"Sea-level" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of the mule-track, the German stops at the chalet in the pine-forest. It is only at the Alpine table d'hote, with a proud consciousness of being seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains, and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... a region of snowsheds to reach the lake in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, and the scenery was as different from any she had met in California as was her mood from the mood of the south. At Tahoe she was a mile above sea-level, and ringed in by higher mountains which had not lost ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... yards was hidden. The last and steepest part of the mountain (three thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven feet from the sea-level) was accomplished on foot, and at two o'clock, after four hours' riding and walking, a seat in a little nook where luncheon could be taken was found; for, unfortunately, there was no more to be done save to seek rest and refreshment. There was literally nothing to be seen, in ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... There was something uncanny in the thought that they were spinning along, sixty feet below the sea-level, cut off from all ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... exceptional character. A month ago, in bright sunshine, I went, once again, by the little electric railway (most blessed invention of our day) from the pine-shaded torrent below to the great Eiger rock-mountain, and through its heart to the glacier beyond, more than 10,000 feet above sea-level. On the way back I left the train at the foot of the Eiger glacier, and walked down with my companion amongst the rocks of the moraine and over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life. Everywhere was a ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the President and under supervision of the Secretary of War, William H. Taft, arrives on the Isthmus to pursue the building of the canal. John F. Wallace is engineer-in-chief. The commission decides on a lock canal, instead of a sea-level ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... corrected for the relation existing between the capacities of the tube and cistern (if its construction be such as to require that correction), and for the capillary action of the tube; and then reduced to the standard temperature of 32 deg. Fahr., and to the sea-level, if on shipboard. For the first correction the neutral point should be marked upon each instrument. It is that particular height which, in its construction, has been actually measured from the surface of the ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... enthusiastic worker in the field, ready to devote all his energies to its cultivation. This requirement is found in the person of Professor Hale himself. The next requirement is an atmosphere of the greatest transparency, and a situation at a high elevation above sea-level, so that the passage of light from the sun to the observer shall be obstructed as little as possible by the mists and vapors near the earth's surface. This requirement is reached by placing the observatory on Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... west, Boenigen (1515 inhabitants), close to Interlaken. Its length is about 9 m., its width 11/2 m., and its maximum depth 856 ft., while its area is 111/2 sq. m., and the surface is 1857 ft. above the sea-level. On the south shore are the Giessbach Falls and the hamlet of Iseltwald. On the north shore are a few small villages. The character of the lake is gloomy and sad as compared with its neighbour, that of Thun. Its chief affluent is the Luetschine (flowing from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... far advanced and the skies are uncertain, a few hours should be given to that massive Down which fronts the traveller from London, Ditchling Beacon, the highest above the sea-level. It is easy of access, the train carries you to Hassock's Gate—the station is almost in a copse—and an omnibus runs from it to a comfortable inn in the centre of Ditchling village. Thence to the Down itself ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... engineer that he was, never even dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really propose was something far milder and simpler in its way, but, as his scheme has given rise to the absurd notion that Sahara as a whole lies below sea-level, it may be worth while briefly to explain what it was he really thought ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... literally at Kenosha summit, where we return, afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me. Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach'd, penetrated the Rockies, (Hayden ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hotel, situated two thousand odd metres above sea-level, as the announcement-cards stuck everywhere say, more than a hundred of us gather in the dining-room at lunch-time. The greatest coolness, the most ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... (Goebeng Station) at 6.42 a.m., and reaching Pasoeroean at 8.23. Here a single-pony carriage is engaged (two and a-half guilders) as far as Pasrepan, where a change is made to a two-pony carriage (three guilders). This conveyance takes one to Poespo, 2,600 feet above sea-level. A halt is made for tiffin in this delightful little hotel, whose pleasant looking proprietress, unfortunately, does not speak English. The remainder of the journey to the Sanatorium (6,000 feet) ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... was now revived, not at Beirut, but at Abeih, fifteen hundred feet above the sea-level, in a temperate atmosphere, and with a magnificent prospect of land and sea. The experience gained in the former seminary was of use in reconstructing the new one. Its primary object was to train up an efficient native ministry. None were to be received to its ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... be true wherever the forces concerned exist in the combinations upon which the law depends, if there are no counteracting conditions. That water can be pumped to about 33 feet at the sea-level, is a derivative law on this planet: is it true in Mars? That depends on whether there are in Mars bodies of a liquid similar to our water; whether there is an atmosphere there, and how great its pressure is; which will vary with its height and density. If there is no atmosphere there ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... orchards, peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and the streets were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched and grooved rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of the High Sierra of California eight thousand feet or more above sea-level. The Victoria Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded from the solid; and the rock islets that rise here and there in it are unchanged to any appreciable extent by all the waves that have broken over them since first they came to light toward the close of the glacial period. The shores also ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... editor more than to get anything worth having from a new hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head; some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... by other discoveries which form their prelude; and, secondly, by the sharpening of the inquiring intellect. Thus Ptolemy grew out of Hipparchus, Copernicus out of both, Kepler out of all three, and Newton out of all the four. Newton did not rise suddenly from the sea-level of the intellect to his amazing elevation. At the time that he appeared, the table-land of knowledge was already high. He juts, it is true, above the table-land, as a massive peak; still he is supported by the plateau, and a great part of his absolute height is the height of ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... m. from the head.of Tajura Bay. In this lake the river is lost. This remarkable phenomenon is explained by the position of Aussa in the centre of a saline lacustrine depression several hundred feet below sea-level. While most of the other lagoons are highly saline, with thick incrustations of salt round their margins, Aussa remains fresh throughout the year, owing to the great body of water discharged into it by the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... each pole, we may say) to the extent of something more than a foot thick, enough to give 1.1 foot of water over those areas, or 0.006 of a foot of water if spread over the whole globe, which would, in reality, raise the sea-level by only some such undiscoverable difference as three-fourths of an inch or an inch. This, or the reverse, which we believe might happen any year, and could certainly not be detected without far more accurate observations and calculations for the mean sea-level than any hitherto ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fighting men, and nearly seventy guns, Soult was pouring along the passes he had chosen. It is impossible to do more than pick out a few of the purple patches in the swift succession of heroic combats that followed: fights waged on mountain summits 5000 feet above the sea-level, in shaggy forests, under tempests of rain and snow. D'Erlon, with a force of 20,000 men, took the British by surprise in the pass of Maya. Ross, an eager and hardy soldier, unexpectedly encountering the French advance guard, instantly shouted the order ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... of the walk of Nicholas and Smike from London to Portsmouth. Close by, on the opposite side of the road, there is a rough sandy track—once the old coach road—which leads up to the stone cross on the extreme summit of the Hindhead—900 feet above sea-level—where the murderers of the sailor were executed, and hung in chains. The view from this point, aptly named Gibbet Hill, is quite ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... market days, after which, if they remained unclaimed, their sale became legal." But many visitors will probably take greater interest in the famed Carclaze Mine, situated more than 600 feet above sea-level; the pit is about 150 feet deep, and nearly a mile round. Once notable for its tin, this mine now supplies an immense quantity of china-clay and stone. Charlestown may claim to be the port of St. Austell, and is becoming also ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... landscape lay in daylight, I presently discerned the outline of shore and sea extending over a semicircle whose radius much exceeded five hundred miles, implying that I was about thirty-five miles from the sea-level. Even at this height the extent of my survey was so great in comparison to my elevation, that a line drawn from the vessel to the horizon was, though very roughly, almost parallel to the surface; and the horizon therefore seemed to be not very far from ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... beneath the ocean long before the earliest traditions of the human race. Wherever the geologist can explore the earth's surface, he can read much of its past history, and can determine approximately its latest movements above and below the sea-level; but wherever oceans and seas now extend, he can do nothing but speculate on the very limited data afforded by the depth of the waters. Here the naturalist steps in, and enables him to fill up this great gap in the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... nose up and began once more my steady grind on the upward spiral. I took a large sweep to avoid the danger-spot of the whirlpool, and soon I was safely above it. Just after one o'clock I was twenty-one thousand feet above the sea-level. To my great joy I had topped the gale, and with every hundred feet of ascent the air grew stiller. On the other hand, it was very cold, and I was conscious of that peculiar nausea which goes with rarefaction of the air. For the first time I unscrewed ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... descend once more, and to reach the Altipiano di Pollino—an Alpine meadow with a little lake (the merest puddle), bright with rare and beautiful flowers. It lies 1780 metres above sea-level, and no one who visits these regions should omit to see this exquisite tract encircled by mountain peaks, though it lies a little off the usual paths. Strawberries, which I had eaten at Rossano, had not yet opened their flowers here; the flora, boreal in parts, has been studied ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... sea-level, following the Bulkley, which flows in a northwesterly direction and enters the great Skeena River at right angles, just below its three forks. Each hour the peaks seemed to assemble and uplift. The days were at their maximum, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Persian, the Red Seas. Through its territories there flowed six of the grandest rivers in the world—the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Oxus, the Nile, each more than a thousand miles in length. Its surface reached from thirteen hundred feet below the sea-level to twenty thousand feet above. It yielded, therefore, every agricultural product. Its mineral wealth was boundless. It inherited the prestige of the Median, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean Empires, whose annals reached back through more ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... lakes, but they are really little other than ponds. On the south coast, directly opposite Matanzas, lies a vast swamp known as the Cienega de Zapata. It occupies an area of about seventy-five miles in length and about thirty miles in width, almost a dead flat, and practically at sea-level. Here and there are open spaces of water or clusters of trees, but most of it is bog and quagmire and dense mangrove thickets. Along the coast are numerous harbors, large and small, that are or, by dredging, could be made available for commercial ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... much lower than the surrounding country, Vauban planned his works with an eye to flooding the region, if necessary, by the waters of the Scheldt. Valenciennes stands at 25.98 metres above the sea-level. But Anzin, the chief suburb, is at 39 metres, and the hills beyond at 80 metres ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hippopotami on their banks, are therefore but the great modern residual geographical phenomena of those of a mesozoic age. The differences, however, between the geological past of Africa and her present state are enormous. Since that primeval time, the lands have been much elevated above the sea-level— eruptive rocks piercing in parts through them; deep rents and defiles have been suddenly formed in the subtending ridges through which some rivers ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... and even course. On some such ocean as this in space all the planetary systems and solar systems seem to move, ever moving on and on with the same uniformity of level through infinite space. Further, this plane of the ecliptic is to the celestial sphere what the sea-level is to the earth. The height of a mountain on the earth is stated to be so ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... the changes caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, &c.—Whether, in any part of the old continents, there are dunes or sandbanks formed, at early geological periods, in the same way as those now existing on the coast of Holland—Whether the sea-level is higher or lower now than formerly with regard to the land-level of the Low Countries—On the wearing of coasts in past and present times, and the means of prevention—Whether a profitable manufacture of iodine may not be attempted ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... bay and marsh, the engineers laid out three principal forts and two redoubts, with breastworks connecting them. The site occupied was a favorable one. On the left rose the high ground, now known as Fort Greene Place or Washington Park, one hundred feet above the sea-level; and on the right, between the main road and the marsh, were lower elevations on lands then owned by Rutgert Van Brunt and Johannes Debevoise. The flanks were thus well adapted for defence, and they were near enough each other to command the ground between them. Two of the works were erected ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... on the Moon surface was negligible—a scant one five-thousandth of the atmospheric pressure at the sea-level on Earth. But within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth-pressure must be maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive tendency, with no external pressure to counteract it. A tremendous necessity ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... movements were more rapid. Be that as it may, I am quite convinced that they are going on at this moment; and it would be well to make marks on the cliffs in various parts of the coast, at the present sea-level, in order to determine, after the lapse of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... element, effortlessly gliding along, her head from time to time up like a dog's—some gentle dog's, say a mild-eyed spaniel's—looking about. She was just a female seal. She knew nothing of the bird or her companion, who were at sea-level, and more often than not hidden in the trough, till she came sliding down the slope of a round-barreled swell, practically on top of them. Then it was too late ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... I am living (East Boston) is built on an island, one kilometer and a half long, extending from north to southeast, and varying in width at different points from two to six or seven hundred metres. Its height above the sea-level is about sixty feet. This little island is composed entirely of glacial muddy deposit, containing scratched pebbles mixed with larger boulders or blocks, and covered also with a considerable number of boulders of divers forms and dimensions. At East Boston you cannot see what underlies this ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... you ask. No; but the Alpines, that chain of mountainettes, redolent of thyme and lavender, not very dangerous, nor yet very high (five to six hundred feet above sea-level), which make an horizon of blue waves along the Provencal roads and are decorated by the local imagination with the fabulous and characteristic names of: Mount Terrible; The End of the World; The Peak ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... and Newburyport. The whole region on both sides of the river abounds in beautifully rounded hills formed of glacial deposits of clay and gravel, and they are fertile to their tops. At many points they press close to the river, which has worn its channel down to the sea-level, and feels the influence of the tides beyond Haverhill. This gives picturesque effects at many points. The highest of the hills have summits about three hundred and sixty feet above the surface of the river, and there are many little lakes and ponds nestling in the hollows in ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... most men are, and though he had been made Supervisor at a time when political pull still crippled the Service, he was loyal to the flag. "I'm mighty glad to see you," he heartily began. "We don't often get a man from the sea-level, and when we ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... in the barometer, as it frequently happens, a column of air that presses upon an inch square near the surface of the earth must weigh about fifteen avoirdupois pounds."(4) As the pressure of air at the sea-level is now estimated at 14.7304 pounds to the square inch, it will be seen that Boyle's calculation was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... excitement of last night. But they soon lost that feeling in hunger. It was a very windy day, with showers now and then; but it was bracing too, especially on this very high road, hundreds of feet above the sea-level. ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... elevated above sea-level is safe from these irruptions. Its surface, enameled with flowers, adorned with ever fresh verdure, peopled with thousands and thousands of differing species of animals, is a place of repose; an abode of delights, where man, placed to aid nature, dominates all other things, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... growing in all altitudes, from sea-level up to the frost-line, which is about 6,000 feet in the tropics. Robusta and liberica varieties of coffee do best in regions from sea-level up to 3,000 feet, while arabica flourishes better ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Iceland; whereas the Polar ice, among which we have been knocking about, is field ice, and—except when packed one ledge above the other, by great pressure—is comparatively flat. I do not think I saw any pieces that were piled up higher than thirty or thirty-five feet above the sea-level, although at a little distance through the mist they ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... infernal. I believe this tract is the bed of what, ages ago, was an inland sea; anyhow it had all the appearance of it, and I was later told geologists thought so too. It is, to say the least, very likely, for Yuma, I heard, is several hundred feet below sea-level. The latitude is 32 1/2 deg. north, a warm latitude in any case, but with desert for hundreds of miles all round, with perhaps as low an elevation as exists on earth, shut in on all sides so that not a breath of ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... the white cliffs, topped with the clay deposit of the glacial ages, approach a height of 200 feet; but although the thickness of the chalk is estimated to be from I,000 to I,500 feet, the greatest height above sea-level is near Wilton Beacon, where the hills rise sharply from the Vale of York to 808 feet, and the beacon itself is 23 feet lower. On this western side of the plateau the views are extremely good, extending for miles across the flat green vale, ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... was kept by myself, assisted at times by Mr. Clarke. Mr. David Duguid, engineer of the Mukhbir, whose gallant conduct will be recorded (Chap. VIII.), and Commander Nasir Ahmed, of the Sinnar, obliged me by registering simultaneous observations at sea-level. The whole was reduced to shape by Mr. W. J. Turner, of the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... between the Atlantic and Pacific shores. The last rail was put down on May 12th, and on the 15th trains began to run. This work had been in process of construction ever since 1863. It traversed the Rocky Mountain range at an elevation of 8,243 feet above sea-level. The Northern Pacific Railway Company was chartered by Congress in 1864. The road was not completed till August, 1883, nor opened to traffic before September. Its length from Duluth to its then terminus on the Columbia River, Washington, was 1,674 miles. The Southern Pacific and the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... coast is well lighted, and it was always a matter of felicitation at night when, every eighty miles or so, the guiding rays of a lighthouse shone out in the soft gloom of the starlight night. One of these lonely towers stands more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and warns ships off ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... it. And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... venture. The experiment aroused immense excitement all over France, and a large concourse of people were gathered together on the outskirts of Paris to witness the risky feat. The balloon made a perfect ascent, and quickly reached a height of about half a mile above sea-level. A strong current of air in the upper regions caused the balloon to take an opposite direction from that intended, and the aeronauts drifted right over Paris. It would have gone hard with them if they had been forced to descend in the city, but the craft was driven ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... From the sea-level nothing, not even the red speck, was discernible; and for a terrible five minutes they wondered, as they scrambled out on hands and knees to the outmost limit of the jutting rocks, whether, among ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... many of his vassals to quit the dangerous shore, and take refuge in the fishing boats—he himself showing the example. That same night, however, while many of the people were asleep in the boats, and others on a flat plain a little above the sea-level, another powerful shock threw down from the neighboring Mount Jaci a great mass, which fell with a dreadful crash, partly into the sea, and partly upon the plain beneath. Immediately the sea rose to a height of twenty ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Treaty in 1903 the United States took possession of the Canal Zone and began to dig. It had to learn lessons of both management and tropical engineering. One by one its chief engineers deserted the enterprise. The choice between a sea-level and a lock canal divided the experts. The legislation by Congress was inadequate. In the spring of 1906 Roosevelt, with the approval of Taft, who had been recalled from the Philippines to be Secretary of War, determined to build a lock canal. The President tramped over the ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... all, sir. According to my calculation, as we came down, we are about sea-level, and the mine ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... During an eruption of Katlugaia, one of the southern Icelandic volcanoes, in 1756, the mass of material thus carried down by the melted snows and glaciers was so great, that, advancing several leagues into the sea, it formed three parallel promontories, which rose above the sea-level, where there had formerly been a depth of forty fathoms of water. Vast ravines were, at the same time, scooped out of the sides of the mountain by the erosion of the waters. Another eruption of this volcano ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... the southeast trade-winds and about eight hundred and forty miles from the coast of Liberia. It is a mass of volcanic matter, thrown up from the bed of the ocean to the height of two thousand eight hundred and eighteen feet at the highest point above sea-level. It is a strategic point, and belonged to Great Britain before it got cold. In the limited but rich soil at the top of the island, among the clouds, vegetation has taken root, and a little scientific farming is carried on ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Egger, Wolff, Koeppe, v. Jaruntowski and Schroeder, Miescher, Kuendig and others, shew, the number of red blood corpuscles in a healthy man, with the normal average of 5,000,000 per mm.^{3}, begins to rise immediately after reaching a height considerably above the sea-level. With a rise proceeding by stages, a new average figure is reached in 10 to 14 days, considerably larger than the old one, and indeed the greater the difference in level between the former and the latter places, the greater is the difference in this figure. ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace. "Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have been past believing that a dying seal could have transported itself ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Cheyenne and Denver lies the new town of Greeley. Although not on the maps in 1870, it now contains fifteen hundred inhabitants, forty or fifty stores, six hotels, churches, schools, and all the apparatus of civilization. This aspiring town, 4779 feet above the sea-level, is an example of those colony towns so successful in the West, and on which we must depend for rebuilding society in the South. Greeley is surrounded by fertile farms, and every city lot looks fresh and green: all this is effected by irrigation. Two canals ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the temple was placed on the akron of the promontory; that is, the summit of Mount San Costanzo where we are now standing. (He elsewhere describes it as being "on the straits.") This summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... a wild, richly timbered, and abundantly watered region of dark forests and grassy parks, ten thousand feet above sea-level, isolated on all sides by the southern Arizona desert—the virgin home of elk and deer, of bear and lion, of wolf and fox, and the birthplace as well as the ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... of August the General arrived at Ajmir, and took the town on the following day. He then sat down to form the regular siege of the citadel, called Taragarh (a fastness strong by nature, and strengthened still more by art, and situated on an eminence some 3,000 feet above sea-level). Bijai Singh, in Rajput fashion, was ready to try negotiation, and thought that he might succeed in practicing upon one whom he would naturally regard in the light of a mercenary leader. He accordingly sent a message to de Boigne offering him the fort, with the territory ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... crust and to make the surface more irregular. In times past, layers of rock once horizontal have been bent and folded into great arches and troughs, and large areas of the earth's surface have been raised high above sea-level. ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... With the object of guarding against this catastrophe, I have described as few birds as possible. I have ignored all those that are not likely to be seen daily in summer in the Himalayas at elevations between 5000 and 7000 feet above the sea-level. Moreover, the birds of the Western have been separated from those of the Eastern Himalayas. The result is that he who peruses this book will be confronted with comparatively few birds, and should experience little difficulty in recognising them when he meets them in the flesh. I am fully alive ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... dreamed that the supposed table-land was merely a rim of ice-mountains, surrounding a valley twice the size of Europe, so far below sea-level that it was warmed to tropic heat by Earth's interior fires? Or that this valley was peopled with what could best be described ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... most beautiful lakes in the world is Lake Tahoe. It is six thousand feet above sea-level, and the mountains around it rise four thousand feet higher. * * * The first thing one would notice, perhaps, is the wonderful clearness of the lake water. As one stands on the wharf the steamer Tahoe seems ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get there as early as ten, you know. It rises or falls for rain and fine, with much or less wind, and one end is "Nly" and the other "Ely" (what's Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn't tell you anything. And you've got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit, and even then I ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... Egypt,—the venerable great-grandmother of civilization. The great work had been completed, in spite of Lord Palmerston's sincere conviction, which he lost no opportunity of proclaiming to the world, that it was impossible to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The sea-level, he said, was not the same in the two seas so that the embankments could not be sustained, and drift-sands from the desert would fill the work up rapidly from day to day. Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, had made ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Mount, 6 m. in circuit, occupying the basin of an extinct volcano, its surface 961 ft. above the sea-level. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... plantains and the common scurvy-grass. Green enteromorpha of two species—E. compressa and E. intestinalis—I also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had thus descended beyond the sea-level were of the high dicotyledonous division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and seed-vessels were low in their standing—fuci and enteromorpha—plants at least not higher than their kindred ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... have been explained by the stimulating atmosphere of their new homes. Even Natal has not escaped this soft impeachment. But the enterprise of colonials has cropped out, under almost every condition of heat and cold, aridity and humidity, of a habitat at sea-level and on high plateau. This blanket theory of climate cannot, therefore, cover the case. Careful analysis supersedes it by a whole group of geographic factors working directly and indirectly. The first of these was the dividing ocean which, prior to the introduction of cheap ocean transportation ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 4) be the sea-bottom, y D the shore, x y the sea-level, then the coarser deposit will subside over the region B, the finer over A, while beyond A there will be no deposit at all; and, consequently, no record will be kept, simply because no deposit is going on. Now, suppose that the whole land, C, D, which we have regarded ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... crossing the deep ravines; many of their shoes were torn from their feet during the day's journey. The highest ridge crossed was 500 feet above the bed of the river, the height of which is approximately 500 feet above the sea-level, and thus the general level of the tableland may be considered to be 1000 feet above the sea. The general course of the river being from the west, it appears advisable to reconnoitre the ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... expedition between them, the first mapping the country, which is done by timing the rate of march, taking compass-bearings, noting the water-shed, etcetera. Then, on arriving in camp, it was necessary to boil the thermometer to ascertain the altitude of the station above the sea-level, and the latitude by the meridional altitude of a star; then, at intervals of sixty miles, lunar observations had to be taken to determine the longitude; and, lastly, there was the duty of keeping a diary, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... eighteen miles three or four days ago, and I think nothing of one or two thousand feet up! I hope this state of things will last at the sea-level. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... however, that in the fossil vegetation of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated. This fact, it seems to me, should be attributed to the mixing of the mountain Pines with the Palms of the sea-level, during that revulsion of Nature by which they were hurled into the same chaotic heap. We are not obliged to infer from their contiguity in these geological remains, that the two species ever flourished together ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... on the other side the saddle over which I had come, I concluded that the saddle itself could not be less than nine thousand feet high; and I should think that the river-bed, on to which I now descended, was three thousand feet above the sea-level. The water had a terrific current, with a fall of not less than forty to fifty feet per mile. It was certainly the river next to the northward of that which flowed past my master's run, and would ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... seen or even heard of a white man before, and treated us with great reverence and kindness, supplying us with as much food and milk as we could eat and drink. This wonderful and beautiful lake lay, according to our aneroid, at a height of no less than 11,450 feet above sea-level, and its climate was quite cold, and not at all unlike that of England. Indeed, for the first three days of our stay there we saw little or nothing of the scenery on account of an unmistakable Scotch mist which prevailed. It was this rain that set the tsetse poison working in our remaining donkeys, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... of a magic-lantern slide. At this moment I can recall the scene as if I saw it again. It was a seaside piece. The moon was shining upon the water, which rippled slowly on to the beach. Right before me a long mole ran into the water. On either side of the mole irregular rocks stood up above the sea-level. On the shore stood several houses, square and rude, which resembled nothing that I had ever seen in house architecture. No one was stirring, but the moon was there and the sea and the gleam of the moonlight on the rippling waters, just as if I had been looking ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... and glanced at her watch. She could see for some distance down the valley and knew that the smoke of a locomotive would spread in a dark cloud across the tops of the pines. The train was late, but there was no smoke yet. It was a long climb from sea-level at Vancouver Inlet and in winter the line was sometimes blocked. There was no obvious ground for alarm, but somehow she was worse afraid ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... was cast forth out of his sepulchre". In May, 1854, the labourers employed in widening the bed of the Canale Corsini (now the only navigable water-way between Ravenna and the sea) came, at the depth of about five feet beneath the sea-level, on some tumuli, evidently sepulchral in their character, made of bricks laid edgeways. Near one of these tumuli, but lying apart by itself, was a golden cuirass adorned with precious stones. The rascally labourers, when ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... dome began to take form, outlined by the trailing streaks of gray. It began to be more definitely traced by interlinings. An aerial lattice spread about a portion of a six-mile hemisphere. The top was fifteen thousand feet above the rocket-ship, twenty-five thousand feet from sea-level, as ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the purposes of this book it may be taken to include the flat open forest and grass-covered tract known as the Terai, immediately at the base of the mountain. This is only a few hundreds of feet above sea-level, so that from there to the summit of the Himalaya there is a rise of nearly 28,000 feet in about seventy miles. The lower part is in the 26th degree of latitude, so that the heat is tropical. And as the region comes within the sweep of ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... regular order—the sandstone at the bottom, the clay above it, the broad belt of chalk halfway up, and the Tertiary muds and rubbles at the top. But in the county as we actually find it, we get a very different state of things. Here, the surface at sea-level is composed of London clay; there, a great mound of chalk rises into a swelling down; and yonder, once more, a steep escarpment leads us down into a broad lowland of the Weald. The causes which have led to this arrangement of surface and conformation must ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... her plates.' The pies were rapidly divided into quarters, and the hungry party began to eat. 'It is true,' said the Exceptional Pedestrian, 'that the character of the apple indicates the elevation above sea-level of the soil in which it grew. The people who grew these apples would have done much better if they had devoted themselves to the cultivation of the huckleberry. These they could have sold, and then have bought much better apples grown in the plains. I also notice that the flour of which this pastry ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... the ocean. Great dikes, faced with granite from Norway, withstand the tempest from the turbulent ocean, and smaller dikes prevent inundations from rivers. In thousands of square miles the only land above sea-level is the summit of the dikes. In the polders or hollow places below the sea, and saved from destruction only by the dikes, is some of the richest and most productive land in Europe. Here prospered a teeming and industrious population. Agriculture, the parent of national prosperity, ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... over a broad, sandy plain, where Indian ponies were grazing in stray bands; and then, after ten miles, it swung off to the east where it broke through the hills and turned down. After that it was a jump-off for six thousand feet, from the mountain-top to down below sea-level; and, before he lost himself in the gap between the hills, Wunpost paused and ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... as regards this explanation will probably be whether the cassia would be found at such a height as we may suppose to be that of the country in question above the sea-level. I know that cassia bark is gathered in the Kasia Hills of Eastern Bengal up to a height of about 4000 feet above the sea, and at least the valleys of "Caindu" are probably not too elevated for this product. Indeed, that of the Kin-sha or Brius, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... are turreted, and some almost pillars, except that their thickness is rather out of proportion to their height. The highest point of the whole, as given before, is 1500 feet above the ground, while it is 2800 feet above the sea-level. Could I be buried at Mount Olga, I should certainly borrow Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph, Circumspice si monumentum requiris. To the eastward from here, as mentioned in my first expedition, and not very far off, lay another strange and singular-looking ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... they laid their trail more toward the sky, and that night found them encamped several thousand feet above the sea-level. It was quite cool, and the campfire was a big one about which they sat after supper, ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... perched up in the line of the Anti-Lebanon, at the end of a cul-de-sac running inwards from the plain, and stands at an elevation of more than 2000 feet above the sea-level, though this is scarcely apparent by reason of the lofty mountains everywhere around, especially Hermon, under the shadow of which Hhasbeya is nestled. This was the cleanest town and the one in best repair at that time that I had hitherto seen in Palestine ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... minute you could see the edges of ribbed rock like glittering gray monsters' skeletons, and the next they were gone in the dazzle, or hidden behind a whirling cloud of dust. Up there, three thousand feet above sea-level, there was still some sweetness in the air, but whenever we looked down through a gap in the range toward the Dead Sea Valley we could watch the oven-heat ascending like fumes above ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... feet above the sea. The birches became mere shrubs, dotting the low mounds which here and there arose out of the ocean of snow. The pulks all ran in the same track and made a single furrow, so that our gunwales were generally below the sea-level. The snow was packed so tight, however, that we rarely shipped any. Two hours passed, and I was at length roused from a half-sleep by the evidence of our having lost the way. Long Isaac and the guide stopped and consulted every few minutes, striking sometimes in one direction ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... of Cancer passes through the middle of Mexico, and therefore its southern half, which is the most important, is all under the burning sun of the "torrid zone." This heat, however, is greatly modified by the height of the surface above sea-level, since the country, taken as a whole, is simply an extensive table-land. The height of the plain in the two central states, Mexico and Puebla, is 8,000 feet, or about double the average height of the highest summits in the ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... 1902, I returned to the mountain West, to picture another conflict, equally stirring and possessing a still finer setting and back-ground. In Hesper I was concerned with a war, in which most of the action had taken place among the clouds, on the hilltops nearly two miles above sea-level. There was something grandly pictorial in this drama; but, after writing a few chapters of it, I felt the need of revisiting ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in the slow mounting of the man on foot. He was both tired and breathless, and as he neared the cabin (which was built on ground quite twelve thousand feet above sea-level) his limbs dragged, and every step he made required his utmost will. Twice he stopped to recover his strength and to ease the beating of his heart, and as he waited thus the last time the lone cabin-dweller appeared in his door and silently gazed, confronting his visitor with a strangely ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task only to get out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the whole of so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in these days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go straight into the waste-basket. To write "poetry" ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the plane was slanting gradually downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit. The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air, however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three hundred feet per minute ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the projecting reefs, around and beneath which the surges roar incessantly. This dangerous entrance to the little bay bears obliquely to the right with a serpentine movement, and there encounters a mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level, the base of which is a vertical palisade of solid rock more than a mile and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere yielding to clefts or undulations until it reaches a height of two hundred feet above the water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... glacier or overflow from the inland ice, projecting beyond the barrier into the sea. It was 400 or 500 ft. high, and at its edge was a large mass of thick bay-ice. The bay formed by the northern edge of this glacier would have made an excellent landing- place. A flat ice-foot nearly three feet above sea-level looked like a natural quay. From this ice-foot a snow-slope rose to the top of the barrier. The bay was protected from the south-easterly wind and was open only to the northerly wind, which is rare in those latitudes. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... which, like Palestine, lie below the sea-level, are known as Salton, Coahuilla, and Imperial Valleys. The lowest part, now filled with water, is usually called the Salton Sea. The whole of this region is comprehended under the name of Colorado Desert. In 1900 a company was formed to reclaim that part of the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... that could be carried. For example, an upward lift of 1,000 pounds from a propeller 15 feet in diameter would demand an expenditure of 50 horse-power under the best possible conditions, and in order to lift this load vertically through such atmospheric pressure as exists at sea-level or thereabouts, an additional 20 horsepower would be required to attain a rate of 11 feet per second—50 horse-power must be continually provided for the mere support of the load, and the additional ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... beaches with rounded waterworn stones all over it; its height is 65 feet. After visiting the island it was easy for us to trace the same terrace formation on the coast; in one place we found waterworn stones over 100 feet above sea-level. Nearly all these stones are erratic and, unlike ordinary beach pebbles, the under sides which lie buried have ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... the mouth of the mine's quite two hundred feet above sea-level, the workings are ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... State of Washington, Nature has done a curious thing. She has built a great lake in the eastern shoulders of the Cascade Mountains. Lake Chelan, more than fifty miles long and averaging a mile and a half in width, is ten hundred and seventy-five feet above sea-level, while its bottom is four hundred feet below the level of the ocean. It is almost completely surrounded by granite walls and peaks which reach more than a mile and ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... happens to be one that I have examined for myself. They were digging out a place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other places, was just before ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... artificial satellite of Earth. It was bright in the lock, and Joe stared out the cabin ports at the quilted sides. There was a hissing of air, and he saw a swirling mist, and then the bulges of the sidewall sagged. The air pressure gauge was spinning up toward normal sea-level air pressure. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... where the ocean-waters have free flow. One is rather puzzled to know where all the water could have come from, for such a tremendous additional amount. Besides, in some places remains of sea-animals are found in mountain heights, as much as two or three thousand feet above the sea-level—as, for instance, in Corsica. This very much increases the difficulty of the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... northwestern and 15 miles in the southeastern part, and it comprises the most fertile lands and the most populous interior towns of the Republic. The highest part of the valley is about 600 feet above sea-level and is situated at its middle point, near the city of Santiago, where a line of low hills dividing the valley into two parts forms a watershed for its rivers. The northwestern of these two sections is known as the Santiago or Yaque valley and forms the greater portion of the basin of ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... those of the Colorado, peculiar and unusual conditions are necessary. There must exist a vast region lying high above sea-level. This region must be arid. Out of it must rise separated mountain masses to such heights that they shall be well watered. These most elevated regions alone having abundant rain and snowfall, torrential streams are generated and ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... of what is now Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile had come under the sway of the Incas, the "people of the sun". The Inca power centered in the Peruvian city of Cuzco and on the shores of Lake Titicaca, which lies twelve thousand feet above sea-level. In this region of magnificent scenery the traveler views with astonishment the ruins of vast edifices, apparently never completed, which were raised either by the Incas or the Indians whom they conquered and displaced. Though the culture ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... and old plates after the modern fashion, where a white-spread table stood decorated with wild-flowers, candle-sticks with little red-shaded tapers, and a pyramid of plums and apricots. There was the usual succession of soup and fish and roast and salad which one looks for at a dinner on the sea-level, winding up with ice-cream of a highly civilized description, but Clover could scarcely eat for wondering how all these things had come there so soon, so very soon. It seemed like magic,—one minute the solemn peaks and passes, the prairie-dogs and the thorny ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... city still around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... temple in which I lived for about two months stands on high ground in a village lying about 2,500 ft. above sea-level in the prefecture of Nagano and does not seem to have been visited by foreigners. It is reached by a road which is little better than a track. No kuruma are to be found in the district, but there are a few light two-wheeled lorries. Practically all the traffic is on ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... such a work would not differ essentially from other canals and would scarcely possess a geographical character,—but of an open cut between the two seas. The late survey by Captain Selfridge, showing that the lowest point on the dividing ridge is 763 feet above the sea-level, must be considered as determining in the negative the question of the possibility of such a cut, by any means now at the control of man; and both the sanguine expectations of benefits, and the dreary suggestions of danger from the realization of this ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... of Mount Pitt and the Three Sisters rise above the dark evergreen woods. Southward innumerable smaller craters and cones are distributed along the axis of the range and on each flank. Of these, Lassen's Butte is the highest, being nearly 11,000 feet above sea-level. Miles of its flanks are reeking and bubbling with hot springs, many of them so boisterous and sulphurous they seem over ready to become spouting geysers like ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... thought of her. These dark-hulled, ocean-going vessels, these alien flags, widened her horizon—deepened her sense of the earth's wonder and the wide-flung nerves of national interest. From this sea-level she looked up in fancy to her brother's ranch near Sibley as at a cabin on a mountain-side. How still and faint and far ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... figures are: the Lake of Huleh 7 feet above the Mediterranean; the Lake of Genesareth 68245 feet, and the Dead Sea 1292 feet below the sea-level; to the south of the Dead Sea, towards the water-parting of the Akabah, the ground is over 720 feet higher than the level ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... at this candor. "Well, the ditch will be about fifty miles long, and, roughly speaking, the work is in three parts—the dredging and harbor-building at sea-level on each end of the Canal, the lock-work, and the excavations on the upper levels. That dam you saw building at Gatun will form a lake about thirty miles long—quite a fish-pond, eh? When a west-bound ship arrives, for instance, it will be raised through the Gatun locks, three of them, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... friend, "for geographical and scientific training in primary schools anywhere is not what it might be. The island of Java, with an area about equal to that of England, contains no fewer than forty-nine great volcanic mountains, some of which rise to 12,000 feet above the sea-level. Many of these mountains are at the present time active." ("Yes, much too active," muttered the negro), "and more than half of them have been seen in eruption since Java was occupied by Europeans. Hot springs, mud-volcanoes, ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... While our Oolitic and Chalk rocks were being slowly laid down under northern seas, the extensive coast plains of the island, especially on its western and southern sides, were again and again under water, and are still raised but a few hundred feet above the sea-level. From south-east to north and north-west there extends a band of extinct volcanoes, connected probably with the old craters of the Comoro Group, where, in Great Comoro, the subterranean forces are still active. All ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... The mighty Maranon, as the natives call the Upper Amazon—or the Solimoens, as it is named by the Portuguese—was before us, having flowed down for many hundred miles from the mountain lake of Lauricocha, in Peru, 12,500 feet above the sea-level. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along the sea-level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no unsimilar ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that young chap as he fights his way toward the top. He could have stopped down there in the valley, where everything was snug and comfortable, but he chose to climb so as to have a look around. I thought of him one day at Scheidegg. There we were, nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, shivering in the midst of ice and snow in mid-July, but we had a look around that made us glad in spite of the cold. As Virgil says: "It will be pleasing to remember these things hereafter." I have often noticed that the old soldiers seem to recall the hardest marches, the most severe battles, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... of the rarefaction which this fact implies. Yet the observed luminous effects may not in reality bear witness contradictory of it. One solitary molecule in each cubic inch of space might, in Professor Young's opinion, produce them; while in the same volume of ordinary air at the sea-level, the molecules number (according to Dr. Johnstone Stoney) ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Constantine, was 58,435. The city occupies a romantic position on a rocky plateau, cut off on all sides save the west from the surrounding country by a beautiful ravine, through which the river Rummel flows. The plateau is 2130 ft. above sea-level, and from 500 to nearly 1000 ft. above the river bed. The ravine, formed by the Rummel, through erosion of the limestone, varies greatly in width—at its narrowest part the cliffs are only 15 ft. apart, at its broadest the valley is 400 yds. wide. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... The Lake of Buhi (300 feet above the sea-level) presents an extremely picturesque appearance, surrounded as it is on all sides by hills fully a thousand feet high; and its western shore is formed by what still remains of the Iriga volcano. I was informed by the priests of the neighboring hamlets that the volcano, until ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... pass. From the north, down the declivities of the foot-hills of the Kenia, four larger and many smaller streams hurry to the Dana, and in their course through their rocky basins form a number of more or less picturesque cascades. The height of this large park-like plateau above the sea-level, measured at its lowest ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... swampy coast belt and the mountains intervenes a zone of very irregular hill country, of which the average height above the sea-level is about one thousand feet, with occasional peaks rising to five or six thousand ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... rivers descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides, are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with their brown mossy streams, change their character as they clip beneath the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The sea deepens ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the lake of Kithay. [Footnote: Oxus, the Jihun of the Arab, the Amu-darya of the Persians, and the Vak-shu of the Hindus, is a river of Central Asia, in Turkestan, draining the Great Pamir through two head streams—the Panja or southern, rising in Lake Victoria, 13,900 feet above the sea-level, and the Ak-su or Murghah, or northern, said to flow from Lake Barkal Yasin, 13,000 feet above the sea-level, and receiving the outflow of Lake Kara-kul above the junction. The united stream flows westwards towards Balkh, before reaching which it gradually ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... one's preconceived ideas of the beauty of the country. On one side, low ridges with rows of picturesque pine-trees just as you know them from Japanese prints, while in the background to the west, above the clouds rose the top of Fuji, nearly 4,000 metres above sea-level. We steamed up in absolute calm, while the long twilight was still further prolonged by a ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... his conjecture was a correct one. He was not alone. There were others beside himself who had won their way to even safer positions than his own. Portions of the reef on which the ship had struck were now to be plainly seen above the sea-level; it was plain that they were rarely touched by the salt water, for there was an attempt at vegetation in one or two places. And beyond the reef Percival saw land, and land that it would be ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... were as many fiords or estuaries. And though the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the land, its alternate subsidences ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... from Laramie, we arrived at the Summit of the Rocky Mountain ridge, where we reached the altitude of about 8400 feet above the sea-level. Of course it was very cold, hill and dale being covered with snow as far as the eye could reach. Now we rush rapidly down-hill, the brakes screwed tightly down, the cars whizzing round the curves, and making the snow fly past in clouds. We have now crossed the backbone ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a criminal of him. It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal oracles of Nature. Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all. We make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes. That is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of selection which would disinherit all the weaker children. The magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made up,—the people without biographies, whose lives ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rocky bed, wide enough to hold the upper Connecticut, entirely taken up by mule and donkey paths and set with the cloth booths of fruit sellers. As one moves south it grows cooler, and Monterey, fifteen hundred feet above sea-level, was not so weighty in its heat as Laredo and southern Texas. But, on the other hand, being surrounded on most sides by mountains, it had less breeze, and the coatless freedom of Texas was here looked down ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... was known also as the sea of Tiberias (John 6:1,23; 21:1). In the Old Testament it is called the sea of Chinnereth (Numb. 34:11) or Chinneroth (Josh. 12:3) after the name of a contiguous city (Josh. 19:35). The surface of the lake or sea is several hundred feet below normal sea-level, 681 feet lower than the Mediterranean according to Zenos, or 700 feet as stated by some others. This low-lying position gives to the region a semi-tropical climate. Zenos, in the Standard Bible Dictionary, says: "The waters of the lake are noted for abundant fish. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... is several thousand feet above the sea-level, is about fifteen miles in circumference, surrounded by lofty hills, and is aptly, though not elegantly, characterized as a "hole." The mountain-grass is of the most nutritious quality; groves of cottonwood trees and willows are scattered ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... All went well until he became absorbed in following downward the foliage of a bush which grew up from below. As he stretched his neck farther and farther down, I saw that he was bending his forelegs. His shoulders sank more and more. There was nothing between me and the sea-level except the mule's ears. By frantic exertions I worked myself backward, and was sliding down behind—too late. The bush broke, causing the mule to fall back forcibly against the inner bank, with myself sandwiched between the adamantine wall of the mountain ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... top, just as an eligible spot presented itself for building purposes. It is situated 8,000 feet above the level of the sea and 7,000 over the average level of "the plains," Umballa, which is near the foot of the range, being 1,000 above the sea-level. From our halting-place we could discern the scene of our night's journey, with Kussowlie looking like a mere speck in the distance, and we felt a proud sort of consciousness of having accomplished ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... hand on the second dial began to drop. They were now rising. As a usual thing, they traveled some forty feet below the surface. Icebergs were scarce in these waters, and the ordinary floe did not lie more than twenty feet below sea-level; still, it was safer lower down. But now—now their safety rested in gliding to a point beneath a water channel or hole, and, once they were under it, they must not ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... the case of Tofua (lat. 20 deg. 30' S.), Metis Island, and Amargura; the others are dormant or extinct. The whole group appears to have been elevated at a recent period, as some of the beds of coral have been raised 1272 feet and upward above the sea-level, as in the case of Eua Island.[6] The greater number of the Pacific volcanoes appear to be basaltic; such as those of the Hawaiian Group, which have been so fully described by Professor J. D. Dana.[7] Here fifteen volcanoes of the first class have been in brilliant action; all ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... port nor town. Not even a house was in sight. The land was low, scarce rising above the sea-level, and appeared to be covered with a dense forest to the water's edge. There was neither buoy nor beacon to direct the course of the vessel, but, for all that, the captain knew very well where he was steering to. It was not his first slaving expedition to the coast of Africa nor yet to ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance by the confluence of several large river channels towards one ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... picturesque town immediately below the highest part of the Serra and nearly 2500 ft above sea-level. ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... village of Kharzan, which is situated near the summit of the mountain, about six thousand feet high. The ascent is continuous and precipitous. An idea may be gained of the steepness by the fact that we now left the valley of the Shah Roud, barely one thousand feet above sea-level, to ascend, in a distance of about twelve miles, over ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... the open channel of the canal from the Concord river to Horn-pond locks in Woburn, from thence it was to be conducted in iron pipes to a reservoir upon Mount Benedict in Charlestown, a hill eighty feet above the sea-level. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... 3700 feet, and is itself about 1740 feet above the sea. Dr. Davy describes it as a lake of great beauty, surrounded by bamboos and tree-ferns. The other crater-lake lies on the north- east coast, and nearer to the sea-level: and I more than suspect that more would be recognised, up and down the island, by the eye of a ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... thousand feet in depth. After three days of this dreary travelling the army emerged into a more genial climate; they had reached the great tableland which spreads out for hundreds of miles along the crests of the Cordilleras, more than seven thousand feet above the sea-level. The vegetation of the torrid and temperate regions had of course disappeared, but the fields were carefully cultivated. Many of the crops were unknown to the Spaniards, but they recognised maize and aloes, and various kinds of cactus. Suddenly the troops came upon what seemed to be a populous ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... to settlers. It is said there is no spot of land in the State three hundred feet above the sea-level. Men born with fins and webbed feet might enjoy themselves in the lakes and swamps, which form a considerable portion of Florida. Those whose tastes are favorable to timber-cutting, can find a profitable employment in preparing live-oak ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... island uninhabited and completely surrounded by dangerous reefs and shoals; shunned by ships and spoken of as a death trap by sailors. But one tree, other than alder and willow, grew upon it. Three hundred feet above sea-level on the high, flat top, a lone and stunted spruce rose from the tundra and breasted the heavy gales that swept the ocean. For firewood there were but the drift logs of the beach. There were no animals ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... and the cliff's base, these discover a beach, several feet above sea-level, having an area of over an acre, covered with coarse grass, just the spot ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... least twenty miles in the time, possibly considerably more according to the route which they had followed, and the march had been along the roughest of roads, and had included an ascent of 3400 feet—about the height of the summit of Snowdon above the sea-level. They must have been weary, and have felt sorely the heat of the sun, now blazing right overhead. Surely it requires no words to labour this point. Joshua's one pressing need at that moment was something to temper the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... the two greatest empires in the world, the Mogul and the Celestial? The veriest tyro in geography can tell you that they are the tallest mountains on the surface of the earth; that their summits—a half-dozen of them at least—surmount the sea-level by more than five miles of perpendicular height; that more than thirty of them rise above twenty thousand feet, and carry upon their tops ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... well-known American astronomer, took up the study of Mars in a most thorough and systematic manner, and has since practically made it his life's work. An observatory was built at Flagstaff, Arizona, far away from towns and smoke, at an altitude of over 6000 feet above the sea-level, the site being specially selected on account of the clearness and purity of its atmosphere; while the observatory, being high up above the denser and more disturbed strata of air, afforded the most favourable ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... arrive in a moment or two," answered the smiling one. "The roof is raised several miles above the sea-level in order ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... distinct statement, I will assume the elevation to be general—that a swelling out of the earth's crust occurred here, sufficient to place the most prominent portions of the protuberance three miles above the sea-level. To fix the ideas, let us consider a circular portion of the crust, say one hundred miles in diameter, and let us suppose, in the first instance, the circumference of this circle to remain fixed, and that the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... reports from the literature, especially of the surgeons of army posts in mountain regions, was somewhat surprised to find that the mortality of all cases occurring above five thousand feet elevation was almost identical with that of a similar class of the population at sea-level. It is only when a sufficient number of cases occur in succession to raise the virulence of the pneumococcus in this curious manner that an epidemic ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... 2,500 feet above sea-level, though rock- laden is exceedingly rich, and the higher we go there is more bergamot, native indigo, with its underleaf dark blue, and lovely coleuses with red markings on their upper leaves, and crimson linings. I, as an ichthyologist, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... favourite walk with many visitors is to Primrose Hill, north-west of the Zoo, which rises two hundred and nineteen feet above sea-level, where the air is usually clear and bright, whilst the view over London is very fine. The hill is the property of Eton College, and is separated from the Zoo by the Regent's Canal, as well as by the Albert Road. Beneath ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various |
