"Tufa" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and partly also on the east, the crater-wall has been broken down and removed; the portion remaining is about 1-1/2 mile in diameter from east to west, and reaches a height of 2,600 feet above the sea-level. All the upper part of the mountain is composed of a pumiceous tufa, rich in sanidine and of a characteristic greenish colour. At two points, to the west near Forio and to the north between Lacco and Casamicciola, this tufa is seen reaching down to the sea; but, in all other parts, it is covered by streams of trachitic lava, by more ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... dust of the London atmosphere, without, at the same time, impeding the free passage of the atmospheric air. This receiver was about half-filled with ordinary spring-water, and supplied at the bottom with sand and mud, together with loose stones of limestone tufa from Matlock, and of sandstone: these were arranged so that the fish could get below.... A small plant of Vallisneria spiralis was introduced, its roots being inserted in the mud and sand, and covered by one of the loose stones, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches, where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets of gold beneath the dazzling sky. Large hawks circled overhead; in the rare ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nests have sought the skies; But the rude plain beneath the ploughshare's stroke Starts into sudden brightness. For indeed The starved hill-country gravel scarce serves the bees With lowly cassias and with rosemary; Rough tufa and chalk too, by black water-worms Gnawed through and through, proclaim no soils beside So rife with serpent-dainties, or that yield Such winding lairs to lurk in. That again, Which vapoury mist and flitting smoke exhales, Drinks moisture up ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... Cassandra's eyes he suddenly became quite silent and took no further interest in the scenery or in the products of Touraine, until Lydia directed his attention to the curious caves in the low hills that look like chalk cliffs. This white, chalky soil, M. La Tour had explained to us, is hard, much like the tufa used so much for building in Italy. We thought that these caves were only used for storing wine, but our chauffeur told us that most of those which are provided with a door and a window are used as ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa" and "silica" with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to express a modified rapture in their contemplation. I should have remembered enough geology to know that granite is not found in this section, except at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The hills I like are made of old-fashioned stuff, not young upstart tufa and sandstone that was not thought of when the Laurentians were built. One really cannot have much respect for a rock that he can kick to pieces. The gay young buttes in this land of quickly shifting horizons are not without their charm; they look well in certain lights, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... Tupha (Tufa), an officer of Odovacar, who deserted to Theodoric and then betrayed him, 251; lawsuit about his property, confiscated to ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... are found in several cities of Etruria. The amphitheatre of Sutri is considered to be peculiarly Etruscan in its mode of construction. It is cut out of the tufa rock, and was no doubt used by that people for festal representations long before Rome attempted anything of the kind. The Romans copied these edifices from the Etruscans. We have historical evidence, also, that gladiatorial combats ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... to sack; and the Pope was at Orvieto, where the Court was suffering very greatly from want of water. Thereupon, at the wish of the Pontiff, Antonio built in that city a well all of stone, twenty-five braccia wide, with two spiral staircases cut in the tufa, one above the other, following the curve of the well. By these two spiral staircases it is possible to descend to the bottom of the well, insomuch that the animals that go there for water, entering by one door, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... forming lakes, of which the Alban Lake is one of the most remarkable. The plain in which Rome stands, now called the Campagna, is not an unbroken level, but a broad undulating tract, intersected by numerous streams, which have cut themselves deep channels through the soft volcanic tufa of which the soil is composed. The climate of Latium was not healthy even in ancient times. The malaria of the Campagna renders Rome itself unhealthy in the summer and autumn; and the Pontine Marshes, which extend along the coast in the south of Latium for a distance of thirty miles, are ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... around the house, past the gun-room window (locked fast enough now, you may be sure), and up steeply through a hedged, immaculate garden, which witnessed to the ordered quality of the owner's mind. At the upper end, under a wall of volcanic tufa, we came to a summerhouse done in the native style, stilts below, palmite thatch above, and walled on three sides only with hanging screens of bamboo. Striking through this screen from the west, the rose and green of the afterglow showed the woman as in a semi-luminous cavern, seated ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... remain in the vague! She signed to Zelie Forestier—seated on the steps of a side-chapel, yellow-paper-covered novel in hand—to follow her. And, after making a genuflexion before the altar of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, gathered up her turquoise-coloured skirts—the yellow-tufa quarries were not superabundantly clean—and pursued her way towards the great main door. The benevolent priest, charmed by her grace of movement, watched her from his place in the confessional, although another penitent now kneeled within the greasy curtain. Verily the delinquencies ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... excavation in one sense, and the first in another; but to watch the diggers at Pompeii is fascinating, even when there is no reasonable expectation of a find. Herculaneum was buried with lava, or rather with tufa, and it is so very hard that the expense of uncovering of only a small part of that city has ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... p. 340.; Vol. vii., p. 316.).—May I be allowed to inform MR. PINKERTON that the sharks' teeth (fossils), now so frequently found imbedded in this tufa rock, and cheaply sold, are not known as "the tongues of vipers," but, on the contrary, from time immemorial, as the "tongues of St. Paul." In proof of this, I would refer MR. PINKERTON to the following extract, which I have taken from an Italian letter now in the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... their enchanted walls, discovering their pretense, burning away their shadowy glory, baring them for what they were—masses of jumbled rock and splintered spires; rain-gutted wraiths of clay, volcanic rock, the tumbled malpais and the tufa ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... additions in the past two years. Looking down upon the sea from the windows of the villa, one could on calm days easily discern the remains of Roman piers and moles lying below the surface of the transparent water; and the tufa-rock on which the house was built was burrowed with those unintelligible excavations of a classic date so common in the neighbourhood. These subterraneous rooms and passages, while they aroused my curiosity, seemed at the same time so gloomy and repellent ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... the Scipios, by the Porta Latina, was discovered by the brothers Sassi, in May, 1780. It consists of "several chambers excavated in the tufa." One of the larger chambers contained the famous sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, the great-grandfather of Scipio Africanus, which is now in the Vatican in the Atrio Quadrate. When the sarcophagus was opened, in 1780, the skeleton was found to be entire. The bones were collected and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the long ravines of the mountain like rolling thunder. "It's calcareous tufa I'm a-wearing, wove on me by exudation and accretion in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... in Roman constructions are the "lapis ruber" (tufa); the "lapis Albanus" (peperino); the "lapis Gabinus" (sperone); the "lapis Tiburtinus" (travertino); the silex ("selce"); and bricks and tiles of various kinds. The cement was composed of pozzolana and lime. Imported marbles came into fashion toward ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Frascati, near Rome. Unfortunately, strata of ferruginous earth conceal the soil from the researches of the geologist. It is only in some ravines, that we find columnar basalts, somewhat curved, and above them very recent breccia, resembling volcanic tufa. The breccia contain fragments of the same basalts which they cover; and it is asserted that marine petrifactions are observed in them. The same phenomenon occurs in the Vicentin, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of alluvial soil, is wholly composed of volcanic tufa, that is to say, an agglomeration of porous rocks and stones. Before the volcanoes broke out it consisted of trap rocks slowly upraised to the level of the sea by the action of central forces. The internal fires had not yet ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... twenty feet from the level of the byre, and they were standing now in a square chamber cut out of the soft tufa. The lantern cast a flickering light, bright below and dim above, over the cracked brown walls. In every direction were the black openings of passages which radiated ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and, on the other hand, "a voyager not familiar with volcanoes might easily mistake the cloud-bonnet of a peak for the smoke of a volcano." This, however, will not account for Zeno's "hill that vomited fire," for he goes on to describe the use which the monks made of the pumice and calcareous tufa ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... villa of some rich Roman; and it was not until 1748 that prying archaeologists hit on the truth and induced the Government to send a chain gang of convicts to dig away the accumulations of earth and tufa. But if it had been a modern Italian city that was buried, no such mistake in preliminary diagnosis could have occurred. Anybody would have known it instantly by the smell. I do not vouch for the dates—I copied them out of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Bishop Fisher left Rochester never to return, being beheaded on Tower Hill, June 22nd, 1535. The front of the Palace has been coated with rough plaster work dusted over with broken tile, but the rear walls are in their original state, being wholly composed of rag, tufa, and here and there Roman tiles. The cellars are of the most massive construction, and many ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... yellow tufa-rock behind Fort de Kock, forms the first stage of the romantic route to Lake Manindjoe. Crossing the twin rivers which have carved their winding gorge in the bosom of the hills, the rude track through the mountains ascends to smooth plateaux forming a flight of gigantic ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings |
