"Altitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mid-July, and even at an altitude of four thousand feet the sun could scorch at noonday. The lonely man sat at his outlook, gazing down the valley. There was a faint haze abroad, a thickening of the air so apparently slight, and in itself so imperceptible, that he would not have noticed it but for the fact that it blotted out many ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... former journey I had traversed countries of extreme fertility in Central Africa, with a healthy climate favourable for the settlement of Europeans, at a mean altitude of 4,000 feet above the sea level. This large and almost boundless extent of country was well peopled by a race who only required the protection of a strong but paternal government to become of considerable importance, ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the north, and trade-wind weather. Morning, a few rain-squalls, clearing, but with passing clouds, as the sun gained altitude. Afternoon heavy, overcast sky, with half a gale of wind. At 2.50 P.M. descried a sail on the starboard-quarter, bearing about S.E. Got up steam and gave chase, and at 5 P.M. came up with her. Fired a blank cartridge and spoke a Prussian ship, which I caused to heave-to for ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... varies with altitude; cold, cloudy, rainy/snowy winters; cool to warm, cloudy, humid summers with ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... coastal plain irregularly back to the mountains, and is thought to be much narrower on the eastern coast than on the western — in fact, it may be quite absent on the eastern. It is the remains of a tilted plain sloping seaward from an altitude of about 1,000 feet to one of, say, 100 feet, and its hilly nature is due to erosion. These hills are generally covered only with grasses; the sheltered moister places often produce rank growths of tall, coarse cogon ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... interposed the Captain, waking up and taking a guess at the sun's altitude in the grey heavens. "We're late this morning: better march 'em up to the ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... visits, as I feared him greatly, and with good reason. On one of these visits, when quite a child, I persuaded my father's groom to let me mount his saddle-horse, which I remember as a gray animal of what seemed a prodigious altitude. The man put me on the horse's back, and being entirely destitute of common-sense or prudence, actually gave me a whip and left the bridle to me. I applied the whip vigorously, and was very soon thrown off and carried back ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... carriage. The three determining factors in the problem of temperature are the desert, the ocean, and the mountains. Thus, in midsummer, although it may be fiercely hot in the inland valleys, it is invariably cool in the mountains on account of their altitude, and near the shore because the hot air rising from the desert invites a daily ocean breeze. Even at a distance from the comfortable coast, humanity never passes into that abject, panting, and perspiring condition in which the inhabitants of the Eastern States are usually seen ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... straight course and knew exactly where he was by a glance at his barometer. At six thousand feet he was behind the British lines at the Bois de Colbert, at seven thousand feet he should be over Nivelle-Ancre and should turn so that he reached his proper altitude at a point one mile behind the fire trenches and somewhere in the region of ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... slave, in such sort as that the one half of his body was black and the other white, not in partition of breadth by the diaphragma, as was that woman consecrated to the Indian Venus whom the Tyanean philosopher did see between the river Hydaspes and Mount Caucasus, but in a perpendicular dimension of altitude; which were things never before that seen in Egypt. He expected by the show of these novelties to win the love of the people. But what happened thereupon? At the production of the camel they were all affrighted, and offended at the sight of the party-coloured man—some scoffed at him as a ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... memorable lecture, if any very lofty altitude had to be ascended in conversational excursions, the aspirant invariably smiled with ineffable tenderness and lightly scaled the height, murmuring "than ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... nearly all the way from Copperopolis to Angel's Camp, but mostly you are in the pine woods. My spirits rose with the altitude and delight at the magnificent view when I at last reached the summit. Toiling up the grade in the dust, I met a good old-fashioned four-horse Concord stage, which from all appearances might have been in action ever since the days of Bret ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... a hill, however insignificant its altitude, is always an inspiring vantage point from which to survey the surrounding world. There is a briskness of atmosphere on a hilltop which is inspiriting to the most jaded of faculties; there is a sparkling vitality in the breath of the morning air which must ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... Newtown and Llanidloes, and in bringing the Oswestry and Newtown line to completion. Instead of meandering, more or less, along river-side lowlands, the track had to be carried uphill and down-dale over the shoulder of the Montgomeryshire highlands, ascending to an altitude of 693 feet above sea level at Talerddig top by a climb of 273 feet from Caersws, and running down again by a 645 feet drop to the Dovey Valley at Machynlleth. This involved a gradient, at one point, of as much as 1 in 52, and, just ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... built himself a smaller airship, or, rather, monoplane, named the BUTTERFLY. In it he made several successful trips about the country, and gave exhibitions at numerous aviation meets; once winning a valuable prize for an altitude flight. In one trip he had met with a slight accident, and the monoplane had only just been repaired after this when he received the message summoning ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... Plynlimmon to which I was bound is the third in Wales for altitude, being only inferior to Snowdon and Cadair Idris. Its proper name is Pum, or Pump, Lumon, signifying the five points, because towards the upper part it is divided into five hills or points. Plynlimmon is a celebrated hill on many accounts. ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward "persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his English Traits and Representative Men and in his memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... some of the robins appeared to be ignorant of the precise whereabouts of the roost; they flew past it at first, and then, after more or less circling about, with loud cackling, dived hurriedly into the wood. I took special note of one fellow, who came from the south at a great altitude, and went directly over the wood. When he was well past it he suddenly pulled himself up, as if fancying he had caught a signal. After a moment of hesitation he proceeded on his northerly course, but had not gone far ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... favourable to the growth of cereals, that it yields usually two hundredfold, and in places of exceptional fertility three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley have a width of four digits. As for the millet and sesame, which in altitude are as great as trees, I will not state their height, although I know it from experience, being convinced that those who have not lived in Babylonia would regard my statement with incredulity." Herodotus in his enthusiasm ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... if he hasn't the papers on his clothes then you have this pleasant scheme for kidnapping him, getting him down to your steamer at Baltimore and cruising with him until he is ready to come to terms. The American air has done much for your imagination, my dear Jules; or possibly the altitude of the hills has ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... of the pistol had died out, the yellow-winged Dragonfly soared upward from Paul's hand and darted like a streak across the red tape, clearing it at the highest altitude yet achieved by any ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... is in the domain of the literary essay that this authoress rose to loftiest altitude. Of wide and profound reading, and of keen and discriminating mind, Mrs. Cole presented in a style of admirable grace and lucidity her reactions to the best works of numerous standard authors, ancient and modern, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is largely marked by altitude. The city, lying in the lap of the hills and looking a little down upon the valley—plebeian business together with those who do the work of Fairlands occupies the lowest levels in the corporate limits. The ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... observing the altitude of the sun, looked at the clock and saw that the time was a few ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was to burn these stumps—an occupation I always enjoyed because the adventure of it made play of the work. The climate was severe in winter, the mercury often dropping to 30 deg. below, though we then had no thermometer to measure it, and the summers, at an altitude of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious. The soil was fairly good, though encumbered with the laminated rock and stones of the Catskill formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and transported about. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... especially in view of the place where I had found it, that this certainly was an arbalest—called also a Jacob's staff and a cross-staff—such as in no very ancient times, until the invention of the quadrant, was used by Europeans in taking the meridional altitude of the sun ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... been heard to remark that if Caspar had made the tombstone, the lady under it would have tried harder than ever to get to heaven. To Stanwell's present mood, however, there was something more than usually irritating in the gratuitous assumption that Arran had only to derogate from his altitude to have a press of ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Howells provided Sellers with a pair of wings, which Sellers declared would enable him to float around in any altitude where the flames might break out. The extinguisher, was not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with Greek fire, on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be inoculated with Greek ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... generally set in at some time in the month of June; and if they catch the ship in the port, it cannot sail until that first monsoon passes. That usually lasts fifteen or twenty days, or one month. If they are caught outside during this weather, they can sail until they reach the district and altitude where they find the usual winds, with which they can make their said voyage easily. Consequently, they will pass Japon, which is the point where all the difficulties of the said voyage lie, with good weather. If the said monsoon ceases, and the ships are caught ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... yesterday I was looking for the heads of my strapping cousins at the bottom button of their well-filled waistcoats, and, before Jack's arrival, meant to do a paternal and patriarchal 'pat' on his, at somewhere about that altitude; a ceremony he must excuse, as the little lad of my mind has thought proper to expand into a young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... this, sir. Jerry Ogden's one of those long-faced gentlemen as turns up their eyes and their noses at us poor miserable sinners as takes a little beer to our dinners. Ah! to hear him talk you'd have fancied he was too good to breathe in the same altitude with such as me. Such lots of good advice he has for us heathens, such sighing and groaning over us poor deluded drinkers of allegorical liquors. Ah! but he's a tidy little cask of his own hid snug out of the way. It's just the case ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... down off the ridge into a valley and then up to higher altitude, where the character of the forest changed. The trees were no longer pines, but firs and spruce, growing thin and exceedingly tall, with few branches below the topmost foliage. So dense was this forest that ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... great requirements of humanity and of civilization. The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which the best specimens prefigure as the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... make it clear that no simple panacea can be applied to the drought problem in the whole of the drought area. Plans must depend on local conditions, for these vary with annual rainfall, soil characteristics, altitude and topography. Water and soil conservation methods may differ in one county from those in an adjoining county. Work to be done in the cattle and sheep country differs in type from work in the wheat country or work in the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... Jacko's eyes and eyebrows! the former were dilated to their utmost capacity, while the latter were elevated to their highest altitude. The professor's eyebrows were knotted together, and his eyes sought the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... should be immediately placed under new conditions, both as to feed and surroundings. If the horse has been stable fed, it is advisable to turn it out on grass for two or three months, preferably in a higher altitude. If the disease has been contracted while running on pasture, place the animal in the stable or corral. In the early stages of the disease beneficial results have followed the supplemental use of lime given in the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... rose to reconnaissance, or to lie in wait as a falcon to pounce upon an invading German plane. Thus the sky was policed by flight against prying aerial eyes. If one German plane could descend to an altitude of a thousand feet, its photographs would reveal the location of a hundred batteries to German gunners and show the plan of concentration clearly enough to leave no doubt of the line of attack; but the anti-aircraft guns, plentiful now as other British material, would have caught it going, if ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... lower one C having rotary motion upon the saddle, resting upon the sill of the window in order to direct the rays of the sun upon the reflector B, at any hour of the day—the vertical motion of the reflector C being necessary, the sun varying in altitude so much during the hours most favorable to the production of portraits. The reflector C was {193} kept up to the required position by the handle lever, upright post and bolts. Reflector B was hinged at its upper end at the top of the window frame, ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... daylight, had proved to be six stories high, the same as ever. I could find, with all my architectural experience, no room in its altitude for those interminable stairways, no width between its walls for that long corridor, where I had tramped at night. And there was yet a greater difficulty. I had read somewhere an aphorism that everything may be false to itself save human nature. A house ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... front; still, I felt that something was wrong. Equally as impressive was the mild diet of cold bread, milk, and weak-looking tea. The effect was the same as that produced by a sudden transition from a low to a high altitude, or vice versa, requiring time for adaptation, as I soon experienced. My fifteen days' leave of absence having expired, I returned ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe—the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me. I need not search for them, and vaguely guess concerning them, as if they were veiled in darkness or hidden in the infinite altitude. I see them before me, and link them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the spot I occupy in the outer world of sense, and enlarges my connection with it to a boundless extent with worlds ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Arctic zone in a sledge-journey of seventy miles. The indomitable old traveller pushed on until he reached a small lumber-village named Pajala. On the night of June 23, 1871, crossing the river with a small party of Swedes and Finns, he ascended Mount Avasaxa, in Finland. At this altitude, he says, "the sky happened to be clear in the direction of the sun, and he shone in all his glory ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... made the dare-devil passage, in which he had not more than a couple of inches' margin to save him from precipitation into eternity. I hardly knew which to admire most—the ingenuity which thus made good in altitude what it lacked in latitude, or the phlegm with which the occupants of the other coach retained their seats ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... surface. The illuminating part of Venus occasionally presents slight spots. It has been ascertained that its surface is very unequal, the greatest mountains being in the southern hemisphere, as in the case of both Mercury and the Earth. The higher mountains in Venus range between 10 and 22 miles in altitude. The planet is also enveloped in an atmosphere like that by which animal and vegetable life is supported on earth; and it has consequently a twilight. Venus performs its revolution round the sun in 225 days. Mercury and Venus have been termed the Inferior Planets, ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... all of a vigorous and hardy nature and require no cultivation. The tops of these plants are generally distilled in situ, under contract with the Grasse manufacturer, by the villagers in the immediate vicinity. The higher the altitude at which these grow, the more esteemed the oil. The finest oil of lavender is produced by distilling the flowers only. About 100 tons of lavender, 25 of spike, 40 of thyme, and 20 of rosemary are sent out from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... humbly conceive, much less upon these, proposed by an unknown author, with regard to either side; yet I have thought them not unworthy your Lordship's notice, as possibly more practicable elsewhere, as to form, and in a great measure as to matter likewise, than in the altitude for which ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... cooker (see Figure 17) in which a temperature higher than that of boiling water is maintained is a great saver of fuel. A food can be cooked in from one third to one fourth the usual length of time in one of these devices. Moreover, pressure cookers are especially valuable for high altitude cooking, where water boils at a temperature ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... sacks of gold-dust with which to pay his board-bill or to buy a pair of boots, with maybe a nugget for Dr. Clappe when he eased a trivial pain,—all these thrills were calls to the gold-filled Mother Earth. Finally, Dr. Clappe's ill-health drove him to the Feather River,—a high altitude, fifty miles from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and the highest point of gold-diggings. There he soon recovered, and to her joy he wrote his wife to join him. And she had varying experiences in transit to the prospective home, which was at Rich Bar,—rich ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... the sixteenth century. The place is now a small village in the arrondissement of Nuits, Cote d'Or. As the crow flies, it is some ten miles distant from the ruins of the castle of Vergy, which stands on a steep height, at an altitude of over 1600 ft., within five miles from Nuits. The castle, which can only be reached on one side of the hill, by a narrow, winding and precipitous pathway, is known to have been in existence already ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... crimson light neared the zenith, the plane rolled forward across the sand and took off. Climbing steeply, Larry anxiously watched the approach of the red band. The gravitation of the Pygmy Planet seemed to diminish as he gained altitude, until presently he could fly vertically from it, without circling at all. He set the bow toward the scarlet bar across the sky ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... mind that accepts the imperfect as a penalty, instead of claiming the perfect as a birthright. Having given in to this attitude, she now, as a natural consequence, could but see the view offered from that comparatively lowly altitude, and that shut her in with the belief her duty lay in renouncing marriage, and also, more limiting still in its effect, the idea that Christopher also held this ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... destination, the more varied and changing became the scenery. At one time we might be closely hemmed in by the mountains, and then the next moment they would stretch away, one above the other, while their summits seemed to contend which should outrival the rest in altitude and beauty of outline. They were covered, to the height of several thousand feet, with luxuriant vegetation, which, for the most part, then generally ceased, and gave way to the bare rock. I was not less interested, however, with the curious ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... this interesting scene which was sent to the Rotherby Guardian, 'loud cheers immediately testified to the sympathy of the honest fellows collected there, with the public-spirited exertions of their fellow-townsmen.' Bill Powers, whose bloodshot eyes, bent hat, and protuberant altitude, marked him out as the natural leader of the assemblage, undertook to interpret the common sentiment by stopping the chaise, advancing to the door with raised hat, and begging to know of Mr. Dempster, whether the Rector had forbidden the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... trace and that of the geologist to account for. In the first place, its surface is occupied by a great array of ridges and hollows. The larger of these, the oceans and continents, first deserve our attention. The difference in altitude of the earth's surface from the height of the continents to the deepest part of the sea is probably between ten and eleven miles, thus amounting to about two fifths of the polar flattening before noted. The average difference ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Democratic nominee for the Presidency, was a college friend of mine, as you know, and we have been intimate through life. He wishes me to write his biography, and I have consented to do so; somewhat reluctantly, however, for Pierce has now reached that altitude when a man, careful of his personal dignity, will begin to think of cutting his acquaintance. But I seek nothing from him, and therefore need not be ashamed to tell the truth of an old friend.... I have written to Barry Cornwall, and shall ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... who was fast recovering from the effects of his fall, had obtained the sun's meridional altitude upon the islet at the entrance of the river, which gave 15 degrees 25 minutes 46 seconds for its latitude, differing from the plan of last year by only ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... from the view, and hence had we mistaken the single tree for a grove or coppice. It the more resembled this on account of its height; for, as already observed, its topmost branches did not exceed thirty or forty feet in clear altitude. It was therefore not the tallest tree in the world, though it was certainly one ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... and then stretched backward, until they joined the trees of the little garden of Numerian's abode. In a line with this house, but separated from it by a short space, stood a long row of buildings, let out floor by floor to separate occupants, and towering to an unwieldy altitude; for in ancient Rome, as in modern London, in consequence of the high price of land in an over-populated city, builders could only secure space in a dwelling by adding inconveniently to its height. Beyond these habitations rose the trees surrounding another patrician abode; and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Treasury? That our resources will be equal to such useful purposes I have no doubt, especially if by completing our fortifications and raising and maintaining our Navy at the point provided for immediately after the war we sustain our present altitude and preserve by means thereof for any length of time the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... neither the height of any mountain nor the depth of any sea is above ten stades (furlongs). However, Xenophanes did not take its altitude conjecturally, but by a proper ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the boggy neighborhood. Here they build their nest in low bushes or upon the ground. Four or five grayish eggs, sprinkled with cinnamon-colored spots in a circle around the larger end, are laid in the grassy cradle in June. Mr. H. D. Minot found one of these nests on Pike's Peak at an altitude of 11,000 feet, almost at the limit of vegetation. The same authority compares the bird's song to that of the redstart and the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... other things than love And live for other aims than happiness. I would not drag thee from thy altitude Of mighty ruler and great conqueror To ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... boy out into the mining country with him too. I supposed he had until I got this frantic cable from Irene. They'd sent her word about Dick's sudden end,—he always did have a weak heart, you know,—and something about the high altitude got him. Went off like that. But Irene was demanding of me to tell her where the boy was. Of course I didn't know. I did my best to find him, hunted high and low. I traced Dick to Goldfield. No use. The boy was not with him when he went West. Where ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... worse than ignorantly refreshing themselves, and the tin kangaroos showing that the breeze was from the east, I travelled farther west to a summer resort in the cool altitude, there to await from Mrs Martha Clay a recall to the vale of melons. That I would get one I was sure, and so little was there in my life that even this prospect lent a zest to ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... urgent message from the French police, was tossed through the railway carriage window as the train moved from the Admiralty Pier, the wind being west, the atmosphere hazy, but the sun shining. For more than a minute the bird circled round till it attained an altitude of about half-a-mile, and then it sailed away Londonwards. By this time the engine had got full steam on, and the train was tearing away at the rate of sixty miles an hour; but the carrier was more than a match for it. Taking a line midway between Maidstone and Sittingbourne, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... of that morning's occupations. Towards evening, I awoke and wishing to see Perdondaris before we left in the morning, and being unable to wake the captain, I went ashore alone. Certainly Perdondaris was a powerful city; it was encompassed by a wall of great strength and altitude, having in it hollow ways for troops to walk in, and battlements along it all the way, and fifteen strong towers on it in every mile, and copper plaques low down where men could read them, telling in all the languages of those parts of the earth—one language ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... for being despised, which was so essential to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude—a starry altitude—in the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the staircase of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Chinatown—that it was washed clean. Perhaps there is nothing to be regretted in this, however, except that any amount of dirt has been piled up right in the heart of Helena. The millionaire residents seem to think that the great altitude and dry atmosphere will prevent any ill ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... the number of the floor, not the room. Adna warned his women folk that "she" was about to go up, but they were not prepared for that swift vertical leap toward the clouds. Another floor, and Mrs. Thropp would have screamed. The altitude affected her. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... plains and plateaus could be crossed by the trunk-roads, the rest of the country is so broken up by mountain and valley that it presented few facilities either to foreign penetration or to external control. The physical barriers to local intercourse, reinforced by striking differences in soil, altitude, and climate, while they precluded Syria herself from attaining national unity, always tended to protect her separate provinces, or "kingdoms," from the full effects of foreign aggression. One city-state could be ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... on the summits of the mountains comes from the sea, whence it is propelled by its weight to a greater height than that of the mountains, why has this portion of the element of water the power to elevate itself to such an altitude and to penetrate the earth by so great an expenditure of labour and time, when the residue of the element of water, whose only obstacle is the air which does not impede it, is not able to raise itself ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... sensational preacher in Brooklyn a few years ago, but a hemorrhage in the pulpit cut short his career in the East. He came out here and got better, but his wife, who had a weak heart, couldn't stand the altitude. She died—a sacrifice to her husband. He's the kind of a man who demands sacrifice. After his wife's death, he fairly lived at the Lambert cottage, and is now in full control. The girl's will is so weakened that she is but a puppet in the grasp ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... approaching, bound due east, seven hundred miles an hour, high altitude.... Correction; six-fifty miles. Correction; six hundred." He paused. "Traffic is decelerating rapidly. I think, sir, this ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Reynolds having said that he took the altitude of a man's taste by his stories and his wit, and of his understanding by the remarks which he repeated; being always sure that he must be a weak man who quotes common things with an emphasis as if they ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... and Skelton had reached, for the first time in history, the high Antarctic inland plateau at an altitude of 9,000 ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... They do not see how a man can take off more than fifty pounds and not hurt himself. I do not see how he can keep it on and not kill himself. They tell me I look like a boy—and I feel like one. I'm as active as I was twenty years ago. When I was in the mountains this summer, at an altitude of seventy-five hundred feet, I could climb slopes with no exhaustion that I couldn't have gone fifteen feet up the year before. My mind is clearer; my body is better. I figure I have added a good many years to ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... had now descended to within a hundred feet of the earth, allowing the crowd below a sufficiently distinct view of the person of its occupant. This was in truth a very droll little somebody. He could not have been more than two feet in height; but this altitude, little as it was, would have been sufficient to destroy his equilibrium, and tilt him over the edge of his tiny car, but for the intervention of a circular rim reaching as high as the breast, and rigged on to the cords of the balloon. The body of the little man ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... twenty feet apart, and for the remaining five miles they do not at any place approach closer, but on the other hand very gradually separate to about sixty feet at the extreme top. At five miles from the bay the walls are fully ten thousand feet in altitude, and are nowhere less in height from that point to the edge of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... no chronometers in use, and but few of our West India captains were in possession of a sextant, or indeed able to work a lunar observation. The latitude was accurately determined every day by measuring the altitude of the sun as it passed the meridian. To ascertain the longitude was a more difficult matter. They were obliged to rely mainly on their dead reckoning; that is, to make a calculation of the course and distance run daily, from the points steered by the compass and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... with them. The birds need to perch and to rest during their sleep, but the fish continue floating around and moving from place to place while asleep. The entire world belongs to them. Wherever there is a mass of water,—ocean, river or lake, in whatever altitude or latitude, a mountain peak lost in the clouds, a valley boiling like a whirlpool, a sparkling and tropical sea with a forest of colors in its bosoms, or a polar sea encrusted with ice and people, with sea-lions and white bears,—there the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... alive after an hour's exposure to it. In order, therefore, to secure a communication between the two ships, a distance not exceeding half a cable's length, as well as from the ships to the house on shore, a line was kept extended, as a guide from one to the other. The meridian, altitude of the sun was observed this day by an artificial horizon, which I noticed from the circumstance of its being the last time we had an opportunity of observing it for ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... exceedingly large, and are formed in rings. A skin in my possession measures 7 ft. 9 in. in length; the tail is full, and the fur long; this is unusually beautiful, and it must have inhabited some lofty altitude where the ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... trace of natives, and called the island Santiago, as it is still known. There were plenty of fish there and many strange birds, so tame that we killed them with sticks. And I had a quadrant with me, and wrote on the table of it the altitude of the Arctic Pole, and I found it better than the chart, for though you see your course of sailing on the chart well enough, yet if once you get wrong, it is hard by map alone to work back into ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... wait for each other, of course, until he can graduate and get admitted to the bar and make a success that will enable him to support her as she deserves to be supported. The girl declines to wait. A much older man—a great, trampling brute of a man, possessed of wealth and fame, and a social altitude positively vertiginous—asks her to marry him. She, woman-weak, yields to the temptation of all the gauds and baubles that go with his name, and marries him. Indeed, few young men at the university ever have as valid an excuse ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... handsome percentage, or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great Olympic games—will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The altitude of literature and poetry has always been religion—and always will be. The Indian Vedas, the Nackas of Zoroaster, the Tal mud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of the nacelle told Dennis that the Aviatik was planing down to a lower altitude, and when, some distance ahead, he saw the milky gleam of a river winding away to right and left, he hung over the side with the powerful German ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... again blank until May 9th, when the writer says, "Our altitude, by barometer, this morning, is over 6000 feet above the valley which we crossed three days ago; the view of it and its surrounding mountains, sublime with chasms, yet grotesque in outline, and all heavily gilded with the setting sun, is one of the most oppressively gorgeous I ever beheld. The ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... the row and the bright light concentered at a particular place on the concrete wall, illuminating, in a row, a clock, a barometer, and centigrade and Fahrenheit thermometers. Almost in a sweep of glance he read the messages of the dials: time 4:30; air pressure, 29:80, which was normal at that altitude and season; and temperature, Fahrenheit, 36. With another press, the gauges of time and heat and air were sent back into ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... of mosquitoes beset me, that I was forced to hurry to the beach and plunge into the water. In this way was I tormented the whole night. At dawn, I retreated once more to the bushes; and climbing the highest tree I found,—whose altitude, however, was not more than twelve feet above the sand,—I beheld, across the calm sea, the dismantled hull of my late home, surrounded by a crowd of boats, which were rapidly filling with plundered merchandise. It was evident ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... believing that if successful I should find directions what to do, and food to sustain me. The search which I was making lay in the direction of my pre-arranged route to the Madison Mountains, which I intended to approach at their lowest point of altitude. ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... surface measure by the usual method of squaring the circle (multiplying by eight, and dividing by ten). This gave the base of the hollow cylinder, which would be equal to the frustum of a cone of like altitude; and another multiplication by the length produced the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... to be found at all elevations, like the Sumatran one which was found by General Fytche at an altitude of 4000 feet; it is much more of a forester than the last. Blyth and Jerdon suppose it to be the same as the species hunted by the Moghul Emperor Baber on the banks of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... "Little Nassau" (named after the "Great Nassau" of many years back) was the balloon I was making ascents in at the time. It was a fair-sized, hot-air affair, of single thickness, good for an hour's flight or so and capable of attaining an altitude of a mile or more. It answered my purpose, for my act at the time was making half-mile parachute jumps at recreation parks and country fairs. I was in Oakland, a California town, filling a summer's engagement with a street railway company. The company owned a large park outside the ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... Travellers have delighted to speak of the Peak of Teneriffe, as the highest mountain in the ancient world, whereas, by the best accounts, Mont Blanc exceeds it* by 3523 feet, or near a mile of perpendicular altitude. The Isle of Ferro, having no such mountain to distinguish it, was celebrated for a century or two on the credit of a miraculous tree, single in its kind, enveloped in perpetual mists, and distilling sufficient water for the ample supply of the island.** But this wonder, though vouched ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... gnarled and bony hand, which locked up everything in its grasp; to bring down the towering altitude of that olden tyranny, whose head was lifted to the clouds; to strike from the soul its clanking chains and set the suffering nations free; to champion the inborn rights of afflicted humanity, and conquer the ignorance and imposture ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... degrees 39 minutes south; and from the anchoring place the island of Amsterdam was in sight to the northward. We had fair weather all the forenoon, but just at noon a squall came on which was unfavourable for our observation. I had however two sets of double altitudes and a good altitude exactly at noon according to the timekeeper. The result of these gave for the latitude of the centre of St. Paul 38 degrees 47 minutes south. The longitude I make 77 degrees 39 minutes east. The variation of the compass, taking the mean of what ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... two volcanic regions, the eastern and the western. The principal point is the volcano Taal, located in the northeastern portion of the province of Batangas. It is situated on a small island in the center of the Bombon laguna, and has an altitude of 550 feet above sea level. Its form is conical, and the rock is composed of basalt feldspar with a small quantity of augite. The crater is supposed to be 232 feet deep. Its sides are almost vertical, and there are two steaming ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... they arose with a motion almost perceptible to the eye, until, in ten minutes, the uppermost were more than 200,000 miles above the solar surface. This was ascertained by careful measurements, the mean of three closely accordant determinations giving 210,000 miles as the extreme altitude attained. I am particular in the statement, because, so far as I know, chromatospheric matter (red hydrogen in this case) has never before been observed at any altitude exceeding five minutes, or 135,000 miles. The velocity ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... the river, from the Gulf of Mexico to Itasca Lake, has been estimated at 3,160 miles. Barometrical observations show its altitude, above the same point, to be 1,680 feet—which denotes an average descent of a fraction over six ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... not perhaps appreciate his merits, or his heroic efforts as a founder. This is not altogether singular, for even in the physical world one cannot rightly estimate the altitude of a mountain by remaining close to its base, but at a distance a just appreciation of its ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... 365 degrees and some odd minutes. There was no globe to represent the earth in the centre, but there was a certain tube, bored like a gun-barrel, which could readily be turned about and fixed to any azimuth or any altitude so as to observe any particular star through the tube, just as we do with our vane-sights;[8]—not at all a despicable device! The third machine was a gnomon [C], the height of which was twice the diameter of the former instrument, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... retire early to our couch; Charley usually takes the first watch, from half-past six to nine o'clock; Brown, Calvert, and Phillips follow in rotation; whilst I take that portion of the night most favourable for taking the altitude. John Murphy has his watch from five to six. We generally tethered three horses, and kept one bridled; and, with these arrangements, we slept as securely and soundly as ever; for I felt sure that we had nothing to fear, as long as our tinkling bell-horse, and perhaps a second horse, was moving ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... chattels themselves. Born in North Carolina, and bred to the trade of a tailor, he reached his fifteenth year before he was taught even to read. In his eighteenth year he migrated to Tennessee, and established himself in that rich upland region on the eastern border of the State, where by altitude the same agricultural conditions are developed that characterize the land which lies several degrees further North. Specially adapted to the cereals, the grasses, and the fruits of Southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, East Tennessee could not employ slave-labor with the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... spending the summer there. Many of those I observed commonly pass this season much farther north. But the geographical distribution of birds is rather a climatical one. The same temperature, though under different parallels, usually attracts the same birds; difference in altitude being equivalent to the difference in latitude. A given height above sea-level under the parallel of thirty degrees may have the same climate as places under that of thirty-five degrees, and similar ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... boulders, rounding on slender ledges, up and ever up. As he ascended he saw gray-white vales below, felt the stimulus of a rarer air, and at last found his heart fluttering unpleasantly in the higher altitude. Yet he held grimly to his task, and, when broad daylight was streaming full upon him, he found himself on a wide shelf of rock, a ledge falling sheer on one side to unseen depths, towering on the other to awe-inspiring heights. Here he came to a halt. And then, so tired ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... feature after leaving this point was a three days' march over Lambalamfipa, an abrupt mountain range, which crosses the country east and west, and attains, it would seem, an altitude of some 4000 feet. Looking down on the plain from its highest passes a vast lake appears to stretch away in front towards the north, but on descending this resolves itself into a glittering plain, for the most part covered with saline incrustations. The path lay directly across this. The difficulties ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... revealed by the fluctuating glare of the fire; aerial windows through which the sky gleamed in splendour, unless when it was obscured for a moment by the clouds which sailed across; pinnacles and crosses of sublime altitude in the remote distance; and in the immediate foreground the great gateway of the abbey and the wide circle of armed men carousing about the fire in ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... age, I will not affirm: his point is expression, and to that all the ornaments he inserts (which are few and short) are evidently directed. He gets higher, they say, than Farinelli; but then this celestial note you do not hear above once in a whole opera; and he falls from this altitude at once to the mellowest, softest, Strongest tones (about the middle of his compass) that can be heard. The Mattei, I assure you, is much improved by his example, and by her great success this winter; but then the burlettas and the Paganina, I have not been so pleased with any thing these many ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... south-east, I made out with the telescope a range of very lofty hills, which, stretching their heads high into the clouds, left me without means of forming any idea of their elevation: but even the portion of them which met my view must have had a very considerable altitude. I took a set of angles from this point but the mistiness of the day rendered it very unfit for my purpose. Whilst I was thus occupied, we heard the cries and calls of a party of natives between us and the tents. From the loudness and proximity ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... Fleet was travelling sent the wind thrumming through the halliards and funnel stays and past Thorogood's ears with a little whistling noise; otherwise few sounds reached him at the altitude at which he stood. On the signal-platform below, a number of signalmen were grouped round the flag-lockers with the halliards in their hands in instant readiness to hoist a signal. The Signal Boatswain had steadied his glass against a semaphore, and was studying something on ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... to run into them is fatal and at night they are very apt to trap the unwary. Roughly, they are a series of balloons supporting a huge wire net or cable streamers. The balloons, anchored to the ground and carrying the nets with them, are sent up to a considerable altitude about large cities and important industrial centres. They are to the night aviators what the spider's web is ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... too high, Would it blur the Christmas glee, That not a Santa Claus could reach The altitude ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... wisdom, the captain resumed possession of his sextant and proceeded to take the altitude of the sun, shouting out occasional unintelligible directions the while through the skylight to Mr McCarthy, who was in his cabin below, so that he might compare the position of the solar orb with Greenwich time as marked by the chronometer. Then ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... me now and asked me to reverse the arrangement and make my car the tail end. I was giving orders for the splitting and kicking in when No. 3 arrived, and thus did not see the greeting of Frederic Cullen and his family. When I joined them, his father told me that the high altitude had knocked his son up so, that he had to be helped from the ordinary sleeper to the special and had gone to bed immediately. Out West we have to know something of medicine, and my car had its chest of drugs: so I took some tablets and went into his ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... old to get coy. I'm going to make my speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by this time." ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... place above where the three portages were necessary the name of Cataract Canon was given; and they were now well into the Grand Canon itself. The walls were more than a mile in height, and, as Major Powell says, a vertical altitude like this is not easily pictured. "Stand on the south steps of the Treasury Building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Park, and measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that altitude, and you will understand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... accordingly. His sort of teaching proclaims him either more or less than a human being in the estimation of normal people. Such a teacher drones forth weary platitudes as if his utterances were oracular. The only prerequisite for a position in some schools of education seems to be a degree of a certain altitude without any reference to real ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... broken by a remarkable gorge, in the sides of which caves also occur. The level of the tableland is indented with "swallet holes," the chief of which are the East Water Swallet and the Devil's Punch-Bowl. The Quantocks are much less extensive, though their highest summits rise to a greater altitude. Like the Mendips, they turn their steepest flank westwards, the ascent on the E. being gradual; and on this side they are cut by a number of well-timbered and delightful combes. Few caves have been discovered ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... form. It has lately become a place of great resort in the warm season of the year. Everything which labor and expence, art and taste could effect was done to render it convenient, showy and elegant. An awning covered the whole area of the garden suspended at an altitude of seventy-five feet; the columns which supported the dome were highly ornamented, and lighted by an immense cut glass chandelier, with ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... snake, or sat on the ground poring over some insect occupied with the business of its little life, I would become conscious of the discussion and argument going on. And every creature I watched, from the great soaring bird circling in the sky at a vast altitude to the little life at my feet, was brought into the argument, and was a type, representing a group marked by a family likeness not only in figure and colouring and language, but in mind as well, in habits and the most trivial traits and tricks of gesture ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... was an important event. Every one, from the smallest to the greatest, was deeply interested in it, while to the man of science it was one of the most exciting of incidents. For the purpose of observing the altitude to which the balloon rose, and the course it took, Le Gentil was on the observatory, Prevost was on one of the towers of Notre Dame, Jeaurat was on La Place Louis XV., and d'Agelet was on the Champ de Mars. It was only ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept the breadth ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... in scores flying in formation, and, having no opposition, were frequently at an altitude of a mere sixty or eighty feet. The scouts, peering down on the situation at Masnieres, took in at a glance the wide area that had to be covered by the solitary Norman Battalion without support of any kind. This ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... meridian altitude, I make the latitude of the Sobat junction 9 degrees 21 minutes 14 seconds. Busy fishing the yard of the "Clumsy," and mending sails. The camels and donkeys all well—plenty of fine grass—made a good stock of hay. My reis and boatmen tell me that the Sobat, within a few days' sail ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Streets. Besides a fountain, and other attractive objects, the park is adorned by a statue of Commodore Perry, erected in 1860 in commemoration of his victory on Lake Erie in 1813. It is of Italian marble, eight feet high, and stands upon a granite pedestal twelve feet in altitude. The most noteworthy buildings are the postoffice, the city hall, the county court house, and the Cleveland medical college. The Union Railway depot, an immense structure of stone near the lake shore, is one of the largest of the kind ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... the distance indicates the presence of a village somewhere around; but having plenty of bread on which to sup I once again determine upon studying astronomy behind a wheat-shock. It is a glorious moonlight night, but the altitude of the country hereabouts is not less than six thousand feet, and the chilliness of the atmosphere, already apparent, bodes ill for anything like a comfortable night; but I scarcely anticipate being disturbed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... eagles, which occasionally departed for their salmon-fishing in the stream. Once or twice they heard the sharp bark of a fox concealed in the alder thickets, and as they reached the upper slopes, where the snow still lay, frequently they saw the mountain ptarmigan, at this altitude still in its white winter plumage. These birds, when alarmed, would fly but a short way and then poise in the air, uttering a sharp, crowing cackle, soon to alight and stand motionless on the snow. All ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough |
