"Sandstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his Lyre? Yet tell me, Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning out all the sandstone rocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses and noble streets? ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... would have been forgotten, or have found their proper place among the catalogue of common things. Thus on one occasion, after hearing of the hermits of the Thebaid, she took it into her head to retire into the wilderness, and chose for her dwelling one of the caverns in the sandstone rock which abound in Siena near the quarter where her father lived. We merely see in this event a sign of her monastic disposition, and a more than usual aptitude for realising the ideas presented to her mind. But the old biographers relate how one celestial vision urged the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 1904. The legislature first met here in 1879. The original designs were by Thomas Fuller, who also designed the parliamentary building at Ottawa, but they were considerably altered. The beautiful Western staircase of red sandstone (from plans by Isaac Gale Perry) and the senate chamber (designed by H. H. Richardson) are the most striking features of the building. The present capitol suffered a heavy loss in the burning of its library in 1911, by which many unreplaceable books and ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... is about twelve feet high, and eight broad. It is built of sandstone well finished, and dug from the neighbouring hills. Its interior is solid, and of small stones, cemented by mortar. It stands about three miles from Gorma, and a quarter of a mile from the foot of the mountain. It is either a tomb or an altar; those well acquainted with Roman architecture ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it was of a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red sandstone, had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular architectural design. Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man's stature in height, and only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the little Mexican maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at eucher and to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, of Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own, by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... day, was along a ridge, which extended upwards of fifty miles, through a succession of deep ravines, where no objects met the eye except barren sandstone rocks, and stunted trees. With the banksia and xanthorrhoea always in sight, the idea of hopeless sterility is ever present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... that part of the country with which we are best acquainted, is of a red argillaceous nature, generally forming a stratum of nine or ten feet in thickness, lying over one of sandstone, in which are imbedded fragments of lava; the latter stratum, at Point William, appears to decline to the east, at an angle of ten ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... of the exclusionists lies in that in their stand are combined both modern and archaic systematists. Falls of sandstone and limestone are repulsive to both theologians and scientists. Sandstone and limestone suggest other worlds upon which occur processes like geological processes; but limestone, as a fossiliferous substance, is of course especially of ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... passed three days in the investigation of the Serra of Errere. We found it to consist wholly of the sandstone deposits described in my previous article, and to have exactly the same geological constitution. In short, the Serra of Monte Alegre, and of course all those connected with it on the northern side of the river, lie in the prolongation of the lower beds forming the banks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... thermometer being at 45 deg.. Quitting the river bottom, the road ran along the uplands, over a rolling country, generally in view of the Kansas from eight to twelve miles distant. Many large boulders, of a very compact sandstone, of various shades of red, some of them of four or five tons in weight, were scattered along the hills; and many beautiful plants in flower, among which the amorpha canescens was a characteristic, enlivened the green of the prairie. At the heads ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... him, when Grasshopper threw himself off the elk's back; and striking a great sandstone rock near the path, he broke it into pieces, and scattered the grains in a thousand directions; for this was nearly his last hope of escape. Manabozho was so close upon him at this place that he had almost caught him; but the foundation of the rock ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... has been already mentioned. The stream had a great influence on my whole life, by giving me a taste for the beauty of wild streams in Scotland and elsewhere. It is called the Brun, and gives its name to Burnley. The rocks are a sandstone sufficiently warm in color to give a very pleasant contrast to the green foliage, and the forms of them are so broken that in sunshine there are plenty of fine accidental lights and shadows. It was one of my greatest pleasures to follow the course of this stream, with a leaping-pole, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Parkes, the soils in the order of their fitness for building purposes are as follows: (1) primitive rock; (2) gravel, with pervious soil; (3) sandstone; (4) limestone; (5) sandstone, with impervious subsoil; (6) clays and marls; (7) marshy land, and ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... oldest not destroyed,—or the first which existed in profoundly deep seas in progress of conversion from sea to land: if they are first they give up. Not so Hutton or Lyell: if first reptile{118} of Red Sandstone really was first which existed: if Pachyderm{119} of Paris was first which existed: fish of Devonian: dragon fly of Lias: for we cannot suppose them the progenitors: they agree too closely with existing divisions. But geologists consider Europe as a passage from sea to island to continent (except ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... "Why, that's like sandstone," cried Colin, in a disappointed tone. "I had an idea that coral was a sort of insect that lived in a shell and that colonies of these grew up from the bottom of the water like trees and when they died—millions ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the background as hyenas lurk to prey. More temples, and many sakkeyehs (no shadoofs here, on the Upper Nile) but few boats. The spacious times were past, when loads of pink granite, honey-coloured sandstone, fragrant woods, and spices from the Land of Punt, went floating ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... a faith in, and a love for, the "testimony of the rocks,"— not only as interpreted by the sagacious Scotchman, as he excavated the "old red sandstone," but as shaped into forms of truth, beauty, and power by the hand of man through all generations. We love to catch a glimpse of these silent memorials of our race, whether as Nymphs half-shaded at noon-day with summer foliage in a garden, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and eroded each assumes its own special topography and is covered with its own special type of vegetation. Thus in South Carolina and Georgia the crystalline Piedmont band of the Appalachian province is bordered on the southeast by a belt of sandstone. This rock is so far from the sea and has been raised so high above it that erosion has converted it into a region of gentle hills, whose tops are six hundred or seven hundred feet above sea-level. ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... seemed as if we were never to get past an island that lay off the shore to the north of us. The mountain height which I had seen at an earlier hour through the telescope lay here some way inland. It was flat on the top, with precipitous sides, like those mountains last described. It seemed to be sandstone or basaltic rock; only the horizontal strata of the ledges on its sides were not visible. I calculated its height at 1000 to 1500 feet. Out at sea we saw several new islands, the nearest of them being ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... with unsparing hand, too. Yet not in accord with Tim Sullivan's advice; solely because his pupil was one of extraordinary capacity. There was no such thing as discouraging Joan; she absorbed learning and retained it, as the sandstone absorbs oil under the pressure of the earth, holding it without wasting a drop until the day it ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... asked himself, as his eyes scanned a bewildering maze of towers and roofs. The tall leaden spire of the Cathedral was unmistakable, 'no prisoners there.' Next he made out the big square fortress of sandstone, red as Red William the Norman who built it long ago, on its central mound frowning ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... I 'm told Some ancients like my rusty lay, As Grandpa Noah loved the old Red-sandstone march of Jubal's day. I used to carol like the birds, But time my wits has quite unfixed, Et quoad verba,—for my words,— Ciel! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... did explain just how he made his way through a maze of water-cut pillars and heaps of sandstone so bewildering that Bud afterward swore that in spite of the fact that he was leading Sunfish, he frequently found himself at that patient animal's tail, where they were doubled around some freakish pillar. Frequently Eddie stopped and peered past his horse ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... ahead, but still Manabozho was overtaking him when Pauppukkeewis saw an elk. He asked it to take him on its back, and this the animal did, and for a time he made great progress. Still Manabozho was in sight. Pauppukkeewis dismounted, and, coming to a large sandstone rock, he broke it in pieces, and scattered the grains. Manabozho was so close upon him at this place that he had almost caught him, but the foundation of the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... define it as the Sandstone NECK of the Metal Mountains: a rather lower block, of Sandstone, intercalated into the Metal-Mountain range, which otherwise, on both hands, is higher, and of harder rocks. Southward (as SHOULDER to this sandstone NECK) lies, continuous, broad and high, the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... the southern borders of endless elephant forests, at which I had at length arrived. The fountain was deep and strong, situated in a hollow at the eastern extremity of an extensive vley, and its margin was surrounded by a level stratum of solid old red sandstone. Here and there lay a thick layer of soil upon a rock, and this was packed flat with the fresh spoors of elephants. Around the water's edge the very rock was worn down by the gigantic feet which ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... able to believe that it could have cut out these gigantic chasms. For more than three hundred miles the River Colorado, coming down from the Rocky Mountains, has eaten its way through a country made of granite and hard beds of limestone and sandstone, and it has cut down straight through these rocks, leaving walls from half-a-mile to a mile high, standing straight up from it. The cliffs of the Great Canyon, as it is called, stretch up for more than a mile above the river which flows ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... stood in a grass-field near Leith Hill Place, in Surrey, and was pulled down 35 years before my visit; all the loose rubbish had been carted away, excepting three large stones of quartzose sandstone, which it was thought might hereafter be of some use. An old workman remembered that they had been left on a bare surface of broken bricks and mortar, close to the foundations of the kiln; but the whole surrounding surface is now covered with turf and mould. The two largest ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... by J. F. Johnson, of Indianapolis, represents a type of modern Hoosier dwellings. It is of permanent construction, of sandstone and brick with a tiled roof, and unique in the fact that all of the materials used and all the furnishings are Indiana products. State pride appears again in the library of 15,000 volumes, confined entirely to the works of Indiana authors and books about Indiana. In addition to the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... on a windy hill, lie a little gray church and a quiet churchyard. At all seasons high winds from the North Sea blow over the graves and fret and eat away the soft gray sandstone of which the plain headstones are made. So great is the wear and tear of these winds that comparatively recent monuments look like those which have stood for centuries. On one of these stones lies a recumbent figure, with what looks not unlike a lance ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... or bottom of the crater. There is no evidence that volcanic action has ever taken place in the immediate neighborhood of Coon Butte. The rock in which the crater has been made is composed of horizontal sandstone and limestone strata. Between three hundred and four hundred million tons of rock fragments have been detached, and a large portion hurled by some cause out of the crater. These fragments lie concentrically ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... you think of a big, red, dead city built of red sandstone, with green aloes growing between the stones, lying out neglected on honey-colored sands? There are forty dead kings there, Maisie, each in a gorgeous tomb finer than all the others. You look at the palaces and streets and shops and tanks, and think ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... will observe quite a different class of birds. In a country of the Beech and Maple I do not find the same songsters that I know where thrive the Oak, Chestnut, and Laurel. In going from a district of the Old Red Sandstone to where I walk upon the old Plutonic Rock, not fifty miles distant, I miss in the woods the Veery, the Hermit-Thrush, the Chestnut-Sided Warbler, the Blue-Backed Warbler, the Green-Backed Warbler, the Black and Yellow Warbler, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... of primeval chaos, stretched its portentous length along the glimmering sea, with head of yawning rock, and ridgy back bristled with forests. Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory of Cape Blomedon, passed the red sandstone cliffs of Lyon's Cove, and descried the mouths of the rivers Canard and Des Habitants, where fertile marshes, diked against the tide, sustained a numerous and thriving population. Before them spread the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... shabby shops, hotels and saloons, and long rows of boarding—and rooming-houses. They alighted at a certain corner, walked a little way along a street unkempt and dreary, Mr. Tiernan scrutinizing the numbers until he paused in front of a house with a basement kitchen and snow-covered, sandstone steps. Climbing these, he pulled the bell, and they stood waiting in the twilight of a half-closed vestibule until presently shuffling steps were heard within; the door was cautiously opened, not more than a foot, but enough to reveal a woman in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have been our companions since leaving Cairo also disappear, and a little way above Luxor low hills of sandstone closely confine the river in a very narrow channel. This is the Gibel Silsileh, which from the earliest times has supplied the stone of which the temples are built. These celebrated quarries produce the finest ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... the Garden of the Gods is the entrance known as the Gateway. Color here runs riot. The mass of rock in the foreground is white, and stands out in sharp contrast to the rich red of the sandstone of the portals, which rise on either side to a height of three hundred feet. Through these giant portals, which in the sunlight glow with ruddy fire, is seen mass upon mass of gorgeous color, rendered more striking by the dazzling whiteness of Pike's Peak, which soars upward in the distance, ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... a certain "bald" among the Great Smoky Mountains there lie, just at the verge of the strange stunted woods from which the treeless dome emerges to touch the clouds, two great tilted blocks of sandstone. They are of marked regularity of shape, as square as if hewn with a chisel. Both are splintered and fissured; one is broken in twain. No other rock is near. The earth in which they are embedded is the rich black soil not unfrequently found upon the summits. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... mouth of Exe to the mouth of Teign the coast is uninteresting. Such beauty as it once possessed has been destroyed by the railway. Cliffs of red sandstone drop to the narrow beach, warm between the blue of sky and sea, but without grandeur, and robbed of their native grace by navvy-hewing, which for the most part makes of them a mere embankment: their verdure stripped away, their juttings tunnelled, along their base the steel parallels of smoky ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the gates ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... would be as great a miracle as the existence of chalk (and the strata associated withit) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated withit;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen's dictum, that "the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity," may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... limestone, in which shells are found belonging to a later formation. The oldest formations are the volcanic mountains near Knin and on Lissa. Next follow the trias strata, as under the Velebits and westwards from Sinj, then the sandstone beds, the different eocene beds and alluvial strata, as in the plain of Dernis, north of the Vrana Lake, by Nona and Imoski. The principal characteristic of the Karst district (to which Dalmatia belongs geologically) is the way the water flows, sometimes ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... gigantic trees on the Himalaya, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark grey foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high. Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are smaller, more varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast with grey limestone and red sandstone rocks. Still, even of the forest between Kurseong and Darjiling, Hooker says that it is difficult to conceive a grander mass of vegetation—the straight shafts of the timber trees shooting aloft, some naked and clean with grey, pale, or brown bark; others literally ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... way to the north of this region, on the banks of the Connecticut River, are beds of red sandstone, on the different layers of which are found the footmarks of long extinct birds. The beds in some parts are twenty-five feet in thickness, composed of layer upon layer; and on each of these layers, when horizontally split, are found imprinted these remarkable footmarks. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... grassy plain or slope; they were amid the debris of rocks which hedge in the upper heights of the great plateau; they were struggling through it like a forlorn hope through chevaux-de-frise. The morning sun came upon them over treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... manners during her short sojourn, caused the entire village and many from the neighboring towns to attend her funeral. A few weeks after her burial, an unknown hand erected the gravestone with its eloquent inscription." The stone is evidently Connecticut sandstone or freestone. Mr. Hanson says of the volume "Eliza Wharton": "The catchpenny volume of letters which pretend to give her history has but the figments of the imagination of its authoress ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... McCormick anxiously waiting for us. High up in the sandstone tower at headquarters, we sat with him in the maze of delicate machinery with which the fire game is played in New York. In great glass cases were glistening brass and nickel machines with discs and levers and bells, tickers, sheets of paper, and annunciators without number. This ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... out to be composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... forest growth, and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic path. But I have travelled that path so often as to know every foot of it, and conceive my surprise when I came upon the glade and found no laboratory. The quaint shed structure with its red sandstone chimney was not. Nor did it look as if it ever had been. There were no signs of ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and high- shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... strong bare arms came in and stared at me steadily for a minute or two, but went away without saying a word. I looked around the old house room that I knew so well, with its floor of flags from Buckley Delph, scoured white with sandstone. There stood, large and solid, the mealark of black oak, with the date, 1644, carved just below the heavy lid, more than 200 years old, and as sound as ever. The sloping mirror over the chest of drawers was still supported by the four seasons, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... age. But the magnet shows this tracery to be iron. We were shown also emeralds and "diamonds," picked up in this region, and there is a mild expectation in all the inhabitants of great mineral treasure. A singular product of the region is the flexible sandstone. It is a most uncanny stone. A slip of it a couple of feet long and an inch in diameter each way bends in the hand like a half-frozen snake. This conduct of a substance that we have been taught to regard as inflexible impairs one's confidence ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at the railway station, Lord Elgin met with a reception worthy of the East. The road, thickly lined with native troops, crossed the Jumna by a bridge of boats, and wound along the river's bank beneath those lofty sandstone walls; then, mounting a steep hill and leaving the main entry into Agra Fort upon the right, the Taj remaining to the left, it led, through miles of garden ground, thickly studded with suburban villas, to the Viceroy's camp, that occupied the centre of an extensive plain, where tents ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... of material have been employed. Up to almost the end of the thirteenth century the builders used a coarse gritstone such as is found five miles to the south-west at Brimham Rocks, and also a finer gritstone or sandstone that may have come from Hackfall. After that date they built with magnesian limestone, brought partly, perhaps, from near York, but chiefly, it would seem, from Quarry Moor, a mile south of the city. At the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... environment in the valley of the Meurthe, and may be made the centre of many excursions. Its picturesque old Romanesque cathedral of red sandstone, about which are grouped noble elms, grows upon the eye; more interesting and beautiful by far are the Gothic cloisters leading from within to the smaller church adjoining. These delicate arcades, in part restored, form a quadrangle. Greenery fills the open space, and wild antirrhinum ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... soft white beach, spread out at the foot of the rocks, abounding with such a wonderful variety of shells, that our researches rarely ended without the discovery of some fresh specimen for our collections. Nor must we omit to mention the only white rock of any size which was to be found in our red sandstone district, which gave its name to the Cove, and as to which there were numerous traditions current in ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... when satin is crumpled and smartly rent. Weird, resonant tappings, moans, and gurgles come from a hollow log drifting, with infinite slowness. Broken sighs and gasps tell where the ripples advancing in echelon wander and lose their way among blocks of sandstone. As the tide rose it prattled and gurgled, toying with tinkling shells and clinking coral, each tone separate and distinct, however thin and faint. My solitary watch gives the rare delight of analysing the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon the rim of it—a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped again through furlongs of black gneiss, red sandstone, and ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... red sandstone, is of inferior thirteenth-century workmanship, with statues of Faith and Charity on either side. The facade is flanked by ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... geologist, and Shackleton's expedition of 1907 — 08, with Professor David and R. Priestley as geologists. According to the investigations of these expeditions, South Victoria Land consists of a vast, ancient complex of crystalline schists and granitic rocks, large extents of which are covered by a sandstone formation ("Beacon Sandstone," Ferrar), on the whole horizontally bedded, which is at least 1,500 feet thick, and in which Shackleton found seams of coal and fossil wood (a coniferous tree). This, as it belongs to the Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... mind and personality, and he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks. Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... forget it, had allied herself with the head of the wealthy Mingott line, married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an Italian marquis and an English banker), and put the crowning touch to her audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone (when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... design of the architect is for a very magnificent edifice in the shape of a Greek cross, with a rotunda sixty feet in diameter. Only one wing has been completed, but this is spacious enough to furnish all needful accommodation. The material is rough-hammered sandstone, of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... those of Herat; I see Teheran—I see Muscat and Medina, and the intervening sands—I see the caravans toiling onward; I see Egypt and the Egyptians—I see the pyramids and obelisks; I look on chiselled histories, songs, philosophies, cut in slabs of sandstone or on granite blocks; I see at Memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies, embalmed, swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries; I look on the fallen Theban, the large-balled eyes, the side-drooping neck, the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... requiring a vast length of time for their accumulation, are entirely destitute of organic remains, without our being able to assign any reason: one of the most striking instances is that of the Flysch formation, which consists of shale and sandstone, several thousand, occasionally even six thousand feet in thickness, and extending for at least 300 miles from Vienna to Switzerland; and although this great mass has been most carefully searched, no fossils, except a few vegetable remains, have ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... and streaks, oceans and straits, has long been the prevalent opinion. Sir J. Herschel in 1830 led the way in ascribing the redness of the planet's light to an inherent peculiarity of soil.[977] Previously it had been assimilated to our sunset glows rather than to our red sandstone formations—set down, that is, to an atmospheric stoppage of blue rays. But the extensive Martian atmosphere, implicitly believed in on the strength of some erroneous observations by Cassini and Roemer in the seventeenth century, vanished before the sharp occultation of a small ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... stone is also exposed to chemical influences from which it was sheltered before. But in the climate of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is a still more powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. The soil that protects the lime and sandstone, the slate and the granite from the influence of the sun, also prevents the water which filters into their crevices and between their strata from freezing in the hardest winters, and the moisture descends, in a liquid form, until it escapes in springs, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... on the roofs and walls of large caves: the white nests in low-roofed caves, generally in sandstone rock; the black in the immense lofty caves formed in the limestone rocks. The latter are reached by means of tall scaffoldings of strong poles of bamboo, often more than a hundred feet in height. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... unwelcome visitor. In the days when there was considerable danger of Indian attacks no windows were constructed, for the householder could defend only one aperture. Later, square holes which could be securely barred at night and during cold weather were made to serve as windows. Flat pieces of sandstone, if they could be found, were used in building the great fireplace; otherwise, thick timbers heavily covered with clay were made to serve. In scarcely a cabin was there a trace of iron or glass; the whole ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... socket, and stood with it in his own hand, looking suspiciously to and fro to descry if perchance he were observed. The coast clear, he turned to the wall of rock beside the road, for this was near the mountain sandstone formation, fissured, splintered, with the erosions of water and weather; and into one of the cellular, tunnel-like apertures he ran the guidon, lance and all,—lost forever ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of rocks occurring in the Catoctin Belt is the sedimentary series. It is all included in the Cambrian period and consists of limestone, shale, sandstone and conglomerate. The two border zones of the Catoctin Belt, however, contain also rocks of the Silurian and Juratrias periods. In general, the sediments are sandy and calcareous in the Juratrias area, and sandy in the Catoctin Belt. They have been the theme of considerable ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... For this purpose there are, unfortunately, but few works which are well calculated to serve the needs of the beginner. Perhaps the best naturalist book, though its form is somewhat ancient, is White's Natural History of Selborne. Hugh Miller's works, particularly his Old Red Sandstone and My Schools and Schoolmasters, show well how a man may become a naturalist under difficulties. Sir John Lubbock's studies on Wasps, and Darwin's work on Animals and Plants under Domestication are also admirable to show how observation should ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... gate of the churchyard, the rain of sand and small pebbles was agonizing, as it swept across up the low sandstone cliffs on that side of the Castle. Two or three excited figures shouted for them to hurry because she was going to strike in Dollar Cove, and everybody began to scramble up the grassy slope, clutching at the tuffets of thrift to aid their progress. It was calm here in the lee; and ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... have deigned to remain many hours. The huge rings by which the fetters were soldered together, and attached to the human body, were, when examined minutely, found to be clenched together by riveting so very thin, that when rubbed with corrosive acid, or patiently ground with a bit of sandstone, the hold of the fetters upon each other might easily be forced asunder, and the purpose of them entirely frustrated. The locks also, large, and apparently very strong, were so coarsely made, that an artist of small ingenuity could ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... untiring industry and integrity. The building has a frontage of forty-two and a half feet, a depth of one hundred and fifty feet, and a height of eighty feet, overtopping all the blocks in the city. The front is of Amherst sandstone. The building is divided into five stories, with a basement; the ground floor, occupied by the store, having five hundred feet of counter-room. Without, the architectural taste displayed was unexceptionably good, the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies, within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep "Piers Cockburn and Marjory his wife." Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried him rests ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... is lower, are featureless billows of gravel, over which a carriage might easily be driven. Not so is the Lachalang, though its well-made zigzags are easy for laden animals. The approach to it is fantastic, among precipitous mountains of red sandstone, and red rocks weathered into pillars, men's heads, and numerous groups of gossipy old women from thirty to fifty feet high, in flat hats and long circular cloaks! Entering by red gates of rock into a region of gigantic mountains, and following ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... lines that have since been constructed, they were then regarded as of the most stupendous description. In deed, the like of them had not before been executed in England. It had been our engineer's original intention carry the railway from the north end of Liverpool, round the red-sandstone ridge on which the upper part of the town is built, and also round the higher rise of the coal formation at Rainhill, by following the natural levels. But the opposition of the landowners having forced the line more to the south, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... societies, both native and European. I may hereafter communicate their different and (me judice) equally erroneous solutions. I solicit also, Messrs. Editors, your own acceptance of the copy herewith enclosed. I need only premise further, that the stone itself is a goodly block of metamorphick sandstone, and that the Runes resemble very nearly the ornithichnites or fossil bird-tracks of Dr. Hitchcock, but with less regularity or apparent design than is displayed by those remarkable geological monuments. These are rather the non bene junctarum discordia ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... register of the strata so far pierced by the bore, but, as they are not described in the technical terms of geology, it is rather difficult to compare them with those of the old well. At a depth of 490 feet, sandstone with iron pyrites was pierced; this would probably be the ferruginous Northampton sand of the Oolite. It is at a less depth than the same stratum at the Spa well; but that was to be expected, as geologists ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... structure of imposing appearance, erected in the center of spacious grounds, most charmingly laid out, with a rare combination of lawn, flowers and shrubbery. The material used in its construction was Seneca sandstone, in color a rich dark red, and was trimmed with a pale mottled green stone, quite as beautiful as serpentine. The effect of the combination was as harmonious as it was ornamental. The main building was four ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... gilded spire and the clusters of white cottages about them. The shore rises steeply and the farms taper back into the forests that crown the hills of the background, which rise fully one thousand feet above the sea. On our left hand as we left the Basin were huge clay or sandstone cliffs cut away by the fierce swells of the Gulf. A lighthouse crowned the Point, with a flag staff from which a Union Jack stood out in the wind as stiff as a board. On the left there were masses of rock to mark the shore line, and several small islands. In one place we could plainly see an arched ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... wasn't safe there for the three horses, and led them away. That was fortunate, but it left Brown alone, right against the cheek of the fire, watching his boiler, stoking in coal, keeping his steam-gauge at 75. As the fire gained, chunks of red-hot sandstone began to smash down on the engine. Brown ran his pressure up to 80, and watched the door anxiously where the boys had ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... earth nothing but a cooling mass, "like a hot-water jar such as is used in carriages," or "a globe of sandstone?" and has its cooling been uniform? An affirmative answer to both these questions seems to be necessary to the validity of the calculations on which Sir W. Thomson lays so ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in fact terrible; the hills are an awful jumble, with no regular formation, but broken up into valleys, dongas, ravines, and partly bare sandstone, and partly covered with dense shrub. In places there are sheer precipices over which it is impossible to climb and down which a false step may send you ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... themselves facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery, and somewhere half way up the enemy had a second trench strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the inorganic world often lead to the production of beautiful forms. In life the reverse is true; the vital forces build up varied and picturesque forms which when pulled down are shapeless and displeasing. The immense layers of sandstone and limestone out of which the wonderful forms that fill the Grand Canon of the Colorado are carved were laid down in wide uniform sheets; if the waters had deposited their material in the forms which we now see, it would have been a miracle. ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... portions of these elements—silicates, carbonates, sulphates, phosphates, and chlorides of lime, potash, magnesia, alumina, soda, oxides of iron and manganese—it derives from the detritus of the granite, gneiss, mica, and chlorite slate, limestone and sandstone rocks, in which the Himmalaya chain of mountains so much abounds; and the organic elements—humates, almates, geates, apoerenates, and crenates—it derives from the mould, formed from the decay of animal and vegetable matter. It is more hydroscopic, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... made for Edward I. to enclose the stone of Scone, which he had brought from Scotland. It was the sacred coronation stone of the Scottish kings, and was supposed to have come originally from Palestine. Unfortunately for this theory it consists of Scotch sandstone, and, as Wills remarks, 'Sir Roger's question was extremely pertinent.' All succeeding sovereigns have been crowned on this chair and stone. It is now railed in, but in Addison's time it was a source of revenue to the guides, who demanded a fine of any person who ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... of this legend is cut in hieroglyphics upon a sandstone stele, with a rounded top, which was found in the temple of Khensu at Thebes, and is now preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris; it was discovered by Champollion, and removed to Paris by Prisse d'Avennes in 1846. ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not "home,"—of course you couldn't call it "home" now; "home" means that big red sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. "Home" means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that you had as a ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... the mound, I now describe a sandstone disk, 1-1/2 inch in diameter and 3/4 inch thick, taken up from near the skeleton in the lower part of Grave Creek mound. According to Schoolcraft's analysis, communicated to the American Ethnological Society, "Of the 22 alphabetic characters, 4 correspond ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... water-power in the neighbourhood of Manchester, and at length found what he wanted a dozen miles away at Wilmslow, over the Cheshire border. Here the stream of the Bollen cuts through a flat and uninteresting table-land, and forms a pretty valley of its own, as it winds between banks of red sandstone. When the mill was built, and a house close to it, Quarry Bank became the home of the family, and it was here that W. R. Greg passed his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... and by terraces the hillside, which it forms into an amphitheater. The houses, built very high like those of Cadiz, terminate in flat roofs that their inhabitants may the better enjoy the sea view. They are all of white Maltese stone; a sort of sandstone easy to work, and with which, at small expense, one can indulge various caprices of sculpture and ornamentation. These rectilinear houses stand well, and have an air of grandeur, which they owe to the absence of (visible) roofs, cornices, and attics. They stand out sharply ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... pulses guaged his night and day, As sandstone rock he bored. His ear supplied, By sound of sea, how much his axe had gored, As clearer came the welcome rush of tide. Hope made his feeble ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... acid of the water must be acquired in percolating through the several hundreds of feet of superincumbent earth and sandstone, as there is but one of these domes, "Sandstone Dome," that extends upward to the sandstone. The solvent water then, after finding its way into the vertical crevices of the limestone, gradually rounded them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... hammer. He never lost sight of the subject; but went on accumulating observations and comparing formations, until at length, many years afterwards, when no longer a working mason, he gave to the world his highly interesting work on the Old Red Sandstone, which at once established his reputation as a scientific geologist. But this work was the fruit of long years of patient observation and research. As he modestly states in his autobiography, "the only merit to which I lay claim in the case is that of patient research- -a merit in ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... And, in thy weakly way of judging, So kindly taught the art of trudging; Or, with a moment's happier lot, Pitied, pensioned, and forgot— Cutty-pipe thy regium donum; Poverty thy summum bonum; Thy frigid couch a sandstone stratum; A colder grave thy ultimatum; Circumventing, circumvented; In short, excessively tormented, Everything combines to scare Charity's dear pensioner! —Say, vagrant, can'st thou grant to me A slice of thy philosophy? Haply, in thy many trudgings, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... King's flat tombstone of rough Island sandstone, so overgrown with ivy that we could hardly read its lengthy inscription, recording his whole history in brief, and finishing with eight lines of original verse composed by his widow. I do not think that poetry was Great-grandmother King's strong point. When Felix read ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... together, and strengthened the structure. The ground floor was also frequently built with dressed stones, while the upper parts were of brick. The limestone of the neighbouring hills was the stone commonly used for such purposes. The fragments of sandstone, granite, and alabaster, which are often found mixed in with it, are generally from some ruined temple; the ancient Egyptians having pulled their neglected monuments to pieces quite as unscrupulously as do their modern successors. The houses ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... malacolite, wollastonite, brown idocrase, garnet, sphene and hornblende. A larger list of minerals has been obtained from an exposure of limestone and associated beds in Glen Gairn, about four miles above the point where that river joins the Dee. Narrow belts of Old Red Sandstone, resting unconformably on the old platform of slates and schists, have been traced from the north coast at Peterhead by Turriff to Fyvie, and also from Huntly by Gartly to Kildrummy Castle. The strata ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ground, and remarkable passes through the rocky mountains; but the course of our journey in general, lay through an arid plain of sand and stones, about two miles in breadth, bounded by rocks of sandstone of an almost uniform appearance. On the second day's march, I saw one or two trees, and the road was so varied, that I could then scarcely believe myself in a desart, which I had always pictured to my imagination as a dreary and interminable plain, with heavy loose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... are made of sandstone; and the illustrations will show them sufficiently. For a full description see the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. xxxvii, ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... a broad river, sweeping round in an imposing curve from the South-Eastward, with abrupt ranges of sandstone hills, for the most part cleared of forest, hemming it in on either side, and a glimpse of lofty blue mountains towering skywards far away to the North-East, is a long straggling collection of atap (thatch made of leaves of ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... Nauvoo, and was one of the 143 Pioneers who entered Salt Lake with Brigham Young the following summer. In December, 1879, his son, Wilson G. Shumway, accepted a call to Arizona. Most of the winter was spent at Grand Falls in a "shack" he built of cottonwood logs, roofed with sandstone slabs. In this he entertained Apostle Woodruff, who directed the chiseling of the name "Wilford Woodruff" upon a rock. Charles Shumway and N.P. Beebe bought the mill rights on Silver Creek, acquired through location the previous year by Nathan C. and Jesse Wanslee, brought machinery from ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... terrace is a marble minaret about a hundred and forty feet in height, of fine proportions, like four sentinels placed there to guard the mausoleum, which forms the centre of the platform. Two mosques, built of red sandstone, stand between these minarets, one on the east and one on the west side. The height of the Taj from the base to the top of the dome must be very nearly or quite three hundred feet. The principal dome in itself is eighty feet high, and of such exquisite ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Avenue in a vast sandstone palace, in which she held those fashionable entertainments which have made the name of Rasselyer-Brown what it is. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... were widely cultivated, especially in the north. Stone, suitable for building, was very scarce, and limestone, alabaster, marble, and basalt had to be taken from northern Mesopotamia, where the mountains also yield copper and lead and iron. Except Eridu, where ancient workers quarried sandstone from its sea-shaped ridge, all the cities were built of brick, an excellent clay being found in abundance. When brick walls were cemented with bitumen they were given great stability. This resinous substance is found in the north and ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... rotten piece between his fingers, "belongs probably to an older geological period than its position would indicate—a primitive sandstone level perhaps. Its position on that layer is no doubt due to volcanic upheavals—such disturbances, or rather the results of such disturbances, have been and are the cause of the greatest trouble to geologists—endless errors and controversy. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... at Marge. Despairingly she pointed to the mountain behind them. For a quarter of a mile it was a sheer wall of red sandstone. Their one way of flight lay downward, practically into the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... mountains or valleys. The giant planet had weathered down to one great curving plain. It was mostly red sandstone, but here and there were reddish carpets of moss and grass. In the distance were a few gaunt trees. They had seen no rivers or seas before they landed. Odin learned later that there were many muddy ponds left upon the surface ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... channel here as when in the remote ages the lava, overflowing, cut out a course and left its pathway clear for all time. Below the lower Cascades a sea-coral formation is found, grayish in color and not very pretty, but showing conclusively its sea formation. Sandstone is also at times uncovered, showing that this was made by sea deposit before the lava flowed down upon it. This Oregon country is said to be the largest lava district in the world. The basaltic formations in the volcanic lands of Sicily and Italy are famous for their richness, and Oregon holds ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... 6000 feet. A remarkable feature of most of these hills, as of many all over the plateau, is that they are flat-topped, and have often steep, even craggy escarpments. This seems due to the fact that the strata (chiefly sandstone) are horizontal; and very often a bed of hard igneous rock, some, kind of trap or greenstone, or porphyry, protects the summit of the hill from the disintegrating influences of the weather. It is a bare land, with very little wood, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... rusty swords or guns or weather-stained saddles lying beside them, under every little shade-giving tree. These skeletons he saw everywhere at very short intervals. Cerro Cora is described as a splendid amphitheatre surrounded by hills, with precipitous sides of red sandstone, and crowned with dark forests. Here and there amid the undulations are grassy knolls flanked by palm trees, and in one of these Lopez, driven to desperation, pitched his tent with a handful of followers. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... town in Britain, except perhaps Bath and Aberdeen. Edinburgh is always, indeed, an interesting place for an enthusiastic lover of building, be he architect or stonemason; for instead of being built of brick like London and so many other English centres, it is built partly of a fine hard local sandstone and partly of basaltic greenstone; and besides its old churches and palaces, many of the public buildings are particularly striking and beautiful architectural works. But just at the moment when young Telford walked wearily into Edinburgh ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... driven over the hill behind the village. Her new home could not yet be seen; but before her lay Four Winds Harbor like a great, shining mirror of rose and silver. Far down, she saw its entrance between the bar of sand dunes on one side and a steep, high, grim, red sandstone cliff on the other. Beyond the bar the sea, calm and austere, dreamed in the afterlight. The little fishing village, nestled in the cove where the sand-dunes met the harbor shore, looked like a great opal in the haze. The sky over them was like a jewelled cup from which the dusk was pouring; the ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shot from a stage fixed in the water, with branches of their favourite food hanging from it; one of twenty-two cwt. was killed not long ago. High up the river, where the alluvium of the estuary is changed for white sandstone, with occasionally black oxide of manganese, the fish are of delicious flavour; among others, the pacoo, near the Falls or Rapids, which is flat, twenty inches long, and weighs four pounds; it feeds on the seed of the arum arborescens, in devouring which the Indians shoot it with their arrows: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... in 1838. It is thought to have been made about 500 B.C., and is called "The Harpy Monument," It is a tower, round the four sides of which runs a frieze at a height of about twenty-one feet from the ground. The frieze is of white marble, and is let into the frieze which is of sandstone. The Lycians, in whose country it was found, were accustomed to bury their dead at the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... belongs to this formation. In the Isle of Wight the lower division is well exposed at Alum Bay (660 ft.) and White Cliff Bay (140 ft.); here it consists of unfossiliferous sands (white, yellow, brown, crimson and every intermediate shade), and clays with layers of lignite and ferruginous sandstone. Similar beds are visible at Bournemouth, and in the neighbourhood of Poole, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting sparely beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In the sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the thyme and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the path. The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the golden day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very principle of life seemed to slumber. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... I have just returned from a visit to the Liverpool Observatory, under the direction of Mr. Hartnup. It is situated on Waterloo dock, and the pier of the observatory rests upon the sandstone of that region, The telescope is an equatorial; like many good instruments in our country, it ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... necessary to say that this magnificent project, so foreign to the traditional ideas and customs of the people, was not easily realised. Imagine a man, without technical knowledge, without skilled workmen, without good tools, and with no better material than soft, crumbling sandstone, endeavouring to build a palace on a marsh! The undertaking would seem to reasonable minds utterly absurd, and yet it must be admitted that Peter's project was scarcely more feasible. He had neither technical knowledge, nor the requisite materials, nor a firm foundation to build on. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... was indeed much more magnificent than anything they had yet seen that day, though it would have made but a poor show beside that of the Babylonian King. They came to it through a great square pillared doorway of sandstone that stood in a high brick wall. The shut doors were of massive cedar, with bronze hinges, and were studded with bronze nails. At the side was a little door and a wicket gate, and through this the priest led the children. He seemed to ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... headed by Professor Libbey, of Princeton University, started early in July to explore a mesa or table-land of sandstone which rises out of the alkali plains, in the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 42, August 26, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... along by six dapple greys, passed by the classic grounds of Knowle, or after crossing Riverside Hill skirted the vast expanse of the Weald of Kent. Past Tonbridge School went the coach, and on through Southborough, until it wound down a steep, curving road with strange outcrops of sandstone beside it, and halted before a great hostelry, bearing the name which had been given him in his directions. He descended, entered the coffee-room, and ordered the underdone steak which his trainer had recommended. Hardly had he finished it when a servant with ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cairo the flat slabs of limestone and sandstone brought from the Turah quarries, which supplied ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... cessation of the works. He had himself proceeded to the lowest soundings without finding the least trace in the soil, burrowed in every direction. They had even attempted to find coal under strata which are usually below it, such as the Devonian red sandstone, but without result. James Starr had therefore abandoned the mine with the absolute conviction that it did not contain ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... tastes slightly soapy. Also, when it dries out it leaves a sticky, and then a glassy, crackly film. Rocks look fairly earthlike, but the absence or scarcity of anything like limestone is noticeable. Practically all the sedimentary rocks are of the sandstone type. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... Others had no known type nearer than Connecticut, in the opposite direction, while the gneiss and mica slate of the island of New-York, with their various embedded minerals, the serpentine and many of the magnesian minerals of Hoboken, with sandstone and trap of the Pallisadoc range, were distinctly recognisable. In this great excavation, where a region of a mile square was wholly removed, to a depth, in many places, of thirty feet, no animal remains, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... consumed in political speech-making. I do not care what the newspapers say of us. I know their accounts are distorted; but they would be distorted if we admitted reporters. Some of them assail us as a convention of compromisers—as belonging to the sandstone stratum of politics. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... found before them, as their ships came to anchor, sandstone bluffs covered with scraggy trees and heath-like plants, with a bright blue sky above, and an elastic, buoyant atmosphere around. As they went inland, they found an endless open forest, the ground being ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... retreats of the fluvial deities, where they can defy the curiosity of man. The adventurous spirit prompted me to explore it, but the lazy one said, 'Leave it.' I took the advice of the latter, and went on by the road, which now left the river, and ascended towards the plateau under cliffs of red sandstone. The thirsty sun had by this time drained almost every flower-cup of its dew; but the freshness of the morning still lingered in the hollows of the rocks, and in the shade of the chestnut, the walnut, and elm. As the earth warmed, it became quieter. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... his horse's back, very nearly at the summit of the long range of hills which bisected the county in which he dwelt. I have described, in mentioning his park, the sandy character of the soil on the opposite slope of the rise; but here higher up, and little trodden by pulverizing feet, the sandstone rock itself occasionally broke out in rugged maps, diversifying the softer characteristics of the scene. Wide, and far away, on either hand, the eye could wander along the range, catching first upon some bold mass of hill, or craggy piece of ground, assuming ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the Trustees of the school were charged with a payment of L200 per annum towards the stipend of the Rector. In 1874 the advowson was sold to a private person. A great deal of restoration, justifiable and otherwise, has taken place, the decay of the local sandstone having made large repairs necessary. In 1861 much renewal of the external stone work was carried out. Unfortunately shortsighted ideas of economy led to the use of the same poor stone and much has recently had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... her in all her doublings, it became easy enough, although it fatigued me greatly owing to our rapid pace. The hill was conical, but I found that it had a flat top—an oblong or pear-shaped area, almost level, of a soft, crumbly sandstone, with a few blocks and boulders of a harder stone scattered about—and no vegetation, except the grey mountain lichen and a few ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... saw mill built by and for the soldiers at Fort Snelling and measured the retrocession of the fall by the fresh break of the rock from the water race way and found it had gone back one hundred and three feet which seemed very extraordinary until examination disclosed the soft sandstone underlying the limestone top of ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... Shrewsbury School are now used as a Free Library and Museum and abound in interest. The house remains in which Prince Rupert stayed during his sojourn in 1644, then owned by "Master Jones the lawyer," at the west end of St. Mary's Church, with its fine old staircase. Whitehall, a fine mansion of red sandstone, was built by Richard Prince, a lawyer, in 1578-82, "to his great chardge with fame to hym and hys posterite for ever." The Old Market Hall in the Renaissance style, with its mixture of debased Gothic and ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... show. But on the 7th of September, this summer (1862), I went with the rape-ruler Arni Jonsson of Wood-stead to inspect the lair. Walking up to it from the level ground below took us three minutes. The lair stands in the lower part of a slip of stones beneath some sheer rocks between a sandstone rock, called the carline, and the stone slip from the peak. It is built up of stones, straight as a line, and runs, 4-3/4 ells in length, 10 inches broad, and is, within walls, 7/8 of an ell deep. The half of it is deftly covered in with flat stones, the longest of which are 2 ells 9 inches ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... the inside is of rough stones. Going south along the dorsum, we found remains of oval foundations; a trench apparently cut in the rock, pottery often an inch and more thick, and broken handmills made of the New Red Sandstone of the Hisma. Finally, at the northernmost point, where the cliff-edge falls abruptly, with a natural arch, towards the swamp, about one kilometre broad at the Bab, we came upon another circle of rough stones. We were doubtful ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... further enhanced by rows of green shutters. It was screened from the north by the hill, and from the east by a dense wood. Myrtles, hydrangeas, magnolias, and orange-trees nourished out-of-doors upon the sheltered terraces cut in the red sandstone. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... travellers from the West to India who have not admired the fortress, built of red sandstone, which is one of the sights of Agra. At the time of the accession of Akbar there was at Agra simply a citadel built of brick, ugly in form and ruinous from decay. Akbar had for some time past resolved to build on its ruins a fortress which should be worthy of the ruler of an empire, and ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... the wealthier inhabitants of Oporto during the violent heat of the summer. The river, immediately within the bar, expands into the appearance of a lake. A little higher up it is narrowed by two abrupt hills. That on the right terminates in a precipice of bright hard sandstone, descending so steeply to the water's edge, that but lately a road has been made from Oporto along the bank of the river, to St. Joao da Foz, by blasting and hewing down a sufficient portion of the rock. This height, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... a great still lake. They had never seen any space look like it. The way to it was difficult and dangerous, but down the narrow path they went, and reached the bottom in safety. They found it composed of smooth, light-coloured sandstone, undulating in parts, but mostly level. It was no wonder to them now that they had not been able to tell what it was, for this surface was everywhere crowded with shadows. The mass was chiefly made up of the shadows of leaves innumerable, ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... height. It is the principal watershed, from which various streams flow in different directions into the three great rivers—Amazon, Orinoco, and Essequibo. Hillhouse and Schombergh describe the side of the mountain as composed of cliffs, fifteen hundred feet in height, of compact sandstone, as perpendicular as if erected with the plumb-line, and overhung in part with low shrubs. Though distant, they appear as if in dangerous proximity. Around are detached masses, apparently torn from those gigantic walls of nature; and every moment it seems ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... inscription:— "Cy Git Marie de Rabutin Chantal, Marquise de Svign. Dcd le 18 Avril 1696." Above the well, in the "Place," is a bronze statue of her with corkscrew curls. About m. from the town is what was one of her favourite walks to an overhanging ledge of sandstone called the Grotte de Roche-Courbire. To visit it, descend from the inn, then take the first byeroad right, by a row of poplars to a short stair. A coach runs from Grignan to Nyons, 20m. S.E. by Valras and Taulignan. Valras ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... an adaptation to environment. The writer has been interested in observing the force of this law as it affects animal life. Lizards in Emery county are slate-gray in color that they may be less conspicuous on a background of clay and gray sandstone; the same animals in St. George take on a reddish color—an adaptation to their environment of ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... Silsileh; the quarries there are of enormous extent, and almost all the sandstone used for building the temples of Upper Egypt was brought from thence. The Nile is narrower there than above, and large stela, were erected there by Rameses II. his successor Mernephtah, on which were inscribed beautiful hymns to the Nile, and lists of the sacrifices to be offered at the Nile- festivals. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... under immense pressure and in the presence of confined moisture, needing a weight of fifteen thousand pounds upon every inch. Therefore, wherever granite is found we know that it has not been formed by deposit, like limestone and sandstone and slate and other sedimentary rocks, but at a prodigious depth under the solid ground, and by slow crystallizing of molten substances. There must have been from two to five miles of other rock lying upon the stuff that crystallized ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... be ground as lightly as possible on a soft wet sandstone or on a wet emery wheel, and care should be taken not to create any surface cracks, which are invariably the result of grinding too forcibly. The foregoing illustrations, Figs. 84 to 91, with their captions, will be ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... remarkable examples of eruptive trap in England. Its shoulders are of silurian and carboniferous strata. The sedimentary deposits within the influence of the volcanic action have passed through considerable changes, the sandstone having become granitic quartz rock, chiefly composed of pure white quartz with particles of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... close to the pillar: its outline was most imposing. Upon reaching it, I found it to be a columnar structure, standing upon a pedestal, which is perhaps eighty feet high, and composed of loose white sandstone, having vast numbers of large blocks lying about in all directions. From the centre of the pedestal rises the pillar, composed also of the same kind of rock; at its top, and for twenty to thirty feet from its summit, the colour of the stone is red. The column itself must be seventy or ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... school exhibiting bad technique, and if we had only this one monument of Luxor from which to form our opinion of its merits, it would be sufficient to prove that the sculptors of Ramses II. were not a whit behind those of Harmham or Seti I. Adroitness in cutting the granite or hard sandstone had in no wise been lost, and the same may be said of the skill in bringing out the contour and life-like action of the figure, and of the art of infusing into the features and demeanour of the Pharaoh something of the superhuman majesty with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
