"Treeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the value of the plant, and the working power of the machinery. The idea of wasting a dollar in making the homes of his employees more attractive, or in putting within their reach mental and moral helps, had never even occurred to him. Treeless, arid, and flat, the country stretched away on every side, only broken by one or two slight knolls separating the Works from a small river that intersected the land at some distance. In the midst of this plain stood the great buildings, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... warmer. The cold antarctic, or Humboldt, current sweeps northward along the coast and greatly modifies the heat of the arid, tropical plateaus. The climate of northern and central Chile is profoundly affected by the high mountain barrier on the eastern frontier and by the broad treeless pampas of Argentina, which raise the easterly moisture-laden winds from the Atlantic to so high an elevation that they sweep across Chile without leaving a drop of rain. At very rare intervals light rains fall in the desert regions north of Coquimbo, but these are brought by the prevailing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of the country as usual—malaria, marshes, mosquitoes, misery; far as the eye can reach, vast treeless marshes perfectly lifeless. At times progressing slowly by towing, the men struggling through the water with the rope; at other times by running round the boat in a circle, pulling with their hands at the grass, which thus acts like the cogs of a wheel to move ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... with the restless spirit of the frontier, unsubdued, unchanged, it cast its burden. There, as they had done before, the newcomers immediately took root, and, after the passage of a year, were all but unconscious of the migration. Over their heads was the same blue prairie sky. Around them, treeless, trackless, was the same rolling, illimitable prairie land. In but one essential were conditions changed; yet that one was epoch-making. Heretofore, surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... these treeless, trackless solitudes, which, with their waving grass, remind one of the bosom of the ocean, develops a keen sight Where the stranger, after intently gazing, descries nothing, he will not only inform him that animals are in sight, but will, moreover, tell him what they are. I ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... a picture, we have explained why Californian views, even in our great, almost treeless valleys, grow so into our hearts and imaginations, after the first dash of disappointment at not finding them like the vernal vales of New England or central New York. But Tesoro Rancho was not treeless. Great spreading ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... these have all originated in a common stirps. Many local differences exist, but none capable of invalidating this conclusion. The warmth yet shade-loving Indian of the Amazon; the Indian of the hot, dry and treeless coasts of Peru and Guayaquil, who exposes his bare head to the sun with as much zest as an African negro; the Indian of the Andes, for whom no cold seems too great, who goes constantly barelegged ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang, The iron plates rang sharp, but turn'd the spear. And Rustum seized his club, which none but he Could wield; an unlopp'd trunk it was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up By their dark springs, the wind in winter-time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge, trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water, they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to it, one or both. It must have been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... intent upon the landscape that ran swiftly northward beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter. He tried to make out familiar places within the hollow basin ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the snowy range runs over an almost treeless rocky mountain called Kalimat, which rises to a height of 6500 feet. From Kalimat the road descends to Takula—16 miles from Almora. Then there is a further descent of 11 miles to Bageswar—a small town situated on the Sarju river. The inhabitants of ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... by traversing so much moist ground and so many streams. Trees, too, grow more readily in the moistened land, and in turn protect the land from the hot winds. Given a proper system of irrigation in operation for twenty-five years, and the epithet, treeless, need not be ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... to be strange: the treeless country through which he was driven, the bald house and huge barns where he was lifted out, the dogs that crowded about him when he was turned into the kennel yard. These eyed him with enmity and walked round and round him. But he stood his ground staunchly for a youngster, returning fierce look ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... twenty, and we built a fire on the rocks and cooked them. It was delightfully cool and shady. It was one of those golden days one never forgets; I was sorry when it was gone." She paused, the high wave of her excitement passed. "I never could live in that treeless country," she went on. "Water, running as God made it, plenty of it, is a necessity to me. But please take your seat, Mr. Tisdale." She settled back in her place and began to date her telegram. "I am just sending the briefest message to let Mrs. ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... and they were in a happy frame of mind. Their dead comrades were dead and mourning was for widows; but for them would be the pleasures of swift reprisals. The fugitives had gone toward the desert, and in that bleak stretch of treeless land it would not be difficult to find them, ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... given its name because it prefers open country rather than the woods — the scrubby undergrowth of oaks, young evergreens, and bushes that border clearings being as good a place as any to look for it, and not the wind-swept, treeless tracts of the wild West. Its range is southerly. The Southern and Middle States are where it is most abundant. Here is a wood warbler that is not a bird of the woods — less so, in fact, than either the summer yellowbird (yellow warbler) or ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... beyond them the bare downs rose hill after hill. On the left the land sloped into a shallow valley sown with various crops; and the shaws about Elliot's farm were the last trees. Beyond the farmhouse the downs ascended higher and higher, treeless, irreclaimable, scooped into long patriarchal solitudes, thrown into ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... peopled by the popular imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Maehrchen" and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men "all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... he cast a sweeping glance over the widespread waste of waters on which nothing floated save a few belated icebergs, and then inland over weary miles of desolate upland barrens, treeless, moss-covered, and painfully rugged. "It is tough luck to be shut up here like birds in a cage, with no chance of the door being opened before next summer. It is tougher on Baldwin, though, than on me, and if he can stand it I guess I can. ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... Malta as seen to-day is an almost treeless, though not unfertile, stretch of rock, with a harbour on the north coast which must always make the place a necessary possession to the first sea power of Europe. Much of its soil is of comparatively modern ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... fertility and easy of cultivation. The climate was almost rainless, and agriculture was dependent upon artificial irrigation. The upper portion of this great river valley was formed of undulating plains stretching away to the north, where, almost treeless, they furnished great pasture ranges for flocks and herds, which also added to the permanency of the food supply and helped to develop the wealth and prosperity of the country. It was in this climate, so favorable for the development of early man, and with this fertile soil ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... immense and silent forest, curiously and beautifully broken by the gleaming waters of a myriad of lakes, between which rugged mountain-ranges rise as a sea of granite billows. At the northeast the mountains culminate within an area of some hundreds of square miles; and here savage, treeless peaks, towering above the timber line, crowd one another, and, standing gloomily shoulder to shoulder, rear their rocky crests amid the frosty clouds. The wild beasts may look forth from the ledges on the mountain-sides over unbroken woodlands stretching beyond the reach of sight — beyond ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very poles! ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... mile along the shore, and then suddenly give place to a broad sandy beach, behind which lies a level, desolate moor, treeless, shrubless, and barren of all vegetation, save coarse grass and weeds, and a profusion of stunted dog-roses, which, in their season, must throw a rare and singular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... no reply. He slewed himself a little to sweep the country over beyond the railroad station with his sullen red eyes. The heat was wavering up from the treeless, shrubless expanse; the white sun was over it as hot as a furnace blast. From the cattle pens the dusty, hoarse cries of the cowboys sounded, "Ho, ho, ho!" in what seemed derision of the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... of the woods. On the prairies and in treeless regions it is not known. It prefers heavy "timber," where there are huge logs and hollow trees in plenty. It requires the neighbourhood of water, and in connection with this may be mentioned a curious habit it has, that of plunging all its food into the water before devouring it. It will ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... by the woody fibre mixed with the pure starch which forms the tapioca. There were also several cabbage-palms, always a welcome addition to our vegetables. Among the fruit were some pine-apples, which had been procured in a dry treeless district—so we ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... covered bridges, where the neighbors, who had broken it out with their ox-teams in the open, had thickly bedded it in snow. In the valleys and sheltered spots it remained free, and so wide that encountering teams could easily pass each other; but where it climbed a hill, or crossed a treeless level, it was narrowed to a single track, with turn-outs at established points, where the drivers of the sleighs waited to be sure that the stretch beyond was clear before going forward. In the country, the winter which held the village in such close siege ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Dogilani plains. On the west the cultivated districts of Sotik and Lumbwa, broken by wooded heights, fall towards Victoria Nyanza. The Mau plateau reaches a height of 9000 ft. on the equator, north of which is the somewhat lower Nandi country, well watered and partly forested. In the treeless plateau of Uasin Gishu, west of Elgeyo, the land again rises to a height of over 8000 ft., and to the west of this is the great mountain mass of Elgon (q.v.). East of Lake Rudolf and south of Lake Stefanie is a large waterless steppe, mainly volcanic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... without water. Very large numbers of elands were met with as usual, though they seldom can get a sip of drink. Many of the plains here have large expanses of grass without trees, but you seldom see a treeless horizon. The ostrich is generally seen quietly feeding on some spot where no one can approach him without being detected by his wary eye. As the wagon moves along far to the windward he thinks it is intending to circumvent him, so he rushes up a mile or so ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... kingdome, resembling in body for quantitie, and in goodness of mettle, the Galloway naggs." The breed seems now to be extinct, though there are doubtless living descendants; and Goonhilly remains an almost treeless table-land, broken by streamlets where it meets the sea. There are many to whom this inland portion of the Lizard country may seem dreary enough, but others will be touched by its indefinite charm of breezy expanse, the beautiful colour of its Cornish heath, the loneliness ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... Valencia with two priests who were by no means unknown. One of them had been in the convent of Loyola at Azpeitia for four years. We talked about our respective homes; they eulogized the Valencian plain while I replied that I preferred the mountains. As we passed some bare, treeless hills such as abound near Chinchilla, one of them—the one, in fact, who had been ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... clumps of oak and pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents, where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... went to the doorway, looking out over Bud's shoulder at the spiritless donkeys trailing in to water. Beyond them the desert baked in its rim of hot, treeless hills. Above them the sky glared a brassy blue with never a could. Over a low ridge came Monte and Pete, walking with heads drooping. Their hip bones lifted above their ridged paunches, their backbones, peaked sharp above, their ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... the lowest of three primitive tribes that inhabit the extreme southern point of Patagonia, whose real estate holdings front on the Strait of Magellan. That region is treeless, rocky, windswept, cold and inhospitable. I can not imagine a place better fitted for an anarchist penal colony. North of it lie plains less rigorous, and by degrees less sterile, and finally there are lands quite habitable ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... had been drawn hither, barred his way. He rode around them at the peril of falling with his horse over a precipice, and now found himself before a labyrinth of scaffolds and free-stone, in the midst of a wild, grey, treeless mountain valley. What kind of a man was this, who had chosen this desert for his home, in life as well as in death! The Escurial suited King Philip, as King Philip suited the Escurial. Here he felt most at ease, from here ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Range he found available pastoral country, which became known as Swinden's country. During this year also, Miller and Dutton explored the country at the back of Fowler's Bay. Forty miles to the north they saw treeless, grassy plains stretching far inland, but could find no permanent water. Warburton afterwards reported in depreciatory terms of this region; but Delisser and Hardwicke, who also visited it, stated that it would ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... the greater part of the way through a very desolate region. For hundreds of miles there are no white people, except the operators and repairers at the stations, and in many places it is unlikely that there will ever be any inhabitants, as the country is a treeless waste, and, at some of the stations, water has to be brought from a considerable distance. Artesian wells have been bored at many of the stations; at some of them successfully, while at others it was ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... would have made an ideal study for a lazy man, I thought, the two windows facing straight into a sand-bank, above which rose a steep hill, or perhaps I should rather say the steep wall of a plateau, on whose treeless top, all by themselves, or with only a graveyard for company, stood the Town Hall and the two village churches. Perched thus upon the roof of the Cape, as it were, and surmounted by cupola and belfry, the hall and the "orthodox" church made ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... riots as master of ceremonies with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped hi cathedral stone—memory of the grove, God's first temple; and when we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest. Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some obscure instinct in us ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... Perhaps it was his fancy, after all. He saw nothing, heard nothing. The emptiness of primeval desolation stretched from him leagues and leagues upon either hand. The gigantic silence of the night lay close over everything, like a muffling Titanic palm. Of what was he suspicious? In that treeless waste an object could be seen at half a day's journey distant. In that vast silence the click of a pebble was as audible as a pistol-shot. And ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... town, as it could boast of a population of about eight hundred people. We made due note of our reaching what was acknowledged to be the second plantation of trees in the county; there were six only in the entire county of Caithness, and even a sight like this was cheery in these almost treeless regions. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... landscape stretches, in the form of an immense treeless upland, towards a long mountain lake. Beyond the lake rises a range of peaks with blue-white snow in the clefts. In the foreground on the left a purling brook falls in severed streamlets down a steep wall of rock, and thence flows smoothly over the upland until it disappears to the ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... also of the position of Russia in Central Asia, which are worth quoting. As to the Afghan border he says: 'The three or four hundred miles of country through which the new north-western frontier of Afghanistan runs is a sandy, treeless, waterless desert, except where it is traversed from south to north by the Heri-Rood, the Murghab and the Oxus. The only cultivable ground is on the banks of these rivers; but in spring time, after the winter snows have melted, ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... not live I gradually arrived at the conclusion that it is best for any locality to develop the species, or a like kind of tree, which belong to that locality. Well, they say, how about the prairies that are treeless? Of course we have there to deal with a question of fire that from time immemorial has swept the prairies covered with grass and has been halted only when it reached the regions of established forests; so that on the prairies I have no doubt we may have great ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... twilight—there came another curious picture. Thus—a wooden town shut in among low, treeless, rolling ground, a calling river that ran unseen between scarped banks; barracks of a detachment of mounted police, a little cemetery where ex-troopers rested, a painfully formal public garden with pebble paths and foot-high fir trees, a few lines of railway ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Gen. Wheeler had just assumed command of all the Cavalry belonging to the 5th Army Corps. His headquarters, instead of being in a suite of rooms in the palatial Tampa Bay Hotel, where all the other general officers had their headquarters, were located about half a mile from the hotel in a treeless pasture. The cavalry guidon floating from a lance-head was the only indication of headquarters, and the half-dozen "A" tents in an irregular line gave no sign that one of the most distinguished generals in the world had here his headquarters ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... and destined to perish almost as quickly—the centre of the grim picture, a mere cluster of rude, unpainted houses, poorly erected shacks, grimy tents flapping in the never ceasing wind swirling across the treeless waste, the ugly red station, the rough cow-pens filled with lowing cattle, the huge, ungainly stores, their false fronts decorated by amateur wielders of the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... works. At the time the fleet arrived, the woods on the west bank had been cleared away below Jackson almost to the extreme range of its guns, thus affording no shelter from observation; the east bank was nearly treeless. Extending across the river from below Jackson, and under the guns of both works, was a line of obstructions which will be ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... woods and mountains for the plains Of treeless level Granta." (p. 103.) ... "'Twas then the time When in two camps, like Pope and Emperor, Byron and Wordsworth parted ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... plant a tree where none is found, Make bright some treeless spot, And as the ceaseless years go round You will not be forgot; From hill to hill, from shore to shore, Let hands forget their play, And men will bless ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... correct, must have been the main stream, not far from the site of Fort Mann. Here he was met by seven Indian chiefs, mounted on excellent horses saddled and bridled after the Spanish manner. They led him to where, along the plateau of the low, treeless hills that bordered the valley, he saw a string of Indian villages, extending for a league and belonging to nine several bands, the names of which can no longer be recognized, and most of which are no doubt extinct. He says that they numbered in all six thousand souls; ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... rocks, and treeless valleys, and bare stony plains, are objects without interest, except in a geological point of view. But it is very different with the Haghar and Azgher. In their eyes, a plain of stones and sand holds the ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... his deep tones, "to find some one to meet you, and," he added with a genial laugh, "to counteract the first impression of this somewhat melancholy and inhospitable scenery." His arm swept out to indicate the dreary little station and the bleak and lowering landscape of treeless hills ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... the sturdy Pilgrim Fathers cut their perilous way through the dense and dangerous depths of the Forest Primeval for the setting up of their hearthstones, so the courageous pioneers of the desolate and treeless West were forced to fight the fury ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... schists), is the continuation of the "Bocage" of Vendee and Maine-et-Loire. Its surface is irregular and covered with hedges and clumps of wood or forests. The systematic application of lime has much improved the soil, which is naturally poor. The Plaine, resting on oolite limestone, is treeless but fertile. The Marais, a low-lying district in the extreme south-west, consists of alluvial clays which also are extremely productive when properly drained. The highest points, several of which exceed 700 ft., are found in a line of hills ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... loaded and General Taylor started on his return, with his army reinforced at Point Isabel, but still less than three thousand strong, to relieve the garrison on the Rio Grande. The road from Point Isabel to Matamoras is over an open, rolling, treeless prairie, until the timber that borders the bank of the Rio Grande is reached. This river, like the Mississippi, flows through a rich alluvial valley in the most meandering manner, running towards all points of the compass at times within a few ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and the delicacy of the contrasts between the downs and the richly-foliaged fields through which the Avon winds. It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... wide treeless waste like a turf moor, with a background of sombre forest. The moor, which is broken into humps and hillocks, smokes and boils and babbles like the hell-broth of Macbeth's witches, and across it winds, snake-wise, ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... our troops, the restful scene began to change. Treeless ridges carpeted with just enough green to veil the rocky formation of the ground began to break out with a superficial rash of the colour of fresh earth. In rows and circles, by angles and zigzags, the training trenches began to take form daily under the pick and ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... exhaustless kennel-deluge, in all weathers. Next to the children of the inhabitants, in visible numerical importance, came the shirts and petticoats, and miscellaneous linen of the inhabitants; fluttering out to dry publicly on certain days of the week, and enlivening the treeless little gardens where they hung, with lightsome avenues of pinafores, and solemn-spreading foliage of stout Welsh flannel. Here that absorbing passion for oranges (especially active when the fruit is half ripe, and the weather is bitter cold), which distinguishes the city English girl of the lower ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... gold in the Rockies came across the plains, legions of adventurers trailed westward. The few roads that led across the rolling prairies to the Rockies were soon deep-cut. Wagons trains strung out across the treeless land like huge, creeping serpents moving lazily in the sun. Joyfully the adventurers went—happy, courageous. They were the vanguards of civilization, pushing ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... evidently been handled by man, with some toxodon and mylodon teeth." Fig. 49 represents the now extinct mylodon. Some time afterwards, the discovery of another carapace under similar conditions added weight to Ameghino's supposition.[110] In the midst of the pampas, those vast treeless plains, where no rock or accident of conformation affords shelter from heat or cold or a hiding-place from wild beasts, man was not at a loss; he hollowed out for himself a hole in the earth, roofing it over with the shell ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... down a superb tree of the same kind that was on his property line, in order that he might run his barbed-wire fence straight? No; I agree with him that this tree-murderer has probably a barbed-wire heart, and we expect that his future existence will be treeless, at least! ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... campaign here than in Egypt. The sun seems to scorch into your very brain, and you are suffocated by dust. Drink as much as you will, you are always tormented by thirst. It is a level plain, for the most part treeless, and with nothing to break the view but the mud villages, which are the same colour as the soil. Bah! we loathed them. And yet I ought not to say anything against the villages, for, if it had not been for one of them, I should not be here ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... morning we stopped forty minutes at Tchertchen, almost at the foot of the ramifications of the Kuen Lun. None of us had seen this miserable, desolate country, treeless and verdureless, which the railway was now crossing on its ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich spruce forests and unrecorded Eskimo tribes. It had been his intention, (and his bid for fame), to ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... shone forth, and within an hour the travellers had reached the plain; they sprang on to the beasts and rode madly on towards the lake, which, when the sun rose, gleamed before them in silvery green. As they drew near to it they could discern, on its treeless western shore, black masses moving hither and thither; clouds of dust rose up from the plain, pierced by flashes of light, like the rays of the sun ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... It is treeless, though in part overgrown with a rank vegetation, chiefly tussac-grass [Note 2], with its grand bunches of leaves, six feet in height, surrounded by plume-like flower-spikes, almost ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... Nicholas of earlier days than the rollicking, red-garbed Saint Nick of now. Only, whereas for years he had graced the window of the Exchange, bearing over his shoulder a little bough of green for a Christmas tree, this season he stood treeless, and instead bore on his shoulder a United States flag. On a placard below him Simeon ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... great treeless plain, being followed by all in single file. With such caution did we tread, and so excited were we all, that at first scarcely was a word spoken. Very soon, however, with confidence in Omar's leadership the natives grew hilarious again, and keeping ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... family, discouraged too great intimacy with them, and for the most part the new-comers preferred the shelter of their own tent. They soon emerged from the Red River Valley, left the vast, level, treeless plain behind them, and plunged into the rolling and lightly wooded Pembina region. Here clumps of small willows and, where repeated fires had not destroyed them, light bluffs of slender poplars afforded a measure of protection, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... (Now pansy-blue and clear), We know a land is waiting, A brown land, very dear: A land of open spaces, Gaunt forest, treeless plain: And if we once have loved it We must ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... for example, the frontier line of homemakers had to cut, roll, and burn thousands of trees before they could put out a crop of any size. Beyond the Mississippi, however, there were all ready for the breaking plow great reaches of almost treeless prairie, where every stick of timber was precious. In the other parts, often rough and mountainous, where stood primeval forests of the finest woods, the railroads made good use of the timber. They consumed acres of forests ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Environment: treeless, sparse and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; lacks fresh water; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for seabirds, shorebirds, and ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the station was almost treeless, and Mr. Lee was doing a good deal of planting, and had a very fine garden under formation. Some two miles to the rear of the station, in a deep cleft of the hills, lay a considerable black and white pine forest. It is a peculiarity of New Zealand that the ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... or the uptilted ice-table of the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depression behind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupied by a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hills rises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I recognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque for its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directly ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the ford the channel widened, and the river became very shallow, the low rolling hills falling away into a wide green prairie. We camped that night on a small island, low and treeless, but covered with deep, rank grass. Next morning our sleeping-bags were wet with frost and dew. A hard pull against a heavy wind between gradually deepening rocky banks made us more than glad to pitch camp at noon a short distance above the mouth of Henry's Fork, a considerable stream flowing ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... stout rails to guard against the chargings of long-horned cattle chased through the thoroughfares by lasso-whirling "bull-drivers" as wild as they. In the middle of the river-front was a ferry, whence Louisiana Avenue, broad, treeless, grassy, and thinly lined with slaughter-houses, led across the plain. Down this untidy plaisance a grimy little street-car, every half-hour, jogged out to the Carrollton railway and returned. This street and the water-front were lighted—twilighted—with ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... besides, altogether improbable, that the brown bear of Europe should turn up in the "Barren Grounds" of the Hudson's Bay territory—an isolated, treeless tract—quite unlike his habitat in the Old World; and to which no line of migration could be traced with much probability. We might suppose such a migration through Siberia and Russian America; and certainly there is some probability in this view: for although it has been hitherto stated that the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... behind him, and rolled all day through the prosaic plains of France; startling the pale little towns, down whose treeless streets the sun shone, oh! so drearily, and taking up boors and market-folks at every monastic station. There was a pretty young girl sitting beside Ralph in the afternoon, but he refused to talk to her, for he was schooling himself, and preferred to scan ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... arrival at Sylvania Castle, a dignified manor-house in a nook by the cliffs, with modern castellations and battlements; and he had walked through the rooms, about the lawn, and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island of treeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure. In name, nature, and accessories the property within the girdling wall formed a complete antithesis to everything in its precincts. To find other trees between Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... back to tell you. You know that little treeless 'bubble' that stands on the edge of the canyon only about half a mile up-stream from here? Well, when I drove up the hill out of our valley just now I turned, naturally, to look at the scar on the mountain, when the first thing ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... Bivouacked on the treeless plain, so far from the old trail and from the timber ahead that they could see no sign of the Black Hillers or the troops, the next morning's sun rose on the band of Sioux led by Persimmon Bill. Used to all kinds of exigencies, the red men did not mind either a lack ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... wild-cat, and alligator. Now and then there was the cool blue of sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea, and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy ditches; but ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... had spoken with prophetic wisdom. Dry Bottom was trying as best it knew how to wallow in the depths of sin. Unlovely, soiled, desolate of verdure, dumped down upon a flat of sand in a treeless waste, amid cactus, crabbed yucca, scorpions, horned toads, and rattlesnakes. Dry Bottom had forgotten its morals, subverted its ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... poor soldiers who were languishing in hospital tents on the sunburnt and treeless prairies of the Dakotas, or suffering from disease contracted in the miasmatic swamps of the rebellious South have had their hearts gladdened and their bodies strengthened by being supplied with the delicacies collected through the efforts of the noble ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... with my tree cultivation. In fact, farmers living in that section of the country were always poking fun at my nut tree plantings and orchard work, for their idea of what was proper on a farm was a treeless field of plowed ground. As I thought of all these things, I pulled up many other trees; in fact, there were dozens that were chopped off so that they could be completely pulled out. Others still had one or two roots clinging to the main trunk ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... the Wooded Farm. Best Use of Poor Forest Land. The Handling of Fire in Clearing. Planting on Treeless Farms. Species Most Promising for Fuel and Improvement Material. Windbreaks to Prevent Evaporation of Soil Moisture. Methods and ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... Babylonia is a treeless country, and timber had to be imported from the earliest times. The date palm was probably introduced by man, as were certainly the vine and the fig tree, which were widely cultivated, especially in the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... atmosphere. No inhabitant of Brussels need wander far to search for solitude; let him but move half a league from his own city and he will find her brooding still and blank over the wide fields, so drear though so fertile, spread out treeless and trackless round the capital of Brabant. Having gained the summit of the hill, and having stood and looked long over the cultured but lifeless campaign, I felt a wish to quit the high road, which I had hitherto followed, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the islands of New Siberia, of Wrangel's Land, and of the part of North America east of Behring's Straits, whose natural state gave occasion to the golden glamour of tradition with which the belief of the common people incorrectly adorned the bleak, treeless islands ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... must be divided in the tomb, For I would die among the hills of Spain, And o'er the treeless, melancholy plain Await the coming of the final gloom. But thou — O pitiful! — wilt find scant room Among thy kindred by the northern main, And fade into the drifting mist again, The hemlocks' ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... moriche palm towering above the humbler shrubs. Through this they who travel so gleefully are making their way; but cannot yet be seen from the spot where Halberger has halted. But just on the opposite bank, where the trail goes up from the ford, is a bit of treeless sward, several acres in extent, in all likelihood, kept clear of undergrowth by the wild horses and other animals on their way to the water to drink. It runs back like an embayment into the close-growing scrub, and as the trail can be distinguished debouching at its upper end, the naturalist ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... discharge of artillery in the outskirts, and the church bells begin ringing; but the peals dwindle away to a melancholy jangle, and then to silence. Simultaneously, on the northern horizon of the arid, unenclosed, and treeless plain swept by the eye around the city, a cloud of dust arises, and a Royal procession is seen nearing. It means the new ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Note: treeless, sparse, and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... all ices sliding the girls, Yet leaving not the straight path, lest tardy should be their arrival. Lone on the bleak hill-side, stood the unpainted village school-house, Winds taking aim at it like a target, smoke belching from its chimney, Bare to the fiery suns of summer, like the treeless Nantucket. Desks were ranged under the windows where on high benches without backs Sate the little ones, their feet vainly reaching toward the distant floor, Commanded everlastingly to keep still and ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... its moderately copious and not unfrequent water-courses, and he very naturally concludes 'the American Desert' a misnomer, or at best a gross exaggeration. But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind him, the country begins to shoal, as a sailor might say, growing rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless. The scanty forage that is still visible is confined to the immediate banks or often submerged intervales of streams, though a little sometimes lingers in hollows or ravines where the drifted snows of winter evidently lay melting slowly till ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... proprietors were of all degrees: here was the great house of a lord, there a miserable dramshop. The enclosure consisted of no less than thirteen acres, making Stephen's Green the largest public square in Europe. It was simply a great treeless field, with an equestrian statue of George II. stuck in the middle of it. The principal entrance to the ground is described as "decorated with four piers of black stone crowned with globes of mountain granite, once respectable, but exhibiting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing. We left the high-road and soon were in the ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a new word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it since. Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... see; and they would get good value for their bargain. Behind us, the sky-line was a panorama of the Holy City, domes, minarets and curved stone roofs rising irregularly above gray battlemented walls. Down on the right was the ghastly valley of Jehoshaphat, treeless, dry, and crowded with white tombs—"dry bones in the valley of death." To the left were everlasting limestone hills, one of them topped by the ruined reputed tomb of Samuel—all trenched, cross-trenched and war-scarred, ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... soldier of Cortes's army called Villafuerte, and that the day succeeding the terrible Noche Triste, it was concealed by him in the place where it was afterwards discovered. At all events, the image disappeared, and nothing further was known of it until, on the top of a barren and treeless mountain, in the heart of a large maguey, she was found by a fortunate Indian. Her restoration was joyfully hailed by the Spaniards. A church was erected on the spot. A priest was appointed to take charge of the miraculous image. Her fame spread abroad. Gifts of immense value were brought ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... knoll, just beyond the line of bushes, and on lower ground, fully a dozen young men lounged, basking in the morning sun, which poured through upon this small, treeless space. ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... The bush, or great forest, which is almost impenetrable in the coastal belt, becomes somewhat more open in patches in the middle belt, while on the plateau open, park-like country alternates with treeless, grassy plains, and the forest is confined to the deep valleys or the mountain-slopes. The rainfall, which is fair on the coast, becomes very light in the middle belt, which in consequence tends to have an arid character; on the plateau it is high or ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... it since it had fallen. Our first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it passes over wind-swept, treeless wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the men employed had done their work well until within ten miles of the Koyukuk River. There it was found that the labour and cost already expended had exhausted the appropriation, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... with their hands, and when they opened them a moment later they beheld Nigostu{COMBINING BREVE}n, the Earth, complete in extent. No hills or mountains were there in sight, nothing but a smooth, treeless, reddish-brown plain. ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... the East, Watches swart arms roll down the precious bales, Spoils of the tropic forests; year by year Amid the din of heathen voices, groaning Himself half heathen? How to those—brave hearts! Who toil with laden loins and sinking stride Beside the bitter wells of treeless sands Toward the peaks which flood the ancient Nile, To free a tyrant's captives? How to those— New patriarchs of the new-found underworld— Who stand, like Jacob, on the virgin lawns, And count their flocks' increase? To them that day Shall dawn in glory, and solstitial blaze Of full midsummer ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... the shanty, and watched Dave stir together sour milk and soda for bread. The ranch was away in the hills, much too far from any town for visits from the baker's wagon. The treeless hills were the ranging-place of cattle and horses. Far away in the valley Sid could see the river-bed. It was dry now, but Dave said that if one dug down anywhere in the sand, one could find a current of water a few feet below the surface. Dave always knew things. ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... chapel dedicated to St. Michel, which surmounts the tumulus, forms a conspicuous landmark from every point, and commands a most extensive view over the stones of Carnac ranged in their eleven lines, on a treeless plain, the Morbihan, and the long dreary ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... the coasts of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, while he himself marched along the shore of the province, then called Gedrosia, and now Mekhran. It was a most dismal tract. Above towered mountains of reddish- brown bare stone, treeless and without verdure, the scanty grass produced in the summer being burnt up long before September, the month of his march; and all the slope below was equally desolate slopes of gravel. The few inhabitants were called by the Greeks fish-eaters ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... three or four cottages made up a tiny hamlet, from which the smoke would presently rise. To English eyes, to our eyes, the scene, these oases in the limitless brown of the bog, had been wild and rude; but to Colonel John, long familiar with the treeless plains of Poland and the frozen flats of Lithuania, it spoke of home, it spoke of peace and safety and comfort, and even of a narrow plenty. The soft Irish air lapped it, the distances were mellow, memories of boyhood rounded off all ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... friends and warnings from Mackaye, I started next day on my journey. I arrived in the midst of a dreary, treeless country, and a little pert, snub-nosed shoemaker met me, and we walked together across the open down towards a circular camp, the earthwork, probably, of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... city in this region is Tiflis, the "city of seventy languages." It may, indeed, be called the modern Babel. As seen from the mountains, it lies at the bottom of a brown, treeless valley, between steep hills, on either ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... and gracious use of the cloud was to shelter them from the fiery sun. Like a great umbrella, that majestic pillar spread its canopy above the camp, and became a shielding shadow from the burning heat in the treeless desert. No one who has never felt an Oriental sun can fully appreciate how much this ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... superior; they are flat and without undulations, composed in general of gravel or hard clay, and rarely enlivened by any show of water; except for two months in the spring, they exhibit to the eye a uniform brown expanse, almost treeless, which impresses the traveller with a feeling of sadness and weariness. Even in Azerbijan, which is one of the least arid portions of the territory, vast tracks consist of open undulating downs, desolate and sterile, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... America. Now the river expands into lake-like proportions, its surface dotted with numerous low and wooded islands. At intervals, towns, villages, or forts may be seen on the summits of the cliffs, sixty feet above the water. Generally the country on the western side is a level, treeless plain; but as the river is ascended woods appear, which gradually become thicker, presenting, as further progress is made, more ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... on a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin. It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate. The plaster, gnawed away by winds laden with searching sea-moisture, had fallen to earth, exposing the underlying masonry of cheap construction whose rusty ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless wastes and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches from between the Qu'-Appelle to the Saskatchewan rivers. Through it the great trail to the North lays its long, winding course, and over it broods the loneliness of the untenanted. Alone in the vast waste Mount Spathanaw ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... entirely forgotten the need of food, but now the memory of it had rushed upon him like a flood over a barrier, as soon as he saw the bacon. And when they had collected enough of tiny inflammable things, for it was a treeless plain, and Morano had made a fire, and the odour of the bacon became perceptible, this memory was ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Baker Island treeless, sparse, and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... shrubs—those four yews by the gates a present from FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon will be treeless. It was not so when my father first came to it. Where now there is one huge field, there then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two "Greens" ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the sky—these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the traveler with a sense of his insignificance. The vast silences, too, of brooding, treeless wastes, sun-baked river-beds, shadowless brown squares standing for miles at a brief height above the shadowless brown floor of the plain—silences amidst which only the wind finds a voice—these, too, insist drearily on the nothingness ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... portion of the country over which he rode, was a treeless plain and the keen blue eyes of the matchless mountaineer were kept on a continual strain. A moving speck in the distant horizon, the faint column of thin smoke rising from the far off grove, or a faint yellow dust against the blue ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... side of the guide's cabin the car awaited them, and mile after mile they drove on through treeless wastes, the few houses with their thatch anchored down by stones, showing what winds must sweep along those unsheltered tracts. The desolate solitude began to weary the volatile pair into silence; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Canadian wilderness are locally known as the Coast Country—the shores of the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay; the Barren Grounds—the treeless country between Hudson Bay and the Mackenzie River; the Strong Woods Country—the whole of that enormous belt of heavy timber that spans Canada from east to west; the Border Lands—the tracts of small, scattered timber that lie between the prairies and the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... development. No person who has seen the gazelles in confinement in a temperate climate can form an idea of the beauty of the animal in its native desert. Born in the scorching sun, nursed on the burning sand of the treeless and shadowless wilderness, the gazelle is among the antelope tribe as the Arab horse is among its brethren, the high-bred and superlative beauty of the race. The skin is as sleek as satin, of a colour difficult to describe, as it varies between the lightest mauve and ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... scene had changed: summer was gone. A grey November mist hung low on the hills which only yesterday had shone resplendent in the sun, and under its melancholy curtain the dead flat of the Chaeronean plain, a wide treeless expanse shut in by desolate slopes, wore an aspect of chilly sadness befitting the battlefield where a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... where the hedges begin, there were in those days two elms forming the end of the long avenue, two colossal trees larger than any of the others. The treeless fields stretch out from the high road, like a broad band of green wool, as far as the willows and birches by the river. The distance from the last elms to the bridge is scarcely three hundred yards. The lovers ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... matter of that, Penmorgan was quite gloomy enough in itself, in all conscience, to account for his dislike—a lonely and gaunt-looking granite-built house, standing bare and square on the edge of a black moor, under shelter of a rocky dip, in a treeless country. It must have been a terrible change for a bachelor about town, like Walter Tyrrel, to come down at twenty-eight from his luxurious club and his snug chambers in St. James' to the isolation and desolation of that wild Cornish manor-house. ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... picking my way for some hours through a desolate plateau—the high veldt—about five thousand feet above the sea level, and entirely treeless. In places, to be sure, a few low bushes of prickly aspect rose in tangled clumps; but for the most part the arid table-land was covered by a thick growth of short brown grass, about nine inches high, burnt up in the sun, and most wearisome ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... intruded upon the solitary prairies of the west, and troops of horses dashed madly away upon our approach, the thunder of their hoofs continuing to be audible long after their disappearance. At eight miles from Goliad begins an extensive and treeless prairie, known as the Nine-mile Prairie; and across this, towards three in the afternoon, we had advanced about four or five miles. Myself and some of my comrades, who acted as rearguard, were about two miles behind, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Nivelle as they left the car on the outskirts of the town and entered the long main street. That was all of Nivelle, a long, treeless main street from which branched ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... still worse. The middle distance was dotted with half a dozen "follies" "for sale," each with its small bunch of workmen's cottages, some empty, some full, alas! and all treeless and grassless under the blazing sun. Far beyond to the right, shading away from green to blue, rose the hills of Widewood—lost Widewood!—hiding other "tied-up capital" and more stranded labor. For scattered through those lovely forests were scores, hundreds, of peasants from across seas, to every ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... swamps only in being treeless. They are open sheets of water surrounded by bands of greater or less width of tall grasses. The third day, between 30 and 40 miles from Myers, we left the pine tree lands and started across what are called in Southern Florida the "prairies." ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... the morning blue, cloudless, and still. Packard had conferred briefly with Barbee; the Ranch Number Ten men had gone about their work. Steve and Bill Royce, riding side by side, had mounted one of the flat, treeless hills in the upper valley and were now sitting silent while Royce fumbled with his pipe and Steve sent a long, eager look down across the open meadow-lands ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... standing up in stately and solemn grandeur, their arms lovingly intertwined, through the everlasting verdure of which the sun never shines; and others still are gigantic rocks, rising up out of the deep water, all treeless and shrubless, remaining always in brown and barren desolation, on which the eagle and osprey devour their prey, and the flocks of gulls that frequent the lake 'light to rest from their almost ceaseless flight. Civilization has not as yet marred in anything ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... cost, I am told, something like thirty thousand pounds. At this rate the tundra section of the Bering Straits Railway would alone involve an outlay of twenty million sterling; probably far more, for every foot of timber for the roadway would have to be imported into this treeless waste. And how is this expenditure going to be repaid by these barren deserts, in winter of ice, and in summer of mud and mosquitoes. Let another Klondike be discovered near, say, Sredni-Kolymsk, and I have no doubt that surveys for a line ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... thought points the way out of another contradictious puzzle, that which confronts my argument from the ears of an ass. It roams treeless deserts where no foe can approach unseen. Thistles make no sound. Why should it be adorned with ears which in their amplitude are scarcely surpassed by those of the rabbit and the hare. There is no answer unless their function is to hear the bray of a fellow-ass.... One may object that that majestic ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... rose; and just below, like the petals of some vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast and island opened magically into blossom. The rocky cliffs of Mattapan slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed; treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all exquisitely rosy and alive. He had seen Greece before, yet never thus, and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay infinitely deeper than any mere ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of Falmouth is situated in a sheltered bay with the glittering sea beyond. Landward lie the villages of Mabe and Constantine, with their great granite quarries, and beyond them wide expanses of undulating and treeless land that is not devoid of beauty. Here the climate is so mild that hydrangeas become large bushes, and the eucalyptus attains the proportions of a forest tree. The port rose perhaps to its greatest height of prosperity in the days of the fourth George, when the famous ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... barrens—treeless plains in the midst of dense forest—the caribou collect in small herds as winter comes on, following the old gregarious instinct. Then each one cannot do as he pleases any more; and it is for this winter ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... comforts combined with the traditions of past glories; it would have avenues of grand old trees and marble statues, and terraces leading into Italian gardens, and so forth. In fact, my imagination got so riotous that I forgot to look at the treeless, muddy roads, and I never noticed the wrenching of the ancient landau in which ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... commonly called "The Picket Wire," but the real name of which is La Purgatoire. It is about five miles from the post and makes a nice objective point for a short ride, for the clear water gurgling over the stones, and the trees and bushes along its banks, are always attractive in this treeless country. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... were so far away that I had to make a special camp from which to operate. The waggon was loaded with ice from the water-pocket, and a supply of provisions, and driven about seven miles to a basaltic gulch, in a well-wooded locality on the edge of a treeless valley, where the load was dropped and I was left with my horse. Before dark I gathered a lot of wood, made a good fire, and melted some of the ice that formed my water supply, in a brass kettle, watering my horse, which ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... had met him before. The brown twilight was coming on, and a warm sleepy hush pervaded earth and air, broken only by the stream below them, cantering away over its stones to join the Wan Water. Neither of them was inclined to quarrel with the treeless country about them: they were lapped in foliage; nor with the desolate moorland hills around them: they ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Desert from Korosko, situated between the First and Second Cataracts, southward across the burning sands of the Nubian Desert, a distance of 425 miles, concur in the statement that it is an undertaking unmatched in its severity and rigors by any like journey over the treeless and shrub-less spaces of the earth. "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," as told by De Quincey, in his matchless descriptive style, carrying his readers with him through scenes of almost unparalleled warfare, privation, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... The land around was treeless and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of Salt Lake ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Mississippi is a very different country from the hot and treeless prairies of Illinois. As Stephen alighted at the little station at Glencoe and was driven away by Ned in the Colonel's buggy, he drew in deep breaths of the sweet ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dismal century, finally melting away as the milder weather began slowly to return, leaving Ireland a very lamentable-looking island indeed, not unlike one of those deplorable islands scattered along the shores of Greenland and upon the edges of Baffin's Bay—treeless, grassless, brown and scalded, wearing everywhere over its surface the marks of that great ice-plough which had lacerated ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless |
