"Treeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Standing on the ridge top she could see, far off through one of the treeless glades that are found so often in the spruce forest, the long path of a snowshoe trail. Instinctively she followed it ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... a discharge of artillery in the outskirts, and the church bells begin ringing; but the peals dwindle away to a melancholy jangle, and then to silence. Simultaneously, on the northern horizon of the arid, unenclosed, and treeless plain swept by the eye around the city, a cloud of dust arises, and a Royal procession is seen nearing. It means ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... proved true prophets. Nevertheless, that day was a weary one. There was no scenery. We had got into a barren, lakeless, treeless district where the world was one monotonous expanse of grey-brown prairie. We just crawled along. Kate had her hands full driving those ponies. Jerry was in capital fettle and couldn't understand why he mightn't tear ahead at full speed. He was so much disgusted over being compelled to walk that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... calm and full of old-fashioned brigs and barques. She watched them growing small like pictures floating between a green sea and a mauve sky; and then was surprised to see the white cliffs so near; and the blowing woodland was welcome after the treeless French plain. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... hand inside his coat and clutched at the papers that Jean de Gravois had read. Then he drew them forth, slowly, and held them crumpled in his fingers, while for many minutes he stared straight out into the gray gloom of the treeless plain. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... discovery there is little of interest to record. The winter, which proved to be a very mild one, passed away, and in the spring they set sail again for Greenland, their ship laden deeply with timber, so useful a treasure in their treeless northern home, while the long-boat was filled to the gunwale with the grapes ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... gay with the riders, and the bull in the stall is left, And the plough is alone in the furrow, and the wedge in the hole half-cleft; And late shall the ewes be folded, and the kine come home to the pail, And late shall the fires be litten in the outmost treeless dale: For men fare to the gate of Giuki and the ancient cloudy hall, And therein are the earls assembled and the kings wear purple and pall, And the flowers are spread beneath them, and the bench-cloths ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... long rest, they hitched the team in again and started on toward the west. They had still half-way (twenty-five miles) to go. The way grew stranger. The land, more broken and treeless, seemed very wonderful to them. They came into a region full of dry lake-beds, and Bert, who had a taste for geology, explained the cause of the valleys so level at the bottom, and pointed out the old-time limits of the water. As night began to fall, it seemed ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... vocal organ, or vibratory drum, at the cicada's waist, and saw that some cicadas possessed it and others not; and he knew, as the poets also knew, that it was the males who sang, while their wives listened and were silent. He tells how the cicada is absent from treeless countries, as, for instance, from Cyrene (and why, I wonder, does he go all the way to Cyrene for his illustration?), neither is it heard in deep and sunless woods; but in the olive-groves you hear it at its best, for an olive-grove is sparse and the sun comes through. Then he ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... into the northern end of the great Lake Winnipeg, fully 1300 miles from the glacier cradle where it took its birth. This river, which has along it every diversity of hill and vale, meadow-land and forest, treeless plain and fertile hill-side, is called by the wild tribes who dwell-along its glorious shores the Kissaskatchewan, or Rapid-flowing River. But this Kissaskatchewan is not the only river which waters the great central region lying between ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... lowest of three primitive tribes that inhabit the extreme southern point of Patagonia, whose real estate holdings front on the Strait of Magellan. That region is treeless, rocky, windswept, cold and inhospitable. I can not imagine a place better fitted for an anarchist penal colony. North of it lie plains less rigorous, and by degrees less sterile, and finally there are lands quite habitable by ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... development. No person who has seen the gazelles in confinement in a temperate climate can form an idea of the beauty of the animal in its native desert. Born in the scorching sun, nursed on the burning sand of the treeless and shadowless wilderness, the gazelle is among the antelope tribe as the Arab horse is among its brethren, the high-bred and superlative beauty of the race. The skin is as sleek as satin, of a colour ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... were mostly flattened and pressed over to one side, and altogether they seemed so piteous, that one wished to say, "Nobody shall do so to you any more, poor things!" Excepting these, the immediate coast, for five or six hundred miles that we skirted it, was absolutely treeless. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... poorly cultivated land, vineyards, and little farms, extend to the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless, treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this limitless prairie, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... cheaper structure of little else but corrugated iron sheets, while to the left, where a similar street crossed the railroad at right angles, there was a one-story cement building proudly labeled "Bank." Both streets suddenly disappeared in a sandy, treeless plain. ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... on snow-shoes nearly six feet long, strode mightily out of the forest, and gazed across the treeless valley ahead. ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... vow'd; but, ah! how seldom pledges Given to the dying, to the dead, are held! The Esquire reach'd the shore, where sand and sedge is O'er melancholy hills, by paths of eld; Treeless and houseless was the prospect round, Rock-strewn and boisterous the lake before; A Charon-shape in a skiff a-ground— The pilgrim turned, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... our woods and mountains for the plains Of treeless level Granta." (p. 103.) ... "'Twas then the time When in two camps, like Pope and Emperor, Byron and Wordsworth parted ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... as I thought of them, whether the cultured monks and the uncivilized Britons delighted as much in the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... for these oranges at first, that orange growing boomed all over Southern California. People thought their fortunes were made when they set out a few acres of small budded trees they had paid a dollar or more apiece for. Whole towns sprang up in dry treeless valleys where only cattle and sheep had pastured, and land worth only twenty-five dollars an acre before the orange excitement, sold quickly for eight hundred and a thousand when planted with trees. The towns of Pomona, Redlands, Monrovia, and others in the orange localities ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... got to it, was treeless, wind-swept, and moon-swept. It was a great white altar, victimless and bare. He felt devastated, weak. It was a relief, bodily and mental, to sink to his knees—to fall—to lie at his length. He pressed his hot face into the cool, consoling whiteness, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... trod the great treeless plain, being followed by all in single file. With such caution did we tread, and so excited were we all, that at first scarcely was a word spoken. Very soon, however, with confidence in Omar's leadership the natives grew hilarious again, and keeping ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... boys below to close up on us, we three settled down to the maintenance of the hottest fire we could deliver at the rifle flashes above us, to cover their advance. Luckily there were many boulders scattered along the grassy treeless slope they had to advance across to reach the foot of the cliff. Thus by darting from one boulder to another they had tolerable cover and were able to reach us with no worse casualties than a comparatively ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge, trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water, they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to it, one or both. It must have been the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and his eyes blazed. He started to speak, then shut his mouth with a snap, turned on his heel, and strode across the treeless glade to where his noisy riders were saddling up, tightening girths, buckling straps, and examining the unshod feet of their horses or smoothing out the burrs from mane and tail. The red sun glittered ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the west on the broad Trail to the mountains. The great plains in those early days were solitary and desolate beyond the power of description; the Arkansas River sluggishly followed the tortuous windings of its treeless banks with a placidness that was awful in its very silence; and whoso traced the wanderings of that stream with no companion but his own thoughts, realized in all its intensity the depth of solitude from which Robinson Crusoe suffered on his lonely island. Illimitable as the ocean, the weary ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... and without undulations, composed in general of gravel or hard clay, and rarely enlivened by any show of water; except for two months in the spring, they exhibit to the eye a uniform brown expanse, almost treeless, which impresses the traveller with a feeling of sadness and weariness. Even in Azerbijan, which is one of the least arid portions of the territory, vast tracks consist of open undulating downs, desolate and sterile, bearing only a coarse withered grass ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... carefully cleans the plants. Constant heat, damp, and moisture, shelter from solar beams, from scorching heat, and from nocturnal radiation, are thus all procured for the plant, which would certainly not live twenty-four hours, if exposed to the climate of this treeless district. Great attention is paid to the cultivation, which is very profitable. Snakes frequently take up their quarters in these hot-houses, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... treeless plain, so far from the old trail and from the timber ahead that they could see no sign of the Black Hillers or the troops, the next morning's sun rose on the band of Sioux led by Persimmon Bill. Used to all kinds of ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... the real name of which is La Purgatoire. It is about five miles from the post and makes a nice objective point for a short ride, for the clear water gurgling over the stones, and the trees and bushes along its banks, are always attractive in this treeless country. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... surrounding the station was almost treeless, and Mr. Lee was doing a good deal of planting, and had a very fine garden under formation. Some two miles to the rear of the station, in a deep cleft of the hills, lay a considerable black and white pine forest. It is a peculiarity of New Zealand that the pine forests indigenous ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... not we go to a land where there is much that is far better than we find here, and live as the Fire-spouters live? Did the Great Maker of all things intend that we should remain content with these treeless islands among the ice, when there are lands not very far away where we may find much of all kinds of things that are far better? If it is wise to change our hunting and fishing grounds close at hand, surely it may be wise to change to those that are far away—especially when we know that they are ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... lonely, desolate country, treeless, a barren waste; but Jean loved it. He said the land was better than ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... sighed, as he cast a sweeping glance over the widespread waste of waters on which nothing floated save a few belated icebergs, and then inland over weary miles of desolate upland barrens, treeless, moss-covered, and painfully rugged. "It is tough luck to be shut up here like birds in a cage, with no chance of the door being opened before next summer. It is tougher on Baldwin, though, than on me, and if he can stand ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... divided in the tomb, For I would die among the hills of Spain, And o'er the treeless, melancholy plain Await the coming of the final gloom. But thou — O pitiful! — wilt find scant room Among thy kindred by the northern main, And fade into the drifting mist again, The hemlocks' shadow, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... fountains all through the vast regions where the flocks roam, and in some parts there are cisterns, though the sheep like the living water best. The shepherds know where these drinking-places are all through the treeless country where streams are few. It is a fine sight to see the shepherds bring their flocks 'beside the still waters' at some well or fountain, while the wide, silent country over which they and many other sheep have wandered, spreads all around them, and the full expanse of ...
— The Song of our Syrian Guest • William Allen Knight
... so smeared with oleaginous gush that I had conceived against them a sort of antipathy, which was not diminished by their barren, treeless appearance. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... that Squire Boone had succeeded in bringing one or two horses across the mountains. The abundance of grass kept them in fine condition. Upon the backs of these horses, the pioneers could traverse the treeless prairies without obstruction, and large portions of the forest were as free from underbrush as the park of an English nobleman. Invaluable as these animals were to the adventurers, they greatly increased their perils. They could not easily be concealed. Their footprints could not be effaced, ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... fine June, and overpoweringly hot. Wind-swept, treeless Gorlay lay shadeless and panting under the blazing sun, and the dwellers there determined that they preferred the cutting winds and driving rains to which ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Brorson spent at Randrup where his father and grandfather had worked before him were probably the happiest in his life. The parish is located in a low, treeless plain bordering the North Sea. Its climate, except for a few months of summer, is raw and blustery. In stormy weather the sea frequently floods its lower fields, causing severe losses in crops, stocks ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... of the woods. On the prairies and in treeless regions it is not known. It prefers heavy "timber," where there are huge logs and hollow trees in plenty. It requires the neighbourhood of water, and in connection with this may be mentioned a curious ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure: that is to say, when it is of the kind to my taste. I enjoyed that day, though we travelled slowly, though it was cold, though it rained. Somewhat bare, flat, and treeless was the route along which our journey lay; and slimy canals crept, like half-torpid green snakes, beside the road; and formal pollard willows edged level fields, tilled like kitchen-garden beds. The sky, too, was monotonously gray; the atmosphere was stagnant and humid; yet amidst all these ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... channel widened, and the river became very shallow, the low rolling hills falling away into a wide green prairie. We camped that night on a small island, low and treeless, but covered with deep, rank grass. Next morning our sleeping-bags were wet with frost and dew. A hard pull against a heavy wind between gradually deepening rocky banks made us more than glad to pitch camp at ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... Environment: treeless, sparse and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; lacks fresh water; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... was made it was immediately after one of those wonderful seasons that transform these parts of Central Australia from a treeless and grassless desert to a land where the swelling plains that stretch from bound to bound of the horizon are as vast fields of ripening corn in ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... poet describes as earth's last habitant. I had accompanied the priest half-way to the river forks. Here, he was to get passage in an Indian canoe to the tribes of the upper Missouri. After an affectionate farewell, I stood on a knoll of treeless land and watched the broad-brimmed hat and ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... —As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... introduced as a natural and necessary element. The following passage, taken from the writings of Han Wen-kung, whose name has been pronounced to be "one of the most venerated," is a fair specimen of the trash to be met with at every turn in that trackless, treeless desert, which for want of a more appropriate term we are obliged to call ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... from the swamps only in being treeless. They are open sheets of water surrounded by bands of greater or less width of tall grasses. The third day, between 30 and 40 miles from Myers, we left the pine tree lands and started across what ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... we did not find as much in the way of supplies and ammunition as we had hoped. The Turk had destroyed the greater part of his store. We did find great quantities of wood, and in that barren, treeless country it was worth a lot. Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession. Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform of poles, cut ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... soldier of Cortes's army called Villafuerte, and that the day succeeding the terrible Noche Triste, it was concealed by him in the place where it was afterwards discovered. At all events, the image disappeared, and nothing further was known of it until, on the top of a barren and treeless mountain, in the heart of a large maguey, she was found by a fortunate Indian. Her restoration was joyfully hailed by the Spaniards. A church was erected on the spot. A priest was appointed to take charge of the miraculous image. Her fame spread abroad. Gifts of immense value were brought ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... anger when a crabbed neighbor ruthlessly cut down a superb tree of the same kind that was on his property line, in order that he might run his barbed-wire fence straight? No; I agree with him that this tree-murderer has probably a barbed-wire heart, and we expect that his future existence will be treeless, ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... never saw'st an oak Much bigger than a wagon spoke: Thou only could'st the Muse invoke On treeless fen: Then come and aim a higher stroke, My man ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... islands of New Siberia, of Wrangel's Land, and of the part of North America east of Behring's Straits, whose natural state gave occasion to the golden glamour of tradition with which the belief of the common people incorrectly adorned the bleak, treeless islands in the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... by 800 yards; the width of the river actually separating the faces of the two works. At the time the fleet arrived, the woods on the west bank had been cleared away below Jackson almost to the extreme range of its guns, thus affording no shelter from observation; the east bank was nearly treeless. Extending across the river from below Jackson, and under the guns of both works, was a line of obstructions which will ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... downs and the richly-foliaged fields through which the Avon winds. It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar and lovely harmony ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... manor-house in a nook by the cliffs, with modern castellations and battlements; and he had walked through the rooms, about the lawn, and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island of treeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure. In name, nature, and accessories the property within the girdling wall formed a complete antithesis to everything in its precincts. To find other trees between Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a little ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... silent forest, curiously and beautifully broken by the gleaming waters of a myriad of lakes, between which rugged mountain-ranges rise as a sea of granite billows. At the northeast the mountains culminate within an area of some hundreds of square miles; and here savage, treeless peaks, towering above the timber line, crowd one another, and, standing gloomily shoulder to shoulder, rear their rocky crests amid the frosty clouds. The wild beasts may look forth from the ledges on the mountain-sides over unbroken woodlands stretching beyond ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... clouds, watching the star, like giant children that peep down a well. The jewel descends by four sparkling chains, so far away they look to be dewy threads of silk. As the bright mystery grows larger it appears to be approaching the treeless hill of Washington Park, a hill that is surrounded by many wooded ridges. The people come running from everywhere to watch. Here indeed will be a Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean. Flying machines appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round as ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... we'd got to the valleys yet," said I, eagerly, connecting Mormons with fertility and jasmine. And I lifted the flaps of the stage, first one side and then the other, and saw the desert everywhere flat, treeless, and staring like ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... heavy rains fell, and the water rushed down to the Nile, carving out the great watercourses which remain to this day, bearing testimony to the truth. And the flints, which the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the plateau-forests made and used, still lie on the now treeless ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... master of ceremonies with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped hi cathedral stone—memory of the grove, God's first temple; and when we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest. Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some obscure instinct in us ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... are the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich spruce forests and unrecorded Eskimo tribes. It had been his intention, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... here on an elevation, disappearing in the curve of a heavy cut two hundred yards further north. In front the ground fell sharply and rolled out in a vast green meadow, almost treeless and level as a mill-pond. Far off on the horizon rose the blue haze of a range of foothills, upon which the falling sun momentarily stood, like a gold-piece edge-up on a table. Nearer, to their right, was a strip of uncleared woods, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... she loved flowers, was sated here, and owned that no profusion of them could make a landscape. "There is a dreary monotony in a scene like this, that words cannot express. The sky of brass over our heads, and this treeless, lifeless sea of sandy hillocks around us, excite a feeling of desolation and solitude, which forces me to look round on our party to convince myself that I am not alone ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... in a wild and desolate country. Below them stretched a seemingly endless waste of snow and ice—great forests interspersed with treeless patches, while now and then they sailed ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... years ago, when it was first ceded to Britain, Hong-Kong was a barren, treeless, granite island, it really is an astonishing place. It is easily the handsomest modern city in Asia, has a population of 400,000, and is by a long way the busiest port in the world. It is an exceedingly ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... spring, warm, gracious. This part of the world seems to be well-nigh treeless! There is no generous foliage, but wherever there are branches to bear it the first green has started ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... long delinquent wages; and they were in a happy frame of mind. Their dead comrades were dead and mourning was for widows; but for them would be the pleasures of swift reprisals. The fugitives had gone toward the desert, and in that bleak stretch of treeless land it would not be difficult to find them, once ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... naked rocks, and treeless valleys, and bare stony plains, are objects without interest, except in a geological point of view. But it is very different with the Haghar and Azgher. In their eyes, a plain of stones and sand holds the place of a heath of growing bloom; a barren ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... their homes. In point of fact, there were great areas of upland—not alone in the prairie country of northern Indiana and Illinois, but in the hilly regions within a hundred miles of the Ohio—that were almost treeless. On these unobstructed stretches grasses grew in profusion; and here roamed great herds of herbivorous animal-kind—deer and elk, and also buffalo, "filing in grave procession to drink at the rivers, plunging and snorting among the rapids and quicksands, rolling their huge ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... roads lead to it; no fertile and cultivated land surrounds it; no trees or parks or pleasure grounds are near it. The houses might have been pitched down yesterday for all the notice the veldt takes of them. Spread out over the hills and valleys for some hundreds of miles each side this barren treeless veldt, which, after all, is the main fact of South African life, seems to carry these little unexpected towns on its breast with the same ease and unconsciousness that the sea carries its fleets of ships; surrounding ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America; while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Jersey would never be overpassed. There grew before the men's eyes, upon the treeless plateau which marked the summit, a small country church and graveyard. Inexpressibly lonely they looked against the stormy sky, lonely and beckoning. From company to company ran a statement. "When you get to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the sand, Which it sent flying wide;—then Sohrab threw In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang, The iron plates rang sharp, but turn'd the spear. And Rustum seized his club, which none but he Could wield; an unlopp'd trunk it was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up By their dark springs, the wind in winter-time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge The club which Rustum lifted now, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... little knoll, just beyond the line of bushes, and on lower ground, fully a dozen young men lounged, basking in the morning sun, which poured through upon this small, treeless space. ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... Long before the treeless wastes are reached, the forests cease to be forests except by courtesy. The trees—black and white spruce, the Canadian larch, and the gray pine, willow, alder, etc.—have an appearance of youth; so that the traveller ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... where none is found, Make bright some treeless spot, And as the ceaseless years go round You will not be forgot; From hill to hill, from shore to shore, Let hands forget their play, And men will bless forevermore ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... twenty-five degrees below zero; nearly all the tent-pins were broken, and nearly forty soldiers and teamsters were on the sick list, most of them being frost-bitten. “The earth,” writes the colonel, “has no more lifeless, treeless, grassless desert; it contains scarcely a wolf to glut itself on the hundreds of dead and frozen animals which for thirty miles ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... is a satisfaction to turn to the towering rock of St. Angelo; not a tree, not a shrub, not a spire of grass, on its perpendicular side. We try to analyze the satisfaction there is in such a bald, treeless, verdureless mass. We can grasp it intellectually, in its sharp solidity, which is undisturbed by any ornament: it is, to the mind, like some complete intellectual performance; the mind rests on it, like a demonstration in Euclid. And yet what a color ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... our troops, the restful scene began to change. Treeless ridges carpeted with just enough green to veil the rocky formation of the ground began to break out with a superficial rash of the colour of fresh earth. In rows and circles, by angles and zigzags, the training trenches began to take form daily under the pick ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... behind us; but the pines themselves were smaller, interspersed with what is called "crooked timber," which grows in grotesque dwarf-like forms. The forest at last diminished into mere sparse shrubs, and finally we reached the treeless region, called in German the Alpen, where there is rich pasturage for cattle and sheep during the summer. We were now on tolerably level ground, and I thought we should get a trot out of our wretched horses, but no, not a step faster would they ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... elimination of things that would not live I gradually arrived at the conclusion that it is best for any locality to develop the species, or a like kind of tree, which belong to that locality. Well, they say, how about the prairies that are treeless? Of course we have there to deal with a question of fire that from time immemorial has swept the prairies covered with grass and has been halted only when it reached the regions of established forests; so ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... Highveer Point and am looking down Heddon's Mouth. Heddon is the corruption of the Celtic word "etin," which means a giant, and the Celtic spirit which so named this wild valley had indeed a sense of the poetry and grandeur of places. Sheer either side rise the slate hills, bare, waterless, and treeless. The southern hill is one steep slope of scree; the northern hill, Highveer Point, on which I stand, is covered with dead gorse and heather, which they have been burning in the spring, and the sharp smell lingers ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... found we had upon our right hand, and stretching away to the west, an enormous salt expanse, and it appeared as if we had hit exactly upon the eastern edge of it, at which we rejoiced greatly for a time. Continuing on our course over treeless sandhills for a mile or two, we found we had not escaped this feature quite so easily, for it was now right in our road; it appeared, however, to be bounded by sandhills a little more to the left, eastwards; so we ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... thirty thousand pounds. At this rate the tundra section of the Bering Straits Railway would alone involve an outlay of twenty million sterling; probably far more, for every foot of timber for the roadway would have to be imported into this treeless waste. And how is this expenditure going to be repaid by these barren deserts, in winter of ice, and in summer of mud and mosquitoes. Let another Klondike be discovered near, say, Sredni-Kolymsk, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... inexhaustible fertility and easy of cultivation. The climate was almost rainless, and agriculture was dependent upon artificial irrigation. The upper portion of this great river valley was formed of undulating plains stretching away to the north, where, almost treeless, they furnished great pasture ranges for flocks and herds, which also added to the permanency of the food supply and helped to develop the wealth and prosperity of the country. It was in this climate, so favorable for the development of early man, and with this fertile soil yielding such bountiful ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Chicago the more depressing the landscape became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... all true perception of natural beauty,—as though the one great end were to graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive examination. Hence whatever new they met with, they were ready to welcome and enjoy. They could appreciate the long, bare, houseless, treeless glens, not less than the well-wooded lakes. And yet Miss Wordsworth's home-heartedness makes her long for some touches of home and human habitation to break the long bleak solitudes she passed through. The absolute desolation of the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... flat-topped mountain, as I say, was grassy and quite treeless, although it rose like a truncated sugar-cone out of a wilderness of trees which stretched for miles below us, north, south, east, and west, bordered on the horizon by towering blue mountains, their distant ranges enclosing the forests as in ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... Greek colonies, but, on the contrary, were glad to learn of them many of the rudiments of civilization. Some of these tribes retained their ancestral habits of wandering herdsmen, and, with their flocks, traversed the vast and treeless plains, where they found ample pasture. Others selecting sunny and fertile valleys, scattered their seed and cultivated the soil. Thus the Scythians were divided into two quite distinct classes, the herdsmen ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... came on with drifting showers, which descended in torrents, lashing the naked plain, and battering our vehicle with the force and noise of a waterspout. And though at length the moon rose, and looked out at times from the cloud, she had nothing to show us but houseless, treeless desolation; and, as if scared at what she saw, she instantly hid her face in another mass of vapour. The stages were short, and the halts long; for which the postilion had but too good excuse, in ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... tell, and they gave up all hope of life. And at last touched the ground, and when daylight came waded to the shore; and saw nothing round but sand and desolate salt pools, for they had come to the quicksands of the Syrtis, and the dreary treeless flats which lie between Numidia and Cyrene, on the burning shore of Africa. And there they wandered starving for many a weary day, ere they could launch their ship again, and gain the open sea. And there Canthus was killed, while he was trying to drive off sheep, by a stone which ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... as seen to-day is an almost treeless, though not unfertile, stretch of rock, with a harbour on the north coast which must always make the place a necessary possession to the first sea power of Europe. Much of its soil is of comparatively modern creation, and four thousand years ago the island ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... respect, as well as in the general aspect of the country, they resemble that most healthy of all healthy climates, the interior of South Africa, near and adjacent to the Desert. This ridge has neither fountain nor marsh upon it, and east of the Kalomo we look upon treeless undulating plains covered with short grass. From a point somewhat near to the great falls, this ridge or oblong mound trends away to the northeast, and there treeless elevated plains again appear. Then again the ridge is said to bend ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Cataracts, southward across the burning sands of the Nubian Desert, a distance of 425 miles, concur in the statement that it is an undertaking unmatched in its severity and rigors by any like journey over the treeless and shrub-less spaces of the earth. "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," as told by De Quincey, in his matchless descriptive style, carrying his readers with him through scenes of almost unparalleled ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... old Teutonic forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Maehrchen" and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men "all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the distant sky-line (Now pansy-blue and clear), We know a land is waiting, A brown land, very dear: A land of open spaces, Gaunt forest, treeless plain: And if we once have loved it We must ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... tree watching the tribe defile across the water-course: then remounting, after a ride of two miles, we reached a ground called Kuranyali [30], upon which the wigwams of the Nomads were already rising. The parched and treeless stubble lies about eight miles from and 145o S.E. of Gudingaras; both places are supplied by Angagarri, a well near the sea, which is so distant that cattle, to return before nightfall, must ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... the country as usual—malaria, marshes, mosquitoes, misery; far as the eye can reach, vast treeless marshes perfectly lifeless. At times progressing slowly by towing, the men struggling through the water with the rope; at other times by running round the boat in a circle, pulling with their hands at the grass, which thus acts ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... of the mountains and plains is now treeless, but it is manifest, both from the evidence of the inscriptions and from the observations of travellers, that the whole of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was turned from my westward course by salt-water lakes; and at last, on October 19th, at about 80 miles to the east of my former track, I found myself on the brink of the Stony Desert. Coming suddenly on it I almost lost my breath. If anything, it looked more forbidding than before. Herbless and treeless, it filled more than half of the horizon. Not an object was visible on which to steer, yet we held on our course by compass like a ship ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... of a tete-a-tete more complete and unbroken than any we have yet enjoyed. All day I watch the endless, treeless, hedgeless German flats fly past; the straight-lopped poplars, the spread of tall green wheat, the blaze of rape-fields—the villages and towns, with two-towered German churches, over and over, and over again. Oh, for a hill, were it no bigger than a molehill! Oh, for ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... and the settlement itself there stretched a winding road, arid and treeless, perhaps two miles in length. It announced definitely that its end was futility. All this day long heavy bullock-carts had rumbled over it, rumbled toward the landing and rattled emptily back to the settlement. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... "mellowed by the stealing hours of time;" but we missed the bright sunny fields of France, we found none of the soft loveliness of the Italian climate or vegetation, and were ever contrasting its treeless surface with well-wooded Belgium and Switzerland. When gazing upon its stunted shrubbery and dry yellow grass, it was natural to recall the lovely valleys and plains of Japan, and even the closely-cultivated ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the dog, though even at that distance, as she moved almost imperceptibly over the short turf of the treeless expanse along by the sea, he would have been sure that it was ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... edges of his loneliness; solitude, if it hurts, sometimes cures too. But he was not yet cured of longing for that self-forbidden city in the North. He desired it—he desired the arid wilderness of its treeless streets, its incessant sounds, its restless energy; he desired its pleasures, its frivolous days and nights, its satiated security, its ennui. Its life had been his life, its people his people, and he longed for it with ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... now, save for the dread of snakes, was pleasant and open. We had been gradually ascending during the last two hours, and now we found ourselves traversing the lengthening crest of a rocky and treeless ridge, with valleys on either side of us, choked with motionless lakes of mist, which seemed like vast snow fields under the splendour ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers |
