in clicks and gurgles. He imitated some of their chatter one night to amuse me, and, believe me, Izzy ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... confronted with a situation which might involve not only the unlawful absorption of supreme control, but the sacrifice of life and valuable property as a consequence of it. Let me put this proposition to them. Here is a vessel, it may be, out on a trackless ocean hundreds of miles from land, her forecastle hands consisting of a gang of murderous ruffians ready to make lawful authority impotent, and, if need be, to enforce their own by overpowering the captain and officers and making an opportunity for mutiny. Let the moralists ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... to tell about those few weeks spent at Botany Bay before the navigator and his companions "vanished trackless into blue immensity," as Carlyle puts it. A fragment of conversation is preserved by Tench. A musket was fired one day, and the natives marvelled less at the noise than at the fact that the bullet made a ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... our life here and hereafter is encompassed with mystery. To think is to be lost on the trackless ocean of doubt. The Papists have the easiest creed, for they believe that which they are taught, and take the mysteries of the unseen world at second hand from their Priests. A year ago, had I been happy enough to win your daughter, I should have tried my hardest to wean ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... down, hardly knowing what to do next. Where was she to go? In that wilderness of London, more desolate than the trackless ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... their own. His good-humor was inexhaustible. Not a hardship or privation came amiss to him. He had a phrase, "Such fun!" that always rushed laughingly to his lips when another man would have cursed and groaned. If we lost our way in the great trackless moors, missed our dinner, and were half-famished, Guy rubbed hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range,—its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers, and trackless plains,—that is to my mind wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring; fitted to grapple with difficulties and to support privations. There seems but little soil in his heart for the support ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... over wide tracts of waste land where the ground was rugged, uneven, and covered with brushwood. The vast forests which then existed in the north of England, have long since been cleared away, and wild trackless heaths have been converted into parks, meadows, and corn-fields. Maud and the two girls rode in a waggon wherein they had placed some wooden stools, several baskets of provision, and all their clothing, with such other things as they wished to take with them. Robin drove, while Henry ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers, and Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the Search Number Two rode at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived because their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went to work at ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... by assassin's lead! Mighty warrior shade, bearing upon thy tense, heroic face traces of Mount McGregor's pain! Thou from Atlanta march! Thou from Winchester ride! Thou from Mentor Mecca, thy glazing orbs lighting with boyhood's longing for ocean's trackless wave! And ye mighty hosts of marching and countermarching nineteenth-century worthies, witness bear to worth of your most ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... mate in the pairing season. And the Princess of Panchala then embraced the second son of Pandu, even as a creeper embraces a huge and mighty Sala on the banks of the Gomati. And embracing him with her arms, Krishna of faultless features awaked him as a lioness awaketh a sleeping lion in a trackless forest. And embracing Bhimasena even as a she-elephant embraceth her mighty mate, the faultless Panchali addressed him in voice sweet as the sound of a stringed instrument emitting Gandhara note. And she said, 'Arise, arise! Why dost thou, O Bhimasena, lie down as one dead? Surely, he that is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... urged on the march of Davoust, who was to circle round from the north, and the advance of Jerome Bonaparte's Westphalians, who were bidden to hurry on eastwards from the town of Grodno on the Upper Niemen. Their convergence would drive Bagration into the almost trackless marshes of the Pripet, whence his force would emerge, if at ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... more than three centuries. That Uilcapampa could so long defy investigation and exploration shows better than anything else how wisely Manco had selected his refuge. It is indeed a veritable labyrinth of snow-clad peaks, unknown glaciers, and trackless canyons. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... planets, wheel in wheel, Arch'd the wan Sapphire. Nay, the hum of men, Or other things talking in unknown tongues, And notes of busy life in distant worlds Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear. A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts Involving and embracing each with each Rapid as fire, inextricably link'd, Expanding momently with every sight And sound which struck the palpitating sense, The issue of strong impulse, hurried through The riv'n rapt brain: as when in some large lake From pressure ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... scouting along its borders. And on, on, now through open fields, and now through dense forests, now through splashy pools, or rapid rivers, and now over sharp pitches or deep ravines, now in cross-roads or cow-paths, and now in trackless thickets, now over fenny moors, and now along the rocky declivities of mountains,—on, on, did they pursue their toilsome and weary way through the seemingly interminable hours of all the first half ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... interesting. In the forest, the dead wood is phosphorescent; some nights the whole ground is strewn with it, so that it seems like a grating over a pale hell; doubtless this is one of the things that feed the night fears of the natives; and I am free to confess that in a night of trackless darkness where all else is void, these pallid IGNES SUPPOSITI have a fantastic appearance, rather bogey even. One night, when it was very dark, a man had put out a little lantern by the wayside to show the entrance to his ground. I saw the light, as I thought, far ahead, and ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Soudan before he realized the tremendous responsibilities he had assumed; and with all his strength of character, and his trust in his Almighty, ever-present Friend, it is not to be wondered at that when alone in the trackless desert, with the results of ages of wrong-doing before him, this man of heroic action and indomitable spirit sometimes gave way to depression and murmuring; although this was exceedingly rare. If we remember what he had already done and suffered for down-trodden ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... riding over the even, sandy trail of the prairies which stretched away south of the Assiniboine River. His sunburnt face was sternly reposeful, and in his usually keen gray eyes was that open staring light which belongs to the man who gropes his way over Nature's trackless wastes, and whose mind is ever asking the question of direction. But there was no question of such a nature in his mind now. His look was the look of habit, when the call of the trail ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... birds often hurl themselves against the headlight and frequently their bodies are later picked up from the engine platform beneath. Birds seem rarely to lose their sense of direction, and they pursue their way for hundreds of miles across the trackless ocean. Terns, Gulls, and Murres are known to go many miles in quest of food for their young and return through dense fogs with unerring ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... Havasupai village early one morning, each riding an Indian pony, with all the provisions we thought we should need on our saddles. After awhile, we entered a side canyon I had never before explored. During the whole of that day we toiled, riding as hard as we could over the almost trackless canyon floor; trailing through deep sand; climbing over masses of boulders that freshets or cloud-bursts had. piled between the walls; forcing our way through dense willows; scratched by thickets of mesquites. Again and again in the walls were seen cliff-dwellings ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... cup the sooner the spill," for scarcely had Ning drawn on the recovered sheaths and with incautious joy repeated the magic sentence than he was instantly projected across vast space and into the trackless confines of the Outer Upper Paths. If this were an imagined tale, framed to entice the credulous, herein would its falseness cry aloud, but even in this age Ning may still be seen from time to time with a tail ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... seen much of the wonders and glories of the world, vasty deserts, trackless forests, stupendous mountains, mighty rivers, and yet—and yet what more wonderful than this little island of ours, what more tenderly beautiful than our green, English countryside? The thunderous roar ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... left the council of his tribe and went his way toward the mountain of the sun. For six days he made his way through the trackless woods, guided by the sun by day and the stars by night. On the seventh he came to the great mountain—the mountain of the sun—on whose top, according to the tradition of his tribe, the sun rested each night. All ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... bow before Thy viewless wings, as thou careerest o'er This rocking world; that in the boundless sky Suspended, vibrates, as thou rushest by. There is no terror in the lightning's glare, That breaks its red track through the trackless air; There is no terror in the voice that speaks From out the clouds when the loud thunder breaks Over the earth, like that which dwells in thee, Thou ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... blessed thing, as we go along through that dark valley of the shadow of death down into which the sunniest paths go sometimes, to come, amidst the twilight and the gathering clouds, upon tokens that Jesus has been on the road before us? They tell us that in some trackless lands, when one friend passes through the pathless forests, he breaks a twig ever and anon as he goes, that those who come after may see the traces of his having been there, and may know that they are not out of the road. Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night, and the dark woods ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... all peoples,—that death cannot silence the voice of one who confronts danger with unflinching courage, giving his life in the defence of those dependent upon his prowess. Such a man might fall in the trackless wilderness, and his bones lie unhonoured and unburied until they blanched with age: still his voice would ring out in the solitude until its message of courage and joy should find an echo in ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... 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
... them had the slightest desire to see London or Paris or Rome, but they both longed for a fuller knowledge of the West. They were still pioneers, still explorers over whose imagination the trackless waste exercised a deathless dominion. To my uncle I said, "If I could afford it, I would take you with me on one of my trailing expeditions and show you some ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the road was broadly and deeply marked, and good camping grounds were distinctly indicated. The bleaching bones of cattle that had perished, or the broken fragments of wagons or cast-away articles, were thickly strewn on either side of the highway. But in 1846 the way was through almost trackless valleys waving with grass, along rivers where few paths were visible, save those made by the feet of buffaloes and antelope, and over mountains and plains where little more than the westward course of the sun guided the travelers. Trading-posts were stationed at only a few widely distant points, ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... trailed them far o'er the trackless range, Has this knight of the saddle leather; He has risked his life in the mad stampede, And has breasted all kinds of weather. But now is the end of the trail in sight, And the hours on wings are sliding; For it's back to the ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... Gordon, the martyr of the Soudan, an enthusiast also in the suppression of slavery; and as we walk up the nave we must look for the slab of Livingstone, whose remains were brought to their final resting-place over deserts and trackless wildernesses by his faithful ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... We were very indignant when we 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 had been buried. It was not ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 deem these salty plains[6] lead to thy Yemen's happy groves, and dost ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... slender library of his friend. In the peaceful evening hours he listens to weird stories of the lonely land of the Far West—early discovery, zealous monkish exploration, daring voyages in trackless unknown seas, and the descent of curious strangers. Bold Sir Francis Drake, Cabrillo, Viscaino, Portala, the good Junipero Serra of sainted memory, live ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... to think that we owed our deliverance to him. He had roused up the neighbors, and they came over that trackless waste on snow-shoes. On snow-shoes Ephraim went for the doctor, and mother began to mend from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... trackless, unknown sea in the vast realms of thought, Discovered paths to enterprise, with golden issues fraught, Which lent fair commerce fleetest wings, and spurred the heels of trade, And throughout Britain's pleasant land his iron ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... and the one whom Rankin had been talking to formed a column and marched off into the trackless forests ...
— The Helpful Robots • Robert J. Shea
... in his Twice-Told Tales was toying pensively with spectral forms and "dark ideas," Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror. Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards. He sought untiringly for unusual situations, inordinately gloomy or terrible, and made them ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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 ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... life of ours. Before it shall seem long that we have loved, this earth we stand on, these things we touch, these bodies of ours that we think so strong and fair, will be forgotten and dissolved into their elements in the trackless and undiscoverable waste of past mortality, while we ourselves are ever young, and ever fair, and for ever ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... trail at the water, and desiring to put him on the track, we paddled to him. He scrambled into the boat with an air of satisfaction, as if he had always travelled in just such a thing. Soon we had regained the trail, and making the mountains echo to his voice, he again pursued the deer on into the trackless forest. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... Perhaps it would be better to wait, 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, and odors of dinner began to ascend from the hatchway. Noll had a dinner of his own ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... 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 ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... fitful winds and steady currents carried them hither and thither, ever alert, ever ready for combat and plunder. With guns primed and powder-horn stocked, these plunderers roamed the trackless sea, at times with impatience and drooping hopes, until the sight of a large, heavily riding merchantman sent their blood a-leaping and transformed the deck into a scene of feverish activity. If we recall the peaceful errand of the merchantmen and reflect that their armature was ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... hills travellers often lost their way. Hence crosses were set up to guide them along the trackless heaths. They were as useful as sign-posts, and conveyed an additional lesson. You will find such crosses in the desolate country on the borderland of Yorkshire and Lancashire. They were usually placed on the ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... burning desarts of sunny Africa—from the wild tornados of the gusty West—from the mountains of ice piled by a thousand ages, like impassable barriers round each frozen pole—from the fertile plains and trackless forests of Australia, frequently rises, like a breeze of sweetest incense, the fond remembrance of our native land; which, even in bosoms scathed by storm and pilgrimage, causes to spring up, like a sudden fountain in a barren ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... maid, Whether by nodding towers you tread; Or haunt the desart's trackless gloom, Or hover o'er the yawning tomb; Or climb the Andes' clifted side, Or by the Nile's coy source abide; Or, starting from your half-year's sleep, From Hecla view the thawing deep; Or, at the purple dawn of day, Tadnor's marble ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... children. But he was restless in the settlement, and his sojourns grew briefer and more infrequent as time rolled on. True to his conviction that no wife existed on earth for him, he never married. His home was the trackless wilds, where he was true to his ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... discussion of it at the Shoe-Bar, and now she recalled vaguely hearing that it had first broken out in these very pastures. Doubtless, as a method of prevention, the surviving stock had been moved elsewhere, and her chances for help would be as likely in the midst of a trackless desert as here. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... universal Pan, 'tis said, was there, And though none saw him,—through the adamant Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air, 115 And through those living spirits, like a want, He passed out of his everlasting lair Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant, And felt that wondrous lady all alone,— And she felt him, upon her ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of man's trackless spirit Is throned an Image, so intensely fair That the adventurous thoughts that wander near it Worship, and as they kneel, tremble and wear The splendour of its presence, and the light 5 Penetrates their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... footstool; that they came to Michigan and rescued the country from the invaders, the English and savages, long before some of us knew that there was such a place as Michigan. When Michigan was almost a trackless wilderness they crossed Lake Erie, landed at Malden, drove the redcoats out of the fort and started them on the double quick. They made for the Canadian woods, and the British and Indians, who held Detroit, followed suit. They were followed by our brave William Henry Harrison, accompanied by Ohio ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... faded away; the gloom grew thicker; far ahead, like an endless sheet losing itself in a distant smother of blackness, stretched the ice and snow of Lake Nipigon. There was no tree, no rock for guidance over the trackless waste, yet never for an instant did Mukoki or Wabigoon falter. The stars began burning brilliantly in the sky; far away the red edge of the moon rose over this world of ice and snow and forest, throbbing and palpitating like a bursting ball of ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... open spaces is an undulating forest in all directions, being apparently both trackless and endless. The great variety of greens observed in the foliage blends in the distance into one dark shade, then changes to dark blue, which gradually fades out to a hazy uncertainty where it is lost at ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... left his home in North Carolina to seek his fortune among the forest-clad mountains, whose summits he could see far-away to the west. With no companion but his horse and no protection but his rifle, he slowly and patiently made his way through the trackless woods, crossing mountain range after mountain range, until he came to the region where the rivers flowing westward had ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... was a sobriquet bestowed by the fresh-water sailors of that region, and the few other white adventurers of Saxon origin who found their way into that trackless region, firstly on Gershom himself, and secondly on his residence. These names were obtained from the intensity of their respective characters, in favor of the beverage named. L'eau de mort was the place termed ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... vapor-fingers to discern The music-hidden keys of skies— Shall touch like thee Until they answer me The chords of the silent air And strike the wild and slumber-music out Dreaming there. Above the hills of singing that I know On the trackless, soundless path That wonder hath I shall go, Beyond the street-cry of the poet, The hurdy-gurdy singing Of the throngs, To the Throne of Silence, Where the Doors That guard the farthest faintest shores Of Day Swing their bars, And shut the songs of heaven in From all ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole,—two unpardonable sins in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were the only property. Worse than ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... alone!" Was a more victorious bravery ever known? Right across the trackless space The small feet have won their race; And he tosses back thereafter Such a peal of ringing laughter! It laughs out from every face, Proud to own "Baby ...
— The Nursery, Number 164 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the trackless deserts, of the formation into separate nations, of modern Europe. It is even with misgivings that the student picks his way from the time of the Great Elector to Bismarck, and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... shall bless the happy day When thy bold streamers steer'd the trackless way. O'er these delightful realms thy sons shall tread, And following millions trace the path you led. Behold yon isles, where first the flag unfurled Waved peaceful triumph o'er the new-found world. Where, aw'd to silence, savage bands gave place, And hail'd ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... Saturday evening, and we had a pleasant camp. George made a big 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 ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... of this eventful year, three hundred resolute men had gained a foothold in Kentucky. In the trackless wilderness, hemmed in by savage foes, these pioneers with their wives and their children began their struggle for a home. In one short year, this handful of men along the western border were drawn into the midst of the war of the Revolution. ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... universality of light; the establishment of posts, which, after its adoption by Louis the Eleventh, came into frequent use in the beginning of the sixteenth century; and lastly, the compass, which, guiding the mariner unerringly through the trackless wastes of the ocean, brought the remotest regions into contact. With these increased facilities for intercommunication, the different European states might be said to be brought into as intimate relation with one another, as the different ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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, ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... or when his stock of knowledge was laid in, nobody knew—it was as much a matter of marvel to those who never saw him read, as the existence of the chameleon has been to those who fancied it never eat. His advances in the heart of his mistress were, as we have seen, equally trackless and inaudible, and his triumph was the first that even rivals knew of his love. In like manner, the productions of his wit took the world by surprise,—being perfected in secret, till ready for display, and then seeming to break from under ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Arthur, long before 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; but their names were lost; And each had slain his brother at a blow; ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... The solemn trackless woods are fair, And bright their summer dress; But their still hush—their whisprings vague, My heart seem to oppress; And 'neath their shadow could I sit, And think the livelong day On my country's fields and hedges green, ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... leads; if he meet with a thousand similar pathways in a journey of five hundred miles, it will still be the same. He can point out the fords of a hundred rivers; he can guide you in safety through a hundred trackless woods. Stand with him at midnight on the Pampa,—let the track be lost,—no moon or stars; the vaqueano quietly dismounts, examines the foliage of the trees, if any are near, and if there are none, plucks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... deeds, Which fester like corrupted weeds, And smell to heaven with poison breath Involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid Since Eve and Cain did what they did And left us naked through the world, Like meteors in midnight hurled, To darkle in this trackless sphere, Not knowing what ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... woman, solicitous only to secure eminence as an authoress. I asked your heart; you have now none to give; but perhaps some day you will love me as devotedly, nay, as madly, as I have long loved you; for love like mine would wake affection even in a marble image; but then rolling oceans and trackless deserts will divide us. And now, good-by. Make yourself a name; bind your aching brow with the chaplet of fame, and see if ambition can fill your heart. Good-by, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... planets, the individual stars in the heaven remained apparently fixed with reference to each other. These seemingly changeless points of light came in time to be regarded as sign-posts to guide the wanderer across the trackless desert, or the voyager ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... whatsoever her husband set about doing he did swiftly and with inflexible purpose. There was no malingering or doubtful hesitation. Once his mind was made up, he acted, Thus, upon the third day from the land staking they bore away eastward from the clearing, across a trackless area, traveling by the sun and Bill's knowledge ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Rachael's heart. In the clear tunnels of light flung from the car lamps it seemed all a moving level of restless water smitten under sheets of rain. Anything more desperate than an effort to find the little belt of safety in this trackless spread of merciless seas it would be hard to imagine. At an ordinary high tide the Bar was but a few inches above the sea; now, with a wind blowing, a heavy rain falling, and the tide almost at the full, no road whatever was visible. It was there, the friendly road that Rachael and the hot ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... distance of 91,000,000 miles, can, by falling upon the retina, and acting as a stimulus, not only produce a contraction of the pupil, but excite thoughts which analyze that ray, instantly spanning the infinitude of trackless space! The same penetrative faculties, with equal facility, can quickly and surely discern the morbid symptoms of body and mind, become familiar with the indications of disease, and classify them scientifically ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... peace of mind for half an hour more, those stanch old deacons and selectmen, who did their duty by their fellow-citizens as they saw it and took no man's bidding. They could not see the trackless roads over the hills, now becoming tracked, and the bent figures driving doggedly against the storm, each impelled by a motive: each motive strengthened by a master mind until it had become imperative. Some, like Eben Williams behind his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... When all-revealing darkness brings Its brighter world than this of light— My spirit, borne on wizard wings, Hath won its upward way afar, And ranged the shoreless sea of dreams— Hath touched at many a wheeling star That shines beyond these solar beams; And on the trackless deep of thought, Like Him, who found this Western World, 'Mid doubt and storm my passage wrought, Till weary fancy's wing was furled— And, as the sky-bent eagle, borne Down by the lightning blast of heaven, So ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... Nothing greeted the roving eyes but desolation,—a desolation utter and complete, a mere waste of tumbled sand, by daylight whitened here and there by irregular patches of alkali, but under the brooding night shadows lying brown, dull, forlorn beyond all expression, a trackless, deserted ocean of mystery, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... by a ship which came in here for a few hours, just to tell you we are safe and well. Starving thirty hours on a bare rock, without even fresh water, being half naked and drenched with wet, having traversed an almost trackless country over dreadful rocks and mountains, laid me up at a village for a few days, but I have since crossed the island on an ass, going for six hours a day, which proves I am pretty well, now, at least.... My locket, and the valuable snuff-box Lord Sligo gave me, and two pelisses, are all I have ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... some people may be apt to imagine. The savage, quick-sighted, and accustomed to perpetual watchfulness, springs from his den behind a bush, and surprizes his enemy with the pointed arrow before he is aware of danger. He ranges through the trackless forest like the beasts of prey, and safely sleeps under the same canopy with the wolf and bear. His vengeance is concealed, and sends the tidings in the fatal blow. The first settlers were obliged to stand in a continual posture of defence; ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... thick, and the place was so overgrown with underwood, that we could not see three yards before us, we therefore were obliged to keep continually hallooing to each other, to prevent our being separately lost in this trackless wilderness. As the weather was intolerably hot, we had nothing on besides our shoes, except our shirts and trowsers, and these were in a very short time torn all to rags by the bushes and brambles; at last however, with incredible difficulty ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... time like Spring, When life's alive in everything, Before new nestlings sing, Before cleft swallows speed their journey back Along the trackless track,— God guides their wing, He spreads their table that they nothing lack,— Before the daisy grows a common flower, Before the sun has power To scorch the world ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... hero, with every virtue justly estimated but with no palliation of weakness or fault; and lastly a triumphant vindication of a theses novel and startling to most, that the earth's barriers are continental, its easy ad defensible highways those of the trackless ocean.... Captain Mahan has revealed the modern world to itself.—American ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... believe in the truth of Sir C. P. Ilbert's remark that whatever the value of the codes in other respects, their educational value must be considerable. They may convince students that law is not a mere trackless jungle of arbitrary rules to be picked up in detail, but that there is really somewhere to be discovered a foundation of reason and common sense. It was one of Fitzjames's favourite topics that the law was capable of being thus exhibited; and that fifty years hence ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... wonted smiles, Presents a cheerful easy task for Giles. Down with a touch the mellow'd soil is laid, And yon tall crop next claims his timely aid; Thither well pleas'd he hies, assur'd to find Wild trackless haunts, and objects ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... brief initial struggle, Barry resigned himself to his captors perforce. Where he was bound for was beyond conjecture; he only heard, faintly through his hood, the cheeping and rustling of the canes; bush tendrils swept along his body and told him that he was being carried through the trackless part of the jungle. His journey was short. In ten minutes he was laid on the ground, still with no word from his captors, and in two long breaths no sound remained near him except the voices of the foliage. He lay still a moment, wondering what his fate was to be; then, involuntarily, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... 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
... they reach the last remaining refuge safely!" said he, with deep emotion. "And may their flight be quick and sure! For the fate of the world, its hope and its salvation from infinite enslavement, are whirling through the trackless wastes of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... said 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 ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... are devoted, as the preceding six illustrate the dawn of our history from the first landing of the white man to the settlement of the Pilgrim Fathers—preceding all of which is the mysterious and unfathomable past symbolized by the trackless "Ocean," the first of ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... ready-made certainty was of avail; that a man must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... work is done. Go, and may blessing and victory go with you." So Finn departed with naught but his weapons and his hunting gear, very sorrowful at leaving the wise and loving friends who had fostered his childhood; but deep in his heart was a wild and fierce delight at the thought of the trackless ways he would travel, and the wonders he would see; and all the future looked to him as beautiful and dim as the mists that fill a mountain glen under the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... doubt his fidelity, and sent him instantly to the haven, to follow the strange man's steps if possible. But, on that very morning, many vessels which had been kept by contrary winds back in port, had put to sea, all destined to distant lands and other climes; the grey man had disappeared trackless as a shade. ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... the heart of all the scene; On him the sun looked more serene; To hill and cloud his face was known,— It seemed the likeness of their own; They knew by secret sympathy The public child of earth and sky. 'You ask,' he said, 'what guide Me through trackless thickets led, Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. I found the water's bed. The watercourses were my guide; I travelled grateful by their side, Or through their channel dry; They led me ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mingling dead! Beneath the turf we tread, Chief, Pilgrim, Patriot sleep— All gone! how changed! and yet the same, As when faith's herald bark first came In sorrow o'er the deep. Still from his noonday height, The sun looks down in light; Along the trackless realms of space, The stars still run their midnight race; The same green valleys smile, the same rough shore Still echoes to the same wild ocean's roar:— But where the bristling night-wolf sprang ...
— An Ode Pronounced Before the Inhabitants of Boston, September the Seventeenth, 1830, • Charles Sprague
... men were swift to battle, swift to cross the coastal water, Swift to war and swift of weapon, swift to paddle trackless miles, Crept with stealth along the canyon, stole her from her love and brought her Once again ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... Walter forced the canoe in and out between them. His 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 hands of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... drop into his pocket. Supposing, then, that No. 5 were surmounted, and that, supernaturally, you knew the value to a hair's breadth, of every separate word (or, perhaps, composite phrase made up from a constellation of words)—ah, poor traveller in trackless forests, still you are lost again—for, oftentimes, and especially in St. Paul, the words may be known, their sense may be known, but their logical relation is still doubtful. The word X and the word Y are separately clear; but has Y the dependency of a consequence ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... is away on the roving quest, Seeking his share of the golden spoil, Out in the wastes of the trackless west, Wandering ever he gives the best Of his years and strength to ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... hands Wrought in wild seas and labored in strange lands, And not alone his patient strength withstood The clashing cliffs and Circe's perilous sands: Eager of some imperishable good He drave new pathways thro' the trackless flood Foreguarded, fearless, free from Fate's commands. How shall our faith discern the truth he sought? We too must watch and wander till our eyes, Turned skyward from the topmost tower of thought, Haply shall find the star that marked his goal, The watch-fire ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... the valve which allowed the reserve supply of compressed air to gradually enter the ship, Damis pulled down the starting lever of the ship. With a terrific lurch the flyer left the surface of Mars and shot up into the trackless realms of space. Abandoning his controls for an instant, Damis looked into one of the observers. The plain below them was empty of Martians, but in the distance he could dimly see two of the silvery domes which marked their cities. He made some short calculations ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... 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 guides you o'er the sea Of life from your nativity:— Many changes ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... come back to me!" she said bravely and proudly, for a moment stopping to face the sun. "He will come back from beyond those hills and trackless woods! He ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... naturally paid attention to astronomy, so far at least as might be serviceable to them in their navigation; and while other nations were applying it merely to the purposes of agriculture and chronology, by means of it they were guided through the "trackless ocean," in their maritime enterprises. The Great Bear seems to have been known and used as a guide by navigators, even before the Phoenicians were celebrated as a sea-faring people; but this constellation affords a very imperfect and uncertain rule for the direction of a ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... cities, and has little to do with Africa and Australia but to mark the coast lines; as year after year he has to make some variation in the features of the great American continent, which indicates the march of the human family over once trackless deserts, while the memorable places of the ancient world undergo few changes but those of name. And then, as he is finishing a globe for the cabin of some "great ammirall," may he not think that, in some frozen nook of the Arctic Sea, the friendly Esquimaux may come to gaze upon his work, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... wisely, and could act as well; With quickest glance could read another's thought, His own, the while, the keenest could not tell; Warrior—with skill to lengthen, or combine, Lead on, or back, the desultory line; Hunter—he passed the trackless forest through,— Now on the mountain trod, now ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... passed a tranquil watch at night, without revisiting the scenes of my boyhood, and wandering through my own fields, accompanied by my beloved sister, and her quite as well beloved friend. How many hours of happiness had I thus passed on the trackless wastes of the Pacific and the Atlantic; and with how much fidelity did memory recall the peculiar graces, whether of body or mind, of each of the dear girls in particular! Since my recent experience in London, Emily Merton would occasionally adorn the picture, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... their horse's head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks and cries ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... May 1890 a column of nearly one thousand men was ready to start from Khama's country; and in June their equipment was approved by a British officer. On September 11, after a march of four hundred miles through trackless country (some of it unknown even to Selous, their guide), the British flag was hoisted on the site of the modern town of Salisbury. It is a chapter of history well worth reading in detail, but Rhodes himself could not be there: the heroes of the march were Jameson ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... thus the snows arise, and foul and fierce All Winter drives along the darkened air, In his own loose-revolving fields the swain Disastered stands; sees other hills ascend, Of unknown, joyless brow, and other scenes, Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain; Nor finds the river nor the forest, hid Beneath the formless wild, but wanders on From hill to dale, still more and more astray, Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, Stung with the thoughts ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum |
