"Talus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breaking ice and dashing of waves mingled with the low, deep booming of the avalanche. Detached masses of the invading snow, mixed with fragments of ice, drift about in sludgy, island-like heaps, while the main body of it forms a talus with its base wholly or in part resting on the bottom of the basin, as controlled by its depth and the size of the avalanche. The next avalanche, of course, encroaches still farther, and so on with each in succession until the entire basin may be filled and its water sponged up ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... packthread, and a number of small pickets driven into the ground, at the several angles and redans, he transferred the lines from his paper; then taking the profile of the place, with its works, to determine the depths and slopes of the ditches,—the talus of the glacis, and the precise height of the several banquettes, parapets, etc.—he set the Corporal to work; and sweetly went it on.—The nature of the soil,—the nature of the work itself,—and, above all, the good-nature of my uncle Toby, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... which was considered of so much importance that its inventor was honoured with a place among the gods in the mythology of the Greeks. This invention is said to have been suggested by the arrangement of the teeth in the jaw of a serpent, used by Talus the nephew of Daedalus in dividing a piece of wood. From the representations of ancient tools found in the paintings at Herculaneum it appears that the frame-saw used by the ancients very nearly resembled that still in use; and we are informed that the tools employed in the carpenters' shops ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c. 243; bend &c. (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd[obs3], rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity|; gentle slope, rapid slope, easy ascent, easy descent; shelving beach; talus; monagne Russe[Fr]; facilis descensus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... river and under the frown of the overhanging cliffs, she directed the path she was breaking. Here and there she made detours to avoid the out-jutting talus, and at other times followed the ice in against the precipitous walls and hugged them closely around the abrupt bends. And so, at the head of her huskies, she came suddenly upon a woman sitting ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... of cliffs there is usually to be found a slope of rock fragments which clearly have fallen from above. Such a heap of waste is known as talus. The amount of talus in any place depends both on the rate of its formation and the rate of its removal. Talus forms rapidly in climates where mechanical disintegration is most effective, where rocks are readily broken into blocks ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton |
