"Basalt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sediment from our continent is carried into the seas of the New World. In short, we are still very little advanced towards the theory of the earth as it now exists." Guettard was the first to discover the volcanoes of Auvergne, but he was "hopelessly wrong" in regard to the origin of basalt, forestalling Werner in his mistakes as to its aqueous origin. He was thus the first Neptunist, while, as Geikie states, his "observations in Auvergne practically ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... In Djebel Adjeloun, Moerad, and Beni Obeid, none of the basalt or black stone is met with; but in some parts of El Kefarat, in our way from Hebras to Om Keis, I saw alternate layers of calcareous and basaltic rock, with thin strata of flint. The habitations of Om Keis ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... with a black band, while his head was covered with a cap that had a projecting peak. The evening came, and darkness spread over the valley: the Black Forest had not received its name in vain. A few miles from Freiburg there stands a lonely hill, named the Emperor's Chair. Dark masses of basalt form the steps of this natural throne; tall evergreens stretch their branches protectingly over the hill. A fresh mountain air is cast about by the big trees, and the north wind is in eternal battle with this giant, which it bends but can ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... island this—as fine a volcanic upheaval as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock 6,000 feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, and turrets; so that, with half-closed eyes, it seems you are approaching a temple, a medieval castle, or a mosque of the East. And the valleys—deep, choked with the most rampant growths of luxuriant ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... Souakim to-day, the port of Nubia. It is about 275 miles, or 25 days' camel-journey, from thence to Berber on the Nile. The road passes through Korib, and among fine red granite and black basalt mountains, 4,000 feet high. We left one of the firemen, Tom Dollar, behind at Aden by mistake, and only found out yesterday that we had done so. It appears that he has a brother living there, whom he was most anxious to go ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of the river canon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Taal, located in the northeastern portion of the province of Batangas. It is situated on a small island in the center of the Bombon laguna, and has an altitude of 550 feet above sea level. Its form is conical, and the rock is composed of basalt feldspar with a small quantity of augite. The crater is supposed to be 232 feet deep. Its sides are almost vertical, and there are two steaming lagunas at ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... a curious resemblance to Peyrousse is Trosky, in Bohemia, but in this latter case the rocks are of basalt, and between the two towers the connecting rock forms a deep depression. In 1415, Johann von Herzmanmiestetz and Otto Berka of Trosk sacked the monastery of Opatowitz, butchered most of the monks, tortured the abbot so that he died a few days later, and carried off all the plunder they could collect. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... basalt having been theoretically demonstrated, Mr. Henry Adcock, C.E., in 1851 took out letters patent for the manufacture of a number of articles from the Rowley ragstone. Furnaces were erected at Messrs. Chance Brothers, and the experiment thoroughly carried out, a number ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things within and without the yellow vista are steeped in a sunshine electrically white, in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavement of basalt the glitter of ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... solid rock, like basalt, can be cut into slices of about 3/32 inch thick. A very loose rock is best boiled in Canada balsam, hard enough to set, before it ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... of which the Mountain is composed are mainly andesites of different classes and basalt. But the peak rests upon a platform of granite, into which the glaciers have cut in their progress. Fine exposures of the older and harder rock are seen on the Nisqually, just below the present end of its glacier, as well as on the Carbon and in Moraine Park. This ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... earth, but a good deal on sea, and a trifle on as uncomfortable a section of basalt as ever served two unhappy buccaniers for bed, table, and sofa. The chilliness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... meteor or a block of volcanic basalt," judged the Master. "It seems sprinkled with small crystals, with rhombs of tile-red feldspath on a dark background like velvet or charcoal, except for one reddish protuberance of an unknown substance. A good blow with a hammer would surely break it along the original lines of fracture—and this ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... two days and nights at Philae and Wallahy! it was hot. The basalt rocks which enclose the river all round the island were burning. Sally and I slept in the Osiris chamber, on the roof of the temple, on our air-beds. Omar lay across the doorway to guard us, and Arthur and his Copt, with ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the romantic coast of Northumberland, "over against" an obscure town of the same name. It stands upon a basalt rock, of a triangular shape, high, rugged, and abrupt on the land side; flanked by the German Ocean, and strong natural rampires of sand, matted together with sea rushes on the east; and only accessible to an enemy on the south-east, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... is an isolated rocky tongue rising suddenly like an island from the low levels, and trending north-west to south-east. The site is perfectly healthy; the ground is gravel, not clay, and the stone is basalt. The upper heights are forested and full of game; the lower are cleared and await the colonist. With the pure and keen Atlantic breeze ever blowing over it, the Mount is a ready-made sanatorium. Its youth has been disreputable. Here Captain Canot, [Footnote: Wanderings ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... to historic matters, both Toltec and Aztec. The great sacrificial stone of the aborigines, placed on the ground floor of the museum, is, in all its detail, a study to occupy one for days. It is of basalt, elaborately chiseled, measuring nine feet in diameter and three feet in height. On this stone the lives of thousands of human beings, we are told, were offered up annually. The municipal palace is on the south side of the plaza, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... middle pavement is composed of a very hard kind of brick called 'basalt,' which is ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative condition; rocks of eruption, p 20 endogenous (granite, sienite, porphyry, greenstone, hyperathene, rock, euphotide, melaphyre, basalt, and phonolithe); sedimentary rocks (silurian schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, infusorial deposit); metamorphosed rock, which contains also, together with the detritus mica schist, and more ancient metamorphic masses. Aggregate and sandstone formations. The phenomenon of contact explained ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... itself up against the mountain. It is here also that the great ice-cliff which runs for hundreds of miles to the east, with the Barrier behind it and the Ross Sea beating into its crevasses and caves, joins the basalt precipice which bounds the Knoll, as the two-knobbed saddle which forms Cape Crozier is called. Altogether it is the kind of place where giants have had a good time in their childhood, playing with ice instead ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... floras,—its flora of the Old Red Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,—probably the richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... forefinger. Within the area is a well, where the priest threw the ashes of the sacrifices. We saw in the Museum at Portici some lovely arabesque paintings, cut from the walls of the cloister. The foliage which ran round the whole sweep of the cloister itself is in the finest taste. A tablet of basalt with Egyptian hieroglyphics was transported from thence to Portici, together with the following inscription, taken from the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... there is any propriety in their presence, though he knows perfectly well that there is a great deal of necessity; and, therefore he builds them. Where? On rocks whose sides are one mass of buttresses, of precisely the same form; on rocks which are cut and cloven by basalt and lava dikes of every size, and which, being themselves secondary, wear away gradually by exposure to the atmosphere, leaving the intersecting dikes standing out in solid and vertical walls, from the faces of their precipices. The eye passes over heaps of ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... pointed. I followed the direction of his hand and came to the low table whereon rested, amongst other curios, the mummy of the cat which had raised Silvio's ire. I got a candle and easily found the mark of the bullet. It had broken a little glass vase and a tazza of black basalt, exquisitely engraved with hieroglyphics, the graven lines being filled with some faint green cement and the whole thing being polished to an equal surface. The bullet, flattened against the wall, lay on ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... up on my elbow. The mountain I had seen from the village—which then had been wrapped in a dark haze—now towered directly above us, rocky and enormous, with black sea-crags at its feet. The rocks were drenched with spray from the breakers, and the booming of the sea as it crashed into the basalt caves resounded like ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... winter, which fissures the surface and rends the rocks of the rivers into regular basalt-like columns, there succeeds a sudden and delightful spring. So instantaneous is the change that nature seems as if taken by surprise and rudely awakened. The delicate green of the opening leaf, the fragrance of the budding flowers, the intoxicating balm of the atmosphere, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Even as we went along, scarcely able to breathe, we saw a huge fragment of rock crash down into the depths below. This was followed by a grinding sound and a rumble like thunder; then high above us shot a shower of red-hot lava and stones, while we crouched under a projecting shelf of black basalt, and forgot that we were prisoners in the midst of such an impressive scene. When the stream of fire which darted upwards had somewhat subsided, our captives urged us forward, and on we went, tumbling and slipping ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... that I could give as of old an occasional hour to literature and geology. The proof-sheets of my book began to drop in upon me, demanding revision; and to a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town, rich in the organisms of the Mountain Limestone, and overflown by a bed of basalt so regularly columnar, that one of the legends of the district attributed its formation to the "ancient Pechts," I was able to devote, not without profit, the evenings of several Saturdays. I formed, at this time, my first acquaintance with the Palaeozoic shells, as they occur ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... hall of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum is a wonderful piece of sculpture known as the Rosetta Stone. I doubt if any other piece in the entire exhibit attracts so much attention from the casual visitor as this slab of black basalt on its telescope-like pedestal. The hall itself, despite its profusion of strangely sculptured treasures, is never crowded, but before this stone you may almost always find some one standing, gazing with more or less of discernment at the strange characters that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... curiously at Stradella, and then took his small block of basalt and a stoneware bottle of nitric acid from a leathern bag he carried, slung on his arm. The spotted cat seemed interested in these objects, and after having gazed at them placidly for half a minute, rose with deliberation, walked along the ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... through the thirsty fields, conveying the vivifying element which in this part of Usagara was so scarce and precious. Down to the river-bed sloped the Mpwapwa, roughened in some places by great boulders of basalt, or by rock masses, which had parted from a precipitous scarp, where clung the kolquall with a sure hold, drawing nourishment where every other green thing failed; clad in others by the hardy mimosa, which rose like a sloping bank of green verdure almost ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... saw hills and a small mountain, but all the country in that direction seemed to be extremely arid and repellent. The bare basalt of volcanic origin showed everywhere, and, even at the distance, he could see many deep quarries in the stone, where races older, doubtless, than Aztecs and Toltecs, had obtained material for building. It was always Ned's feeling when in Mexico that he was in an old, old land, not ancient like England ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and around the margins of the rest of the continent, Africa received its last great accumulation of strata and at the same time underwent a consecutive series of earth-movements. The additional strata consist of the immense quantities of volcanic material on the plateau of East Africa, the basalt flows of West Africa and possibly those of the Zambezi basin. The exact period of the commencement of volcanic activity is unknown. In Abyssinia the Ashangi traps are certainly post-Oolitic. In East Africa the fissure eruptions are considered to belong to the Cretaceous. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... husbands who will last, and you no longer know how to preserve yourselves. Of the last persons who were brought here, scarcely fifteen centuries ago, nothing now remains but a pinch of ashes. Look! my flesh is as hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel. I shall be present on the last day, with the body and features I had in life. My daughter Hermonthis will last longer than a statue of bronze. But at that time the winds will have dissipated the last grains ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... tertiary formations, with their abundant shells, and their relics of vegetable life buried under great sheets of basalt, led him to consider carefully the question of climate during these earlier periods. In opposition to prevalent views on this subject, Darwin points out that his observations are opposed to the conclusion that a higher temperature prevailed universally over the globe during early ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... making for the spot he and others familiar with the region knew as The Crater. Back about half a mile from the rim of Shoestring Canyon, which, itself, had originally been cut out of lava from extinct volcanoes of the range, rose a vast basalt peak, smooth and precipitous on the side toward the canyon. Its lower slopes had once been terraced down to the flat bench land which rimmed the canyon, but, unnumbered ages ago, the subterranean forces had ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... impelled to open it. I found myself in a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed to know was that ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... coast. The range dividing the Flinders from the Cooper River country he estimated to be from 1000 to 1500 feet high, while that which he crossed on his expedition to the south-west, though about the same height, was of quite a different character, being composed of a basalt different from any he had seen before. The slopes of the tableland were grassed with spinifex, which is almost worthless. All basaltic country he had seen previously in other parts of Australia was exceedingly ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... away, the songs say, along the Mysian shore, and past the mouth of Rhindacus, till they found a pleasant bay, sheltered by the long ridges of Arganthus, and by high walls of basalt rock. And there they ran the ship ashore upon the yellow sand, and furled the sail, and took the mast down, and lashed it in its crutch. And next they let down the ladder, and went ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... tables or prisms, and what is their arrangement. It be must remarked if they contain the remains of organised bodies, and care must be taken to take samples in their different states, also of the matter on which the basalt rests. It must be certain above all that there is no intervention of scorified matter, or beds of an earthy appareance, to which the Germans give the name of Wakke, and which are proved to be of ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... deities. The Catholic writers call them messengers and mediators, having their own saints in mind. But their forms were sometimes merely animal, a toad, a tortoise with a sun upon its back, and upon each side a star with the moon in her first change; another was a monstrous figure in basalt, representing a head surmounting a female bosom, diminishing to a ball; another was a human figure made from a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... hall of the palace—the vastest hall in the world—dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... it in the nature of the country. The cities of Assyria—NINEVEH (Koyunjik), KALAH (Nimrud), ARBELA, DUR-SHARRUKIN (Khorsabad) were built in the midst of a hilly region abounding in many varieties of stone, from soft limestone to hard basalt; some of them actually stood on rocky ground, their moats being in part cut through the rock. Had they wanted stone of better quality, they had only to get it from the Zagros range of mountains, which skirts all Assyria to the East, separating it from Media. Yet they never availed ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... waters of Normandy, then on the banks of the Seine along which he coasted, bending to the oar. Then Brittany with its beaches, where high waves rolled in beneath low and dreary skies, then Auvergne, with its scattered huts amid the sour grass, beneath rocks of basalt; and, finally, Corsica, Italy, Sicily, not with artistic enthusiasm, but simply to enjoy the delight of grand, pure outlines. Africa, the country of Salammbo, the desert, finally call him, and he breathes those distant odors borne on the slow winds; the sunlight inundates his ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... One sees the pulpit on the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the aery dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk; And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. {30} —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to the entrance of the channel. The 'Stancomb Wills' pushed off at 11 a.m. and quickly passed out of sight around the island. Then Hurley and I walked along the beach towards the west, climbing through a gap between the cliff and a great detached pillar of basalt. The narrow strip of beach was cumbered with masses of rock that had fallen from the cliffs. We struggled along for two miles or more in the search for a place where we could get the boats ashore and make a permanent camp in ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the grass-covered soil sloped steeply down to the water's edge, rising again in the form of a cliff as the cove took a bend away toward the north-east. The rocky cliffs seemed to be composed of basalt, with a thick covering of rich deep-red soil, upon which vegetation flourished luxuriantly. The breeze, following the trend of the channel—the water in which seemed deep enough to float a battleship—wafted us gently forward, and I headed the boat for the point where the grass ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language was known. "All that is necessary," so he reasoned, "is to compare the Greek text with ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... water but that of wells, generally muddy, brackish, or bitter, and at fearful intervals. On the first evening, the place of encampment was a small plain, with no other vegetation than a few prickly talk bushes, encircled by high mountains of basalt, which gave it the appearance of a volcanic crater. Here, at a well of tolerably good water, called Gatfa, the camels were loaded with water for five days. The next day, the horse and foot men passed over a very steep mountain called Nufdai, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... swept out into dreadful magnificences of height and depth, and glow and shadow. Cliffs of black basalt, scarred and riven by the accidents of thousands of years, frowned like eyeless giant faces. One height, with a supernal leap, had risen from the highest, and stood poised a mile aloft, as if it were a feat to stand so for a second, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... whirlpools. The boats hugged the left wall for some distance, but when the men saw that they could not descend on this side they pulled up stream several hundred yards and crossed to the other. Here there was a bed of basalt about one hundred feet high, which, disembarking, they followed, pulling the boats after them by ropes. The major, as usual, went ahead, and discovered that it would be impossible to lower the boats from the cliff; but the men had already brought one of them to the brink of the falls and had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... immense villa at Tibur, to enable him to celebrate his voluptuous feasts under the friendly eyes of Serapis. He extolled the merits of the deified Antinous in inscriptions couched in the ancient language of the Pharaohs, and set the fashion of statues hewn out of black basalt in the Egyptian style.[36] The amateurs of that period affected to prefer the hieratic rigidity of the barbarian idols to the elegant freedom of Alexandrian art. Those esthetic manifestations probably corresponded to religious prejudices, and the Latin worship ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... gaze upward to their lofty, vaulted arches, to drink in the impression of architectual sublimity, which I can neither analyze nor express. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt. There is little ornament here. That roof looks plain and bare; yet I feel that the air is dense with sublimity. Onward I sped, crossing a bridge by the Hotel Dieu, and, leaving the river, plunged into narrow streets. Explored a quadrangular market; surveyed the old church of St Genevieve, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... deep in hell they had forged a terrible temptation. They knew the walls of the citadel of morality, built alone on natural virtue and unaided by divine grace, would soon crumble before their powerful machinations. In moments of sober reflection our resolutions are like prisms of basalt, that will not be riven by the lightning, but which in the hour of real trial prove to be ice-crystals that a sunbeam can dissolve. The powers that wage war with frail humanity have hung on the portals of the infernal kingdom, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... he caught up his rifle and strode on down the passage, at that moment illuminated by the last unearthly rays of the aurora borealis. A single, dazzling beam played before him like a powerful searchlight, to light a high vaulted tunnel of basalt rocks which were distorted by some long-gone convulsion of the earth into a hundred weird cleavages and faults. For that brief instant he found he could see perhaps a hundred feet down into a high roofed passage, along the top of which poured a tremendous ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... entirely volcanic, rises 3442 feet above the Mediterranean, and the Trebia Lada, 2723 feet high, is one of the three basaltic feet forming the Trebina, or Tripod, on the summit of Monte Arcuentu, a mountain between Orestano and Ales formed of horizontal layers of basalt. Further south at Nurri, closely approaching the primitive chain, are two hills, called “pizzè-ogheddu,” and “pizzè ogu mannu,” or peaks of the little and great eye, which were certainly ignivomous mouths, and the peasants believe that they still have a subterraneous communication. A volcanic ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... help being impressed by his surroundings during his halt at the surveying camp established at the highest point his railway was to reach. He spent the night there, arriving just too late to see the last dying glow of sunlight upon the snowy flank of Higuerota. Pillared masses of black basalt framed like an open portal a portion of the white field lying aslant against the west. In the transparent air of the high altitudes everything seemed very near, steeped in a clear stillness as in an imponderable liquid; and with his ear ready to catch the first sound of the expected ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... a boat!" 'Poleon cried. In between the basalt jaws appeared a skiff with two rowers, and a man in the stern. The latter was braced on wide-spread legs and he held his weight upon a steering-sweep. Down the boat came at a galloping gait, threshing over waves and flinging spray head-high; it bucked and ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... reached, and much of the range they had crossed, was formed of basalt in various stages of decomposition; but in the country before them, for several miles in advance, huge masses of granite and fragments of quartz indicated a change in the nature of the prevailing rock. The position ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... was bright and attractive; for though no large trees were growing near the shore, the land was covered with a glorious vegetation, and looked attractive right away to the slopes of the volcano, as soon as the crater bay, with its lowering black basalt, was left a quarter of ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... J. B. Stearns, of Short Hills, N.J. The example shown in Fig. 7 was obtained near the Gulf of Dolce, 82 deg 55' west. Three views are presented: profile, front, and back. It is carved from what appears to be a compact, grayish olive tufa or basalt, and represents a male personage, distinct in style from the female figure first presented. The head is rounded above, the arms are flattened against the sides, and the feet are folded in a novel position beneath the body. The ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... every appearance of contentment, on forms of mountain which are rounded into banks above, and cut into precipices below, as is the case in most elevated table-lands; in the chalk coteaux of the Seine, the basalt borders of the Rhine, and the lower gorges of the Alps; so that while the most striking pieces of natural mountain scenery usually rise from the plain under some such outline as that at a, Fig. 82, Turner always formed his composition, if possible, on ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... countless evolutions, countless universes. We know that through the Cosmos all is law. No chance decides what units shall form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall be locked in granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from analogy, the cosmical history of every ultimate unit, psychological or physical, is determined just as surely and as exactly as in the Buddhist doctrine ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... surf filled his ears; through flying patches of mist he caught glimpses of rollers bursting white against the reef; heard duller detonations along unseen sands, and shattering reports where heavy waves exploded among basalt rocks. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... or column-drum of fine white marble, hollowed to act as a mortar; like the Moslem headstone of the same material, it is attributed to the Jebel el-Lauz, where ancient quarries are talked of. There were also Makrkah ("rub-stones") of close-grained red syenite, and fragments of the basalt handmills used for quartz-grinding. Part of a mortar was found, made of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... a wing of the great, black pile, was the ancient habitat of these worthies, and the torture chamber, still extant, is a hall almost as big as the Dresden throne-room. In an inscription hewn in the basalt, the sovereign bishop, Johannes VI, poses as builder and seems proud of the damnable fact. Other princes of the Church let us know in high-sounding Latin script that they created the "Monk hole" and ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... woolly-haired Africans, as black as the basalt tablets in the museum, were seated on the floor of the white marble court. Some were eating their frugal meal; some were lying on their backs resting; while others were lost in prayer. Here and there a tall sheikh or a professor was standing talking to a group of students, seated ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... crystallisation of rock-materials (even siliceous conglomerate, limestone and rock-salt) had been effected! These extravagant "anti-Wernerian" views the young student might well regard as not one whit less absurd and repellant than the doctrine of the "aqueous precipitation" of basalt. There is no evidence that Darwin, even if he ever heard of them, was in any way impressed, in his early career, by the suggestive passages in Hutton and Playfair, to which Lyell afterwards called attention, and which foreshadowed ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... here interject an observation which appears to me suggestive and may prove valuable. It has been observed that the inhabitants of basaltic localities are more generally natural clairvoyants than others. Basalt is an igneous rock composed largely of augite and felspar, which are silicate crystals of calcium, potassium, alumina, etc., of which the Moonstone is a variety. The connecting link is that clairvoyance is found to be unusually ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... Basalt is a brown rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular forms, which astonish by their singular appearance. Here we found Nature proceeding geometrically, and working quite after a human fashion, as if she had employed the plummet line, the compass and the ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Then tell me of your city in the sea, Paved with red basalt of the Paduan hills. Tell me of art in Venice. Three great names, Giorgione, Titian, and the Tintoretto, Illustrate your Venetian school, and send A challenge to the world. The first is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that of the Vallum, show a skill in engineering such as we are apt to fancy belongs only to these days of powerful machinery, and explosives for rending a way through the hardest rock. The ditches have both been cut through the solid basalt, and great boulders of it are strewn around; one huge mass, weighing many tons, has been hoisted out—by what means, we are left to wonder; and another, still in the ditch, has the holes, intended for ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... densely charged with mud, deluged the country far and wide. At the end of four days (October 12th), a second eruption occurred, more violent than the first, in which hot water and mud were again vomited, and great blocks of basalt were thrown to the distance of seven miles from the volcano. There was at the same time a violent earthquake, the face of the mountain was utterly changed, its summits broken down, and one side, which had ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... friend. After the boys had left, Tyope had continued to weed his corn, not with any pretence of activity or haste, but in the slow, persistent way peculiar to the sedentary Indian, which makes of him a steady though not a very profitable worker. Tyope's only implement was a piece of basalt resembling a knife, and he weeded on without interruption until the shadows of the plants extended from row to row. Then he straightened himself and scanned quietly the whole valley as far as visible, like one who is ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... found within the limits previously laid down is Mount Mlanje, in the extreme south-eastern corner of the protectorate. This remarkable and picturesque mass is an isolated "chunk" of the Archean plateau, through which at a later date there has been a volcanic outburst of basalt. The summit and sides of this mass exhibit several craters. The highest peak of Mlanje reaches an altitude of 9683 ft. (In German territory, near the north end of Lake Nyasa, and close to the British frontier, is Mount Rungwe, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... moved forward. The texture of the heavens above them changed. The sun—the one thing in their new universe that seemed unchanged in size and aspect—shone down on them. The plateau came jarringly to rest. Great cliffs of what seemed black basalt gleamed high ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... more southerly lands to vegetable palaeontology, a branch of knowledge to which our preceding Arctic expeditions yielded new additions of such importance through the fossil herbaria from luxuriant ancient forests which they brought to light from the ice-covered cliffs of Spitzbergen and from the basalt-covered sandstones and schists of the Noui-soak Peninsula in Greenland, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the place worth all we have undergone. The crags are wonderful, chalk at the bottom, basalt above, and of course all round to the Giant's Causeway it is finer still. Well may we, as the Bishop is always doing, give thanks that we were taken, by the Divine Hand guiding tide and current, to this milder and ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... mosque, that they might perform their devotions where, according to their belief, mohammed received from the angel gabriel the first chapter of the Koran."—Author. "In the kaaba at mecca, there is a celebrated block of volcanic basalt, which the mohammedans venerate as the gift of gabriel to abraham, but their ancestors once held it to be an image of remphan, or saturn; so 'the image which fell down from jupiter,' to share with diana the homage of the ephesians, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... from blocks of rough pink basalt, the entry guarded by two great caryatids enwrapped in chains of carved metal, set somehow into the surface of the basalt. The gilt had long ago worn away from the chains so that it alternately gleamed gold or smudged base metal. The caryatids were ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... significant fact, and one which proves that the various kinds of coal which are found are nothing but stages begotten by different degrees of disentanglement of the contained gases, that where, as in some parts, a mass of basalt has come into contact with ordinary bituminous coal, the coal has assumed the character of anthracite, whilst the change has in some instances gone so far as to convert the anthracite into graphite. The basalt, which is one of the igneous rocks, has been erupted into ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... and Bataan Island each receiving a gold medal. Third, an exhibit of gold and gold quartz, which filled five wall cases and two small table cases, and which received three gold medals, six silver medals, and four bronze medals. Gold medals were also given the exhibit of basalt for heavy foundations and heavy construction, marble from Romblon Island, a geological and mineralogical collection exhibited by the mining bureau and Isuan mineral water from Los ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... these pieces. Let me run over the names of a very few of them. 'Saul,' a poem beloved by all true women; 'Caliban,' which the men, not unnaturally perhaps, often prefer. The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth century successor rolling out his post-prandial Apologia. 'My Last Duchess,' the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Andrea del Sarto,' 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' 'Cleon,' 'A Death in the Desert,' ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... era, and possibly the work of the same hand, being among the most interesting of our Norman fonts. The material of which they are made has never been settled, some authorities defining it as Tournai marble, others as basalt, and yet others as nothing ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... In Egypt altars took the form of a truncated cone or of a cubical block of polished granite or of basalt, with one or more basin-like depressions in the upper surface for receiving fluid libations. These had channels whereby fluids poured into the receptacles could be drained off. The surface was plain, inscribed with dedicatory or other ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... earlier visit to Linyanti he had heard of a mighty waterfall on the river, and now he discovered this African Niagara, which he named the Victoria Falls. Above the falls the river is 1800 yards broad, and the huge volumes of water dash down foaming and roaring over a barrier of basalt 390 feet high to the depth beneath. The water boils and bubbles as in a kettle, and is confined in a rocky chasm in some places barely 50 yards broad. Clouds of spray and vapour hover constantly above the fall, and the natives call it "the smoking water." Among ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... god of destruction, and his wife Parvati seated behind him; they have both snakes in their hands, and Siva has a large one round his loins as a waistband. There are several demons in human shape lying prostrate under the belly of the bull, and the whole are well cut out of one large slab of hard basalt from a dyke in the marble rock beneath. They call the whole group 'Gauri Sankar', and I found in the fair, exposed for sale, a brass model of a similar one from Jeypore (Jaipur), but not so well shaped and proportioned. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... and hardly ever going more than a few yards back into the grassy plain-and-hill country. Their tracks and dung covered the ground. They had also evidently descended into the depths of the canon wherever there was the slightest break or even lowering in the upper line of basalt cliffs. Although mountain sheep often browse in winter, I saw but few traces of browsing here; probably on the sheer cliff side they always got some grazing. When I spied the band they were lying not far from the spot in which they had lain the day before, and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... of an austere, rigid, metallic and sepulchral magnificence, giving the impression of a Greek temple with columns, architraves, flagstones and ornaments of black marble, gold and ebony. The hall is trapezium-shaped. Basalt steps, occupying almost the entire width, divide it into three successive stages, which rise gradually toward the back. On the right and left, between the columns, are doors of sombre bronze. At the back, a monumental door of brass. The palace is lit only ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Manufactures are large and comprehensive, and include the most famous distilleries in the world. The Minerals are most abundant, and among these may be reckoned quartz, porphyry, felspar, malachite, manganese, and basalt. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... brow of the hill, in an age before man was born, the giant force of some primeval convulsion had flung a lava torrent of molten rock to the bed of the Paglia. And there still was the torrent—a rock-stream composed of huge blocks of basalt—flowing in one vast steep fall, a couple of hundred yards wide, through the forest from top to bottom ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the hill was tree-covered, and they could see nothing beyond their immediate locality until the sailor found a point higher than the rest, where a rugged collection of hard basalt and the uprooting of some poon trees provided an open space elevated ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... of certain kinds, and not elsewhere. Among strata of granite or basalt for instance, nobody expects to find coal. But along with a certain kind of sandstone it may reasonably be expected. Now the Hartford wiseacres found that tremendously far down under their city, there was a sort of sandstone, and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Where did that quartz come from? From the limestone? But the limestone contains very little silica, and is apparently of normal composition quite up to the vein. From the trap? This is compact, sonorous basalt, apparently unchanged; and that could not have supplied the silica ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... run for shelter under the lee of the island. As we closed the land, grand effects were produced by the clouds and mist driving before the gale down the green slopes of the mountains to the dark cliffs of lava and basalt, on which the mighty surges of the Atlantic were breaking into foam. Late in the afternoon of December 2nd the 'Sunbeam' gained the northern entrance to the channel which divides Fayal and Pico. An attempt was made to reach Horta, but it was found that a heavy sea was running ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... structure is ophitic in the finer varieties, and to some extent in the coarser kinds as well. They are holocrystalline in form and true glassy bases are rare, rendering the term diabase more appropriate than basalt. ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... natives used for chissels, &c. Mr F. specifies several other mineral substances found in this neighbourhood, particularly argillaceous strata of a rusty colour, which is inferred to contain iron, and a black compact and ponderous basalt, of which the natives form their pattoo-pattoos. It is unnecessary to make remarks on the subjects now mentioned, as they must be resumed in our account of Cook's third voyage, where we shall have to consider Mr Anderson's ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... natural terrace runs along under the cliff in the direction of Camden Sound, which I believe would form a good road to that harbour. The tract thus enclosed appears to be very fertile. Porphyry and basalt are the common rocks. The soil is rich vegetable mould, mixed with gravel and covered with the most luxuriant grass. The trees were in general small. We only found three springs here; these however were sufficient to prove that it was well supplied in this respect. A species of ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... and limestone. At one place a village site was discovered, in which several hundred people once found shelter. To the north of this and about twenty-five miles from the summit of San Francisco Peak there is a volcanic cone of cinder and basalt. This small cone had been used as the site of a village, apueblo having been built around the crater. The materials of construction were derived from a great sandstone quarry near by, and the pit from which they were taken was many feet in depth and ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... entirely lost sight of their original meaning. This is strikingly the case with the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not pilularius; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and very rarely of pietra dura, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of pietra dura,—which, being essentially the same, change their names with their colors,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... familiarized themselves with the darkness, and favored by the glimmering of the stars, he began to recognize with but little effort the actual shape of the surrounding objects. The window was divided in two equal parts by a stone mullion, and had in front a wide shelf of basalt, surrounded by a balustrade. Gilbert fastened one of two knotted ropes with which he had supplied himself securely to the mullion; then he crept upon the ledge of basalt and stood there for a few moments contemplating ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... sides, just below the water-line, are heavily mossed with seaweed. The polygonal masses composing these shapes are called by the fishermen 'tortoise-shell stones.' There is a legend that once Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, to try his strength, came here, and, lifting up one of these masses of basalt, flung it across the sea to the mountain of Sanbeyama. At the foot of Sanbe the mighty rock thus thrown by the Great Deity of Kitzuki may still be seen, it is alleged, even unto ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... some of the finest harbours in the world. About a third of its interior to the north and east is occupied by an elevated mountainous region, raised from 3,000 to 5,000 feet above the sea, and consisting of Primary rocks—granite, gneiss, and basalt—probably very ancient land, and forming during the Secondary geological epoch an island much smaller than the Madagascar of to-day. While our Oolitic and Chalk rocks were being slowly laid down under ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Therefore your basalt, jade, and gems, Your Saracenic silver, your Nilotic gods, your diadems To bind the brows of Queens, impure, Perfidious, passionate, perfumed—these Your petted, pagan stage-properties, Seem but as toys of trifling worth. For I have ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... though the other by stone hinges Hung to its flanking tower. The path they followed Threaded an old paved road whose flags were edged With dry grass and dry weeds, even cactuses Had pushed the stones up or found root in muck heaps: The path struck up the slope of the fallen door, Basalt like midnight, o'er which dusty feet Had greyed a passage, for it rested on Some debris fallen from the left-hand tower, And from its upper edge rude blocks like steps Led down into the straight main street, that ran Past eyeless buildings ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... are built of a hard dark and heavy species of basalt, the chief component of the mountains of Java. The stone is usually hewn in square blocks of various sizes, as is the case with the Boro Budur. The respective surfaces of the stones which lie on each other in the building have grooves and projections which key into each other as in the best ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... no record of who gave the money or who the architect was. It has a fine tower and a couple of solid bells; it has a few bits of good brass-work, a chandelier and some candlesticks, and it has a fine eighteenth-century tomb in a corner, with a huge slab of black basalt on the top, and a heraldic shield and a very obsequious inscription, which might apply to anyone, and yet could be true of nobody. Why the particular old gentleman should want to sleep there, or who was willing to spend so much on his lying in state, no ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thought of preserving their echoes, or of shrining them in the eternal basalt of print, like to the oft-repeated cries of Lurley's hunted in-dweller. The humorous infection caught also me, as a thing inevitable; but the case, I wot, proved an unfavourable one: and who dare enter the arena of contention with these mighty men of Momus, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... two mighty mountains of wood burning far into heaven, and each was lofty as the pyre that blazes over men slain in some red war, and each pile roared and flared above a steep crag of smooth black basalt, and between the burning mounds of fire lay the flame-flecked water ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a breaking wave, "you had ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity, not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and impressive illustration ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict, dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, looks down upon a sea of fog, through which rise mountain-tops like islands; or sees through the biting sleet a desert of scrub and crag rolling to the feet of Mount Heemskirk ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... vehicle for his thought through its resistance to his chisel; it sustains the impress of his imagination solely through its unwillingness to receive the same. Not chalk, not any loose and friable material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Esther vi. 8, and the [Greek: kidaris] of the Greeks. The inscriptions of which a translation follows was found at Babylon by Sir Harford Jones Bridges, and now forms part of the India House Collection. It is engraved on a short column of black basalt, and is divided into ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... successfully imitated on the continent. What was the astonishment of Oswald in hearing her! He remained at first immovably fixed to the spot where he was, and feeling confused he leaned against one of the lions of basalt at the foot of the stairway descending from the Capitol. Corinne viewed him again, forcibly struck with the emotion he betrayed; but she was dragged away towards the car, and the whole crowd disappeared long before Oswald had recovered his strength ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... love thee still in spite of it: Yet how should our Lord Love curtail one whit Thy perfect praise whom most he would exalt? Alas! he can but make my heart's low vault Even in men's sight unworthier, being lit By thee, who thereby show'st more exquisite Like fiery chrysoprase in deep basalt. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... The hard, dark basalt of which the Hawaiian ko'i, adz, is made; any pebble, or small water-worn stone, such as would be used to hold in place the pa-u ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... is alike difficult to obtain, transport, and raise, block shafts more than ten or twelve feet long, except in remarkable positions, and as pieces of singular magnificence. Large pillars are therefore always composed of more than one block of stone. Such pillars are either jointed like basalt columns, and composed of solid pieces of stone set one above another; or they are filled up towers, built of small stones cemented into a mass, with more or less of regularity: Keep this distinction carefully in mind, it is of great ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo—a lonely rock some miles north of Madeira. Its southern shore is a long sweeping bay of white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaks of basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores. When Columbus and his bride arrived there the place was almost as bare as it is to-day. There were the governor's house; the settlement of Portuguese who worked in the mills ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... A heavy basalt sarcophagus had been prepared which was to be the outer coffin of the mummy. This sarcophagus had also the form and features of the dead pharaoh. It was covered with inscriptions, and pictures of people praying, of sacred birds and ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the most striking of the geological features of this region are immense gravel deposits displayed in sections on the walls of the river gorges. About two miles above the North Fork confluence there is a bluff of basalt three hundred and fifty feet high, and above this a bed of gravel four hundred feet thick, while beneath the basalt there is another bed ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... drift from the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and gravels." The immense antiquity of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared to be proved, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... inaudible it was so spiritless and faint—yet, gaze as I might toward the top, I could see nothing. I skirted the main rock and climbed as far as I easily could up the ravine. Here my attention was arrested by a dot of scarlet against the grim, bare face of the basalt. Yes, there she was, about forty feet above me, hanging on to a shelving rock with her little Italian greyhound in her arms. She was peering down, disclosing a pallid face. I saw at once that she had hung there until her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... seen, in mosaic, generals offering conquered cities to the Emperor on the palms of their hands. And on every side are columns of basalt, gratings of silver filigree, seats of ivory, and tapestries embroidered with pearls. The light falls from the vaulted roof, and Antony proceeds on his way. Tepid exhalations spread around; occasionally he hears the modest patter of a sandal. Posted ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... found in bone-caverns. Eruptive masses intrude in the Balkans and Sredna Gora, as well as in the Archean formation of the southern [v.04 p.0774] ranges, presenting granite, syenite, diorite, diabase, quartz-porphyry, melaphyre, liparite, trachyte, andesite, basalt, &c. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... at the distance of four miles and is invisible from the opposite side of the sound, otherwise a short traverse might have saved us some days. The few eminences that are on this side were mistaken for islands when seen from the opposite shore; they are for the most part cliffs of basalt and are not above one hundred feet high; the subjacent strata are of white sandstone. The rocks are mostly confined to the capes and shores, the soil inland being flat, clayey, and barren. Most of the headlands showed traces of visits from the Esquimaux but none of ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... down in the valley, staggering, struggling, climbing, falling: blindly groping its way to the great lake that slumbered, the other side of the forest, in the peace of the dawn. Here it was a block of basalt that forced the streamlet to wind round and about four times; there, the roots of a hoary tree; further on still, the mere recollection of an obstacle now gone for ever thrust it back to its source, bubbling ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... most of them in the latter.[67] They may be recognized at once by the band of inscription which passes across the figures and reproduces one text again and again (Fig. 4). To Assurnazirpal's son SHALMANESER III. belongs the obelisk of basalt which also stands in the British Museum. Its four faces are adorned with reliefs and with a running commentary engraved ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... covered either with an open forest or with high ferns. In general the soil is extremely fertile, and where it is naturally drained a rich vegetation of fern and flax occurs. On the north-west are several conical hills of basalt, which are surrounded by oases of fertile soil. On the south-western side is Petre Bay, on which, at the mouth of the river Mantagu, is Waitangi, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... rounded form. The setting sun poured its full glory over the spot; the bared heads—the animated faces of the crowd—the grey and vast mass of the Capitol; and, not far from the side of Rienzi, it brought into a strange and startling light the sculptured form of a colossal Lion of Basalt, (The existent Capitol is very different from the building at the time of Rienzi; and the reader must not suppose that the present staircase, designed by Michael Angelo, at the base of which are two marble lions, removed by Pius IV. from the Church of ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Tinaarloo, and the largest is that of Borger, which contains forty-five blocks, of which ten are cap-stones. Several Huenenbetter have been excavated. In them are found pottery vases, flint celts, axes and hammers of grey granite, basalt, and jade. ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... it has been found that fresh basalt exposed to continually moving water will lose about 0.20 gramme per square metre of surface per year. The mineral orthoclase, which enters largely into the constitution of many granites, was found to lose ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... stratum is found to consist of calcareous matter, with numerous shells embedded, most or all of which now exist on the neighbouring coast. It rests on ancient volcanic rocks, and has been covered by a stream of basalt, which must have entered the sea when the white shelly bed was lying at the bottom. It is interesting to trace the changes, produced by the heat of the overlying lava, on the friable mass, which in parts has been converted into a crystalline ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the plains; and as you travel from the south to the north, the older and harder they become. The highest mountains of Wales, and some of its hills, have crests of the very oldest and hardest rock—granite, porphyry, and basalt; and these rocks are given their form by fire. But the greater part of the country is made of rocks formed by water—still the oldest of their kind. In the north-west, centre, and west—about two-thirds of the whole country,—the rocks are ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... function and go on: The fact is founded in the void of things. But if the primal germs themselves be soft, Reason cannot be brought to bear to show The ways whereby may be created these Great crags of basalt and the during iron; For their whole nature will profoundly lack The first foundations of a solid frame. But powerful in old simplicity, Abide the solid, the primeval germs; And by their combinations more condensed, All objects can be tightly knit ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... were strong and would last a long time. I do not remember that any other tribe of Plains Indians made such stone bowls or mortars, though, of course, they were commonly made, and in singular perfection, by the Pacific Coast tribes; and I have known of rare cases in which basalt mortars and small soapstone ollas have been found on the central plateau of the continent in southern Wyoming. These articles, however, had no doubt been obtained by trade ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... closing in on the dark and frowning tower that was perched like an osprey upon the basalt cliffs that overlooked the sea. The building was really rather a peel tower than a castle, for it was of no great extent, consisting merely of the tall, gaunt tower with a wing added on to its western side. Situated on the edge of the bare sea, like a lighthouse abandoned, ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... not meet the challenge at once. His deep set opaque black eyes and mastiff-like mouth looked as immovable as the carving on the basalt stool upon which he sat. The cacique thought he was impressed, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... traces of man in the globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree of the species from which we ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... know, but Joe Basalt chaffed me. He swore I was walking in my sleep; but I have come back upon my old opinion since I have ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... rivers far antedating the gravels of the Somme. It is therefore not a little interesting to learn from Prof. Whitney that he finds many proofs of the existence of man in the gravels of the Pliocene Age in California. Under the solid basalt of Table Mountain have been found many works of men's hands, as well as the celebrated ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the home of the water babies, in Saint Brandan's fairy isle, he found that the isle stood all on pillars, and that its roots were full of caves. There were pillars of black basalt and pillars of green and crimson serpentine; and pillars ribboned with red and white and yellow sandstone; and there were blue grottoes and white grottoes, all curtained and draped with seaweeds, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... graphite occur, which are undoubtedly the product of the complete distillation of liquid hydrocarbons with which the rock was once impregnated. The remarkable purity of such graphite is the natural result of its mode of formation, and such cases resemble the occurrence of graphite in cast iron and basalt. The black clouds and bands which stain many otherwise white marbles are generally due to specks of graphite, the residue of hydrocarbons which once saturated the rock. Some limestones are quite black from the carbonaceous matter they contain (Lycoming Valley, Pa., Glenn's Falls, N. Y., ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... part of the range called Bakaa. The Bakaa tribe, however, removed to Kolobeng, and is now joined to that of Sechele. The range stands about 700 or 800 feet above the plains, and is composed of great masses of black basalt. It is probably part of the latest series of volcanic rocks in South Africa. At the eastern end these hills have curious fungoid or cup-shaped hollows, of a size which suggests the idea of craters. Within these are masses of the rock crystallized in the columnar form of this formation. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the Columbia, where the river dashes over the huge rocks in a most picturesque way. These falls were called La Chaudiere by the Canadian voyageurs, because the pool below looks like a great boiling caldron. We noticed that limestone there replaced the black basalt, of which we had seen so much, the water falling over a tabular bed of ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... trees to gluttony. First some bird-drops the seeds of the banian fig into crevices of the ramparts, and its insidious roots push their way and grow and grow into great tortuous snakes, embracing the massive blocks of basalt, heaving them up and holding them up, so that they cannot fall. Then prickly shrubs and thorny trees follow, fighting for every inch of ground, but quite unable to eject the gently persistent custard-apple, descended doubtless from ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... reach his home from Sunrise Land the better. There were many such monuments of divinities in the north. They are met with all about the lakes and in the wooded wilderness, the most striking one being the magnificent spire of basalt in the Black Hills region of Wyoming. It is known as Devil's Tower, or Mateo's Tepee, and by the red men is held to be the wigwam of a were-animal that can become man at pleasure. This singular rock towers above the Belle Fourche River to a ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... about the port and its neighbourhood. The sun was growing strong. The rocks were emerging by degrees from their winter clothing of snow; moss of a wine-like colour was springing up on the basalt cliffs, strips of seaweed fifty yards long were floating on the sea, and on the plain the lyella, which is of Andean origin, was pushing up its little points, and the only leguminous plant of the region, that gigantic cabbage already mentioned, valuable ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into petal-shaped wedges for the Opus Alexandrinum. I don't think we saw one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely, precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white marble, Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... direction of the river here was due north and south. Perhaps a mile from the bank of the river to the west, rose a high tableland which terminated in precipitous and generally insurmountable bluffs of black basalt, extending above the general level of the valley about twelve hundred feet. Projecting eastward from the side of these lofty cliffs was a singular rocky plateau, the outer lines of which roughly formed a half circle. This elevation was bordered on the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... had traced round the page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for. Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,—one would say the cliff was bleeding;—perhaps she did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... orange. Here stood soldiers, to whom again the password was given. Entering, they beheld a great hall, surrounded by a colonnade of the Corinthian order, whereon had been lavished exquisite carving; in niches behind the columns stood statues in basalt, thrice the size of life, representing Roman emperors, and at the far end was a tribune with a marble throne. This, once the hall of audience, at present served as a sort of antechamber; here and ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... his military tactics was very reassuring. There was a high hill of basalt, something resembling a pyramid, within a quarter of a mile of us; I accordingly ordered some of my men every day to ascend this look-out station, and I resolved to burn the high grass at once, so as to destroy all cover for the concealment of an enemy. That evening I very nearly burned our ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... animal, or whatever title one chooses to give the thing, can look at its product with a certain degree of complacency and satisfaction. For it has your curved lines: it starts off into noticeable angles; it is jagged like corals; it darts forward like crystals; it agglomerates like basalt; nay, there is no conceivable line that does not hop, skip, and jump about our bodies. We, coz, are the spoilt, the cockered children of the formation: and this is why the common rabble of nature are so malicious and envious toward us. Their ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... peculiar and almost impassable nature of the country, Borneo has never been crossed by the white man. Travelling over some of the mountains seems to be an absolute impossibility. Many of them consist almost wholly of huge blocks of basalt, soft, moist, and too slippery to walk upon. I would rather attempt to cross the continent of Africa than the island of Borneo. The explorer must carry with him provisions enough to last both going and returning. The jungle affords nothing fit for human ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... more importance than its strength, especially in pavements or steps, where it is subject to great wear; also in plinths and quoins of buildings where it is desired to preserve a good face and sharp arris. The order of strength and hardness of stone is—(1) Basalt, (2) granite, (3) limestone, (4) sandstone. Granite, seinite, and gneiss take the first, place for strength, hardness and durability, but they will not stand a high temperature. "Stones which are of a fine, uniform grain, compact ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... what had thus far been accomplished by the settlers. Small parties of prospectors had been sent out to ascertain the resources of the island; and, among many other valuable products, coal, iron, clay of exceptionally fine quality for the manufacture of bricks and tiles, marble, granite, basalt, limestone, pine, satinwood, teak, and sandalwood in exceedingly large quantities had been found. A brick and tile yard had been established over on the north-west side of the island, and large quantities of splendid bricks and tiles had already been made; a limekiln had been built, ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... the more nearly before us, it is possible to make a substance resembling basalt in a furnace; limestone and sandstone have both been formed from suitable materials in appropriate receptacles; the phenomena of cleavage have, with the aid of electricity, been simulated on a small scale, and by the same agent crystals are formed. In short, the remark which ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... weird scene—the most weird I have ever known. We stood in a snow-pit amongst the hills, and above us rose in grandeur the great pyramids of basalt and gneiss. There was no sign of living green thing, even of lichens or of moss, in that elevated plain above the sea; and the shrill call of the gulls was hushed in the greater stillness of the night. The moon, high in the unclouded sky, gave light far down ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... the glade of the iguanodons, and farther off was a round opening in the trees which marked the swamp of the pterodactyls. On the side facing me, however, the plateau presented a very different aspect. There the basalt cliffs of the outside were reproduced upon the inside, forming an escarpment about two hundred feet high, with a woody slope beneath it. Along the base of these red cliffs, some distance above the ground, I could see a number of dark holes through the glass, which I conjectured to be the mouths ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the carven face upon the basalt door;— Her beauty could not charm him, her voice had lost its power; So she wrapped a veil about her and entreated him no more But sat alone and watched, from out her window ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... extravagancies of what was known at that day as 'Vulcanism' or 'Plutonism,' in contradistinction to the 'Neptunism' of Werner. Hutton, while rejecting the Wernerian notion of "the aqueous precipitation of basalt," maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of all strata—clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even rock-salt—must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the formation of chalk-flints and the ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... In bronze and basalt let us raise The bust of CAESAR; he has done Great things for Rome; but here is one Above the rest, o'ertopping praise. The elephants and kings are gone, But still the roaring tumult sways— Much for the Conqueror of the East, More ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various |
