"Rubble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pebble; calculus, concretion; flint, granite, marble, quartz, adamant, shale, flag, flagstone, cobblestone, rubble, brash, shingle; monolith, polyolith; cairn, muller, merestone; cromlech; madstone, snakestone; aerolite, meteorite; (of fruit) endocarp, pit, nut, putamen. Associated Words: petrify, petrifaction, lithology, lithography, lithic, lapidary, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... elements, then, are our labourer and his family composed; and before Roger Acton goes abroad at earliest streak of dawn, we will take a casual peep within his dwelling. It consists of four bare rubble walls, enclosing a grouted floor, worn unevenly, and here and there in holes, and puddly. There were but two rooms in the tenement, one on the ground, and one over-head; which latter is with no small difficulty got at by scaling a ladder-like stair-case that fronts the cottage-door. This upper ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... infinite caution, giving heed to every foothold, and feeling before him with his hands. Fortunately there was little snow to obstruct him; for what had descended into the gorge was lodged in the crevices of the stones. He crawled over heaps of rubble, digging his toes in, to keep from sliding into the water; and there were great hundred-ton boulders, over which he dragged himself on his stomach. Above the canyon there were no stars visible; and below, it was wrapped ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... it the upcast earth is so disposed as to form the glacis proper, for about 50 feet before dipping to the general ground level. The Wall itself is usually 8 feet thick, the outer and inner faces formed of large blocks of freestone, with an interior core of carefully-filled-in rubble. The whole thus formed a defence of the most formidable character, testifying strongly to the respect in which the valour of the Borderers against whom it was constructed was held by Hadrian and ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... apprenticeship; and to him he went accordingly. The business carried on by his new master was of a very humble sort. Telford, in his autobiography, states that most of the farmers' houses in the district then consisted of "one storey of mud walls, or rubble stones bedded in clay, and thatched with straw, rushes, or heather; the floors being of earth, and the fire in the middle, having a plastered creel chimney for the escape of the smoke; while, instead of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines. At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... there, and blue waxen flowers struggled up amid the rubble of what were once defiant bastions. I lay down in the luxuriant grass, closed my eyes, and longed for a vision of heroic days. I thought of the Prince who had been entertained there with his great retinue; ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... of the same type, although there are some variations. It does not compare with the fine work found on the San Juan and its tributaries, although belonging to that type—the walls being composed of two faces with rubble filling, and the interstices of the large stones being filled or chinked with spalls. This chinking is more pronounced and better done in the northern part of the ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... would be so. But suppose they are six inches thick, you may take it for granted that underneath there will be rubble, loose stuff, except where any chambers may be built. If we were to bore a hole through this top layer the powder, instead of splitting the stones up, would expend its force among the loose stuff beneath it; and besides, instead of remaining in its place, ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... There is little affinity indeed between the building methods of the ancient Romans and those of their trade whose sorry, pitiable record exists in the Quartiere Nuovo of Rome. About the Porta Nigra is no trace of stucco or rubble. The huge blocks of which it is built stand one upon the other clean-hewn and square. No signs of mortar are left, but we see marks of iron or brass clamps. Its colour is a warm, deep red, softened here and there by streaks ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... precipitous cliff-like edge of the hill in a narrow coombe. The earth at the top hung over the verge, and beech-trees stood as it seemed in the act to topple, their exposed roots twisting to and fro before they re-entered the face of the precipice. Large masses of chalky rubble had actually fallen, and others were all but detached. The coombe, of course, could be overlooked from thence; but a moment's reflection convinced me there was no risk, for who would dare to go near enough to the edge to ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... bigger task than he had anticipated. A few inches at a time, resting in between, he dragged him over the ground and up a broken rubble of ice to the side of the boat. But into the boat he could not get him. Elijah's limp body was far more difficult to lift and handle than an equal weight of like dimensions but rigid. Daylight failed to hoist ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... pavement. But this vulgar storm of life seemed shut out of Helena's room, that remained indifferent, like a church. Two candles burned dimly as on an altar, glistening yellow on the dark piano. The lamp was blown out, and the flameless fire, a red rubble, dwindled in the grate, so that the yellow glow of the candles seemed to shine even on the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... grass, or a leaf of a shrub, was to be seen on all the steep slope, or rather precipice, for there was very little slope about it; nothing but grey loose shingle, which the first hoof-fall of the leading horse invariably sent slipping and sliding, in a perfect avalanche of rubble, down into the soft bright green morass beneath. Of all the bad "tracks" I encountered in my primitive rides, I really believe I suffered more real terror and anguish on that particular hill-side than on any other. My companion's conduct too, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... is a great resource. I walk far among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, full of weeds, ruinous; ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rocks I've gained through chimneys rough and steep That crumble at a careless touch, and send A rattling train of rubble bounding down The icy slopes, which great crevasses rend. Re-entrant over here the mountain dips Into a ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... by their subsidence even increased the mischief. Cottingham removed them and built up the wall, which deviated twenty-two inches from the upright, with a face of ashlar which constituted an invisible buttress. He also found that the central tower consisted to a great extent of rubble, and was incapable of supporting the spire. He almost entirely rebuilt it from the roof, and left it in its present form, finished with corner pinnacles but without a spire. All these serious works affecting the safety of the fabric involved the setting aside, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... made his way through the metal litter until he was close enough to make out the source of the light. It came from the center of a shallow area that had been cleared of rubble. A rusted misshapen mass of metal lay in the center of the cleared space. The greenish glow was coming from ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... stern, where the truck was tilted on one end and the huge stone toppled into the water. The process of unloading took each ship about three-quarters of an hour. There were forty-five other ships, each capable of carrying some fifty tons of small stones and rubble. These latter cargoes were shot into the water in much the manner ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of "stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... above through the waste of ash and rubble, and as they wandered abroad where the fields had been and saw how every brush and tree had been seared from the earth or poisoned by chemical brews, I knew that their fight was not merely a bitter one—it was hopeless. And I heard them muttering among ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... "a great scheme cannot be carried unless made the business of successive administrations"; that "virtuous and able men are the fittest to serve their country"; all this I look on as no more than so much rubble to fill up the spaces between the regular masonry. Pretty much in the same light I cannot forbear considering his detached observations on commerce; such as, that "the system for colony regulations would be very simple, and mutually beneficial to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a few buildings remain above the mounds of rubble, and as soon as the pickaxe is applied to any spot, irregular layers of bricks, enamelled tiles, and inscribed tablets are brought to light—in fine, all those numberless objects which bear witness to the presence of man and to his long sojourn on the spot. But these vestiges are so mutilated ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and TRAVELLERS, and HEADERS, and RUBBLE, and POLISHED ASHLAR, and PIERRES PERDUES, and even the thrilling question of the STRING- COURSE, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation of years; youth ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out to shore up the ceilings of the basement with mighty battens of wood, and to convert that region into a nest of cunningly devised bedrooms. Others reinforced the flooring above with a layer of earth and brick rubble three feet deep. On the top of all this they relaid not only the original ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... here!" exclaimed Wade. Indeed, below them were villages, of crude huts made of timber and stone and mud. Rubble work walls, for they needed little shelter here, and ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... mile the houses and shops are more city-like, and, being newer than those beyond, are more ornamented as to the stucco of their windows and doors. Here, as elsewhere in this stoneless land, with rare exceptions, the buildings are of brick or rubble, stuccoed and washed, generally in light yellow, with walls three feet or more apart, warmly filled in, and ventilated through the hermetically sealed windows by ample panes in the centre of the sashes, or by apertures in the string-courses between stories, which open into each room. Shops below, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred. It has had the honour of being freely utilised without acknowledgment by writers of repute; and finally it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the foundations ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... little wrinkle on the side of Two Peak, and set the bushes in the mouth of the draw, and piled an iron ledge across the top and spread barren mountainside all around it. In the hiding Injun Jim had done his share, too. He had pulled rubble down over the face of the bank of richness, and eyes less keen than Casey's would have passed it by ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... in summing of money is this: as we say in England, halfpenie, penie, shilling, and pound, so say they Poledenga, Denga, Altine and Rubble: there goeth two Poledengas to a Denga, six Dengaes to an Altine, and 23 Altines, and two Dengaes ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... where a great conical hole showed the clean brown earth. And at the bottom of each of these holes lay a pool of foetid green water. The walls were crumbling, decay was rampant, the place breathed corruption. Occasionally the silence would be broken by a crash, and a little heap of brick rubble would subside into the road, raising a cloud of thick choking dust. Occasionally there would be another sound, like the drone of a great beetle, followed by a dull echoing roar and a bigger cloud of dust. Occasionally would come the ping-phut of a stray bullet; ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... horse I ever saw," Lute called back, as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of rubble and into ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous descent by a flight of break-neck stone steps. At the right-hand side of the same street stands an old rubble chalk wall, even older. It is just past the new house of the Bible Society, and seems to have formed part of the old City wall, which at first ended at Baynard Castle. The rampart advanced to Mountfiquet, and, lastly, to please and protect ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to the foreshore, a broadening scree of rubble, ruined masonry, broken beams of timber—some of them smouldering; and over the top of it shone the blaze of the town. But the actual gap appeared to be undefended, and, better still, the rubbish on ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... hay-time. And Leonard, commonly called Lenny, was an only son, and his mother a widow. The cottage stood apart, and somewhat remote, in one of the many nooks of the long green village lane. And a thoroughly English cottage it was—three centuries old at least; with walls of rubble let into oak frames, and duly whitewashed every summer, a thatched roof, small panes of glass, and an old doorway raised from the ground by two steps. There was about this little dwelling all the homely rustic elegance which peasant life admits of: a honeysuckle ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of the Sierra de Nacori, on top of another knoll, and at an elevation of 6,400 feet, we found numerous rude ground plans, some of which showed rubble walls fifteen inches thick. They formed groups of four or five apartments, each ten by twelve feet. But on the north side of that summit there was a larger plan, nearly eighteen feet square; however, the outlines of the entire settlement were not distinct enough to enable us ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... according to the late Canon Raven, was the Roman station Gariannonum of the Notitia Imperii. Its walls are built of flint-rubble concrete, and there are lacing courses of tiles. There is no wall on the west, and Canon Raven used to contend that one existed there but has been destroyed. But this conjecture seems improbable. That side was probably defended by the sea, which has considerably receded. Two gates remain, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... containing as many as eight or ten urns full of calcined bones. The excavation of a tumulus in the plain of Tarbes brought to light an enormous block of granite resting on blocks of quartz. The spaces between these blocks were filled in with rubble made of small stones cemented into one mass with clay. Edwin-Harness Mound, near Liberty (Ohio), is 160 feet long by eighty or ninety wide, and thirteen to eighteen high in the middle. It contained a ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... mine. A silence fell upon the little company, and even Sadie's bright face reflected the harshness of Nature. The escort had closed in, and marched beside them, their boots scrunching among the loose black rubble. Colonel Cochrane and Belmont were still riding together ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the garden, so perfectly a poet's ideal, stretched a landing defended from the incessant swash of the bay by a stone revetment. There was then a pavement of smoothly laid flags, and then a higher wall of dark rubble-work, coped with bevelled slabs. An open pavilion, with a bell-fashioned dome on slender pillars, all of wood red painted, gave admission to the garden. Then a roadway of gray pebbles and flesh-tinted shells invited a visitor, whether afoot or on horseback, through clumps of acacias undergrown with ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... "No, sir. I can't let any one through. And if I did 'twould be no good. The staircase is clean gone—a great big stone staircase, too! It's all in bits, just like a lot of rubble. The front of the house ain't touched, but the center and behind—well, sir, you never ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... failed again—that she had slipped through his fingers. If only for a moment she had looked up to him and believed in him the evil spirit that was climbing up on to his shoulders would have fled away. There was a stout piece of stick lying amidst the rubble at his feet, and he took it up and felt it as a swordsman ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... tower in the centre and the graceful pointed turrets at each corner. Most of the roof was gone, but enough remained to show that it had been very high-pitched, and that the proportions of the building must have been perfect. The interior was a mass of rubble; here and there direct hits had blown holes in the wonderfully carved walls, and some of the statues of the famous men of the ancient city had been tumbled from their niches between the third tier ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... called, on Conanicut Island. These houses show all the peculiarities of the constructive science of their day, which aimed simply to attain solidity and protection from the elements. The chimneys and end-walls were generally built of stone, laid up as random rubble, with mortar composed of shell lime, sand, and gravel, and flakes of broken slate pounded fine. The sides of these buildings, and the ends above the line of roof-plate, were of frame construction, made of heavy oak timber, rudely squared, put together with treenails and boarded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the long walls, not, indeed, finished till at a later time, which were called the Legs. And the place where they built them being soft and marshy ground, they were forced to sink great weights of stone and rubble to secure the foundation, and did all this out of the money Cimon supplied them with. It was he, likewise, who first embellished the upper city with those fine and ornamental places of exercise and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... southern gable. Sockets in the walls, on either side, where massive beams had once lodged, showed that the building had been in three stories, though all the floors had fallen in and made a mound of rubble in the centre of the hall ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... excepted—but the power of extraction that must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... was still evident, in spite of the low drifts of the snow, but progress was slow. We were still in the heavy rubble-ice and had to continuously hew our way with pickaxes to make a path for the sledges. While we were at work making a pathway, the dogs would curl up and lie down with their noses in their tails, and we would ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... every blow from their hammers; blocks of rock were tossed aside, and smashed into fragments, ere being filled into the tubs which were ever waiting ready to convey the debris to the pit-head. Few words were spoken, except when a warning shout was given, when some loose rubble poured down from the great gaping cavern in the roof, and then men jumped and sprang to safety with the agility of desperation, to wait till the rumbling had ceased, only to leap back again into the yawning hell, tearing at the stones, and trying to work their way into the ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... walls and the roof were finished, and a stage had been erected at the end of the building. But half a wall and some of the roof had fallen upon it, and the rubble had ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... and it was crossed by a path which came close to the wall. Ever since her childhood it had been Phyllis's pleasure to clamber up this fence and sit on the top—a feat not so difficult as it may seem, the walls in this district being built of rubble, without mortar, so that there were plenty of crevices ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... "muckers." I slid down the face of government-made cliffs on the seat of my commissary breeches. I fought my way up again to stalk through long lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. I rolled down in the sand and rubble of what threatened to develop into "slides." I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted negroes—negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color—while dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie" blasts ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... and the back hatch of the original mill yet formed a cascade which had raised its terrific roar for centuries. The cottage itself was built of old stones from the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the rubble of the walls. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Appia was the southern. These roads were very elaborately built. In constructing them, the earth was excavated till a solid foundation was obtained; over this a layer of loose stones was laid, then another layer nine inches thick of rubble-work of broken stones cemented with lime, then another layer of broken pottery cemented in like manner, over which was a pavement of large polygonal blocks of hard stone nicely fitted together. Roads thus constructed were exceedingly durable, so that portions ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... master of the Roman Commonwealth, he settled finally on the top of the hill, having purchased for his residence the house of Hortensius, a simple and modest house, indeed, with columns of the commonest kind of stone, pavements of rubble-work, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... brought up and retreated, tripping back upon one another over rubble and bowlder, and giving out startled oaths. Then they halted, a ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... passages and interiors, speckled with fallen mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters, flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and the what-not that litters the path of construction. Without, in the avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either side, were low-riding, long, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... matter that the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral are in ruins, that the homes and churches are but rubble in the streets? What do we care if great shells have torn gaping holes in the Grande Place, and if the station is a battered wreck where the rails are bent and twisted as bits of wire? We do not mourn for Ypres, for it is ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... a narrow, winding passage which led to an old court, surrounded by rubble walls, with little moss-covered galleries under the roof and a weathercock upon the peak, as in the Tanner's Lane in Strasbourg. To the right was the brewery, and in a corner a great wheel, turned by an enormous dog, which pumped the beer to every ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... flecked white, the pink, and the yellow with brown. Then for a shelf among rocks the milk-worts, the sky-blue, the white and the pink; with these I float out May like Fra Angelico. For June there are Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to drift like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant. Foxglove and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like a scarf. After this—August, September, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... looked like the waiting-room of an unfinished railway station. The style of building is peculiar, and looks so temporary as to keep one constantly in mind of the threatening earthquake. Most of the edifices, large and small, public and private, are constructed of rubble set in cement, with an occasional big, rough-squared stone to give an appearance of solidity, and perhaps a few courses of bricks in the old Roman style. If the building is of importance, this work is hidden beneath stucco; otherwise it remains like the mere shell of a house, and is disfigured ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line which was still in process of construction. The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived—all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos. There was so little order ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the sublime chapter in the GREAT BOOK, the Seventy-first on LOVE, wherein nothing is written, but the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask and a Pick-axe, and therewith pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of preceding excavators in the solitary quarry: a yet more instructive passage than the overscrawled Seventieth, or French Section, whence the chapter opens, and where hitherto ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... times the walls were very much thicker, composed of hewn stone, making a kind of casing at each side, called ashlar, the interval being filled with rubble masonry cemented with lime and loam. This stuffing having deteriorated the weight above had split the outer wall, though most fortunately the interior face was perfectly sound ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... supported on prismatically shaped pillars, and then runs through a bed of round pebbles, composed of volcanic stone and white lime, as hard as marble, in which impressions of shell-fish and coral can be traced. Further up the river the volcanic rubble disappears, and the containing strata then consist of the marble-like pebbles cemented together with calcareous spar. These strata alternate with banks of clay and coarse-grained soil, which contain scanty and badly preserved imprints of leaves and mussel-fish. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... blanketed by the dust fog. There was the beginning of a series of monstrous craters where men had begun rebuilding underground, the ruined landing field, and a section of what had been the great business district. Now it was only a field of rubble, with bits of windowless walls leading up to a crazy tangle of twisted girders. Only memory could locate where the major streets had been. Over everything lay the green wash of incandite, and the wind carried the smell of a charnel ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... a pass between hills of sandstone and rubble, where moss-agates are found (an excellent place for an ambush), we followed the same sort of country as before over a succession of small creeks and divides. These table-lands were always barren, and covered with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... stones, stakes, or rubble, constructed to stop or impede the course of a stream. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... raised this barrow. The other day it was opened for a distinguished society of antiquaries to inspect; they found that in the centre were stones carefully laid, encircling a small chamber, whilst the outer portions were of ordinary rubble. Nothing but lime-dust and dirt was found in the chamber; but in the course of thousands of years most of these barrows have probably been opened a good many times by Cotswold natives in search of "golden coffins" ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... foot of the Downs, Cicely left the highway and entered a narrow lane without hedges, but worn low between banks of chalk or white rubble. The track was cut up with ruts so deep that the bed of the pony-trap seemed almost to touch the ground. As we went rather slowly along this awkward place we could see the wild thyme growing on the bank at ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... that caused the trouble Lay entombed in earth and rubble, Left about in various places, In the way that early races— Hittites, Greeks, or Hottentots— Used to leave important Pots; Till at length, to close the list, Came an Archaeologist, Came and dug with care and pain, Came and found ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Rome and other sites. When mixed with lime, it formed a very strong cement. This material was poured in a fluid state into timber casings, where it quickly set and hardened. Small pieces of stone, called rubble, were also forced down into the cement to give it additional stability. Buildings of this sort were usually faced with brick, which in turn might be covered with thin slabs of marble, thus producing an ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... it was, the cowpony found the steep pass with its loose rubble hard going. Melissy took the climb much easier. In the way she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple dips to right and left, there was a ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... development of a brick architecture, and fine examples of brickwork abound in the Low Countries. The Romans seem to have introduced brickmaking into England, and specimens of the large thin bricks, which they used chiefly as a bond for rubble masonry, may be seen in the many remains of Roman buildings scattered about that country. During the reigns of the early Tudor kings the art of brickmaking arrived at great perfection, and some of the finest known specimens of ornamental brickwork are to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... standing, except those buildings fashioned of structural steel, and these showed twisted girders like the skeletons of primeval monsters, supporting sections of sagging floors. Houses, hotels had melted into shapeless heaps of rubble, which filled the streets to a depth of a dozen yards, burying everything beneath them. Yet here and there could be seen the forms of dead pedestrians, motor-cars emerging out of the debris, lying in every conceivable position; horses, horribly mangled, were shrieking as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... tower worthy of notice, except the Priory of Longueville, situate to the right of the road, about twelve miles from Dieppe. I did not see Longueville, and I am told that the ruins are quite insignificant, yet I regret that I did not visit them. The French can never be made to believe that an old rubble wall is really and truly worth a day's journey: hence their reports respecting the notability of any given ruin can seldom be depended upon. And at least I should have had the satisfaction of ascertaining the actual state of the remains ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... the salt marsh and steered the launch into the creek, reducing speed as he did so. On their right, the marsh stretched inland along the sluggish creek bank. On their left, the high old bulk of the Creek House rose from a yard that was strewn with rubble and years' accumulation of weeds and litter. A hundred yards up the creek was the gray, rickety piling of ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... men dragged twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as "Fort Rascal" because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble, fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... hackish, 'barney' is to {fred} (sense 1) as {bar} is to {foo}. That is, people who commonly use 'fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use 'barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... measured 44 feet in diameter. It was founded with large broad stones at a depth of about 2 feet 6 inches, and built to within 10 inches of the surface with rubble work, on which a course of neatly dressed and well-jointed masonry was laid, of the red sandstone from the quarries to the eastward of Arbroath, which brought the platform on a level with the surface of ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the buildings there are no signs of mortar, the intervals between the beds being chinked with stones of the minutest thinness. The filling and backing are done in rubble masonry, the mortar presenting no indications of the presence of lime. The thickness of the main wall at base is within an inch or two of three feet; higher up, it is less, diminishing every story by retreating jogs on the inside, from bottom to ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... of the work, between Stations 182 90 and 183 65, the rock was low, and provision had to be made for maintaining the yards to the north of the site. Therefore a rubble-masonry retaining wall was built, with the face about 2 ft. north of the face of the proposed concrete wall which was to be put in later. On the same side of the work, between Stations 188 24 and 188 46, the rock was exceedingly poor, and as a small ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • B.F. Cresson, Jr
... found? There was a good deal of discussion on the point and no very satisfactory solution offered. Cannot help thinking that there is something in the thought that the glacier may have been weighted down with rubble which finally disengaged itself and allowed the ice to rise. Such speculations ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Medio had been a place of some splendour in its time. The ruinous heavy buildings clung to the hillsides, and my eyes plunged into a broad vista of an empty and magnificent street. Behind many of the imposing and escutcheoned frontages there was nothing but heaps of rubble; the footsteps of rare passers-by woke lonely echoes, and strips of grass outlined in parallelograms the flagstones of the roadway. The Casa Riego raised its buttressed and loop-holed bulk near the shore, resembling a defensive outwork; on my other hand the shallow bay, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... smooth, but hummocky, for under it lay heaps of worthless stone and marble drawn out of the quarries ages ago, which the green vestment had covered for the most part, though it left sometimes a little patch of broken rubble peering out at the top of a mound. There were many tumble-down walls and low gables left of the cottages of the old quarrymen; grass-covered ridges marked out the little garden-folds, and here and there still stood a forlorn gooseberry-bush, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... assign a use for certain areas which have been paved apparently with brick rubble, or, in more evident cases, by flatlaid bricks. Four such paved areas have ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... candle, and could scarcely check a cry of joy as I perceived that our task would henceforth be much lighter than I had supposed. At the end of the hole, instead of another stone cemented like the first, as I expected, there was a mass of rubble. I could not doubt that the whole of the interior of the wall consisted of this material, and that we should encounter no more blocks of stone until we came to the outer layer of ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... back at night and find half your bedroom shot away—that happened to me the other night—there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, and when you opened the door, nothing but a hole ten feet deep full of rubble—jolly luck, it didn't happen at night-time!) there are actually some lilac trees, and the buds on them are quite big. And somehow or other the birds manage to sing in spite of the hell the Huns have made ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bushes. But, being thorough in all that he undertook, he returned to the cave and again conducted an inquisition. The silver-hued vein became more strongly marked at the point where it disappeared downwards into a collection of rubble and sand. That was all. Did men give their toil, their lives, for this? So it would appear. Be that as it might, he had a more pressing work. If the cave still held a secret ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... center. The class-rooms are all placed in the rear of the building, to secure quiet, and open on each floor into a corridor surrounding the main staircase which occupies the center of the building. The walls are built of Headington stone in rubble work, with dressings of brick, between which the walling is plastered, and the front is enriched with cornices and pilasters, and a hood over the entrance door, all of terra cotta. The hinder part of the building is kept studiously ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... whole extent of the copper-bearing region was mined in remote times by a race of whom the Indians preserve no tradition there is abundant evidence, such as numerous excavations in the solid rock, heaps of rubble and dirt along the courses of the veins, copper utensils such as knives, chisels, spears, arrowheads, stone hammers creased for the attachment of withes, wooden bowls for boiling water from the mines, wooden ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... full of pain. With the exception of the dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones without cement, and from age, or badness of the material, looking as if they could scarcely hold together. The gaping chinks admitted every blast; the leaning chimneys had lost half their ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... had been removed and the jambs had been widened on each side of the fireplace; it yawned empty and cold. A little rubble of mortar, newly dried, lay about the bottom of the square recess. The sight of the crude, unfamiliar scraps of dropped lime in the gaping place where warmth should have been, increased the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... so. As Smiles says—"A dead fish can float with the stream, but it takes a man to swim against it." What could be more noble than the start and the starter of Christianity? How beautiful the upward struggle of an idea, like some sweet flower blossoming out amongst rubble and cinders! But, alas! to say that this idea was a final idea! That this scheme of thought was above the reason! That this gentle philosopher was that supreme intelligence to which we cannot even imagine a personality without ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... winter for just another day. But the iron hand closed down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was required, and he had ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... same dead, dull response. I was in the darkest corner now, beyond the stairs, still hopelessly beating the gun barrel against the stone. The dim light revealed no change in the wall formation, the same irregular expanse of rubble set in solid mortar, hardened by a century of exposure to the dry atmosphere. Then to an idle, listless blow there came a hollow, wooden sound, that caused the heart to leap into the throat. I tried again, a foot to the left, ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... the engine began to slow down. The wheels had hardly stopped moving when Curly crept out, plowed through the sand, up the rubble of a little hill, and into a draw where a bunch of scrub ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... and in the most ancient churches, as in that at Dover Castle, and that at Bricksworth, we find arches constructed of flat bricks or tiles, set edgewise, which was also a Roman fashion. The masonry was chiefly composed of rubble, with ashlar or squared blocks of stone at the angles, disposed in courses in a ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... the dull inhabitants of the quarter going about their common business; a man was crying "mackerel" in a doleful voice, slowly passing up the street, and staring into the white-curtained "parlors," searching for the face of a purchaser behind the India-rubble plants, stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books that adorned the windows. One of the blistered doors over the way banged, and a woman came scurrying out on some errand, and the garden gate shrieked two melancholy notes as she opened it and let it ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the fact, at least, under existing systems, that the best-paying reefs are those that are largely intersected with fissures—more inclined to come out in pebbles than in blocks—or, if I might coin a designation, 'rubble reefs,' as contradistinguished from 'boulder reefs,' showing at the same time a certain degree of ignigenous discoloration . . . still, where there are evidences of excessive volcanic effect . . . the reef may be set down as poor . ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... rat-men rallied and swept on forward in a wave that nothing could have stopped this time—but their charge was too late. The entire rocky projection collapsed with a final sickening lurch, and slid to the pit's floor, carrying Joan and Powell with it in a miniature avalanche of rocky rubble. ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... construction was abundant. The great city of Palae-Tyrus was close at hand, partly in ruins, and with many of the houses deserted by their inhabitants. Its walls would furnish abundance of stone, mortar, and rubble. Behind Palae-Tyrus lay the flanks of Lebanon, cultivated in orchards, while beyond were its dense and inexhaustible forests of fir, pine, and cedar. Human labour could be obtained to almost any extent, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... and peered over the edge of the cliff. He was fascinated, breathlessly absorbed. He pressed the turf a little closer in his eagerness, and so loosened a large stone that rolled down, starting a cataract of sand and rubble. He had just time to throw himself back sideways, as the hollow fringe of turf gave way and plunged down the cliff-side. So far from taking his escape with becoming seriousness, he amused himself by trying to feel as he would have felt ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... was louder now, but she hardly heard it, because her ears strained for some sound which the singing might cover: the sound of rubble crumbling under a foot that ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... colonel had made his battalion headquarters; but I did not want to go enough to persist when I understood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout—and I always like to be within striking distance of one—was a cave twenty feet deep with a roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments of a town hall are piled on ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... west window, and the sculptured doorways were complete, though they remained but as a fragment of a ruined building. A century and a half passed and the whole had disappeared, carted away to build walls and stables for the local squires, or sold by the local squires for rubble. ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... and the walls collapsed, and we found ourselves standing on a bare grassy hillside, looking down in shock and horror as below us, section after section of what had been apparently bare hill and rock caved in and collapsed into dusty rubble. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... intermingled with bamboo; but the bottoms are characterised by a fine growth of fig-trees of great variety along with high grasses; whilst near the villages were found good gardens of plantains, and numerous Palmyra trees. The rainy season being not far off, the villagers were busy in burning rubble and breaking their ground. Within their reach everywhere is the sarsaparilla vine, but growing as a weed, for they know nothing of ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... variety, thriving in any situation. It produces sweetly-scented flowers throughout July and August. It does best when planted under trees, or in partial shade on rock-work, in well-drained, good loamy or peaty soil mixed with a fair proportion of brick rubble. Plant the corms in September 3 in. apart, and 1-1/2 in. deep. Height, 6 ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... building is at best a very ragged affair, without religion's finishing hand; at the utmost a fine ruin no more. And if that be the utmost of nature's handiwork, what is at the other end of the scale? alas! the rubble stones of the ruin; what of good and fair nature had reared there was not strong enough to stand alone. But religion cannot work alike on every foundation; and the varieties are as many as the individuals. Sometimes she must build the whole, from ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the first signs of destruction. Broken rubble on the streets. The smell of greasy smoke in their nostrils. More and more people appeared, going in the same direction they were. The normally deserted streets of Hovedstad were now almost crowded. Disans, obvious by their bare shoulders, ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... the situation in great detail and awaited Marie's reaction. It was even more encouraging than he had hoped for. "I understand less than before! How could anything reactivate that rubble? They put everything over five years old into the piles, and the stuff's supposed to be decrepit already. You'd almost think we were destroying wealth before its time, because if those disabled mechanisms reactivate—" She came to a dead halt. "That's madness! Oh, I wish High Holy Day were here ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... pebbles, having all sunk to the same depth within the same time. Considering the nature of the substratum, which at Leith Hill Place was sandy soil including many bits of rock, and at Stonehenge, chalk-rubble with broken flints; considering, also, the presence of the turf-covered sloping border of mould round the great fragments of stone at both these places, their sinking does not appear to have been sensibly aided by their weight, though ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... Certainly, the gunners' seats were not provided with cushions, and the guns were not mounted on C-springs; but the shaking and jolting were not very great on the smooth high-road, it was only when the wheels crunched over newly-strewn rubble that their seats vibrated roughly ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... held a welter of rocks above it as a dam holds the pressure of water—and the dam had burst. The torrent of stone from above had swept into motion and carried with it the accumulation of loose rubble below. Where the ledge had been was now a cliff—a sheer wall of rock. It had been covered before by the talus that was ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... eighty from the city of Mexico. Orizaba, having a little over twenty thousand inhabitants, is in many respects the quaintest, as it is one of the oldest, cities in the country. Most of the dwellings are but one story in height, built with broad, overhanging eaves, and are composed of rubble-stone, mortar, sun-dried brick, and a variety of other material; but not including wood. The low, iron-grated windows, so universal in Spanish towns, are not wanting here, through the bars of which, dark-eyed senoritas and laughing children watch us as we pass, often exhibiting pleasant family groups ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... figure, 2 m. east of Bamian, representing Sakya Buddha entering Nirv[a]na, i.e. in act of death. This was "about 1000 ft. in length." No traces of this are alluded to by modern travellers, but in all likelihood it was only formed of rubble plastered (as is the case still with such Nirv[a]na figures in Indo-China) and of no durability. For a city so notable Bamian has a very obscure history. It does not seem possible to identify it with any city in classical geography; Alexandria ad Caucasum it certainly was not. The first ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... feet, that is not too much. If the soil be compact, or such as will hold water, it should be thoroughly drained from the lowest point or corner, and the drain always kept open; (a stone drain is the best and most durable,) and if floored with a coat of flat, or rubble stones, well set in good hydraulic cement—or cement alone, when the stone cannot be obtained—all the better. This last will make it rat proof. For the purpose of avoiding these destructive creatures, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... of money is this: as we say in England, halfpenny, penny, shilling, and pound, so say they, poledenga, denga, altine, and rubble (rouble). There goeth two poledengas to a denga, six dengaes to an altine, and twenty-three altines and two dengaes ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... Hospital, and extending north and south, or parallel with the course of the island and river, is the New York Penitentiary, the first public institution erected on the island. It is a gloomy and massive edifice, constructed of hewn stone and rubble masonry. It is four stories in height, and consists of a central building and wings. The central building is 65 by 75 feet, and the wings each 200 by 50 feet in size. The entire building is exceedingly strong. The floors are of stone, and the stairways and doors of iron. It contains 500 ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... which they apply to his ear, and through which they whisper what they have to say. They think that at death men have no perception as they had none before they were born. Their houses are small, built of wood and earth, covered partly with rubble and partly with palm-leaves. It is ascertained that there are twenty thousand houses in the city of Porne. They marry as many wives as they can afford to keep; they eat birds and fish; make bread of rice; and drink a liquor drawn from the palm tree—of which we have spoken before. Some ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair |
