"Cairn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all Llewelyn's grief; he could not bring his faithful dog to life again. So he buried him outside the castle walls within sight of the great mountain of Snowdon, where every passer-by might see his grave, and raised over it a great cairn of stones. And to this day the place is called Beth Gellert, or the Grave ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... horseback. Released in the late afternoon, lodged in a hut at the edge of the small camp, he used the moment's leisure to climb a small hill and at its height to throw himself down beside a broken cairn. He shut his eyes, but after a few moments opened them and gazed upon the camp of Cope, covering also but a little space, so small were ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... another lying dead, and a sixth huddled at one side, clutching its abdomen and whimpering. There had been a quick flurry of shots that had felled all four of the assailants, and Seldar Glav had finished the wounded creature with his dagger, but Eldra was dead. They had built a cairn of stones over her body, as they had done over the bodies of the two children killed by the cold. But, after an examination to see what sort of things they were, they had tumbled the bodies of the Hairy People over the cliff. These had been too bestial to bury ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... to stain In the best blood that warms thy vein. Now, truce, farewell! and, ruth, begone!— Yet think not that by thee alone, Proud Chief! can courtesy be shown; Though not from copse, or heath, or cairn, Start at my whistle clansmen stern, Of this small horn one feeble blast Would fearful odds against thee cast. But fear not—doubt not—which thou wilt— We try this quarrel hilt to hilt."— Then each at once his falchion drew, Each on the ground his scabbard threw, Each looked to sun, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... moonlight of the bitter March night. Then, in a sort of trance, looking out of her window in the half-ruined castle to the ruined abbey, the mysterious round tower, the stony mountains, she beholds the vision of Queen Maeve, with an attendant troupe of harpers and pages, rise from the cairn and approach the castle. As the troupe returns from castle to cairn Maeve's spirit passes with it under the Northern lights into the land of the ever-young of Tir-nan-Ogue. When her sister goes to call her to make ready for her wedding, she finds Maeve sitting still and cold ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... wood as 'twere his own garden, for he had hunted it many times with his cousiri, and so he led me briskly, by a kind of natural path, to the first cairn. Neither there nor at the second did I ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... some centuries from now, be brought again to light, and excite as much marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of which we do not understand, and the use of which we cannot now account for. They will be seemingly as meaningless as any lonely cairn, isolated broken piece of wall, or solitary fragment of a building, of which no principal part remains, and which puzzles us to account for at the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... CAIRN, a heap of stones often, though not always, loosely thrown together, generally by way of a sepulchral monument, and it would seem sometimes in execration ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Robert Puntens, in Carlowrie, where a surgeon dressed his wounds, and Mrs. Puntens gave him some warm milk, and he lay in their barn all night. From thence he went to the south, and next Sabbath preached at Cairn-hill, somewhere adjacent to Loudon, in his blood and wounds (for no danger could stop him from going about doing good). His text was in Heb. xi. 32. And shall I more say, for time would fail me to tell of Gideon, &c. At night some persons said to him, We think, Sir, preaching and praying ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... might have "grand gallops among the hills"—those grave wastes of heather and bent that sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, purior electro, of Yarrow. St. Mary's Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the St. Mary's of North and of the Shepherd. Only ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... I've bin waitin' nigh upon two year for ye. I've watched ye tak oop, first wi' this young fellar, and then wi' that, till soomtimes my heart's fit t' burst. Many a day, oop on t' fell-top, t' thought o' ye's nigh driven me daft, and I've left my shepherdin' jest t' set on a cairn in t' mist, picturin' an' broodin' on yer face. Many an evenin' I've started oop t' vicarage, wi' t' resolution t' speak right oot t' ye; but when it coomed t' point, a sort o' timidity seemed t' hould me back, I was that feared t' displease ye. I knaw I'm na scholar, an' ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... Valor had vanished, how could I remain? The earth has grown dim and old, fostermother. The gods have gone far away, and the lights from the mountains and the Lions of the Flaming Heart are still, O fostermother, when they heap the cairn over him, let me be beside him in the narrow grave. I will still be ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... climbed high above timberline on the Long's Peak trail, and, following my adventurous impulse, left the cairn-marked pathway and swung over to the big moraine that lay south. From its top I peeped into the chasm that lies between it and the Peak, then angled down its abrupt slope to a sparkling waterfall, and, following along the swift, icy stream above it, was climbing ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... four trades, but there have been several additions. Of the first extension made after Sir Charles's death, and of the probability of the adoption of the scheme by other countries, Sir George Askwith wrote: "It will be the first stone on Sir Charles's cairn. I can see them all coming up the hill, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... love to shine upon The lonely cairn on the dark hill's side, And I weep at night o'er the brave ones gone, But not o'er ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... the tradition that a large heap of stones formed like an Esquimaux hut on the highest point of Appledore, was built there by Captain John Smith and his men as a memorial of their discovery of the islands. This heap of stones is a veritable cairn, such as climbers of the Alps build on the summits of those peaks which they have ascended for the first time. It is customary in such cases to insert a champagne bottle among the stones, containing the ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... ramble with a friend last spring (it was Basil Morton), he had come upon this still little town between the mountains and the shore, amid a country shining with yellow gorse, hills clothed with larch, heathery moorland, ferny lanes, and wild heights where the wind roars on crag or cairn. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... which is often confused with the Poltalloch, or White West Highlander, to whom it is possibly related. And the Pittenweem, with which the Poltalloch Terriers are now being crossed; while Mrs. Alastair Campbell, of Ardrishaig, has a pack of Cairn Terriers which seem to represent the original type of the improved Scottie. Considering the great number of strains that have been preserved by sporting families and maintained in more or less purity to type, it is easy to understand how a "new" breed may become fashionable, and still claim ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... a wondrous blade indeed. There is no other such in the world, for the dwarfs forged it of old, and he shall be unconquered who holds it aloft. This was King Odin's sword, and it is named Whitefire. Ralph the Red took it from King Eric's cairn in Norway, and he strove long with the Barrow-Dweller[*] before he wrenched it from his grasp. But my father won it and slew Ralph, though he had never done this had Whitefire been aloft against him. But Ralph the Red, being in ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... one may attest by walking up, in the cloudy and dark day, the Cairn-a-Mount, a lofty knoll, across which a road leads to Deeside, to the north of the poet's birthplace, and watching the sea of vapour boiling, shifting, sinking, rising, tumultuating at ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... in the Heart of Midlothian when Sharpitlaw, accompanied by Ratcliffe and Madge Wildfire, go to Muschat's Cairn ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... those mysterious priests of the Celts, the Druids, built fires on the hill-tops in France, Britain, and Ireland, in honor of the sun. At this last festival the Druids of all the region gathered in their white robes around the stone altar or cairn on the hill-top. Here stood an emblem of the sun, and on the cairn was a sacred fire, which had been kept burning through the year. The Druids formed about the fire, and, at a signal, quenched it, while deep silence rested on the mountains ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... as they had left it, and undisturbed. It was lowered from its rude platform, and they laid it in its final resting-place in a grave among the spruce trees not far from her father's lodge. Over the grave a cairn of boulders was raised, and surmounted by a tablet of wood upon which was carved simply the ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... 27th. Erected a cairn of stones on South-East point of Mount Moore, after which continued on and reached the spring found by me on the 24th; distance fifteen miles. The last six miles poor spinifex country. Fine and grassy round spring. Barometer 28.54; thermometer 56 degrees ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... over it. It was the original intention to erect a monument, but the enterprise of the projectors of this royal entombment failed at that point. The grave is surrounded by a low wall of loose stones, to which each visitor adds one, and in the course of ages the cairn may grow to a good size. The explorer lies there without name or headstone to mark his awful resting-place. The mountain is his monument. He is alone with its majesty. He is there in the clouds, in the tempests, where the lightnings play, and thunders leap, amid the elemental ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this lake rises a mountain of dark, greenish colour, resembling an immense cairn constructed by the hands of Titans. Upon its summit rests a cloud of white fog collected by evaporation from the surrounding water, which has been condensed by the freshness of the night. The numerous dark fissures distinguishable along the sides ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake? It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... a', my leddy," cried Meg, letting go my hand and waving me toward the entrance, "and gin ye suld see bonny Harry Bertram, tell him there is ane he kens o' will meet him the night down by the cairn when the clock strikes the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... heart of the Scotch Highlands, we passed through Glen Garry and the Valley of the Spey. Cairn Gorm rose something over four thousand feet immediately on our right, when, turning abruptly northwest, we came into Inverness just at nightfall. It had been another long, hard day, and, since ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... in autumn!" said the little maiden. And suddenly the atmosphere grew as blue again as before; the forest grew red, and green, and yellow-colored. The dogs came leaping along, and whole flocks of wild-fowl flew over the cairn, where blackberry-bushes were hanging round the old stones. The sea was dark blue, covered with ships full of white sails; and in the barn old women, maidens, and children were sitting picking hops into a large ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... 'harmony of colour" (unus color). Each age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house. But again, by a change in the theory, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Continental officer ter injure them cairn ginooine Whigs," chimed in Hennion, "an' only swore an oath cuz it ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... that it was finished in a hurry, long after the author had given up poetry as a main occupation. But the half burlesque Spenserians of the overture are very good; the contrasted songs, 'Dweller of the Cairn' and 'A Danish Maid for Me,' are happy. Harold's interview with the Chapter is a famous bit of bravura; and all concerning the Castle of the Seven Shields, from the ballad introducing it, through the description of its actual appearance (in which, by the way, Scott shows almost ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret Fuller, or my part in one;—for Channing and Ward are to do theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New York ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... On our side of the pits the marks of our occupation are plain. There in several places, as at La Boisselle and on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old front line by thousands of sandbags till it is a hill-top or cairn from which they could see beyond. The sandbags have rotted and the chalk and flints within have fallen partly through the rags, and Nature has already begun to change those heaps to her own colours, but they will be there for ever as the ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... right towered a precipice, on the bare crest of which stood a heap of stones piled like a column—the remains, probably, of a cairn. On this commanding point Nicholas perceived a female figure, dilated to gigantic proportions against the sky, who, as far as he could distinguish, seemed watching him, and making signs to him, apparently to go back; but he paid little regard ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the garden, consulting about its restoration. Sydney declared he would come and work at it every day till it was cleared and planted. He would begin to-morrow with the cairn for the rock-plants. ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... the cliffs of Pleinmont, where a cairn long marked her resting-place. Tita was taken to the Vale; all attempts to restore her from the shock which her nerves had received failed till on one sunny morning Hilda's infant was placed on her knees: when the child crowed, and smiled at her, the cloud imperceptibly passed away, never to ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... pointed with pardonable pride to a pile of stones which the workmen had there raised to commemorate the event. While nearly all the other marks of the work during its progress had been obliterated, that cairn had been left standing in commemoration of the caution and foresight ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... treading upon the tops and thickly-interwoven branches of dwarf pines, which, by the growth of centuries, though mossy with age, had barely reached three feet in altitude. Next, they came to masses and fragments of naked rock heaped confusedly together, like a cairn reared by giants in memory of a giant chief. In this bleak realm of upper air nothing breathed, nothing grew; there was no life but what was concentrated in their two hearts; they had climbed so high that Nature herself seemed no longer to keep them company. ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... end of a moorland parish, far out of the sight of any house, there stands a cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it, in the going down of the brae-side, a monument with some verses half defaced. It was here that Claverhouse shot with his own hand the Praying Weaver of Balweary, and the chisel of Old Mortality has clinked on that lonely gravestone. Public and domestic ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Nepal. Three years before that event they were driven from their old capital Kapilavastu; but they formed a new one fifteen miles further south, just beyond the present frontier of Nepal, and there they erected a stupa or massive stone cairn, to guard the portion of the ashes of the Buddha which was committed to ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... so in Montenegro, when the traveller is filled with a sense of peace at the grandeur of the wild mountainous scenery, or the beauty of a sylvan forest glade, a rough cross, or cairn of stones, will be pointed out where men have met ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... a singular place into which the Monarch II had descended. High declivitous, masses of rock formed a sort of immense cairn. They seemed shut in on every side, fully one hundred feet below ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... and was as marked as if Ralph had been her son. They covered his silken winding-sheet with flowers until the sepulchre was filled, then they laid flat stones across his resting place, and began to build a cairn over all. They continued building until the sun went down, little Cora bringing stones in her baby hands and placing them with the same precision that she saw her mother and Miss ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... upon the Erebus and Terror, give them three cheers, and go away into the desolate waste—to die! Point Victory their object. They gained it, and then their helplessness came and stared them in the face. In a cairn on the point Fitzjames placed a brief record, and that is all. They have only food for a month more, and day by day the strong are growing weak ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... right; I left my traps here and went fifty yards further on up the slope, and there's another cairn there—very lucky! I had a job to find my way back here in the mist, though. However, I'm on the right track now. Wonder what's become of those Cambridge fellows. They're sure not to be up to my tips, and most likely they're ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... Saulcy on the plateau of El Azemieh, one of which rises in the centre of a belt of roughly sculptured upright stones; and yet a third group is to be seen near Mount Nebo, which Major Conder thus describes: "Here a well-defined dolmen was found northwest of the flat, ruined cairn, which harks the summit of the ride. The cap-stone was very thick, and its top is some five feet from the ground. The side-stones were rudely piled, and none of the blocks were cut or shaped ... In subsequent visits it was ascertained that on the south slope ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... went for drives with Dr. Trenire far out into the country, over wild moorland, or through beautiful valleys, and Pamela loved these drives as much as anything, and felt she could listen for hours while the doctor told her the story of some old cairn, or the legend of a holy ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... a burst of bitter wind, and a sheet of blinding, stinging rain. I make my way up through it towards a peak which I soon see through a tear in the mist is not the highest, so I angle off and go up the one to the left, and after a desperate fight reach the cairn—only, alas! to find a hurricane raging and a fog in full possession, and not a ten yards' view to be had in any direction. Near the cairn on the ground are several bottles, some of which the energetic German officers, I suppose, had emptied in honour ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a sin for any one to alter these old stories, but as generations passed more and more wonderful matters came into the legend. It was believed that the dead Gunnar, the famed archer, sang within his cairn or "Howe," the mound wherein he was buried, and his famous bill or cutting spear was said to have been made by magic, and to sing in the night before the wounding of men and the waking of war. People were thought to be "second-sighted"—that is, to have prophetic vision. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard nor spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell off my chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished together, and in place of the sweet heather there was the table with the tiresome papers. I reached out yearningly after the heath; I had not seen it for such a long time,—how long it did seem!—and—but in the same breath it was all there again in the smile ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... evening; and when it was found that a splendid stag—with brow, bay, and tray, and crockets complete—was strapped on to the pony, and when the word was passed that Sandy the red-haired and John from the yacht were to take back the pony to a certain well-known cairn where another monarch of the hills lay slain, there was a great rejoicing through Castle Dare, and Lady Macleod herself must needs come out to shake hands with her guest, and to congratulate him on his ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... traditions have come down to us even from prehistoric times and have proved true. Our archaeologists, for example, after long study of the remains, cannot tell us how long ago—centuries or thousands of years—a warrior with golden armour was buried under the great cairn at Mold in Flintshire. ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... all is surmise and uncertainty. Often, when yet a boy, and engaged in fishing in the King's Burn, have we mounted these pyramids, and felt that we were standing on holy ground. "Oh," thought we, "that some courteous cairn would blab it out what 'tis they are!" But the cairns were silent; and hence the necessity we are under of professing our ignorance of what they refused to divulge. But there is a large opening ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Aberdeen, thence to Stonehive, where James Burness, from Montrose, met me by appointment. I spent two days among our relations, and found our aunts, Jean and Isabel, still alive, and hale old women. John Cairn, though born the same year with our father, walks as vigorously as I can: they have had several letters from his son in New York. William Brand is likewise a stout old fellow; but further particulars I delay till I see you, which will be in two or three weeks. The ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... found on Beechey Island with head-boards marking the names and ages of three men of the crew who had died in the winter. Near a cape of the island was a cairn built of stone. It was evidently intended to hold the records of the expedition. Yet, strange to say, neither in the cairn nor anywhere about it was a single ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... Younghusband range. We could see no springs until we reached the Blyth, in which there is water, but a little brackish; it will do well for cattle. Rode through the middle of the range, and came upon some horse-tracks, not very old; saw where the party had camped, and a cairn of stones they had erected on the top of one of the hills. Followed their tracks some distance down the gully; they seemed to be going to the Burrow Springs; they appear, however, to have gone back again. Left ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... Argyleshire, referred to by him, at the late meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, as being in the form of a serpent or saurian. The mound, says the Scotsman, is a most perfect one. The head is a large cairn, and the body of the earthen reptile 300 feet long; and in the centre of the head there were evidences, when Mr. Phene first visited it, of an altar having been placed there. The position with ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... to a small moss-grown cairn, probably the resting-place of some Celtic chief of other times, and the call of "Officers to the front," soon brought them ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to do any burying. I made the bones into a decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was enough to make a man pray. I felt better when I had ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... Buddha. The account of his death states that after the cremation of his body the Mallas placed his bones in their council hall and honoured them with songs and dances. Then eight communities or individuals demanded a portion of the relics and over each portion a cairn was built. These proceedings are mentioned as if they were the usual ceremonial observed on the death of a great man and in the same Sutta[55] the Buddha himself mentions four classes of men worthy of a cairn or dagoba.[56] We may perhaps conclude that ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... feet long, and one is double for a part of the way, and each of the three starts from a menhir, or long stone. Near Merivale Bridge are two double stone rows, but the stones are small. Close by are a sacred circle, a kistvaen, a pound and hut-circles, and one cairn, besides the ruins of others that have been destroyed. It would be absurd to pretend to enter on such a wide subject here. Some idea of its extent may be gathered by considering one single branch of it: Mr Baring-Gould has stated that ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... deep about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were springing green among ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... high up on wintry Knock-na-rea In an old cairn of stones; while her poor women Must lie and jog in the wave if they would sleep Being water born—yet if she cry their names They run up on the land and dance in the moon Till they are giddy and would ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... surprised on shore by the Portuguese and Arabs. The Hart and Roebuck sailed from Macera, [Mazica,] on the 6th of August, and anchored in the evening of the 8th beside the admiral in the port of Zoar. This road differs from that in which we were in, being cairn, but the air was so hot as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... the Queen's Park, from Musehat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury's Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... the little spring shelved in by shale at the lower edge of the swell, we found a tiny cairn built of clumps of sod and bits of shale. Fastened on it was a scrap from Bill's ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... general's uniform; she herself in purple velvet, with diamonds and pearls, and a crown of flowers; the corsage of her gown entirely covered with little bows of ribbon of divers colours, which her friends had given her, each adding one, like stones thrown on a cairn in memory of the departed. She had also short sleeves and white ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... not a very intellectual or spiritual day after all. Went in the afternoon away to the east. Had a good view and a time of devotion at a cairn from which an eagle rose as I approached. Returned to the camp and bought milk and some cheese. Intended to make porridge, but the fire was not good on account of the blowing, so I drank off my milk, ate some bread, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... beside a knee like a lean knuckle:—all combined to form a picture ludicrous to a vulgar nature, but gently pitiful to the lover of his kind, he looked like a half mouldered warrior, waked from beneath an ancient cairn, to walk about in a world other than he took it to be. Malcolm, in his commonplace Sunday suit, served as a foil to his picturesque grandfather; to whose oft reiterated desire that he would wear the highland ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... before he left and by paying it out through the end of the prospector lay a telegraph line between the outer and inner worlds. In my letter I told him to be sure to mark the terminus of the line very plainly with a high cairn, in case I was not able to reach him before he set out, so that I might easily find and communicate with him should he be so fortunate ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... they made land; then came Sigrun, daughter of King Hogni, down on to the beach with a great army, and turned them away thence to a good haven called Gnipalund; but the landsmen see what has befallen and come down to the sea-shore. The brother of King Hodbrod, lord of a land called Swarin's Cairn, cried out to them, and asked them who was captain over that mighty army. Then up stands Sinfjotli, with a helm on his head, bright shining as glass, and a byrny as white as snow; a spear in his hand, and ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... circles were developed out of the hedge, or setting of stone, which frequently surrounds the base of a barrow, and was intended to keep the ghost in, and prevent it from injuring the living. By degrees the wall was increased in size while the barrow or cairn decreased; until at last a small mound of earth, or heap of stones, only marked the place of burial, and the huge circle of stones surrounded it. Stonehenge, with its well-wrought stones and gigantic trilitha, is much later than the circles of Avebury and Rollright, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... sepulchral, we may well understand that the burying-places of great men, of kings, or priests, or generals, were likewise used for the celebration of other religious rites. Thus we read in the Book of Lecan, "that Amhalgaith built a cairn, for the purpose of holding a meeting of the Hy-Amhalgaith every year, and to view his ships and fleet going and coming, and as a place of interment for himself."(55) Nor does it follow, as some antiquarians maintain, that every structure in the style of a cromlech, even ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... dragged the body up here, and with his knife dug him a shallow grave between the roots of a conspicuous pine. It was a long, hard task. He covered him with brush in lieu of a coffin, and, throwing the earth back, heaped a cairn of stones on top. Placing a flat stone in the centre, he scratched the man's name on it and the date. He spoke no articulate prayer, but thought ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Ireland; and again, when writing—in his work on the Beauties of the Boyne (1849)—an account of the great old barrows of Dowth, New Grange, etc., placed on its banks above Drogheda, he describes at some length the last of these mounds (New Grange),—stating that it "consists" of an enormous cairn or "hill of small stones, calculated at 180,000 tons weight, occupying the summit of one of the natural undulating slopes which enclose the valley of the Boyne upon the north. It is said to cover nearly two acres, and is ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... earlier myth the cauldron may have been her property. As Brangwaine, she reappears in romance, giving a love-potion to Tristram—perhaps a reminiscence of her former functions as a goddess of love, or earlier of fertility. In the Mabinogion she is buried in Anglesey at Ynys Bronwen, where a cairn with bones discovered in 1813 was held to be the ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... the way from here to the Pole and back. When we had completed all this repacking and had everything ready, two of us went over to Mount Betty, and collected as many different specimens of rock as we could lay our hands on. At the same time we built a great cairn, and left there a can of 17 litres of paraffin, two packets of matches — containing twenty boxes — and an account of our expedition. Possibly someone may find a use for these ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... forgotten, That was wise with his tongue and brave; And the cairn over Colan crumbled, And the cross ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... Leezie was, As cantie as a kittlin; [lively] But och! that night, amang the shaws, [woods] She gat a fearfu' settlin'! She thro' the whins, an' by the cairn, [gorse, stone heap] An' owre the hill gaed scrievin'; [careering] Where three laird's lands met at a burn,[17] To dip her left sark-sleeve in, [shirt-] Was ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... "marks the grave of some poor chap that died on his way to the Klondike. Do ye obsarve that cairn of stones a ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... out on his shield, and he was buried in a cairn there. Many men grieved for him, for he had many ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... He had reached the cairn of round stones that marks the town land of Drimsleive, and was turning the brae when a voice called ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... are found a number of jagged peaks and splintered pinnacles of granite, some of which resemble the giant remains of ancient sculpture, all the worse for exposure to the weather. On a promontory 1,400 feet high at the northeast point of the island I placed in a cairn a bottle containing written information of our landing and a copy of the New York Herald of ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... emus. At first we found great difficulty in identifying any of the hills; but after much consultation and reference to the map we at last picked out Mount Shenton, and on reaching the hill knew that we were right, for we found Wells' cairn of stones and the marks of his camp and camels. The next difficulty was in finding the soakage, as from a bad reproduction of Wells' map it was impossible to determine whether the soak was at the foot of Mount Shenton or near another hill three miles away. It only remained ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... come to remedy, my Father," said the Poor Thing; "for we must go this night to the little isle of sheep, where our fathers lie in the dead-cairn, and to-morrow to the Earl's Hall, and there shall you find a wife ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat—no gloves—I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty—such weather—such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lustily; and occasionally a heavy farm-wagon crossed the country bridge which spans the ravine just above us, its rumblings echoing in the quarried glen for all the world like distant thunder. Before turning in, each built a cairn upon the beach, at the point which he thought the water might reach by morning. The Boy, more venturesome than the rest, piled his cairn highest up the slope; and when daylight revealed the fact that the river, in its four-feet rise, had crept nearest his goal, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... of a mile from the cave last mentioned is a rock grave on a ledge which projects at about 40 feet (vertically) below the top of the hill. As near as can be judged, in its present torn-up condition, the cairn was originally about 10 by 20 feet in dimensions; so there were probably two graves covered by the ordinary conical heaps of stone, the depression between them being filled up to form ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... truthfulness should be wanting, and that, in order to suit the spirit of our age, it should lack something which was part and parcel of popular belief in the age to which it belonged. To a thoughtful mind, therefore, such stories as that of Swan's witchcraft, Gunnar's song in his cairn, the Wolf's ride before the Burning, Flosi's dream, the signs and tokens before Brian's battle, and even Njal's weird foresight, on which the whole story hangs, will be regarded as proofs rather ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... he was cross the ford, Whare in the snaw the chapman smoored; And past the birks and meikle stane, Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And thro' the whins and by the cairn, Whare hunters fand the murdered bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hanged hersel. Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars thro' the woods; The lightnings flash ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... friend and foe, under pretence of levying blackmail, sometimes as if by my authority, and sometimes (and be cursed to his consummate impudence) in his own great name! Upon my honour, if I live to see the cairn of Benmore again, I shall be tempted to hang that fellow! I recognize his hand particularly in the mode of your rescue from that canting rascal Gilfillan, and I have little doubt that Donald himself played the part of the pedlar on that ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... we passed a "memorial heap," or cairn. Some tragedy occurred there, and the custom of the region is that the passer-by places reverently on the pile of rocks already formed an additional stone. Elsewhere I had seen this done when it seemed to me the actor was under the spell of a ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... fire spluttered and blazed close by the electricians at their work, and red gleams xan up the vertical steel mast and threads of copper wire towards the zenith. The Prince sat on a rock close by, with his chin on his hand, waiting. Beyond and to the northward was the cairn that covered Von Winterfeld, surmounted by a cross of steel, and from among the tumbled rocks in the distance the eyes of a wolf gleamed redly. On the other hand was the wreckage of the great airship ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... anniversary of Cabot's voyage. King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters the size of a house claim that it was here John Cabot sent his sailors ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there. For generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling to the tidal bore, came scudding into ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Tam was cross the ford, Whare in the snaw, the chapman smoor'd; And past the birks and meikle stane, Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And thro' the whins, and by the cairn, Where hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.— Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars thro' the woods; The lightnings ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... nightly cry. By this time he was 'cross the foord, Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; And past the birks and meikle stane Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane: And through the whins, and by the cairn Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel'. Before him Doon pours a' his floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods; The lightnings flash frae pole ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... in at the cairn whence she and Courtier had looked down at the herds of ponies. It was the merest memory now, vague and a little sweet, like the remembrance of some exceptional Spring day, when trees seem to flower before your eyes, and in sheer ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... away across the heath, neither taking the track on towards Haweswater, nor returning by the path which had brought them thither. He went away northwards across the wild fell; and Kate, having risen up and seated herself on a small cairn of stones which stood there, watched him as he descended the slope of the hill till he was out of sight. He did not run, but he seemed to move rapidly, and he never once turned round to look at her. He went away, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... dismayed by the hauntings, but deemed it good sport rather than not when Glam rode the house-roofs. But when another Christmas came the shepherd was missed; search was made, and he was found on the hill-side by Glam's cairn, his neck broken, and every bone in his body smashed. Then Glam waxed more mighty than ever; the cattle bellowed and roared, and gored each other; the byre cracked, and a cattle-man who had been long in Thorhall's service was found dead, ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... embryo Union with most precious service—a service that every man, woman and child in our thirty-eight States is to some extent receiving the benefit of to-day—and I for one here cheerfully, reverently throw my pebble on the cairn of his memory. As we all know, the season demands—or rather, will it ever be out of season?—that America learn to better dwell on her choicest possession, the legacy of her good and faithful men—that she well preserve their ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... one, he had anticipated and planned for it. He had no boards with which to make a coffin, but there was plenty of stout canvas, and in a double thickness of this he sewed the body of his friend. Before doing so he dug away the snow beside a cairn of rocks that marked the last resting place of her who had gone before, and placed the electric heater, with extended wire connections, on the ground thus exposed. Within a few hours this soil became sufficiently thawed to permit him to dig a shallow grave, to which, by great effort, ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... a crude mound of stones and the line of walking slaves stopped as soon as they reached it, dropping with satisfied grunts onto the sand. The cairn was obviously a border marker and Ch'aka walked to it and rested his foot on one of the stones, watching while the other line of slaves approached. They, too, stopped at the cairn and settled to the ground: ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey |
