"Scarp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sat there at the edge of the pool looking up at the rocky scarp before them, part of which glowed in the sunlight reflected from the sky, while the rest down by where they sat was bathed in purply shadows which were ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... that Coldscaur, which is in North Marvilion beyond the Middle Shires, stands on a fretted scarp. It is strongly defended by art as well as nature, for there are three ravines about it with a stepped path through each up to the Castle. These were defended about midway of each by a wicket-gate and a couple of towers. The gorges are so narrow that there ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... of the trenches, with features set, On that hot, still morning, in measured pace, Our column climbed; climbed higher yet, Past the fauss'bray, scarp, up the curtain-face, And along ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... heaviest beams they had brought stretched across the gate-way, as high as they could reach overhead, and propped against the masonry on either side with shorter beams; then poles, planks, and fagots were stretched in a slope from the ground to the crossing timbers, so as to make a scarp; and, as soon as this was done, shovel and pick were set to work to dig a deep wide ditch, the earth from which was thrown up over the wood; while men on either side filled baskets and carried their loads to pile upon ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... Medran, who fought his way into the trenches where the Turkish cannon were planted, and at first drove all before him; but the Janissaries rallied and forced back the Christians out of the trenches. Unfortunately there was a high wind, which drove the smoke of the artillery down on the counter-scarp (the slope of masonry facing the rampart), and while it was thus hidden from the Christians, the Turks succeeded in effecting a lodgment there, fortifying themselves with trees and sacks of earth and wool. When the smoke cleared off, the knights were dismayed to see ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but, thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the windows or the broad lawns of the Chateau, for the mountain and glacier is a huge back-drop seen ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... hoping by these to cover Douay and other frontier towns, which were threatened by the confederates. The troops left for the defence of the lines retired without opposition. The allies having laid bridges over the scarp, the duke of Marlborough with his division passed the river and encamped at Vitri. Prince Eugene remained on the other side and invested Douay, the enemy retiring towards Cambray. Mareschal Villars still commanded the French army, which was extremely numerous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... wonderful scenery of which we are so proud. Our earthquakes are due to movements similar to those which, through hundreds of thousands of years, have been raising the lofty mountains of the Cordilleran region. The Sierra Nevada range, with its abrupt eastern scarp nearly two miles high, faces an important line of fracture along which movements have continued to take place up ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... and a Roman road. The Roman road ran proverbially direct; even its few curves were not seldom formed by straight lines joined together. The British road was quite different. It curled as fancy dictated, wandered along the foot or the scarp of a range of hills, followed the ridge of winding downs, and only by chance stumbled briefly into straightness. Whenever ancient remains show a long straight line or several correctly drawn right angles, we may be sure that they date from a ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... by getting on land, which is yet a harder step. Because the steep of the ground, like a staircase void of stairs, stands facing you, and the cliff upon either side juts up close, to forbid any flanking movement, and the scanty scarp denies fair start for a rush at the power of the hill front. Yet here must the heavy boats beach themselves, and wallow and yaw in the shingly roar, while their cargo and crew get out of them, their gunwales swinging ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the escarpment. Into it your track apparently runs point-blank: a confronting mass which, if it were to slip down, would overwhelm the whole town. But in a moment you find that the road, the old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns at a sharp angle when it reaches the base of the scarp, and ascends in the stiffest of inclines to the right. To the left there is also another ascending road, modern, almost as steep as the first, and perfectly straight. This is ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... far from level. After two hours of riding on a small and wiry horse with no built-in springs, Hoddan hurt in a great many places he'd never known he owned. He and Thal rode in an indeterminate direction with an irregular scarp of low mountains silhouetted against the unfamiliar stars. A vagrant night-wind blew. Thal had said it was a three-hour ride to Don Loris' castle. After something over two of them, he ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... am sorry I have done injustice to my sovereign, and your master. But I am, like a true Scotsman, wise behind hand—the mistake has happened—my Supplication has been refused, and my only resource is to employ the rest of my means to carry Moniplies and myself to some counter-scarp, and die in the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... heralds of the torrent to come, fell through an opening above and pattered upon the dusty carpet at Paul's feet. He glanced upward at the darkening pall which seemed to rest upon the hill top. Its oppressive blackness suggested weight, so that one trembled for the stability of the chalky scarp which must uphold that ebon canopy. Paul moved further along the aisle to a spot where the foliage was unbroken, as rain began a rapid tattoo upon the leafy roof. In the following instant the hillside ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Still, there is much to do yet before they are finished, and there are points where fortifications might be added with advantage. These I will gladly point out to you. They have been beyond our means here, for, as you will perceive, it will need blasting in many places to scarp the rock, and to render inaccessible several points at which active men can now climb up. For this work, powder is required. And I would submit that, for such hard work, it will be needful to supply extra ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... widow, ten or twelve years apparently the senior. They sailed with only one friend to see them off, an aide-de-camp of the commanding general, yet not without much curiosity on part of the younger woman as to the composition of the passenger list. Even before they were beyond the rocky scarp of Alcatraz, for few things are impossible to a pretty woman, she had been able to secure a copy and to say, with bated breath, to the languid invalid: "At least he's not going on this ship. It might be better if he were." For Miss ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... the character of those bluffs is peculiarly fitted for military purposes. For long stretches along the north side the cliffs stand sheer and have spurs that dip down sharply to the valley. The ridge, or the top of the bluff, which looks from below like the scarp of a great plateau, lies at an average of a mile or more from the stream. Many of these spurs jut out in such a way that if fortified they could enfilade up and downstream. To add to the military value of such a barrier the edge of the scarp is heavily wooded, while the lower slopes ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... opposite the great temple. The walls are from 30 to 35 feet in height, and the rock immediately below them is steeply, but irregularly, scarped all round the hill. The long line of battlements which crowns the steep scarp on the east is broken only by the lofty towers and fretted domes of the noble palace of Raja Man Singh. On the opposite side, the line of battlements is relieved by the deep recess of the Urwahi valley, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... marched down from the town, and, under the direction of the knights, laboured all night at the mound, removing great quantities of the fallen stones and rubbish in a line halfway up it, and piling them above so as to form a scarp across the mound that would need ladders to ascend. Another party worked at the top of the mound, and there built up a wall eight feet high. The work was completed by daylight, and the knights felt that they were now in a position ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... railway carriage—and instantly the hellish din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused ouvriers are quarrying the famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... its signal successes in Mexico, than to the high military character of this population-no young aspirant for glory, fresh from this useful school, could have greater delight in laying out his first bastion, or counter-scarp, or glacis, than Corporal Flint enjoyed in fortifying Castle Meal. It will be remembered that this was the first occasion he was ever actually at the head of the engineering department Hitherto, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... a plan of a circular stockade, surrounded by a ditch and earthen parapet. The ditch ten feet wide by seven deep. The diameter from scarp to scarp, sixty feet; diameter of inner circular ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... went out there was no sun; the snow was blue and cold. I hurried away down the hill, musing on Maggie. The road made a loop down the sharp face of the slope. As I went crunching over the laborious snow I became aware of a figure striding down the steep scarp to intercept me. It was a man with his hands in front of him, half stuck in his breeches pockets, and his shoulders square—a real farmer of the hills; Alfred, of course. He waited for me by ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... another trout, waded ashore and glanced with a rueful smile at the dozen this one made. They scarcely averaged half a pound, and he had spent most of a day that could badly be spared in catching them. Plodding back along the shingle with his load, he reached a little level strip beneath a scarp of rock, where a fire blazed among the boulders. A tent stood beneath two or three small, wind-stunted spruces, and a ragged man in long river-boots lay resting on one elbow near the blaze, regardless ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... on an operational plan which had been scathingly disapproved by his superiors, went to the rescue ... the successful rescue ... of a three-man Lunar exploration party which had become lost near the south scarp of Sinus Iridum. The officer's name, I am almost certain, was Captain Steven Darius ... the Senator's grandfather, I believe ... an officer the Navy will ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... next passed up by Caleb, who, declining the proffered hand, drew himself up, by a firm grasp upon the rocky scarp of the cliff. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... visits of the watery sprites, but you may keep off hares from your flower-beds, two-legged cats from your larder, and sentimental "cousins" from your maids. You may thus, indeed, make your hall or mansion into a little fortified place, with fosse and counter-scarp, and covered way, and glacis; or at any rate, you may put a plain English haw-haw ditch and fence all round the sacred enclosure; and depend upon it that you will find the good effects of this extra expense in the anti-rheumatic tendencies of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... shoulder of this island was Fort Moultrie, an irregular fort, without ditch or counterscarp, with a brick scarp wall about twelve feet high, which could be scaled anywhere, and this was surmounted by an earth parapet capable of mounting about forty twenty-four and thirty-two pounder smooth-bore iron guns. Inside the fort were three two-story brick barracks, sufficient to quarter the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... any time during his life, almost up to the present hour, he might have entered without question, for the gates were seldom closed and never locked, the portcullises, sheathed in the wall above, hung moveless in their rusty chains, and the drawbridges spanned the moat from scarp to counterscarp, as if from the first their beams had rested there in solid masonry. And still, during the day, there was little sign of change, beyond an indefinable presence of busier life, even in the hush of the hot autumnal noon. But at night the drawbridges rose and the portcullises descended—each ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... drink the life-blood and tear the haunch; he will watch it steal away and hide under the karaunda bush; he will sit there till day breaks, when he will creep under the thorn jungle, across the stream, up the scarp of the ravine, through the long grass to the sahib's camp, and give the word that makes the hunter's heart dance. From the camp he will stride from hamlet to hamlet till he has raised an army of beaters; ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... deep, and the parapet was about twelve feet high, making its crest about twenty feet above the bottom of the ditch. The berme usually left between the bottom of the parapet slope and the ditch was cut away so as to leave no level standing-place at the top of the scarp. This was the work which Longstreet afterward assaulted. Its chief defect was due to the situation and the contour of the ground around, which made its position so prominent a salient in the lines that the flanking fire was necessarily imperfect, leaving a considerable ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... and sometimes breaking away and littering the plain with rubble. The desert is never completely desert for long, and on turning westward as he was directed, Joseph caught sight of the hill which he had been told to look out for—he could not miss it, for the evening sun lit up a high scarp, and on coming to the end of a third mile the desert began to look a little less desert, brambles began again. Banu could not be far away. But Joseph did not dare to go farther. He had been walking for many hours, and even if he were to meet Banu he could not speak ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... rumble ominously, and in him there was burning a slow and sullen anger. He buried himself among the rocks; he followed a ledge with Muskwa slinking close at his heels; he climbed over a huge scarp of rock, and twisted among boulders half as big as houses. But not once did he go where Muskwa could not easily follow. Once, when he drew himself from a ledge to a projecting seam of sandstone higher up, and ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... dripping, but the fog had almost cleared away, leaving only a haze in the air. A pale, level line of it cut across the scarp of the Big Hill. The sun shone with a peculiar ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... furiously angry down below there. But those who were not wounded had tumbled ashore, and they replied to our second volley with a more concerted fire. And in the flash Of their guns I, craning over the scarp of the hill, saw clearly but ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham |
