"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and beating our way through jungle or of dizzy climbs up to the snow, those short nights, so cold that six blankets hardly kept us warm, while our tired horses wandered far, searching for such bits of grass as grew among the shale. ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... soon as Walter's guard had been smashed down by a most unconventional attack, and Walter himself had been knocked senseless by a swing on the side of the jaw, Bill Shale leaped gaily ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... questions change. What were the mineral resources of the soil? It is not necessary to enlarge on these. The use of coal as a fuel is wholly recent. On the other hand, certain varieties of it were used as ornaments—the cannel coal, and the bituminous shale of Dorsetshire ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... of mountain which we have to examine—those formed by the softer slaty coherents, when their perishable and frail substance has been raised into cliffs in the manner illustrated by Fig. 12 at p. 146,—cliffs whose front every frost disorganizes into filmy shale, and of which every thunder-shower dissolves tons in the swoln blackness of torrents. If this takes place from the top downwards, the cliff is gradually effaced, and a more or less rounded eminence is soon all that remains of it; but if the lower beds only decompose, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... issues: air heavily polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; contamination of soil and groundwater with petroleum products, chemicals at former Soviet military bases; Estonia has more than 1,400 natural and manmade lakes, the smaller of which in agricultural areas are heavily affected by organic ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... us to Charlie's Knob, and beyond it the range, which on close examination was not imposing, being a series of detached sandstone hills, their summits flat and slightly sloping to the South, capped with a hard reddish-brown rock (baked shale). On the cap, loose fragments of shale and thick scrub; forming its sides sheer cliffs, at most fifteen feet high, perforated by holes and caves, above rough, stony banks. The whole covered with tufts of spinifex, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... at the time when our coal was forming, the water kept the air away, and much carbon was left. This is the way coal was made. Some of the layers, or strata, are fifty or sixty feet thick, and some are hardly thicker than paper. On top of each one is a stratum of sandstone or dark-gray shale. This was made by the sand and mud which were brought in by the water. These shaly rocks split easily into sheets and show beautiful fossil impressions of ferns. There are also impressions of the bark and fruit of trees, ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... the bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a miscalculated step. Sometimes, higher up, a path wide enough only for the setting down of foot before foot skirted a cliff's edge—and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... afternoon we examined some of the old red sandstone which underlies all that part of Cape Breton Island, found some good specimens, and some very plain and deep glacial scratches. There is also some coal and a good deal of shale in with the sandstone. ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... happening to slide on a piece of shale at that moment, I sat down unexpectedly and the horse put its foot ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were found to be part of a horizontal, stratified series of sandstones underlying the igneous rock. There were bands of coarse gravel and fine examples of stream-bedding interspersed with seams of carbonaceous shale and poor coal. Among the debris were several pieces of sandstone marked by black, fossilized plant-remains. The summits of the beacons were platforms of very hard rock, baked by the volcanic overflow. The columns, roughly hexagonal and ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... kalte Shale (with Wine).— Boil 1 cup sugar with 3 cups water and the peel of 1 lemon for 10 minutes, when cold add 1 bottle white wine, the juice of 2 lemons and 1/4 pound rice which has been boiled in 2 waters till tender; place the kalte Shale ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke
... his lady safely, and he carried her willingly. Even her impatience could find no fault with the manner in which he climbed steep pitches, slid down slopes as steep, jumped narrow washouts, and picked his way through thickets of quaking aspens or over wide stretches of shale rock and lava beds. He was wet to his ears when finally he shuffled into Ward's trail up the creek bottom; but he breathed evenly, and he carried his head high and perked his ears knowingly forward when the corral and haystack came into view around a sharp bend.. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... and the one that the Chief's horse directly behind would bump me off the trail. It was a cheerful situation. The Canyon walls closed in upon us, and the trail grew worse, if that could be possible. The firm rock gave way to shale that slipped and slid under the feet of the horses. It was so narrow that one slip of a hoof would send the horse crashing on the rocks hundreds of feet beneath. Still this is the only path it has been possible to make ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... much snow, and places where the track along the mountain-side was undiscoverable. Walking was tiresome enough on the loose shingle and shale, but it became worse when I actually had to cut each step into the frozen snow. The work was tedious to a degree, and the progress slow. After a while I noticed a series of lofty snow tunnels over the raging stream, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... wheels had come loose, half a mile off the nearest town. Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed until half-past nine at night. Full of consideration for the new mates now fast wedded to his heart by an accident. Matthew Shale proposed to Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fellow let his cowpony pick its way down the steep shale hill to the draw. He saddled without a waste motion, packed his supplies deftly, mounted, and was off. In the way he cut across the desert toward the moving herd was the certainty of the frontiersman. He did not hurry, but he wasted no time. His horse circled in and out among the sand dunes, ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... started from the town, and rode down the crest of long, gently-sloping ridges, which seemed interminable. The rock over which we passed was red sandstone, mottled and streaked with green, red shale, and occasional patches of conglomerate. Crossing a little stream by a pretty bridge, we made an abrupt ascent, and soon saw the little town, Cuaquitepec, at the ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... clutching cholla and down breakneck inclines after the escaping three-year-old. Fierce cactus thorns had torn at the leather chaps as horse and rider had ripped through them, zigzagging across the steep mountain slope at a gallop, the pony now slithering down the shale with braced forelegs, now taking washes and inclines with the surefooted litheness ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted jewel-weed growing in the shale. The mill was a place of sharp contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy, dripping silence. He remembered how astonished he was one day, when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the millstones, and discovered what ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... pretty kettle of 'em lately, William. I heard of it yesterday on the Bench. Lord Shale, our new Lord-Lieutenant, brought it down. A trick they played the fellow 'bout a Dauphin. Serve him right. You heard ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of that name whose waters run through a green shale, and while not discoloring the water impart ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... and fell on me, clawed back to its feet, and bolted. Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and things generally kept gettin' no better right along hour ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. The two ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... clay or ground shale, are burned until the materials begin to fuse superficially, forming their own glaze. Other forms of brick and tile are not glazed at all, but are left porous. The red color of ordinary brick and earthenware is due to an oxide of iron formed in ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... ancient demon of water-force had excelled himself in enchantments. The slopes of the alluvial soil were dotted with little buttes of mingled sandstone and shale, varying from five to twenty feet in height, many of them bearing a grotesque likeness to artificial objects. There were columns, there were haystacks, there were enormous bells, there were inverted jars, there were junk bottles, there were rustic seats. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... of the way across when the shale began to move, slowly at first, with a gentle rattle, then faster. He gave a shout of terror and floundered, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... to consist chiefly of the Glossopteris brownii (of Brongniart) a fern which occurs in a stratum of ironstone at Newcastle, and in one of the same mineral on the southern coast, also in sandstone in the valley of the Hunter, and abundantly in the shale near the coal wrought ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... surface, the recovery of the specimens embedded in it was difficult. A haul made on the 26th brought a prize for the geologist in the form of a lump of sandstone weighing 75 lbs., a piece of fossiliferous limestone, a fragment of striated shale, sandstone-grit, and some pebbles. Hauling in the dredge by hand was severe work, and on the 24th we used the Girling tractor-motor, which brought in 500 fathoms of line in thirty minutes, including stops. One stop was due to water having run over the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the roof. Ethel Blue made the beginning of an exclamation as she saw his arm rising, but she smothered her cry for her good sense told her that this experienced man would not endanger the lives of himself or his guests. The coal had been taken out very cleanly, and above them they saw not coal but shale. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... and descended under the rim. It was up and down over rough shale, and up steps of broken rocks, and down little cliffs. We crossed the ridge twice, many times having to lend a hand ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... precise. In his paper on the coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having been driven as far as into Europe, had deposited on its soil ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... "Bird's-eye," "Black River," and "Trenton" Limestones, of which the last is the thickest and most important. The thickness of this group is variable, and the bands of limestone in it are often separated by beds of shale. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... cut across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... then drops at the falls into a narrow gorge through which it courses seven miles to the escarpment, the crest of which is a bed of limestone—60 ft. thick at the falls. The water plunges into a deep basin hollowed out of soft shale, which, as well as the escarpment, is being constantly worn away. The site of the cataract retreats upstream and the gorge is lengthened at a rate of about five ft. a year. It is evident that the whole gorge has been dug out by the river, and ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... which comes from wells bored deep down in the ground in Pennsylvania, in the south of Russia, in Burma, and elsewhere. Also it is distilled in Scotland from oil shale, from which paraffin oil and wax and similar substances are produced. When the oil is brought to the surface it contains many impurities, and in its native form is unsuitable for motor engines. The crude oil is composed of a number ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... rush over a giddy slope of shale that looked perpetually upon the brink of a general slide down en masse, with their immense shadows underrunning them, the eagles startled suddenly by their unexpectedness a great red beast into motion. There was a clatter of antlers, a click of hoofs, a little ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... boundaries, and cases are known in which enormous masses of this kind (half an acre in area) have been found in such situations. They are masses which have been dislodged, by fissures and landslides, from the crater's walls and have tumbled into the cavity. Pieces of sandstone, limestone and shale occur in the agglomerates mixed with volcanic materials, and very often have been baked and partly recrystallized by contact with the hot igneous rocks and the gases discharged by the volcano. At Vesuvius such blocks ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is a matter of observation that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. Every one who has done even a ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... so vertical are the ridges, so jagged the ascending outlines. And each pipe is painted a different colour ... pale slate green, purple, yellow, grey, orange, and chocolate, each colour corresponding with a layer of the slate, shale, limestone, or trap strata" (Neve's Picturesque Kashmir, pp. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... limestone are evidently the same as those of the tertiary formation along the south-east coast of Arabia, and therefore the same as those of Cutch; and it is exceedingly interesting to find that among the blue-coloured fossils which are accompanied by specimens of the blue shale, composing the beds from which they have been weathered out, are species of Terebratula Belemnites, identical with those figured in Grant's Geology of Cutch; thus enabling us to extend those beds of the Jurassic formation ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... near the edge of the precipices. The result ... has been to produce an indescribable scene of desolation. Everywhere the hillsides facing the valley have been stripped bare from crest to base, and the seams of coal and partings of shale could be seen running in and out of the irregularities of the cliffs with a sharpness and distinctness which recalled the pictures of the caons of Colorado. At the bottom of the valley was a piled-up heap of dbris and broken trees, while the old stream had been obliterated and ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... The clerk corrected himself. "Well, there's another way out. The Producers & Developers Shale and Oil Company have a suite of offices that run into the Rockford Building. They've built an alley to connect between the two buildings. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... coal-measures are most striking, and point to a time when the sandy clay which imbedded them was borne by water in a very tranquil manner, to be deposited where the ferns had grown, enveloping them gradually, and consolidating them into their mass of future shale. In one species known as the neuropteris, the nerves of the leaves are as clear and as apparent as in a newly-grown fern, the name being derived from two Greek words meaning "nerve-fern." It is interesting to consider the history of such a leaf, throughout ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... receded. They ran dizzily forward in the shifting, wet gravel of the beach. When the next incoming comber was beginning to curl down from the top, Jean dashed to the bluff. Shielding the little fellow below her, she clung to the uneven shale of its base, presenting her back to the billow that crashed with a deafening roar just ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... shorewise, as shores. 'Schore, undur settynge of a ynge at wolde falle.' P. Parv. Du. Schooren, To Under-prop. Aller eschays, To shale, stradle, goe crooked, or wide betweene the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this wild-eyed dragon was plainly ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... the sounds below now. Whoever came up the rock ladder must be unused to negotiating such a stairway, for they rattled small bits of loose shale down at times; and Frank felt sure he could hear a panting sound, very much like that which tired Bob had been ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... inclined plane, and been drowned. He never stirred a limb nor uttered a cry. His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly. If help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time. We dug into the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make our position more secure. We did not venture to speak of our late companion's fate to one another. Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had we become through famine and fatigue. We had devoured our leather belts, and even ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... day, to be walking along its Southern edge, when, suddenly, several pieces of rock and shale were dislodged from the face of the cliff immediately beneath me, and fell with a sullen crash through the trees. I heard them splash in the river at the bottom; and then silence. I should not have given this incident more than a passing thought, had not Pepper at once begun to bark savagely; ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... can see the marks his shoes made in the shale," said Trapper Jim, pointing to the ground in ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... wall projected the muzzle of an extremely well-cared-for gun—the only gun in the State that could shoot. Namgay Doola had narrowly missed a villager just before we came up. The Standing Army stood. It could do no more, for when it advanced pieces of sharp shale flew from the windows. To these were added from time to time showers of scalding water. We saw red heads bobbing up and down in the hut. The family of Namgay Doola were aiding their sire, and blood-curdling yells of defiance were the only answers ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... ascent. In some spots they contract to an arm's length of space, outside of which limit they drop sheer away; elsewhere they stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more hair-raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with loose boulders and shale. A fall on the part of your horse would mean a more than serious accident; but Western horses do not fall. The major premise stands: even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear, however ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... dark in color and very hard. They are not arranged in regular layers like sandstone and shale; many of them show numerous little cavities which once contained steam. These cavities give to the rock a slag-like appearance. In this kind of rock, which we shall call lava, there are, of course, no remains of shells ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... midnight schemes, Strange peeping eyes, soft smiling fairy faces, Dark consciousness of fallen angels nigh, Sad converse with the dead, or headlong races Down the straight cliffs, or clinging on a shelf Of brittle shale, or hunted thro' the sky!— O, God of mind, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... (squalling, no doubt, in special robe, and impatient for the christening), the waiting relatives, the inevitable decanter, and the thick cuts of indigestible bun. The minister, I say, trudged home with his treasure-trove of petrified ferns and foot-marked shale—a greater fossil than any under his own cases of glass. His memory was stirred by his wife's catechising, but it was too late to undo ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... them from the bank, where they were scattered, he saw something else there which was neither beautiful nor fragrant, but over which he bent with earnest scrutiny. An ordinary looking piece of shale or stone it would have seemed to an inexperienced eye, a thing with irregular veins of a greenish appearance, and the green dotted plainly with yellow—so plainly as to show even in the moonlight the nature of ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... resinous, reddish-brown, translucent, hydrocarbon derivative (C40H6202S), found in certain laminated shales of Tasmania, Resiniferous shale." ('Standard.') ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Metamorphic rocks. These, by the combined action of heat, pressure, water, and chemical agents, have been crystallized and chemically altered. The rocks of the first class, such as chalk, limestone, shale, and sandstone, are distinguished by the existence of fossils in them, or by the successive layers of the material which goes to make up their structure and to give them a stratified appearance. The rocks of the second class are recognized by their resemblance to the products of modern volcanoes ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... pack burros scrambled for a footing or skated awkwardly with tiny hoofs desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... had said, a "blind" trail; that is, the trail lost itself in the creek which watered a string of corrals. Moreover, Bud had very keen eyes, and he had seen how a panel of the corral directly across the shale-rock bed of a small stream was really a set of bars. The round pole corral lent itself easily to hidden gateways, without any deliberate attempt at disguising ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... slow work. The incline was steep, of soft earth and loose shale. But Blinky knew where to feel his way, and eventually they reached the flat, to find easier progress. Blinky made a detour, and finally, as they gradually approached several lamplights, far apart, he whispered: "You wait ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... each instance of this kind would be pounced upon by a tribal medicine-man or some other jealous enemy, and used to discredit me. A few days after telling the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I was on a walk-about with Yamba in my mountain region, when I suddenly discovered that shale existed in very considerable quantities, and I thereupon conceived the idea of demonstrating to the blacks that, not only was the Bible narrative a true one, but that it was quite possible to ignite stone; and I would even show them ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... ledge of the rocks was a steep declivity of loose shale sprinkled over with large and small boulders of radically different formations, and in no manner resembling the friable, uncertain ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... of rocks has been called by English geologists, the Silurian System, because largely developed at the surface of a district of western England, formerly occupied by a people whom the Roman historians call Silures. It is a series of sandstones, limestones, and beds of shale (hardened mud), which are classed in the following sub-groups, beginning with the undermost: —1, Llandillo rocks, (darkish calcareous flagstones;) 2 and 3, two groups called Caradoc rocks; 4, Wenlock shale; 5, Wenlock limestone; 6, Lower Ludlow rocks, (shales and ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... too simple, a clear track winding higher and higher for a couple of miles. Pausing to rest for a moment, we could turn and see the entire valley outspread below us. Gradually the trail grew steeper, in spots pitched almost at a 50-degree angle, and was scattered with gravel, loose rock and shale, so that we placed our feet carefully, leaning forward to catch at handholds and steady ourselves against rocks. I tested each boulder carefully, since any weight placed against an unsteady rock might dislodge it on somebody below. One of ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the light. This time it burned suddenly clear and large and very bright, away off to the left of him where he had by daylight noticed a bare shale slide. The light seemed to stand in the very center of the slide, no more than a ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... prairies stretch away for hundreds of miles, gradually ascending on the side towards the mountains, where the highlands are sparsely covered with pinyon and cedar. The lofty banks through which the Arkansas occasionally passes are of shale and sandstone, rising precipitously from the water. Ascending the river the country is wild and broken, until it enters the mountain region, where the scenery is incomparably grand and imposing. The surrounding prairies are naturally arid and sterile, producing but little ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... his head, would seem an ordeal impossible for human endurance. Between the autumn of 1022 and the spring of 1024, that is to say during two winters, he lived in a cave in the west of the island. A steep shale slide was below a cliff, and above this a hollow in the rock. He built up the mouth of the cave, and hung grey wadmal before the entrance, so that none below could notice anything peculiar, or any one living there. Whatever fuel he wanted, all he had to eat, everything ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... beyond the borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and preached a djehad. But above all it was the road—Linforth's road. It came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... he was standing on—a little ledge of shale not over five or six feet in length and two feet wide—for in lower water I had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And why ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... all guide and help from the lie of the ground—so embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow. All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful—owing to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to Chapiu about seven—itself one of the most desolately-placed villages ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... be something of a hard proposition right at the beginning. Jagged rocks, sudden narrow miniature gullies, bushes with sharp thorns, slippery, treacherous shale, made the descent a trying one. Once Margery lost her footing on one of these shale shelfs. She fell flat on her back and slid screaming a full twenty yards, shooting out on a grassy slope little the worse for her slide, except that she had ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... along carefully when he heard Bob call his name. The rattle of falling shale at the same time gave him a pretty strong suspicion as to ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... moorland districts, and passing over ochre beds, contains iron, and on its way deposits on the beds of the streamlets conveying it, and on the stones, red or brown oxide of iron. All water of this kind ought to be avoided in dyeing and similar operations. The iron in water from old coal pits and shale deposits is usually present as sulphate due to the oxidation of pyrites, a sulphuret or sulphide of iron. Water from heaths and moorlands is often acid from certain vegetable acids termed "peaty acids." This acidity ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... year, usually in the spring and early summer. These were the only lines of poetry and prose Father wrote. They are still very legible on the face of the landscape and cannot be easily erased from it. Gathered out of the confusion of nature, built up of fragments of the old Devonian rock and shale, laid with due regard to the wear and tear of time, well- bottomed and well-capped, establishing boundaries and defining possessions, etc., these lines of stone wall afford a good lesson in many things besides wall building. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... limestone better than to any other rock. Limestone, however, calcines when subjected to fire and is, therefore, objected to by many engineers for building construction. The harder and denser sandstones, mica-schists, granites and syanites make good stone for concrete and occasionally shale and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... appearance of the whole, as it radiated from the central mass, whence the carved trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches,—a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns,—a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... white wafer, through the dense thickness. Drenched through, and almost blown from my slippery footing by the whirling gusts that rush under the fall, with my feet naked for better safety, grasping the shale broken from the precipice against which I pressed myself, my delight was so intense that I really could hardly bear to ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... rocks and sun-baked shale to a valley where the principal crops seem to be alfalfa and clover, and which is flanked on the south by dense forests of pine, encroaching downward from the mountain slopes clear on to the level greensward, is rather an agreeable surprise; the secret of the magic change ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the top of his speed, and following a winding route, with which he was evidently familiar, as he avoided the water and the bogs, and kept on firm ground. I made an attempt to come up with him; but in my haste trod upon a piece of loose shale, which, sliding beneath me, threw me upon the ground, and badly wounded my right foot, so that for the moment ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... shale, the slope for its whole length appeared to be smooth and of uniform pitch, except that about three-quarters of the way down we could see a line of snow hummocks stretching all across its course, indicating pretty surely that here had grown a ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... River Bluestone Co., Ulster county. Silver medal Bluestone International Graphite Co., Ticonderoga Graphite International Pulp Co., Gouverneur Talc International Salt Co., Ithaca Salt Interstate Conduit & Brick Co., Ithaca Brick Jamestown Shale Paving Brick Co., Jamestown Brick Jewettville Pressed Brick & Paving Co., Jewettville Brick R. Jones, Prospect Graphite J. F. Kilgour, Lordville Bluestone F. H. Kinkel, Bedford Feldspar Quartz A. Gracie King, Garrisons Granite Francis Larkins, Ossining Granite B. B. Mason, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... torrents, and marshes bottomless abysses. Pits of quicksand develop in most unexpected places. Driven from smooth lake margins, the trailers' ponies are forced to climb ledges of rock, and to rattle over long slides of shale. In places the threadlike way itself becomes an aqueduct for a rushing overflow ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... voice came pealing down the cliff, waking the echoes on the shore, and with a sort of incredulous joy Mrs. Beauchamp listened to the sturdy steps coming slowly, surely, carefully down, with a little ripple of shale following them. ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... forms. The rocks at Wolgan Gap are a coarse sandstone stained almost black by an iron oxide derived from included bands of ironstone. These black surfaces were selected by the artists. Nearby in the rock is a band of shale which had disintegrated at its exposed edge to a white powder. The native artist put some of this white powder in his mouth, placed his hand or foot upon the rock, and blew the moistened powder upon and around his outstretched ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... this point and its outlet be explained. The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms. Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces. The evidence of a recession of ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... outside the city as it then was, and still beyond its clutches, the country was cut by a winding river bottom with sharp edges of shale. Down this valley Rocky River came brawling in the spring, over-fed and quarrelsome. Later in the year—its youthful appetite having caught an indigestion—it shrunk and wasted to a shadow. By August you could cross it on the stones. The uproar of its former flood was marked upon the ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... skeleton of these monster Dinosaurs is recovered. While our western states, in certain places, are rich in fossil remains, there is very seldom a complete skeleton unearthed. At best there are but a few bones, or the impressions of bones, in the sandstone rocks or shale. But from these bones, from the impressions of those that have been eaten by time, and by their knowledge of what sort of anatomy was needed to keep these wonderful creatures on earth, it is possible for scientists to almost completely and perfectly restore them, ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... strength. The mountain seemed to heave before them in a succession of huge boulders, and as each one was scaled another appeared beyond it. At length they reached a piled confusion of rocks, where a little cairn had been built of small stones and loose pieces of shale. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... staircase, I followed the guide along a narrow path covered with fragments of shale, with Table Rock above and the deep abyss below. A cold, damp wind blew against me, succeeded by a sharp pelting rain, and the path became more slippery and difficult. Still I was not near the sheet of water, and felt not the slightest dizziness. I speedily arrived at the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... not answer but sat looking off across the jumbled foothills, rock-studded and gray with sage. Some distance from them a bare shale-slide extended for half a mile along a sidehill, barren and devoid of all vegetation. Here and there, far off across the country, vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch growing below spring seeps. A few scattered ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts |
