"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... left the council of his tribe and went his way toward the mountain of the sun. For six days he made his way through the trackless woods, guided by the sun by day and the stars by night. On the seventh he came to the great mountain—the mountain of the sun—on whose top, according to the tradition of his tribe, the sun rested each night. All day long he climbed, saying to himself: 'I will sleep ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... time like Spring, When life's alive in everything, 20 Before new nestlings sing, Before cleft swallows speed their journey back Along the trackless track— God guides their wing, He spreads their table that they nothing lack,— Before the daisy grows a common flower, Before the sun has power To scorch the world up in his ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... Maxims of extreme antiquity show how the avocations of the husbandman are to be guided by the movements of the heavenly bodies. The positions of the stars indicated the time to plough, and the time to sow. To the mariner who was seeking a way across the trackless ocean, the heavenly bodies offered the only reliable marks by which his path could be guided. There was, accordingly, a stimulus both from intellectual curiosity and from practical necessity to follow the movements of the stars. Thus began a search for the causes ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... most largely laid under contribution in this manner was of the sort to interest Allan: it was a highly spiced narrative of Traveling Adventures in the wilds of Australia. Pouncing on an extract which described the sufferings of the traveling-party, lost in a trackless wilderness, and in danger of dying by thirst, Allan announced that he had found something to make his friend's flesh creep, and began eagerly to ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... burning on the Parisian pavements, while the blood of the adventurer ran slow and cold. The illusions bred of the winter dawn had been dispersed by the light of day; life was no glad enterprise—no climbing of golden heights, but the barren crossing of a trackless region where no hand proffered guidance and false signs misled the weary eyes. One weapon alone was necessary in the pursuance of the gray journey—a sure command—a sure possession ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... go down to the sea in ships, sing; shepherds who tend their flocks by night, sing; men in the forest or those who follow the trackless plains, sing. Congregational singing is most popular among those who live far apart—to get together and sing is a solace. Loneliness, separation and heart-hunger all drive men ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... listened. When at last they prepared to resume their journey, Lucile glanced upward again. Then a cry of consternation escaped her lips; the fog had thickened; the stars were lost to them. They were again adrift on the trackless floe ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... thus leading the advanced guard of civilization, and bringing into these rough districts gentle and well-educated females, who soften and improve all around them by mental refinements, is serving his country as much by founding peaceful villages and pleasant homesteads in the trackless wilds, as ever he did by personal courage, or military ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... mood Of great endurance: Not alone his hands Wrought in wild seas and labored in strange lands, And not alone his patient strength withstood The clashing cliffs and Circe's perilous sands: Eager of some imperishable good He drave new pathways thro' the trackless flood Foreguarded, fearless, free from Fate's commands. How shall our faith discern the truth he sought? We too must watch and wander till our eyes, Turned skyward from the topmost tower of thought, Haply shall find the star that marked ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... hard and bitter laugh, and struck out faster, gripping her hands hard, so that it hurt, but looking away from her across the dead, even white of the trackless snow. There was a pain not to be comforted or reached in his beautiful eyes. It had nothing to do ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... been involved in fiery ruin, or had the comet been dragged away from its orbit by the attraction of one of those dead suns, those derelicts of Creation which, dark and silent, drift for age after age through the trackless ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... sagacity have calculated that Egypt—the most defensible country in the world, bounded on the south by inaccessible mountains, on the east by the Red Sea, on the west by the trackless, burning desert; able to defend the mouths of her river with a powerful navy, and to drown an invading army every year by the inundation of the Nile; which had not only maintained her independence, but extended her conquests ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... automobiles than with horses. He had passed the last of them, without interruption even from the justice of the peace who lived along the road. As a matter of fact, De Launay had left the road as soon as the fences permitted and had taken to the trackless sage. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the piles of cloudy haze. White waves curled dismally at the base of the Pao de Assucar, and the weird shrieks of the sea-gulls on the rocks that jutted around it made the dreariness more desolate. Far out in the trackless waste the sky lowered gloomily over the weary waters. Fit emblem of her path through life—dark was the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... yet a beardless boy, had acquired by his adventurous march under Arnold to Canada, through our northeastern wilds, then a trackless desert; his gallant bearing at Quebec and Monalouth; his efficient services in the retreat of our army from Long Island and New-York; and his difficult and delicate command on the lines of Westchester, followed him to private ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... so far from taking away his liberty, shall even add to it, because through it his course is set so fast in the ways of truth as to allow him, undividedly, to give up his whole soul to the purpose of his voyage, and to steer a wider and freer path over the trackless, but to him, with his rudder and compass, no longer the trackless or waste ocean; for, God and his endeavours prospering him, that shall yield up unto his hands discoveries as man-worthy as any hitherto beheld by men, or conceived ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... are as carefully governed as those of the sea-birds, and though many days in the open water he never forgets the direct course to his favorite haunts. How marvelous the instinct that guides with unerring certainty over the trackless waters! ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the wide prairies, and since they had wood and cornmeal in plenty, she would not have been much alarmed if her husband had been home. But snow deep enough to bury them must cover up all landmarks, and she knew her husband would not rest till he had found them. To get lost on the trackless prairie was fearfully easy, and to suffer and die almost in sight of home was no unusual thing, and was her one ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... hunted through the borders of the forest that is called Magh Breogain, through blind trackless places and through broken lands, over beautiful level plains and the high hills of Desmumum, under pleasant Slieve Crot and smooth Slieve na Muc, along the level banks of the blue Siuir and over the green plain of Feman and the rough plain of Eithne, and ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... small swags, having entrusted their tools and tents to teamsters, and, travelled quietly, taking four days to accomplish the journey. The route lay through trackless country. As yet few parties from Forest Creek had set out for Simpson's Ranges, and Jim and his friends encountered no other travellers until they were approaching the new rush, and then the road assumed the familiar ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... mustn't be too long, a- keeping you too, sir, under the vertebral rays of an Australian sun. I just couldn't stand it no longer—so I gets together my little savings, pays my own passage, sails across the trackless deep to the southern atmosphere—and here I am, to take my chance for good fortune or bad fortune, if I may only now and then have a smile from my dear young master Mr Frank, and gaze once more on those familiar ligaments which I loved ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... seemed that Nature had tumbled down an impenetrable bewilderment of rock, the hillsides cracking into deep, dark crevices, and the crests of the mountains showing behind and beyond a massed confusion of crags and hollows, trackless and untraversable. Governor King declared himself satisfied that the effort to cross the range was a task "as chimerical as useless," an opinion strengthened by the fact that, as Allan Cunningham had related,* the aboriginals known to the settlement were "totally ignorant of any pass ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... would often harness her father's horse to the old family sleigh and drive alone across the lake. She took her snow-shoes with her, and, leaving the horse at some friendly farmhouse, she would tramp into the woods over the trackless snow. The girl would stand still and look up at the solemn pines and listen, awed by their majestic movement and the desolate loveliness all around. At such time, if the thought of marriage came, she did not put it aside with the light fancy that she wished still to remain ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... in upon us. We plucked some ears as we passed, and found them ripe and well filled. The plain seemed as trackless as a forest, and our postboy suspected, from time to time, that he had lost his way among the narrow roads. A few peasant men whom we encountered at close quarters took off their hats, but without servility, and we greeted ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... and shining merpussy, during one deep dive into the under-world of trackless waters, had had time to recollect an appointment with a friend, and had settled in her mind that, as soon as she was once more in upper air, she would mention it to the crew of the boat she had dived from. She was long enough under for that. Then up she came into the rise and fall and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... stronger on Saturday evening, and we had a pleasant camp. George made a big fire of tamarack, and we lay before it on a couch of spruce boughs and ate tough boiled venison and drank the broth; and, feeling we had made some progress, we were happy, despite the fact that we were in the midst of a trackless wilderness with our way to Michikamau and the Indians as uncertain ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... there was not a single settler, nor a settlement of any kind, on or near the river for a distance of more than a thousand miles. From the river out, a hundred miles in an air line westward, across a practically trackless region, would be required to measure the distance to the nearest Mormon settlements on the Sevier, while eastward it was more than twice as far to the few pioneers who had crossed the Backbone of the Continent. The Uinta Indian Agency was the nearest establishment to Green River. It was forty ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... voyage finished, they steered for the nearest port with all the eager impatience of sea-cloyed sailors. Yet, scarcely were they anchored in some frontier haven than they fell to dreaming of the wilderness, of the far silences in the trackless sea of trees, of the winds ruffling the forest's crests till ten thousand trees toss their leaves, silver side up, as white-caps flash, rolling in long patches on a ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... alive—when Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The children lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, although the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... opportunity of leaving his master's house, and hid himself in a thick forest, which was at some miles' distance from the city. But here the unhappy man found that he had only escaped from one kind of misery to experience another. He wandered about all day through a vast and trackless wood, where his flesh was continually torn by thorns and brambles; he grew hungry, but could find no food in this dreary solitude! At length he was ready to die with fatigue, and lay down in despair in a large cavern which ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... season. And the Princess of Panchala then embraced the second son of Pandu, even as a creeper embraces a huge and mighty Sala on the banks of the Gomati. And embracing him with her arms, Krishna of faultless features awaked him as a lioness awaketh a sleeping lion in a trackless forest. And embracing Bhimasena even as a she-elephant embraceth her mighty mate, the faultless Panchali addressed him in voice sweet as the sound of a stringed instrument emitting Gandhara note. And she said, 'Arise, arise! Why dost thou, O Bhimasena, lie down as one dead? ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... falling of a bit of turf or the loosening of a stone would be fatal. Up, up, the hunter must go in search of the cunning game, until lost among the cliffs, and blinded by the thick mists which appear as clouds to those in the valley below, he may often wander in the trackless solitudes for days, with the terrible roar of avalanches sounding in his ears, before being able to return to his home. And yet in face of all these dangers, the Swiss, apart from the price they obtain for the flesh, skin, and horns of the chamois, have an inborn love of this ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and took command of the troops at that place. Hull had under him such noted officers as Colonels Duncan McArthur, James Findlay and Lewis Cass. With these forces, he marched to Detroit, through an almost trackless wilderness. While on the march with about two thousand men, Hull was informed of the declaration of war, which news at the same time reached the British posts in Canada, and his little army was in imminent peril. The government ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... read with more avidity than his official reports of daily adventure, danger and discovery, of scaling unclimbed mountains, wrecking his canoes on the rapids of unvisited rivers, parleying and battling with hostile Indians, and facing starvation while hemmed in by trackless snows. One of these journeys had led him to the Pacific coast when our war with Mexico let loose the spirit of revolution in the Mexican province of California. With his characteristic restless audacity Fremont joined his little company ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... and Fenimol sat in the control cabin, staring out through the visiplates, abstracted. There was no need of staring, and they were not really looking, for there was nothing at which to look. Outside the transparent metal hull of that monster of the trackless void, there was nothing visible. The Galaxy of which our Earth is an infinitesimal mote, the Galaxy which former astronomers considered the Universe, was so far behind that its immeasurable diameter was too small to affect the vision of the unaided eye. Other Galaxies ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small hand-bag, 'phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter's train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... level patch occurred over which they trotted briskly, and then down they went again by a steep incline into the bed of an ice-buried stream, to find a similarly steep ascent on the other side. Occasionally, coming to a wall-like cliff surrounded by a tangled and trackless forest, they were forced to seek the shores of the sea, and there, among rocks and ice-drift, pick ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... Empire. Julius Caesar, who transformed Rome from a republic into an empire, and Napoleon the Corsican, are the classic illustrations of the power of great ambition and dauntless persistency. Far nobler is that quiet, courageous perseverance which led Livingston through the trackless swamps and forests of Africa and blazed the way for the conquest of the dark continent. Equally significant is that noble ambition, coupled with heroic perseverance, that has enabled settlement workers to bring light to the darkest parts of ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... or more the three adventurers followed their strange guide in silence through the dense, trackless woods. He walked very rapidly, looking neither to the right nor to the left, finding his way apparently by an intuitive sense of direction. Occasionally he glanced back over ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... From trail to trackless wilderness. A grilling hike. Tad, in a fine shot, bags an antelope. "Hooray! Maybe that was a chance shot!" A ducking in ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... to fix upon him as the one to accuse? In a flash he leaped to a startling conclusion. Barry Lapelle! The man who knew all about his thievish transactions and who for months had profited by them. Hides, wool, fresh meats from the secret lairs and slaughter pens back in the trackless wilds, all these had gone down the river on Barry's boats, products of a far-reaching system of outlawry, with Barry and his ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... these simple, effortless movements, the destiny of the ship and all within her was to a large extent controlled. There was something almost sublime, to her imagination, in the ability to "guide the furrowing keel on its way along the trackless deep," as she expressed it to herself; and she determined she would learn ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... that flashes up in the pan mighty strong at first, an' goes out, an' nary mite o' pity in it. But thar' ain't no pity 'ithout love; and it's a love 't ain't no fine-spun thread, but a ten-inch hawser; a love 't stands by ye when thar' 's a trackless path afore and a lost trail ahind; when ye're scuddin' afore the squall, an' the seas come thunderin' down on ye; when yer boat 's in splinters, and ye're a-bitin' the sand. Yis, an' when yer cruisin' 's all done at las', an' ye're jest a poor old hulk around in ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... again came to the shore, and having a pretty distinct view of several parts of the ruinous fabric which was the object of our excursion, we took the distant castle for our guide, and entered upon a trackless sand, which, by the route we pursued, is about two miles and a half over. It is soft and disagreeable travelling in many places; but there is no quicksand. Those, however, who are unacquainted with the road to the Peel of Fouldrey should take a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... I am glad to stand beside you while I tell these women from the other side of the world who has brought them here. This, ladies of Europe, is your great prototype—this the woman who has trodden the trackless fields of the pioneer till the thorns are buried in roses; this, the woman who has lived to hear the hisses turn to dulcet strains of music; the woman who has dared to plead for every good cause under heaven, who ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... when the dreadful storms peculiar to these regions suddenly come on, and form an insurmountable barrier, or sweep away or bury the unfortunate traveller. Should he escape these dangers, the path is now become trackless, and he wanders amid the dreary solitudes until night overtakes him; and then, when he pauses from fatigue or uncertainty with regard to the path he should pursue, his limbs are speedily benumbed. Fatal slumbers, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... all transport was left behind. But that is not strictly true: a large quantity of transport was brought on by the Union Forces; passed through the deepest sand in waterless desert, between gorges, over big kopjes, into almost trackless bushveld—and was never more than a day and a half behind. At one place out of a convoy of ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen, above the illimitable plain, 385 Morning on night and night on morning rise, Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea, Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves So long have mingled with the gusty wind ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... nearly starved to death. They stayed at Fort Enterprise; but, long before the spring returned, they found their food was all but finished, and the nearest place to get more was five hundred miles away, over a trackless desert of snow. One of their number, however, tramped the whole weary way, and brought back food to his ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... cattle. The trees stood so thick, and the place was so overgrown with underwood, that we could not see three yards before us, we therefore were obliged to keep continually hallooing to each other, to prevent our being separately lost in this trackless wilderness. As the weather was intolerably hot, we had nothing on besides our shoes, except our shirts and trowsers, and these were in a very short time torn all to rags by the bushes and brambles; at last however, with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... they passed over the trackless ocean, and saw day by day the great billows rolling between them and the mysterious horizon, the sailors were again filled with dread. They lacked the courage to sail onward into the unknown distance. The compass began to vacillate, and no longer pointed toward the north; ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern charcoal-burner with interest. He ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... their girths, and turned them loose on the desert, that they might find their way back to some happier dwelling place. Then, taking some provision from their saddle-bags, they placed it on their shoulders, and casting aside their heavy riding boots they plunged like two courageous swimmers into the trackless waste. ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... The solemn trackless woods are fair, And bright their summer dress; But their still hush—their whisprings vague, My heart seem to oppress; And 'neath their shadow could I sit, And think the livelong day On my country's fields and hedges green, Gemmed ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... holding of the "fickle wind" the only chance of their escape from perishing in the wilderness of waters. By the one, the feeling excited is supremely that of man's power. By the other, of his utter helplessness. To the one, the expanse of ocean could scarcely be considered "trackless." To the other, it was a ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove—her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... shelves and rocks we have struck upon is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men who have their own little bark or that of others to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to the haven of ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... gaze about them in despair at the wilderness of jungle that closed about them on every side. He saw them cast horrified looks at each other at the situation in which they found themselves—lost in the trackless ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... sand upon this station, yet are we allowed, to voice our desires, being mouth-pieces of Fate. Nay! wait one moment until I make clear the way, so that you may not put down your beautiful feet blindly upon a trackless waste of doubt and mistrust. If you come with me to-night, you come alone. I have no woman in my desert home, excepting one old hunchback slave, a withered bough but faithful. No woman has set foot within the belt of palms surrounding my house, and without ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... the happy shore? 'Tis not an earthly pilot that can steer So frail a bark through such a stormy tide. Cannot the eye of faith look up and see The clouds of sorrow part—the day-star rise Above life's trackless ocean, shedding light Upon the darkened nations? From its beams The mist of error flies, the angry waves Of passion, which so long have vexed the world, Are hushed to rest; controlled by Him who rose From tranquil sleep, ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... is the magnetic attraction of the heart toward Truth and Virtue. The needle, imbued with this mystic property, and pointing unerringly to the north, carries the mariner safely over the trackless ocean, through storm and darkness, until his glad eyes behold the beneficent beacons that welcome him to safe and hospitable harbor. Then the hearts of those who love him are gladdened, and his home made happy; and this gladness and happiness are due to the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that he has also written a number of books of travel, plays, musical comedies and one cook-book. The background of this picture shows the densely matted bush of the Filbert Islands in their interior portion, a jungle growth which might well baffle any but the most skillful threader of the trackless wilds. The gun carried by Dr. Traprock is a museum-piece, having been presented to the author's great-grandfather by Israel Putnam immediately after the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga. Thanks to constant upkeep it is in as good condition as ever. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... love's magic change the scene, To trackless lands unknown, 'Twere Eden in the desert wild, Wi' him ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... trips out of the eight, one hundred and thirty miles of sun-baked, crab-holed, practically trackless plains, no sign of human habitation anywhere, cracks that would swallow a man—"hardly enough wood to boil a quart pot," the Fizzer says, and a sun-temperature hovering about 160 degrees (there is no shade-temperature on the Downs); shadeless, trackless, sun-baked, crab-holed plains, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... ankles in spotless white, their black boots looking blacker by comparison, they proceeded in the general direction of the distant village, with the order and decorum of sea lords descending on a dockyard for inspection purposes. The trackless sand proved hot and sharp; the dog proved in poor condition from the voyage and the morning's incidental martyrdom, and Byng was generous-hearted. He picked up the dog and carried him; and Scamp displayed his ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... pulled their horse's head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... detailed in General Howard's book. He tells us that he waited six days for the arrival of men from various forts in his department, then followed Joseph with six hundred soldiers, beside a large number of citizen volunteers and his Indian scouts. As it was evident they had a long chase over trackless wilderness in prospect, he discarded his supply wagons and took pack mules instead. But by this time the Indians had ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... people. Ethelyn was never forgotten, whether in the capitol, or the street, or at home, or awake, or asleep. Ethie's face and Ethie's form were everywhere, and if earnest, longing thoughts could have availed to bring her back, she would have come, whether across the rolling sea, or afar from the trackless desert. But they could not reach her, Ethie did not come, and the term of Richard's governorship glided away, and he declined a re-election, and went back to Olney, looking ten years older than when he left it, with an habitual expression of sadness on his face, which even strangers noticed, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... all at rest; to have nothing in common with the slumbering world around, not even sleep, Heaven's gift to all its creatures, and be akin to nothing but despair; to feel, by the wretched contrast with everything on every hand, more utterly alone and cast away than in a trackless desert; this is a kind of suffering, on which the rivers of great cities close full many a time, and which the solitude in crowds ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... which we see, as in a parable, how inward love and faith work out in material beauty. Huge timbers of pine and sycamore, hewn on Palomar, the Mountain of Doves, many miles away, had been hauled by oxen over trackless hill and valley, to form the joists and rafters that one sees to-day, after the lapse of more than a century, firm and serviceable, fastened with wooden ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... latter suggested much and minute advice respecting the youth's journey through the trackless forest. Upon this subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as if he were sending Reuben to the battle or the chase while he himself remained secure at home, and not as if the human countenance that was about to leave him were the last he would ever behold. But his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the mercantile navy of Britain was better qualified than he to take his ship across the trackless main, and, if need be, carry her safely into port; but seamanship and knowledge of channels and bars and currents avail nothing when the sails and cordage of a ship are unseaworthy ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... much of the wonders and glories of the world, vasty deserts, trackless forests, stupendous mountains, mighty rivers, and yet—and yet what more wonderful than this little island of ours, what more tenderly beautiful than our green, English countryside? The thunderous roar of plunging cataracts, the cloud-capped ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... George has gone from me, Far away o'er the trackless sea. His gladdening voice I hear not now, I see not the light of his sunny brow. My cheeks with lonely tears are wet; But go where he will he will love me yet. O Thou whose blessings the heart enlarge, Keep from all ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... to urge them forward on their perilous and dreary enterprise? What surrounding circumstances encouraged them to face unknown dangers? He should think that many a wearisome day and night in crossing the arid, trackless desert-path he was traversing, he would, on laying down his head to rest, say, "Would for bedtime in Perth, and all well!" Nothing daunted, however, by perils, privations, and difficulties, he carried his enterprise successfully through; ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... superstitious terror. His right hand was laid upon his hip in close proximity to a pistol-pocket, and Persimmon Sneed remembered suddenly that his own pistol was in its holster on his saddle, he could not say how far distant in these wild, trackless woods, and that this man was a notorious offender against the law, sundry warrants for his arrest for horse-stealing having been issued at divers times and places. There had been much talk of an organized band who had assisted ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... he stated finally. "In our ship, the Nomad, we'll guide you across the trackless wastes of the heavens. We'll take you to our capital cities; point out to you the richest of the industrial centers. We have no love for our own worlds. Mado and I deserted them for a life of vagabondage amongst the stars. We ask no reward other than that we be permitted ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... quitted the wood, and having descended a deep ravine, we climbed a barren moor, over which we had proceeded half way, when to my unutterable joy, we discovered the far-off fane of Rievaulx, whose wan towers just peered from out of the hanging woods. Pursuing our way we soon exchanged the trackless moor for a much more grateful domain. A sloping wood on each side of us opened into a wider expanse, and the turrets of Byland abbey appeared in the distance. At this moment we forgot the toil of threading harassing woods and crossing wide heaths. After refreshing ourselves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... me like that star I have often watched in the long hours of the night, which has shown me the way on many a trackless sea. I know I am as far beneath you as I am beneath that star. But though the distance is great, my love can bridge it, if you will let me try. Katharine—won't you answer me, Katharine? Is there nothing you can say to me? ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... light of History, universal peace appears less as a dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... point the borders of Gruenewald descend somewhat steeply, here and there breaking into crags; and this shaggy and trackless country stands in a bold contrast to the cultivated plain below. It was traversed at that period by two roads alone; one, the imperial highway, bound to Brandenau in Gerolstein, descended the slope obliquely and by the easiest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day they should have kept, Lost unheeded and lost unwept; Lost in a way that made search vain, Lost in a trackless and boundless main; Lost like the day of Job's awful curse, In his third chapter, third and fourth verse; Wrecked was their patron's only day,— What would the holy ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... endeavored to allay her fears, although conscious of the peril they were in. The horse was plodding its way through the snow-drifts and it was evident that the animal would soon become exhausted. The blizzard might last all night, or it might continue for three days. On those trackless wastes in such a storm death by freezing was almost certain, unless they reached a place of shelter. The hours dragged by. He kept up an incessant talking with Annie, lest she should fall into the fatal sleep. The girl was quick to perceive his tender care, and in full apprehension of their danger, ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... with a flick of the rawhide, he angled off across the trackless prairie. One panic-stricken look at the black, tar-papered shack, standing alone in that barren expanse, and the last spark of our dwindling enthusiasm for homesteading was snuffed out. The house, which had seemed such an extraordinary stroke of ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... that do desire Hazard of trackless ways, In with content to wait their watch And warm before ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Sword been given, Hard are the palms with the kiss of the hilt; Through the trackless waste hath the road been riven For the blade to seek to ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Beneath thee is the boundless earth, above thee is the boundless heaven, an iron soil and brazen sky. Speed, swiftly speed, thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Ah! dost thou deem these ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... After 1873 the varied applications of electricity to industry and communication gave a new direction to investment. After 1893, with every preceding activity stimulated and extended, there came the first successful construction of a trackless engine—the motor-car—and the rebuilding of the physical plants of cities, railways, and suburban residences. The recovery of confidence came after 1896, and before the end of the century speculation ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... had at last decided to recapture its forsaken role of the Snow King. For two days and as many nights the air had been one swirl of snow which shut out earth and sky. But on the third morning the Hill woke to a dazzling world of cloudless blue and trackless white. A resplendent bride-like day it was and fitly so for before sundown the old House on the Hill was to know another bride. Elinor Ruth Farringdon's affairs required her immediate attention in Australia and she was leaving to-night for that far away island which was again ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... was nothing more to say, he kissed his mother and bade his grandfather good-by, and went out of Troezen towards the trackless coastland which lay to the west and north. And with blessings and tears the king and AEthra followed him to the city gates, and watched him until his tall form was lost to sight among the trees which bordered the shore of ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... with aimless, trackless skill Is twin'd a mazy chain, In the warm foldings of a heart, ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... and trackless forests was very difficult, and we often went astray. One day when I was alone with a child who served me in the capacity of guide, we were greatly puzzled. We wished to find a little hut that we had built in the woods in which to sleep; nightfall was ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... the way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking back, but through tears, and with a reverence and tenderness far ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a man must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and prejudices one by one, and conscious ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... other lands; Of ever-boiling fountains, Of poisonous lakes, and barren sands, Vast forests, trackless mountains; I painted bright Italian skies, I lauded Persian roses, Coined similes for Spanish eyes, And jests for Indian noses; I laughed at Lisbon's love of mass, And Vienna's dread of treason; And Laura asked me where the glass Stood at ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... character, the thoughts and feelings, the sentiments, the principles and the faith, and even the modes of life, that prevail among uncivilized aborigines living in forests, or roaming wildly over uninclosed and trackless plains. Of those who have the opportunity to observe them, accordingly, some extol, in the highest degree, their rude but charming simplicity, their truth and faithfulness, the strength of their filial and conjugal affection, and their superiority ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... stated that in foggy weather birds often hurl themselves against the headlight and frequently their bodies are later picked up from the engine platform beneath. Birds seem rarely to lose their sense of direction, and they pursue their way for hundreds of miles across the trackless ocean. Terns, Gulls, and Murres are known to go many miles in quest of food for their young and return through dense fogs with ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... road, as they both knew, was indeed no more than a horse path cut through the trackless forest which lay across the States of Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky. Its reputation was not good. Many a trader passing north from New Orleans with coin, many a settler passing west with packhorses and household effects, had disappeared on this wilderness road, and left ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... when they reached it, struck chill even to Rachael's heart. In the clear tunnels of light flung from the car lamps it seemed all a moving level of restless water smitten under sheets of rain. Anything more desperate than an effort to find the little belt of safety in this trackless spread of merciless seas it would be hard to imagine. At an ordinary high tide the Bar was but a few inches above the sea; now, with a wind blowing, a heavy rain falling, and the tide almost at the full, no road whatever was visible. It ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... and despatch-bearing through the trackless wilderness had aged me. I prided myself I was an old man in worldly wisdom. Patsy Dale had only added three years to her young life. I could even feel much at ease in meeting Ericus Dale. And yet there had ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Indian wigwam were described by Cooper with a fidelity and picturesqueness which will always give to his works a national value. Now that farms and manufacturing towns cover what a century ago was a trackless wilderness, where backwoodsmen and Indians shot bear and deer, it would be almost impossible for us to realize the previous condition of our now populous country were it not for the novels of Cooper. And this great writer ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... rougher, stronger companion—man; first on the voyage across a stormy ocean, from England to America; then at Plymouth, and Jamestown, and all the settlements first planted by Europeans on our Coast; then through the trackless wilderness, onward across the continent, till every river has been forded, and every chain of mountains has been scaled, the Peaceful Ocean has been reached, and fifty thousand cities, towns, and hamlets all over the land have been formed from those aggregations of household life ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... had stepped as lightly as possible, bringing his feet softly but squarely down on the ground, after the fashion of the American Indian, when threading his way through the trackless forest. He now used the utmost care in leaving the trail, for none knew better than he the amazing keenness of the dark eyes that were liable to scan the ground over which ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... himself, Owen could find nothing more explicit to say than that the colour of the desert was the colour of emptiness, and they sat down trying to talk of falconry. But it was impossible to talk in front of this trackless plain, cela coupe la parole, flowing away to the south, to the west, to the east, ending— it was impossible to imagine it ending anywhere, no more than we can imagine the ends of the sky; and the desert conveyed the same impression ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... persons of my fellow-travellers, and found them uniformly uninteresting. My mind wandered from them out of the window, and I noted with a casual eye the advance civilization was making on both sides of the track. I began wandering vaguely from that back to the time when this was a trackless wilderness; and I pictured to myself the advent of the white man, and so on in an aimless sort of a way, from the beginning of our country until I reached the Declaration of Independence, the terms of which have always remained vividly impressed ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... bowers of Paradise That desolate region, overgrown with thorn And thistle rank—a trackless waste forlorn, Unblessed by God, o'erarched by sullen skies, There stand that guilty pair, now sadly wise, Their hearts with grief, their feet with briers torn, Vainly their faded innocence they mourn, And toward the gates of Eden turn their eyes. No more to see the beauty ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... of the roses of India. It satisfied and satiated with its rich potency. And breathing this odor and gazing into its deep wells of color, you had strange dreams of those other pilgrims who left home and friends, and journeyed through the perils of a trackless wilderness to plant still farther ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... she fell asleep, and I crept to my bed, but I could not sleep. I must act. At last, I made a decision. I was strong and fearless, and father had no food or light or supplies, out there alone in the trackless wilderness. I stole to my mother's side and she roused at my ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... snow-clad mountain called Lekakisera, which has never, to the best of my belief, been visited before by a European, but which I cannot now stop to describe. There we rested a fortnight, and then started out into the trackless and uninhabited forest of a vast district called Elgumi. In this forest alone there are more elephants than I ever met with or heard of before. The mighty mammals literally swarm there entirely unmolested by man, and only kept down by the natural law that prevents any animals ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... but this would not seem reasonable to one who thought his senses showed him that the earth was a flat plain of indefinite extent, and that around the inhabited regions on all sides extended, to vast distances, either desert wastes or trackless oceans. How could that same sun, which plunged into the ocean at a fabulous distance in the west, reappear the next morning at an equally great distance in the east? The old mythology asserted that after ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... deep To dim sea-caves where bright treasures sleep, And dareth with curious quest explore The ancient wonders of Ocean's floor. It fearless roams over Deserts vast, Where destruction rides on the Simoom's blast, And trackless sands have for ages frowned O'er cities in ancient song renowned. It climbs where the dazzling glaciers lie, Changeless and cold, 'neath a glowing sky, And leaves the trace of its triumphs proud Above the regions of ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... drowned. The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination by whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence. Besides, the children's kindred were bound ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... is, visible, or conceivable to thought of man, by which, to her living conscience and errorless pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt afar beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through concealing clouds, and over trackless lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by the finger ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... prisoners. On the next day they crossed to the southern shore, and ascended the River Richelieu as far as the rapids of Chambly, whence they pursued their march on foot among the brambles, rocks, and swamps of the trackless forest. When they reached Lake Champlain, they made new canoes and re-embarked, landed at its southern extremity six days afterwards, and thence made for the Upper Hudson. Here they found a fishing ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Millicent and Blake sat in the sunshine on the slope of the hill. Beneath them a wide landscape stretched away toward the Ottawa valley, the road to the lonely North, and the girl felt a longing to see the trackless wilds. The ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... as comfortable standing on the topmost window ledge of the Flat Iron building, in New York. And, to Nucky, there was no trail! Only a narrow, corkscrew shelf, deep banked with snow into which the mules set their small feet gingerly. For many minutes, the boy saw only this trackless ledge, and the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... in second infancy, Rise in some distant clime, and then, perchance, Some bold adventurer, fill'd with golden dreams, Steering his bark through trackless solitudes, Where, to his wandering thoughts, no daring prow Hath ever ploughed before,—espies the cliffs Of fallen Albion.—To the land unknown He journeys joyful; and perhaps descries Some vestige of her ancient stateliness: Then he, with vain ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... we reached the rock where we had parted with the guide, and looked around us into the dense, trackless woods with many misgivings. To strike out now on our own hook, where the way was so blind and after the experience we had just had, was a step not to be carelessly taken. The tops of these mountains are so broad, and a short distance in the woods seems so far, that one is by no means master ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... overwhelmed with calamity, even as my foolish self for having disregarded my two well-wishers. That fool who, disregarding the way pointed out by the scriptures, seeketh to slay his enemies, falleth off from the path of righteousness and is lost in the trackless wilderness of sin. One should not cast weapons upon kine, Brahmanas, kings, women, friends, one's own mother, one's own preceptor, a weak man, an idiot, a blind man, a sleeping man, a terrified man, one just arisen from ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... rustle of the soft night wind beyond the open door of the cave that was my habitation and the far-off, never-ceasing murmur that was the voice of those great waters that hemmed me in,—a desolate ocean where no ships ever sailed, a trackless waste that stretched away ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... on weeping without exactly knowing why she wept. Throughout the long and fatiguing journey she had maintained unflinching energy and perseverance,—undaunted by storm, sleet, and darkness, she had driven steadily over long miles of trackless snow—her instinct had guided her by the shortest and quickest routes—she seemed to know every station and village on the way,—she always managed to obtain relays of reindeer just when they were needed,—in short, Errington would hardly have been able to reach the Altenfjord ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... traversing a distance of 91,000,000 miles, can, by falling upon the retina, and acting as a stimulus, not only produce a contraction of the pupil, but excite thoughts which analyze that ray, instantly spanning the infinitude of trackless space! The same penetrative faculties, with equal facility, can quickly and surely discern the morbid symptoms of body and mind, become familiar with the indications of disease, and classify them scientifically among the phenomena of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... fire. At forty they always spoke of the house and farm as "my mother's, Mistress Boyer's," and meekly obeyed the old woman as she ordered them about with a sharp tongue. The instinct of kinship was as strong in them as in the old Jews. They would strike a bee-line for each other through the trackless wilderness when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... between the regions of Hela and the upper world. Well the guard of the bridge knew, when she heard on the bridge the noise of the horse's feet, that it was no shade who was crossing; but when Hermod told his errand, he was allowed to go on. And now his way led over trackless, slippery ice, on which scarce any other horse could have kept his footing; and surely no other horse could have leapt, as did Sleipnir, the gate to Hela's own realm. Once within, Hermod came rapidly into the presence of the queen, and on his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... against the emperor Thou wagest with the emperor's own army? O God of heaven! what a change is this. Beseems it me to offer such persuasion To thee, who like the fixed star of the pole Wert all I gazed at on life's trackless ocean? O! what a rent thou makest in my heart! The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obediency, Must I pluck life asunder from thy name? Nay, do not turn thy countenance upon me— It ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... highest water-level, we may well believe their constitution is somewhat different from those that are reared on ordinary ground. The Indians are wonderfully expert in finding their way among the trackless mazes of the Gapo, being guided by the broken twigs and scraped bark that indicate the ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... lonely brooks on rainy days Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, In size a giant, stalking through thick fog, His sheep like Greenland bears, or as he stepped Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, His form hath flashed upon me, glorified ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... like Glorious Milton had been known To Lands which Conquest has insur'd our Own. Milton! whose Muse Kisses th' embroider'd Skies, While Earth below grows little, as She Flies. Thro' trackless Air she bends her winding Flight, Far as the Confines of retreating Light. Tells the sindg'd Moor, how scepter'd Death began His Lengthning Empire o'er offending Man. Unteaches conquer'd Nations to Rebel, By Singing ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... in that dim domain of chaos, thy creation, fleeting, invisible, and unembodied, is in perpetual, flow; changeful as the play of clouds, yet stable as the eternal laws by which they form their misty towers, their glittering fanes, and foam-crested pinnacles! Trackless as the wind, yet as powerful, thy sweet spirit, Music, floats wherever beats the human heart, for Rhythm rocks the core of life. Music nerves the soul with strength or dissolves it in love; she idealizes Pain into soul-touching Beauty; assuming all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... vicinity of which he had often hunted. In a forest of which he knew nothing, he would be quite as much at a loss as a European. Thus it is, I am convinced, with all the wonderful accounts of Indians finding their way through trackless forests to definite points; they may never have passed straight between the two particular points before, but they are well acquainted with the vicinity of both, and have such a general knowledge of the whole country, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... joined in the outbreak at the agency and lost their leader, half a score of mad-brained young warriors, scores of their best war ponies, but, what was of most consequence, had burned up the whole store of agency provisions and, with their squaws and children, were now lurking among the trackless Bad Lands to the north, outcasts upon the face of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... there (Amid the brazen cymbal's hollow ring) And aged priests the solemn feast prepare; To her their nightly orisons they sing; That she may look from her high throne, and guide The wandering bark secure along the trackless tide. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the robe which wraps his form, And tall his plume of gory red; His voice is like the rising storm, But light and trackless is his tread. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Israel" using some nautical language, such as old Pirate Wilkes had made but too familiar to their ears. But they never caught him, for Israel's "yea" remained "yea" and his "nay" "nay," even when navigating donkeys over the trackless waste of Killantringan Common. But in revenge, every now and then, Israel would get hold of a village lad and lead him triumphantly to his meeting, whence he would not come forth till, as like as not, "he had ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Holy Spirit. It is in the story of a most remarkable journey from Egypt to the border line of Palestine. The journey was remarkable for two things. First, for the sort of country it was through. It is a trackless waste of sand, that spreads over thousands of square miles. It was infested with venomous serpents and scorpions, and is described as "all that great and terrible wilderness," "a waste howling wilderness," and "a land ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... soil is rich and the climate soft, the hills are low and safe;[52] as the ground becomes poorer and the air keener, they rise into forms of more peril and pride; and their utmost terror is shown only where their fragments fall on trackless ice, and the thunder of their ruin can be heard but by ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... now none to give; but perhaps some day you will love me as devotedly, nay, as madly, as I have long loved you; for love like mine would wake affection even in a marble image; but then rolling oceans and trackless deserts will divide us. And now, good-by. Make yourself a name; bind your aching brow with the chaplet of fame, and see if ambition can fill your heart. Good-by, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... we do in the midst of rivers, water in all its forms, except indeed that of the trackless and mighty ocean, is familiar to our little inland county. The slow majestic Thames, the swift and wandering Kennett, the clear and brimming Loddon, all lend life and verdure to our rich and fertile valleys. Of the great river of England—whose ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... sparkled on a altar like the emerald and gold winged butterflies flutterin' round that sacred hant, amongst the wild flowers that blossomed even up to the door. And it seemed as if the soul could soar up easier somehow when you could look right into the blue mystery of the sky, the trackless path that souls mount up on in prayer and praise. Somehow plaster and mortar seem more confinin'. Though I d'no as it really makes any difference. Heaven is over all, and the soul's wings can pierce the heaviest ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range,—its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers, and trackless plains,—that is to my mind wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring; fitted to grapple with difficulties ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... friends, and hers; between them and that wandering tribe of the totem people on the Kwadocha there were no human beings. Nothing but the unbroken peace of the mountains, in which they were safe. He had ceased to fear their immensity—was no longer disturbed by the thought that in their vast and trackless solitude he might lose himself forever. After what had passed, their gleaming peaks were beckoning to him, and he was confident that he could find his way back to the Finley and down to Hudson's Hope. What a surprise it would be to Father Roland when they dropped in on him ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... spirits trackless come and go"—is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... in which his clouded reputation had stopped the way to his advancement in the English Secret Service, he remembered, even at the last, that a few letters were due to those who still watched his little flickering light on its way over the trackless sea of life. For hard-hearted as he was,—benumbed by the blows of fate, his heart calloused with the snapping of cords and ties which once had closely bound him—there were yet loosely knit bonds of the past which tinged with the glow of his dying passions—the unforgotten ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the water, and, hard by though he was, he seemed very far away. And as when a bearded lion, a ravening lion on the hills, hears the bleating of a fawn afar off, and rushes forth from his lair to seize it, his readiest meal, even so the mighty Heracles, in longing for the lad, sped through the trackless briars, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... upon the wide, open prairie, the trackless plain of sand, the frozen lake, the thin scattering woods of the North, or the treeless snow-clad "Barrens." Now we are about to enter a great forest,—a forest where the leaves never fade, where the flowers are always in bloom,—a forest where the woodman's ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... prairie, tipping the swells with gleams of brightness, and leaving the interval land in deep shadow. Accustomed to scenes of solitude like the present, the old man, as he left the encampment, proceeded alone into the waste, like a bold vessel leaving its haven to enter on the trackless field of the ocean. He appeared to move for some time without object, or, indeed, without any apparent consciousness, whither his limbs were carrying him. At length, on reaching the rise of one of the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... afforded, and throwing aside all my ammunition, papers, etc., started with him in search of water, carrying nothing but my double-barrelled gun. We proceeded towards the sea. As the natives have the faculty, even in the trackless woods which they have never before been in, of returning direct to any spot they have left by however circuitous a course they may have travelled after quitting it, I paid no attention to the direction we were moving in ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... old, it may be so, when there is only a little way to go, and they will then be gathered to their fathers. But half-way through the long journey—with all the graves behind, and the dreary stretch of trackless heath before—Speak ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... awaken his countrymen to the peril into which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every tongue. The story is a familiar one of the Boston clergyman ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... guarded wall, Thou saw'st him pass and sail away, To thread the trackless, distant sea. Where rides the good "St. George" to-day. That brings not back my love ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney
... a moment's pause, "like the larger part of the world, is looking at a mirage. She sees these shining pictures on the hot sand of the world and she says: 'These are the real things. I will fix my gaze on them. What does the hot sand and the trackless waste matter so long as I have these beautiful mirages to look at?' When you say that mirages are insubstantial, evanishing, mere tricks of air and eye, the Clarindas retort, 'But if you take away ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... on the horses, one of these boots had fallen down; I saw therefore that it would be necessary to let him and a native go back the next day upon the two horses we had with us for the purpose of finding it. To Europeans it would seem rather a visionary task to travel twelve or fourteen miles in a trackless forest in the hope of recovering a boot, but the natives' eyes are so keen that their finding it amounted to a ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... that I loved so well about my childhood's home? It was the wide and wave-lashed shore, the black rocks crowned with foam! It was the sea-gull's flapping wing, all trackless in its flight, Its screaming note, that welcomed on the fierce and stormy night! The wild heath had its flowers and moss, the forest had its trees, Which, bending to the evening wind, made music in the breeze; But earth,—ha! ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale |
