"Basalt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... basalt," answered the little girl. Then, leaning far out of the saddle to point to ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... black as the basalt tablets in the museum, were seated on the floor of the white marble court. Some were eating their frugal meal; some were lying on their backs resting; while others were lost in prayer. Here and there a tall sheikh or a professor was standing talking to a group of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... wastes the coasts. The tear and wear of external occupations is ever acting upon our religious life. Travellers tell us that the constant friction of the sand on Egyptian hieroglyphs removes every trace of colour, and even effaces the deep-cut characters from basalt rocks. So the unceasing attrition of multitudinous trifles will take all the bloom off your religion, and efface the name of the King cut on the tables of your hearts, if you do not counteract them by constant earnest effort. Our devotion, our faith, our love are only ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... guide to the entrance of the channel. The 'Stancomb Wills' pushed off at 11 a.m. and quickly passed out of sight around the island. Then Hurley and I walked along the beach towards the west, climbing through a gap between the cliff and a great detached pillar of basalt. The narrow strip of beach was cumbered with masses of rock that had fallen from the cliffs. We struggled along for two miles or more in the search for a place where we could get the boats ashore and make a permanent camp in the event of Wild's search proving ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... glistening sparkle here, there, and everywhere when the sun was shining, and the far distant land sitting Sphinx-like on the Western horizon, with its shaded white slopes, and its bare outcrops of black basalt. Wilson in our "South Polar Times" wrote some lines entitled, "The Barrier Silence"—sometimes the silence was broken by howling blizzard, then and only then, except by the puny handful of men who have passed this way. Only in Scott's first and Shackleton's ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... use in Egypt were carved out of opaque or semi-transparent stones, and those cut in hard stone were usually made of some one of the following varieties: green basalt, diorite, granite, haematite, lapis lazuli, jasper, serpentine, verde antique, smalt, root of emerald, which is the same as plasma or prase[19] cornelian, amethyst, sardonyx, agate and onyx. Those of soft material were cut out of steatite, a soft limestone similar to chalk, but usually ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... these small islands are very different according to their geological formation. The volcanoes, active or extinct, have steep black beaches of volcanic sand, or are fringed with rugged masses of lava and basalt. Coral is generally absent, occurring only in small patches in quiet bays, and rarely or never forming reefs. Ternate, Tidore, and Makian belong to this class. Islands of volcanic origin, not themselves volcanoes, but which have been probably recently upraised, are ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Glover's small and sinewy soul (a psyche of the size, muscular force, and agility of a flea) had been seized, oppressed, and in a manner smashed by the hideous sublimity of this wilderness of sandstone, basalt, and granite. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... overhangs the Mediterranean, are found chalk, and tertiary breccia formed of fragments of chalk and flint. On the north-east of the mountain, beyond the Nahr-el-Mukattah, plutonic rocks appear, breaking through the deposit strata, and forming the beginning of the basalt formation which runs through the plain of Esdraelon to Tabor and the Sea of Galilee.[128] Like most limestone formations, Carmel abounds in caves, which are said to be more than 2,000 in number,[129] and are often of great ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... fine a volcanic upheaval as one will find anywhere. Sheer walls of cloud-capped rock 6,000 feet high, some literally overhanging the crystal-clear water, and all embossed and engraved with strangely patterned basalt. There are pillars, battlements, and turrets; so that, with half-closed eyes, it seems you are approaching a temple, a medieval castle, or a mosque of the East. And the valleys—deep, choked with the most ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... succession of stony plains and gloomy wadys, with no water but that of wells, generally muddy, brackish, or bitter, and at fearful intervals. On the first evening, the place of encampment was a small plain, with no other vegetation than a few prickly talk bushes, encircled by high mountains of basalt, which gave it the appearance of a volcanic crater. Here, at a well of tolerably good water, called Gatfa, the camels were loaded with water for five days. The next day, the horse and foot men passed over a very steep mountain called ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... fell into a circular basin a few yards in diameter. Overflowing this basin, it found its way into the lake by another descent of a few feet. Around the basin, and on both sides of the waterfall, were several curious columns of basalt, and irregular picturesque piles of basaltic rock. The plash of the water, falling into the rocky basin, was the only sound that broke the Sabbath-like silence that pervaded the valley. There was, or seemed to be, something unreal and dream-like about the scene, that made us ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... spirits). Arch Rock is the place that Manitou built to reach his home from Sunrise Land the better. There were many such monuments of divinities in the north. They are met with all about the lakes and in the wooded wilderness, the most striking one being the magnificent spire of basalt in the Black Hills region of Wyoming. It is known as Devil's Tower, or Mateo's Tepee, and by the red men is held to be the wigwam of a were-animal that can become man at pleasure. This singular rock towers above ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... let us take the black obelisk of Shalmaneser II., found by Layard at Nimroud. It is a column of basalt seven feet high and about two feet wide at the base, from which it narrows slightly, until near the top it is reduced by three steps. On the four sides is engraved in five rows of bas-reliefs, twenty in all, the pictured history of the royal conquests, the submission ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... reluctance; whereas he seizes with instant eagerness, and every appearance of contentment, on forms of mountain which are rounded into banks above, and cut into precipices below, as is the case in most elevated table-lands; in the chalk coteaux of the Seine, the basalt borders of the Rhine, and the lower gorges of the Alps; so that while the most striking pieces of natural mountain scenery usually rise from the plain under some such outline as that at a, Fig. 82, Turner always formed his composition, if ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved in the museum of the Capitol, may have seemed to some visitors there perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman art. Had the very seal of empire upon those sombre brows, reflected from his ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... covered with riotous lianas that looped themselves like pythons from limb to limb, and from whose green masses blazing red flowers appeared at intervals like watchful eyes. Scarlet hibiscus and perfumed frangipanni were everywhere, while climbing jasmine tried to cover up the black basalt rocks in the foreground as if to hide everything that was ugly from the eyes of the visitor. The sweet, intoxicating odours came out to us in greeting, yet the place seemed to inspire us with a feeling of awe and mystery that became ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... of the principal deities of the Egyptians, is frequently represented as black.[44] Bubastis, also, the Diana of Greece, and a member of the great Egyptian Triad, is now on exhibition in the British Museum, sculptured in black basalt silting figure.[45] Among the Hindus, Kali, the consort of Siva, one of their great Triad; Crishna, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu; and Vishnu also himself, the second of the Trimerti or Hindu Triad, are represented of a black ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... out to me the extreme care and attention with which he finished his buildings. He inserted small fragments of basalt into the mortar of the external joints of the stones, at close and regular distances, in order to protect the mortar from the adverse action of the weather. And to this day they give proof of their ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence 20 One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the aery dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, With those nine columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse, 30 —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, deg. deg.31 ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... lowlands with that untired rapidity of movement which had made Gaspar Ruiz' raids so famous. We followed the lower valleys up to their precipitous heads. The ride was not without its dangers. A cornice road on a perpendicular wall of basalt wound itself around a buttressing rock, and at last we emerged from the gloom of a deep gorge upon ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... That we are is the certainty that, we have been and will be. We have survived countless evolutions, countless universes. We know that through the Cosmos all is law. No chance decides what units shall form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall be locked in granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from analogy, the cosmical history of every ultimate unit, psychological or physical, is determined just as surely and as exactly as in the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... long, but on consulting Olsen's map, I saw that they would be avoided by winding along the seashore. In fact, the great plutonic action is confined to the central portion of the island; there, rocks of the trappean and volcanic class, including trachyte, basalt, and tuffs and agglomerates associated with streams of lava, have made this a land of supernatural horrors. I had no idea of the spectacle which was awaiting us in the peninsula of Snfell, where these ruins of a fiery nature have formed ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... work of the same hand, being among the most interesting of our Norman fonts. The material of which they are made has never been settled, some authorities defining it as Tournai marble, others as basalt, and yet others as nothing more ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems—if you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the basalt courses Where twisted hills betray The seat of the world-old Forces Who ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of the river canon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... The highest mountain found within the limits previously laid down is Mount Mlanje, in the extreme south-eastern corner of the protectorate. This remarkable and picturesque mass is an isolated "chunk" of the Archean plateau, through which at a later date there has been a volcanic outburst of basalt. The summit and sides of this mass exhibit several craters. The highest peak of Mlanje reaches an altitude of 9683 ft. (In German territory, near the north end of Lake Nyasa, and close to the British ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... again, must I pause to speculate whether the dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree of the species from which we are ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... southward on the slope of the hill. Two well-marked lines of wall occur at the foot of the hill, on the flat bottom land, but the slopes of the hill are covered with bowlders and show no well-defined lines. Scattered about on the surface of the ground are some fragments of metates of coarse black basalt and some potsherds, but the latter are ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... Basalt is a brown rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular forms, which astonish by their singular appearance. Here we found Nature proceeding geometrically, and working quite after a human fashion, as if she had employed the plummet ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... at the hotel and drove over to Flint House in the afternoon. The impression of that visit remained. Flint House, rising from the basalt summit of the headland like a granite vault, its windows coldly glistening down on the frothy green gloom of the Atlantic far beneath, the country trap and lean black horse at the flapping gate, the undertaker's man (dissolute parasite of austere ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... tonnage than all the legitimate commerce of the empire, with the possible exception of wheat. Independently of the direct testimony of Latin authors, the Greek statuary, the Egyptian obelisks, and the vast quantities of foreign marbles, granite, parphyry, basalt, and other stones used in sculpture and in architecture, which have been found in the remains of ancient Rome, show that the Imperial capital must have employed an immense amount of tonnage in the importation of heavy articles for which there could ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... floras,—its flora of the Old Red Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,—probably the richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but wholly ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the surf filled his ears; through flying patches of mist he caught glimpses of rollers bursting white against the reef; heard duller detonations along unseen sands, and shattering reports where heavy waves exploded among basalt rocks. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... by Mr. McNiel, and now in the possession of Mr. J. B. Stearns, of Short Hills, N.J. The example shown in Fig. 7 was obtained near the Gulf of Dolce, 82 deg 55' west. Three views are presented: profile, front, and back. It is carved from what appears to be a compact, grayish olive tufa or basalt, and represents a male personage, distinct in style from the female figure first presented. The head is rounded above, the arms are flattened against the sides, and the feet are folded in a novel position beneath the body. The height is ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... below, and narrowing with a gradual rise, until at Miner's Camp it is quite closely bounded by high hillsides, the upper level of the trail being over eight thousand feet above the sea. The ride through this irregular valley is very noble. For a mile or two on our left rose a grand mass of basalt quite two thousand feet in height, buttressed with bold outlying rocks and presenting very regular basaltic columns. A few miles farther the views grew yet more interesting, because around us rose tall ragged gray or dark mountains, and among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... agents, there can be no doubt that, to the land exposed to them, the waves of the sea are by far the most powerful. Think how they beat and tear, and drive and drag, until even the hardest rock, like basalt, becomes honeycombed into strange galleries and passages—Fingal's Cave, for instance—and the softer parts are crumbled away. But the area now exposed to the teeth of the waves is not great. The fury of a winter storm may dash ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... got to the home of the water babies, in Saint Brandan's fairy isle, he found that the isle stood all on pillars, and that its roots were full of caves. There were pillars of black basalt and pillars of green and crimson serpentine; and pillars ribboned with red and white and yellow sandstone; and there were blue grottoes and white grottoes, all curtained and draped with seaweeds, purple and crimson, green and brown; and strewn with soft white ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... fusibility of basalt having been theoretically demonstrated, Mr. Henry Adcock, C.E., in 1851 took out letters patent for the manufacture of a number of articles from the Rowley ragstone. Furnaces were erected at Messrs. Chance Brothers, and the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... vaulted arches, to drink in the impression of architectual sublimity, which I can neither analyze nor express. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt. There is little ornament here. That roof looks plain and bare; yet I feel that the air is dense with sublimity. Onward I sped, crossing a bridge by the Hotel Dieu, and, leaving the river, plunged into narrow ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... de Sguinau, or Croche-Mort, which latter name preserves the legend of an insurgent slave, a man of color, shot dead upon the cliff. These promontories form the semicircular bay of Grande Anse. All this Grande Anse, or "Great Creek," valley is an immense basin of basalt; and narrow as it is, no less than five streams water it, including the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... basin is circular in form, with steep sloping sides about 100 feet high. The lower part of the canon is much rougher to run through than the upper part, the fall being apparently much greater. The sides are generally perpendicular, about 80 to 100 feet high, and consist of basalt, in some places showing ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... does not often rest on specific determinations, and therefore should be received with caution. Six of the COOK AND AUSTRAL Islands (S.W. of the Society group), are fringed; of these, five were described to me by the Rev. J. Williams, as formed of coral-rock, associated with some basalt in Mangaia), and the sixth as lofty and basaltic. Mangaia is nearly three hundred feet high, with a level summit; and according to Mr. S. Wilson (Couthouy's "Remarks," page 34.) it is an upraised reef; "and there are in the central hollow, formerly the bed of ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... valley of considerable altitude called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on the west, the Coeur d'Alene and Bitter Root Mountains on the east, the Okanozan range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south. The valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past. The rainfall was slight except in the foot-hills of the mountains. The Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered on three sides what was known as the Bend country. South of this vast area, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... their constructions. There is no reason for it in the nature of the country. The cities of Assyria—NINEVEH (Koyunjik), KALAH (Nimrud), ARBELA, DUR-SHARRUKIN (Khorsabad) were built in the midst of a hilly region abounding in many varieties of stone, from soft limestone to hard basalt; some of them actually stood on rocky ground, their moats being in part cut through the rock. Had they wanted stone of better quality, they had only to get it from the Zagros range of mountains, which skirts all Assyria to the East, separating it from Media. Yet they never availed themselves ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... isolated rocky tongue rising suddenly like an island from the low levels, and trending north-west to south-east. The site is perfectly healthy; the ground is gravel, not clay, and the stone is basalt. The upper heights are forested and full of game; the lower are cleared and await the colonist. With the pure and keen Atlantic breeze ever blowing over it, the Mount is a ready-made sanatorium. Its youth has been disreputable. Here Captain Canot, [Footnote: Wanderings ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... an observation which appears to me suggestive and may prove valuable. It has been observed that the inhabitants of basaltic localities are more generally natural clairvoyants than others. Basalt is an igneous rock composed largely of augite and felspar, which are silicate crystals of calcium, potassium, alumina, etc., of which the Moonstone is a variety. The connecting link is that clairvoyance ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... to which our preceding Arctic expeditions yielded new additions of such importance through the fossil herbaria from luxuriant ancient forests which they brought to light from the ice-covered cliffs of Spitzbergen and from the basalt-covered sandstones and schists of the Noui-soak Peninsula ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... CHAMPOLLION.—During the expedition into Egypt, in 1799, in throwing up some earthworks near Rosetta, a town on the western arm of the Nile, an officer of the French army discovered a block or tablet of black basalt, upon which were engraved inscriptions in Egyptian and Greek characters. This tablet, called the Rosetta Stone, was sent to France and submitted to the orientalists for interpretation. The inscription was found to be a decree of the Egyptian priests in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes (196 B.C.), ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... baselines) Exclusive economic zone: 200 nm Territorial sea: 12 nm Disputes: none Climate: temperate; warm, dry, summer; precipitation very erratic Terrain: steep, rugged, rocky, volcanic Natural resources: salt, basalt rock, pozzolana, limestone, kaolin, fish Land use: arable land 9%; permanent crops NEGL%; meadows and pastures 6%; forest and woodland NEGL%; other 85%; includes irrigated 1% Environment: subject ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Espaly, and by the face of basaltic columns rising from the Borne and its little affluent the Riou-Pzeliou, in whose bed zircons and blue sapphires have been found. On the opposite side of the Borne is the great mass of basalt called the Croix de la Paille, with a display of prisms in three tiers, called les orgues d'Espaly. The village, pop. 2300, is built at the foot of a rock of volcanic breccia crowned by the scanty ruins of a castle built in 1260 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... were strong and would last a long time. I do not remember that any other tribe of Plains Indians made such stone bowls or mortars, though, of course, they were commonly made, and in singular perfection, by the Pacific Coast tribes; and I have known of rare cases in which basalt mortars and small soapstone ollas have been found on the central plateau of the continent in southern Wyoming. These articles, however, had no doubt been obtained by trade ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... sagely over these matters as he sped on over the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. The western Ghauts were now far behind him and their dark basalt crags. Bombay, Hyderabad, Berar, the Central Provinces, Central India, and the southern prong of Oude was reached. He was, however, no whit the wiser when he reached the Ganges and hastily sought the telegraph station at Allahabad. But he felt like a prince in ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... attention of Parliament. The Manufactures are large and comprehensive, and include the most famous distilleries in the world. The Minerals are most abundant, and among these may be reckoned quartz, porphyry, felspar, malachite, manganese, and basalt. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... with its apsis, and near it a circular building evidently meant for the baptistery: this is covered with a cupola surmounted by the monogram of Christ; and over the gate are curtains drawn up on each side, See Raoul-Rochette-Tableau des Catacombs, p. 332. The font is an ancient urn of basalt the paintings above it, between the second order of columns, representing, the life of S. John ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... great safe stood, and pointed. I followed the direction of his hand and came to the low table whereon rested, amongst other curios, the mummy of the cat which had raised Silvio's ire. I got a candle and easily found the mark of the bullet. It had broken a little glass vase and a tazza of black basalt, exquisitely engraved with hieroglyphics, the graven lines being filled with some faint green cement and the whole thing being polished to an equal surface. The bullet, flattened against the ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... Emma, Powell's party saw where vast floods of lava had flowed from it into the river. They declare that "a stream of molten rock has run up the Canyon three or four miles, and down, we know not how far. The whole north side, as far as we can see, is lined with the black basalt, and high up on the opposite wall are patches of the same material, resting on the benches, and filling old alcoves and caves, and giving to the wall a spotted appearance." All these volcanic mountains can be seen from Hopi or ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... famous hot springs and the fashionable baths of Amatha. On the north-east side, the remains of the extensive necropolis of Gadara are still to be seen. Innumerable sepulchral chambers are excavated in the limestone cliffs, and many of them still contain sarcophaguses of basalt; while not a few are converted into dwellings by the inhabitants of the present village of Um Keis. The distance of Gadara from the south-eastern shore of the Lake of Tiberias is less than seven miles. The nearest of the other cities of the Decapolis, to the north, is Hippos, which also lay some ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the place worth all we have undergone. The crags are wonderful, chalk at the bottom, basalt above, and of course all round to the Giant's Causeway it is finer still. Well may we, as the Bishop is always doing, give thanks that we were taken, by the Divine Hand guiding tide and current, to this milder ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... erected a mosque, that they might perform their devotions where, according to their belief, mohammed received from the angel gabriel the first chapter of the Koran."—Author. "In the kaaba at mecca, there is a celebrated block of volcanic basalt, which the mohammedans venerate as the gift of gabriel to abraham, but their ancestors once held it to be an image of remphan, or saturn; so 'the image which fell down from jupiter,' to share with diana the homage of the ephesians, was probably nothing more than a meteoric stone."—Id. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Longwood and Napoleon's tomb we rode to Flagstaff Hill to search for fossil shells. The whole soil that I saw was composed of decomposed old volcanic rocks; but I saw no rock but basalt in different stages of decomposition; sometimes it assumed the form of porphyry. I also saw veins of quartz, gypsum, and jasper. On a part of Flagstaff Hill there was a thin stratum of calcareous earth, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict, dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, looks down upon a sea of fog, through which rise mountain-tops like islands; or sees through the biting sleet a desert of scrub and crag rolling to the feet of Mount Heemskirk ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... plateau moved forward. The texture of the heavens above them changed. The sun—the one thing in their new universe that seemed unchanged in size and aspect—shone down on them. The plateau came jarringly to rest. Great cliffs of what seemed black basalt gleamed high ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... Where was I? I must know at any cost. I tried to speak, but Captain Nemo stopped me by a gesture, and, picking up a piece of chalk-stone, advanced to a rock of black basalt, and ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... rock-salt) had been effected! These extravagant "anti-Wernerian" views the young student might well regard as not one whit less absurd and repellant than the doctrine of the "aqueous precipitation" of basalt. There is no evidence that Darwin, even if he ever heard of them, was in any way impressed, in his early career, by the suggestive passages in Hutton and Playfair, to which Lyell afterwards called attention, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... outlines, but only as lamellar masses in deep-seated igneous rocks, principally gabbro, of which it is an essential constituent. It occurs also in some peridotites and serpentines, and rarely in volcanic rocks (basalt) and crystalline schists. Masses of considerable size are found in the coarse-grained gabbros of the Island of Skye, Le Prese near Bornio in Valtellina, Lombardy, Prato near Florence, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... etc.) and therefore called BASIC. The acidic lavas, of which RHYOLITE and THRACHYTE are examples, are comparatively light in color and weight, and are difficult to melt. The basic lavas, of which BASALT is a type, are dark and heavy and ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... that fifty minutes away from Nauheim, by a good train, is the ancient city of M——, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with a triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf. And at the top there is a castle—not a square castle like Windsor, but a castle all slate gables and high peaks with gilt weathercocks flashing bravely—the castle of St Elizabeth of Hungary. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... celebrate his voluptuous feasts under the friendly eyes of Serapis. He extolled the merits of the deified Antinous in inscriptions couched in the ancient language of the Pharaohs, and set the fashion of statues hewn out of black basalt in the Egyptian style.[36] The amateurs of that period affected to prefer the hieratic rigidity of the barbarian idols to the elegant freedom of Alexandrian art. Those esthetic manifestations probably corresponded to religious prejudices, and the Latin worship always endeavored ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... got there, he found that the isle stood all on pillars, and that its roots were full of caves. There were pillars of black basalt, like Staffa; and pillars of green and crimson serpentine, like Kynance; and pillars ribboned with red and white and yellow sandstone, like Livermead; and there were blue grottoes like Capri, and white grottoes like Adelsberg; all curtained and draped with ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... of more importance than its strength, especially in pavements or steps, where it is subject to great wear; also in plinths and quoins of buildings where it is desired to preserve a good face and sharp arris. The order of strength and hardness of stone is—(1) Basalt, (2) granite, (3) limestone, (4) sandstone. Granite, seinite, and gneiss take the first, place for strength, hardness and durability, but they will not stand a high temperature. "Stones which are of a fine, uniform grain, compact texture and deep color are ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... be Christmas Day, and I have come out twenty miles this evening to hold a service of that kind with the semi-annual communion as it happens. It will be a cold, cheerless room in a clay-built cabin down in the corner of a bare valley in a trap and basalt district with sparse vegetation and a bare aspect. A cold spot with a handful of Christians, bearing their testimony alone out on the margin of our field of work. I hope to see 40 or 50 patients up to sundown, and then have worship with them at night. That will be my Christmas. This evening—in ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... equipment showed what kind of rock it was—iron and basalt. And I'd made borings which checked. We'd tested the speed of escape which was a good push so we had to be careful, and its force of gravity, which wasn't much. And then I'd discovered that the balance in the lab had a habit of being 25 ...
— The Minus Woman • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... contained many fish, as well as vast numbers of crayfish. One of the girls with us carried fishing-tackle, and in a few minutes some rods were cut, the hooks baited with small crayfish, and several fine fish landed. These were at once cooked, the fires being kindled on some large, flat basalt stones, which were lying scattered about on the bank. On inquiring how these stones came to be there, I was told by "Lizzie" that they were the remains of an old wall that once enclosed one of the ancient villages. Afterwards we came across many similar sites, ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... basalt. As built by Appius, however, the surface was of gravel; the stone blocks date ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... no doubt geographers will be able to point out many examples of this action. The Zambesi is thought to present a great difficulty to the erosion theory, because of the sinuosity of the chasm below the Victoria Falls. But, assuming the basalt to be of tolerably uniform texture, had the river been examined before the formation of this sinuous channel, the present zigzag course of the gorge below the fall could, I am persuaded, have been predicted, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... graphite occur, which are undoubtedly the product of the complete distillation of liquid hydrocarbons with which the rock was once impregnated. The remarkable purity of such graphite is the natural result of its mode of formation, and such cases resemble the occurrence of graphite in cast iron and basalt. The black clouds and bands which stain many otherwise white marbles are generally due to specks of graphite, the residue of hydrocarbons which once saturated the rock. Some limestones are quite black from the carbonaceous matter they contain (Lycoming Valley, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... whit Thy perfect praise whom most he would exalt? Alas! he can but make my heart's low vault Even in men's sight unworthier, being lit By thee, who thereby show'st more exquisite Like fiery chrysoprase in deep basalt. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... hue of richest orange. Here stood soldiers, to whom again the password was given. Entering, they beheld a great hall, surrounded by a colonnade of the Corinthian order, whereon had been lavished exquisite carving; in niches behind the columns stood statues in basalt, thrice the size of life, representing Roman emperors, and at the far end was a tribune with a marble throne. This, once the hall of audience, at present served as a sort of antechamber; here and there loitered a little group of citizens, some of whom had been waiting since early morning ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... writer miscalled the "Giant Cities of Bashan." I have never seen anything weirder than a moonlight night in one of these strong places whose masonry is perfect as when first built, the snowy light pouring on the jet-black basalt and the breeze sighing and the jackal wailing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Hutton's theory was linked to the extravagancies of what was known at that day as 'Vulcanism' or 'Plutonism,' in contradistinction to the 'Neptunism' of Werner. Hutton, while rejecting the Wernerian notion of "the aqueous precipitation of basalt," maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of all strata—clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even rock-salt—must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the formation of chalk-flints and the silicification ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... island dripped. The air was saturated, the decks were wet, and along the shelves of basalt that jutted from the cliffs a hundred blow-holes spouted and roared. In ages of endeavor the ocean had made chambers in the rock and cut passages to the top, through which, at every surge of the pounding waves, the water rushed and rose high in ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... is not only always possible to obtain continuities of this kind: it is, in drawing large forests or mountain forms, essential to truth. The towers of Ehrenbreitstein might or might not in reality fall into such a curve, but assuredly the basalt rock on which they stand did; for all mountain forms not cloven into absolute precipice, nor covered by straight slopes of shales, are more or less governed by these great curves, it being one of the aims of Nature in all her work to produce them. The reader must already know this, if he has been ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... flat plain. Conical tumuli of volcanic slag here and there rose to the height of several hundred feet, and in the far distance resembled the Pyramids of Lower Egypt—doubtless they were the models for that ancient and everlasting architecture; hills of black basalt jutted out from the barren base of sand, and the molten air quivered on the overheated surface of the fearful desert. 114 degrees Fahr. in the shade under the water-skins; 137 degrees in the sun. Noiselessly the spongy tread of the camels crept along the sand—the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... face to the eastward. Under a crag of the stone, where a ledge sloped down to the water; There they set Andromeden, most beautiful, shaped like a goddess, Lifting her long white arms wide-spread to the walls of the basalt, Chaining them, ruthless, with brass; and they called on the might of the Rulers. 'Mystical fish of the seas, dread Queen whom AEthiops honour, Whelming the land in thy wrath, unavoidable, sharp as the sting-ray, Thou, and thy brother the Sun, brain-smiting, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... salt, basalt rock, pozzuolana (a siliceous volcanic ash used to produce hydraulic ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... knows perfectly well that there is a great deal of necessity; and, therefore he builds them. Where? On rocks whose sides are one mass of buttresses, of precisely the same form; on rocks which are cut and cloven by basalt and lava dikes of every size, and which, being themselves secondary, wear away gradually by exposure to the atmosphere, leaving the intersecting dikes standing out in solid and vertical walls, from the faces of their precipices. The eye passes ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... burning chasms, whence these ejections were thrown, two rivers plunged in cataracts; but the water only increased the violence of the eruption. It was thrown into steam with explosive force, and great quantities of mud and balls of basalt were ejected. On the surface of the swollen mound there were formed thousands of small cones, from six to ten feet in height, and sending forth steam to heights varying from twenty to ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... peaks, cliffs and precipices, in many-colored rocks-white and grey, sulphurous yellow, blood-red and ominous black. He recalled the sacred lake of Muth in Thebes, round which sat a hundred statues of the lion-headed Goddess in black basalt, each on a pedestal; and the rocky peaks, which surrounded the valley at his feet, seemed to put on a semblance of life and to move and open their yawning jaws; through the wild rush of blood in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... look for me, swim the river, and push through the forest, around that steep, pyramid peak to the next canyon. You see it?—The Duckabush cuts through there to tide water. I left no trail in crossing the stony bed of the brook, and took advantage of a low basalt bluff in climbing the farther bank. It was while I was working my way over the rock into cover of the trees that the pleasant calling on the ridge behind me changed to the first terrible cry. The mother had ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... slopes, covered with vines, made a sort of funnel into which the track disappeared as though swallowed up. Just then all this hollow was as black as ink, darkened by an enormous cloud, a bar of gloom, cutting the blue of the sky perpendicularly, throwing out banks that resembled cliffs of basalt on which the light broke all white like moonshine. In the solemnity of the deserted track, over the lines of silent rails where one felt that everything was ready for the coming of the prince, it was terrifying to see ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... could give as of old an occasional hour to literature and geology. The proof-sheets of my book began to drop in upon me, demanding revision; and to a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town, rich in the organisms of the Mountain Limestone, and overflown by a bed of basalt so regularly columnar, that one of the legends of the district attributed its formation to the "ancient Pechts," I was able to devote, not without profit, the evenings of several Saturdays. I formed, at this ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... find another 'Old Blue' or a 'perfect treasure of a black basalt' by that time," ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... pretence of activity or haste, but in the slow, persistent way peculiar to the sedentary Indian, which makes of him a steady though not a very profitable worker. Tyope's only implement was a piece of basalt resembling a knife, and he weeded on without interruption until the shadows of the plants extended from row to row. Then he straightened himself and scanned quietly the whole valley as far as visible, like one who is tired and is taking ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... manner it has been found that fresh basalt exposed to continually moving water will lose about 0.20 gramme per square metre of surface per year. The mineral orthoclase, which enters largely into the constitution of many granites, was found to lose under the same conditions ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly |
