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Shale   Listen
verb
Shale  v. t.  To take off the shell or coat of; to shell. "Life, in its upper grades, was bursting its shell, or was shaling off its husk."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books



... of it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. Better the engine had struck me ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... to my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns neatly gummed on white paper. . . . This time I took a piece of coal- shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . . I told each to examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was. W. gave so bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he said they were ferns, like what I showed them last week, but he thought they ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... still remained, though much disturbed with wonder and silly surmises, and ready to catch at any stray marvels that fell in their way. The subterraneous and half-concealed passage in the rock, or rather shale, on which the castle stands, always under the ban of some vague and silly apprehension, had been reported of late as manifesting more than equivocal symptoms of supernatural possession. Dick Empson, or long-nebbed Dick, a sort of shrewd, half-witted incarnation, it might be, of the goblin or ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... can see the marks his shoes made in the shale," said Trapper Jim, pointing to the ground in front, which ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie

... the light. This time it burned suddenly clear and large and very bright, away off to the left of him where he had by daylight noticed a bare shale slide. The light seemed to stand in the very center of the slide, no more ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... nearly a third of the way across when the shale began to move, slowly at first, with a gentle rattle, then faster. He gave a shout of terror and floundered, panic-stricken, where ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a miscalculated step. Sometimes, higher up, a path wide enough only for the setting down of foot before foot skirted a cliff's edge—and the storm might at any point have ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... story of a wonderful oil seepage and had turned a deaf ear on natural gas. He had baited a hook with a stratum of gypsum which would furnish the world with cement. Capital had barely sniffed at the bait. Nor had banks of shale adapted to the making of a perfect brick appealed to its jaded palate. But Symes was never at a loss for something to promote, for there was always a nebula of schemes vaguely present in his prolific brain. Irrigation was the opportunity of the moment ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... overturning of the smallest stone or bit of shale which might betray their position, they soon neared ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell

... point and its outlet be explained. The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms. Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces. The evidence of a recession of the river through the canon is designated by the ridges ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford

... I could, and followed Gunson, who showed me the way he had descended by the help of the rocks, and projecting roots of the dwarf firs which began to grow freely as soon as the slaty shale ceased. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... spring shelved in by shale at the lower edge of the swell, we found a tiny cairn built of clumps of sod and bits of shale. Fastened on it was a scrap from ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... the end we have an entirely different thing. The clay soils are often called mud soils because of the amount of water used in their formation. The slate that Myron brought for road making belongs to the clay family, and so does shale. ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... river of that name whose waters run through a green shale, and while not discoloring the water impart that ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey

... fossils connected with the carboniferous system, and who must have frequently met with the substance which has caused all this excitement, but never imagined it to be gold. The face of the quarry, to the depth of twenty feet from the top, is an accumulation of shale or slate, lying in regular layers, and easily broken. It has been turned to good account of late in the manufacture of slate-pencils of superior quality. Among this shaly accumulation, there are frequent layers of a soft, wet clay or ochre; and it is in this that the brilliants which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various

... exposure they were covered with grape-vines, planted with the utmost precision and regularity. Every corner and cranny among the rocks was utilized. The original planting must have been difficult, for the soil was covered with slabs of shale. The cultivator should develop excellent lungs in scaling those hillsides. The leaves had fallen and the bare vines varied in hue from sepia brown to wine color, with occasional patches of evergreen to set off ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... sleep was prompt and profound. It seemed to him but a few minutes after he had laid his head on the pillow when Jack Shale's voice again resounded in ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... of these tracts are sandy and not naturally so rich and fertile as the more heavy clay soils of the limestone, the red shale, and the marl districts of the State, but they are not so sandy and so coarse-grained as to be non-productive, like some of the pineland areas. The latter are often deficient in plant food and are deservedly characterized as pine barrens, being too poor ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... sticking at all to it, then is it enough: and then you put it into flat shallow Tin forms, first wetted with cold water, and let it stand in them four or five hours in a cold place, till it be quite cold. Then reverse the plates, that it may shale and fall out, and so put the parcels up ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... and, happening to slide on a piece of shale at that moment, I sat down unexpectedly and the horse put its ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Sandhills of golden glow, Where'er the tempests blow, Like a great flood are spread. Sometimes the sacred spot Hears human sounds profane, when As from Ophir or from Memphre Stretches the caravan. From far the eyes, its trail Along the burning shale Bending its wavering tail, Like a mottled serpent scan. These deserts are of God! His are the bounds alone, Here, where no feet have trod, To Him its centre known! And from this smoking sea Veiled in obscurity, The foam one seems to see In fiery ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... day, to be walking along its Southern edge, when, suddenly, several pieces of rock and shale were dislodged from the face of the cliff immediately beneath me, and fell with a sullen crash through the trees. I heard them splash in the river at the bottom; and then silence. I should not have given this incident more than ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson

... his horse around an impracticable slope of shale stuff and went on. The herder followed. When he was within twelve feet or so of the bottom, there was a sound of pebbles knocked loose in haste, a scrambling, and then came the impact of his body. Andy teetered, lost his balance, and went to the bottom in one glorious ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower

... take place throughout the entire progress of the decomposition. Marsh gas and carbonic acid are seen escaping from the surface of pools where recent vegetable matter is submerged, and they are also eliminated in the further decomposition of peat, lignite, coal, and carbonaceous shale. Fire damp and choke-damp, common names for the gases mentioned above, are produced in large quantities in the mines where Tertiary or Cretaceous lignites, or Carboniferous coals or anthracites are mined. It has ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... hill, hurrying because she was later than she had intended to be, and it was cold for a person standing around in the snow. She crossed the deep gulch and climbed laboriously up the other side, over hidden shale rock and through clumps of bushes that snatched at her clothing like a witch's bony fingers. She had no more than reached the top when Jack stepped out from behind a pine tree as wide of girth as a hogshead. Marion gave a little scream, and then laughed. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... fellow let his cowpony pick its way down the steep shale hill to the draw. He saddled without a waste motion, packed his supplies deftly, mounted, and was off. In the way he cut across the desert toward the moving herd was the certainty of the frontiersman. He did not hurry, but he wasted no time. His horse circled ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... be able to climb the face of that steep cliff puzzled Hare. Upon nearer view he discovered the yard-wide trail curving upward in cork-screw fashion round a projecting corner of cliff. The stone was a soft red shale, and the trail had been cut in it at a steep angle. It was so steep that the burros appeared to be climbing straight up. Noddle pattered into it, dropped his head and his long ears and slackened his pace to patient plodding. August walked in ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... height of 2800 or 3000 feet. On the dizzy summit we could discern what had the appearance of an old-fashioned log-cabin, and from this we called it "Log-cabin Cliff." The cabin was in reality a butte of shale, as we could see by means of our glasses, and of course of far greater size than a real cabin, but from below the illusion was complete. At this camp, No. 40, we remained the next day, Prof. wishing to make some investigations. He and Jones crossed to the other side and went down on foot ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... the infant (squalling, no doubt, in special robe, and impatient for the christening), the waiting relatives, the inevitable decanter, and the thick cuts of indigestible bun. The minister, I say, trudged home with his treasure-trove of petrified ferns and foot-marked shale—a greater fossil than any under his own cases of glass. His memory was stirred by his wife's catechising, but it was too late to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... our village, the valley is joined by a deep ravine through which a sequestered road—hidden by hawthorn hedges, and crossed by numerous water-courses where the hillside streams, dropping from rocks of shale, ripple towards a trout-brook feeding the main river—winds into the quiet country. The rugged sides of the ravine are thickly clothed with gorse and brambles, and dotted with hazels, willows, and oaks. This dense cover is inhabited by large numbers of ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... wave particle was not less than eight inches near the edge of the precipices. The result ... has been to produce an indescribable scene of desolation. Everywhere the hillsides facing the valley have been stripped bare from crest to base, and the seams of coal and partings of shale could be seen running in and out of the irregularities of the cliffs with a sharpness and distinctness which recalled the pictures of the caons of Colorado. At the bottom of the valley was a piled-up heap of dbris and broken trees, while the old stream had been obliterated ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison

... but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... them could catch the sounds below now. Whoever came up the rock ladder must be unused to negotiating such a stairway, for they rattled small bits of loose shale down at times; and Frank felt sure he could hear a panting sound, very much like that which tired Bob had ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson

... When they reached the north end of the ridge the man in the lead turned west on a slope studded with large boulders and rock outcroppings. There was considerable shale here, too, and they had to proceed cautiously in spots, both for fear of sliding down the shale and to ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... Picking out the main tunnel and keeping a close watch for rattlers with electric torches, the two men went cautiously ahead. In places earth had fallen and had to be cleared away, but the formation for the most part was a soft rock and shale. They went slowly, for fear ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg

... he reined up and leaped from his horse. Below him he saw Challenge, riderless, and galloping along the edge of the hillside. On the trail lay Eleanor Loring, her black hair vivid against the gray of the shale. He plunged toward her and stooping caught her up in his arms. "Nell! Nell!" he cried, smoothing back her hair from her forehead. "God, Nell! I—I didn't ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... surface, the recovery of the specimens embedded in it was difficult. A haul made on the 26th brought a prize for the geologist in the form of a lump of sandstone weighing 75 lbs., a piece of fossiliferous limestone, a fragment of striated shale, sandstone-grit, and some pebbles. Hauling in the dredge by hand was severe work, and on the 24th we used the Girling tractor-motor, which brought in 500 fathoms of line in thirty minutes, including stops. One stop was due ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... Commander in charge of the base. The King's Messenger climbed into his carriage and the journey was resumed. Along the shores of jade-tinted lochs, through far-stretching deer forest and grouse moor, past brawling rivers of "snow-brew," and along the flanks of shale-strewn hills, the "Navy Special" bore its freight ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... with a hissing rush over a giddy slope of shale that looked perpetually upon the brink of a general slide down en masse, with their immense shadows underrunning them, the eagles startled suddenly by their unexpectedness a great red beast into motion. There was a clatter of antlers, a click of hoofs, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... foot-rails; some of these are evidently private enterprises, as an ancient Celestial is usually on hand for the collection of tiny toll. Narrow bridges, rude steps cut in the face of the cliffs, trails along narrow ledges, over rocky ridges, down across gulches, and anon through loose shale on ticklishly sloping banks, characterize the passage through the canon. The sun is broiling hot, and my knee swollen and painful. It is barely possible to crawl along at a snail's pace by keeping my game leg stiff; bending ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... Chaudefontaine, not far from the village of Magnee, where one of the rents communicating with the surface has been filled up to the brim with rounded and half-rounded stones, angular pieces of limestone and shale, besides sand and mud, together with bones, chiefly of the cave-bear. Connected with this main duct, which is from 1 to 2 feet in width, are several minor ones, each from 1 to 3 inches wide, also ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... clear and precise. In his paper on the coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... apartment house. No watchman was in sight, in the mist of falling flakes, so the criminologist disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy attempt to scale the big structure, but he raised the ladder to the window-sill ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... makes the cow's milk so rich, and we had some good views of the hills. That named Mam Tor was one of the "Seven wonders of the Peak," and its neighbour, known as the Shivering Mountain, was quite a curiosity, as the shale, of which it was composed, was constantly breaking away and sliding down the mountain slope with a sound like that of falling water. Bagshawe Cavern was near at hand, but we did not visit it. It was so named because it had been found on land belonging to Sir William ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... the fault, which consists of decomposed sandstone, shale, feldspar, calcite, etc., interspersed with masses of harder sandstone and baked shale, gradually merges into a compact granular sandstone, which, at a distance of 460 ft. from the shaft, was self-supporting, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis

... no word, but a few steps farther brought them to a towering rock around the base of which the path turned, and then seemed to cease abruptly in a mass of loose shale. It was too clear now. They had lost their road and turned, whilst they were indulging those golden fancies, into a mere cattle-path worn by the numerous herds of goats and oxen, the music of whose jangling bells still came to ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... arched irregularly above, and generally quite shallow, being governed very much in contour and depth by the quality of the rock. The work of excavation has not been an extremely great one, even with the imperfect implements that must have been used, as the shale is for the most part soft ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... times was, in its southwestern extension, part of the floor of a sea which covered much of what is now the Indian Peninsula. In the northern shallows of this sea were laid down beds of conglomerate, shale, sandstone and limestone, derived from the denudation of Archaean rocks, which, probably, rose as hills or mountains in parts of Peninsular India and along the Tibetan edge of the Himalayan region. These beds constitute the record of the long Purana Era[1] and are probably coeval with the Algonkian ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... built over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole village is lighted by it. Elsewhere, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... what he was standing on—a little ledge of shale not over five or six feet in length and two feet wide—for in lower water I had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... we examined some of the old red sandstone which underlies all that part of Cape Breton Island, found some good specimens, and some very plain and deep glacial scratches. There is also some coal and a good deal of shale in with the sandstone. ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley

... his way along carefully when he heard Bob call his name. The rattle of falling shale at the same time gave him a pretty strong suspicion as to ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson

... one tell me he never heard of Fellsgarth? I am surprised. Where can you have been brought up that you have never heard of the venerable ivy-clad pile with its watch-tower and two wings, planted there, where the rivers Shale and Shargle mingle their waters, a mile or more above Hawkswater? My dear sir, Fellsgarth stood there before the days when Henry the Eighth, (of whom you may have possibly heard in the history books) abolished the monasteries and, some ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... great pleasure to me to be once more in the open air after being shut up for what seems so long a time. It felt deliciously warm too, the temperature being 74 deg.. The scenery was beautiful—sandy shores, green woods with high precipitous mountains in the background, covered with shiny slate-like shale, which when moist shows up like a mirror through the mist. The view so reminded me of Scotland that I felt inclined to take up my glasses to look for deer among the craggy peaks and corries. We passed the little pilot ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel—the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai. They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew. For all their marchings, Kedarnath and Badrinath ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... shale bottom. Panting, he stood up and was conscious of the fact that despite his forlornly dripping and dishevelled condition, he was tall and straight and big, and that for some reason all of the girls on ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... rocks was a steep declivity of loose shale sprinkled over with large and small boulders of radically different formations, and in no manner resembling the friable, uncertain bed ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard

... which comes from wells bored deep down in the ground in Pennsylvania, in the south of Russia, in Burma, and elsewhere. Also it is distilled in Scotland from oil shale, from which paraffin oil and wax and similar substances are produced. When the oil is brought to the surface it contains many impurities, and in its native form is unsuitable for motor engines. The crude oil is composed of a number of different kinds ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... himself. "Well, there's another way out. The Producers & Developers Shale and Oil Company have a suite of offices that run into the Rockford Building. They've built an alley to connect between the two buildings. It's on ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... found in many counties of Virginia, especially on shale or sandy loam soils. Blight affects chinkapins to a considerable extent; but because of their bushy type of growth, new shoots arise to replace blighted shoots, thus perpetuating the plants so that they have not died out. Chinkapins are gathered by ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... muzzle of an extremely well-cared-for gun—the only gun in the State that could shoot. Namgay Doola had narrowly missed a villager just before we came up. The Standing Army stood. It could do no more, for when it advanced pieces of sharp shale flew from the windows. To these were added from time to time showers of scalding water. We saw red heads bobbing up and down in the hut. The family of Namgay Doola were aiding their sire, and blood-curdling yells of defiance were the only answers to ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... than in all the coal measures the world contains. A range of limestone rock 100 miles in length by 10 miles in width, and 1,000 yards in depth, would contain 743,000 million tons of carbon, or sufficient to provide carbon for 875,000 million tons of petroleum. Deposits of oil-bearing shale have also limestone close at hand; e.g., coral rag underlies Kimmeridge clay, as it also underlies the famous black shale in Kentucky, which is extraordinarily rich ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... exceedingly difficult. A dense forest growth of cedar and tamarack pushed to the very edge of the water, and the rare open beaches were composed of smooth rocks too small to afford secure footing, and too large to be trodden under. The girl either slipped and stumbled on insecure and ankle-twisting shale, or forced a way through the awful tangle of a swamp. As the canoeing at this point was not at all difficult, her utmost efforts could not keep her abreast of ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... started from the town, and rode down the crest of long, gently-sloping ridges, which seemed interminable. The rock over which we passed was red sandstone, mottled and streaked with green, red shale, and occasional patches of conglomerate. Crossing a little stream by a pretty bridge, we made an abrupt ascent, and soon saw the little town, Cuaquitepec, at the base of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... a complete skeleton of these monster Dinosaurs is recovered. While our western states, in certain places, are rich in fossil remains, there is very seldom a complete skeleton unearthed. At best there are but a few bones, or the impressions of bones, in the sandstone rocks or shale. But from these bones, from the impressions of those that have been eaten by time, and by their knowledge of what sort of anatomy was needed to keep these wonderful creatures on earth, it is possible for scientists to almost completely ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... on the beds of the streamlets conveying it, and on the stones, red or brown oxide of iron. All water of this kind ought to be avoided in dyeing and similar operations. The iron in water from old coal pits and shale deposits is usually present as sulphate due to the oxidation of pyrites, a sulphuret or sulphide of iron. Water from heaths and moorlands is often acid from certain vegetable acids termed "peaty acids." This acidity ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... Concepcion, without the possible identity ever having occurred to me. At last there was no resisting the conclusion. I could not expect shells, for they never occur in this formation; but lignite or carbonaceous shale ought to be found. I had previously been exceedingly puzzled by meeting in the sandstone, thin layers (few inches to feet thick) of a brecciated pitchstone. I strongly suspect the underlying granite has altered such beds into this ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... there came another figure, strong, ruddy, and with a calico skirt tucked up. One was refinement, the other strength; one nerves, the other muscle. Onward he strode, the road damp from its nearness to the creek. Out upon the higher land he turned, the shale clicking under his feet. He had the feeling that some one was walking slowly behind him, stealing the noise of his footsteps to conceal a stealthier tread, and he smiled at his fear, but he halted to listen. He thought of a poem, "The Stab," and he repeated it ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read

... away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side—while all Simla, that is to say as much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading- room and Peliti's veranda,—I was aware that some one, apparently at a vast distance, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... rolling prairies stretch away for hundreds of miles, gradually ascending on the side towards the mountains, where the highlands are sparsely covered with pinyon and cedar. The lofty banks through which the Arkansas occasionally passes are of shale and sandstone, rising precipitously from the water. Ascending the river the country is wild and broken, until it enters the mountain region, where the scenery is incomparably grand and imposing. The surrounding prairies ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... up, ma'm'selle," he answered, for Guida had steered unsteadily for the instant. "Steadee—shale ben! that's right—I remember twenty years ago the black wasps they fly on the coast of France like that. Who can tell now?" He shrugged his shoulders. "P'rhaps they are coum out to play, but see you, when there is trouble in the nest it is my notion that wasps come out to sting. Look at France ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... a mineral. "A resinous, reddish-brown, translucent, hydrocarbon derivative (C40H6202S), found in certain laminated shales of Tasmania, Resiniferous shale." ('Standard.') ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... all the scripture vn to the/ that no creature can locke the out/ and with which thou shalt goo in and out/ and finde pasture and fode euery where. And yf these lesons be not writtten in thyne herte/ then is all the scripture shutt vpp/ as a cornell in the shale/ so that thou mayst read it and comen of it and reherse all the stories of it and dispute sotilly and be a profounde sophister/ and yet vnderstond ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale

... time started half a dozen other stones. In a moment a rock avalanche was roaring down the steep. The great stone led the way. In a series of gigantic leaps, each longer than the last, it thundered downwards, at each jump starting fresh tons of the loose shale ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges

... group of rocks has been called by English geologists, the Silurian System, because largely developed at the surface of a district of western England, formerly occupied by a people whom the Roman historians call Silures. It is a series of sandstones, limestones, and beds of shale (hardened mud), which are classed in the following sub-groups, beginning with the undermost: —1, Llandillo rocks, (darkish calcareous flagstones;) 2 and 3, two groups called Caradoc rocks; 4, Wenlock shale; 5, Wenlock limestone; ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... that had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale, and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit. The village, half a dozen rude straw shacks, stretched along a rocky stream. Beyond it, in a few acres enclosed by a fence, were a tiny church, two wretched wooden cabins, a tumbling kiosk, five or six old men and women squatting ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... now of gneiss and mica-schist, and the mica was so abundant as to cause many a crag and heap of shale to glitter in the sun, as though there had been a mighty shattering of mirrors here into little particles which had fallen upon everything. There was, however, no lack of contrast. To the shining rocks and the fierce sunshine, which seemed to concentrate its fire wherever it fell in the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... porphyry and ashes. The same formation occurs just within the county border at Cerrig-y-Druidion, Langum, Bettys-y-coed and in the Fairy Glen. Northwards from the Ceiriog to the limestone fringe at Llandrillo the Wenlock shale of the Silurian covers the entire mass of the Hiraethog and Clwydian hills, but verging on its western slopes into the Denbighshire grit, which may be traced southward in a continuous line from the mouth of the Conway as far as Llanddewi Ystrad ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... are dark in color and very hard. They are not arranged in regular layers like sandstone and shale; many of them show numerous little cavities which once contained steam. These cavities give to the rock a slag-like appearance. In this kind of rock, which we shall call lava, there are, of course, no remains of shells or bones ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... hillside. Festing knew this was difficult work; one could deal with rock, although it cost much to cut, but it was another matter to bed the rails in treacherous gravel, and the fan-shaped mounds of shale and soil that ran down to the water's edge showed how loose the ground was and the abruptness of the slope. Above, the silver mist drifted about the black firs that clung to the side of the mountain, and in the distance ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... mountain trough. From an altitude of four or five hundred feet, the country falls in sharp steeps to a narrow alluvial bench, and then a broad beach of shale and pebble; the slopes are broken, here and there, where deep, shadowy ravines come winding down, bearing muddy contributions to the greater flood. The higher hills are crowned with forest trees, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... is not always a criterion of its permeability; a very fine grained marble, containing about 0.6 per cent. cell space, transmitted water and oil more freely than a shale that would hold 4 per cent. of its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... the lads gathered in a field which belonged to the Vaughan, and upon which a great tip of rubbish and shale was gradually encroaching. Here choosing sides they played at rounders for a couple of hours, and then flung themselves down on the grass. Some of them lighted pipes, and all enjoyed the quiet of ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty

... wave receded. They ran dizzily forward in the shifting, wet gravel of the beach. When the next incoming comber was beginning to curl down from the top, Jean dashed to the bluff. Shielding the little fellow below her, she clung to the uneven shale of its base, presenting her back to the billow that crashed with a deafening roar just ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... is a Queenslander, sunburnt and hale; R is a Russian, against whom we rail; S is a Spaniard, as slow as a snail; T is a Turk with his wife in a veil; U a United States' Student at Yale; V a Venetian in gondola frail; W Welshman, with coal, slate,—and shale; X is a Xanthian—or is he too stale?— Y is a Yorkshireman, bred by the Swale; Z is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various

... could see the white spume between the chasm walls, darkening with the approach of night. He could hear more clearly the roar of the death-floods. But close to him was smooth water, and he stood now on a shelving tongue of rock and shale, upon which the current had flung him. In front of him was a rock wall. Behind him was another. There was no footing except where he stood. And Marette ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood

... back and forth to make easier work for the pony, until he was high above the live-oak belt and coming into shale rock and rubble that made hard going for the horse. He dismounted, led the pony to a shelving, rock-made shade, and tied him there. Then, with canteen and food slung over his shoulder, Johnny climbed to the peak and sat ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower

... could feel the water running down my skin. We could scarcely see where to go or what to do; but we had bolted just in time. One end of the shelf-rock washed out like soap, and in crumpled the roof, as a mass of shale and mud! Up the gulch sounded a roaring—another, different roaring from the roaring of the rain and thunder. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin

... are quite common in the Mancos. Our frontispiece shows an interesting group, about ten miles from the foot of the canyon. These are situated only about forty feet above the bed of the creek, but still in a secure position. Here a bed of shale had been weathered out of the sandstone, leaving a sort of horizontal groove four feet high and from four to six feet deep. In this a row of minute houses had been built. They had been made to occupy the full height and depth of the crevice, so that ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... backbone (which has been plumped over and sleeked by the flesh of the valley) juts forth, like the scrags of a skeleton, and crumbles in low but rugged cliffs into the flat domain of sea. Here the landing is bad, and the anchorage worse, for a slippery shale rejects the fluke, and the water is usually kept in a fidget between the orders of the west wind and scurry of ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... Chief's horse directly behind would bump me off the trail. It was a cheerful situation. The Canyon walls closed in upon us, and the trail grew worse, if that could be possible. The firm rock gave way to shale that slipped and slid under the feet of the horses. It was so narrow that one slip of a hoof would send the horse crashing on the rocks hundreds of feet beneath. Still this is the only path it has been possible ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... established the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The Corporation is designed to spur the development of commercial technologies for production of synthetic fuels, such as liquid and gaseous fuels from coal and the production of oil from oil shale. The Act provides the Corporation with an initial $22 billion to accomplish these objectives. The principal purpose of the legislation is to ensure that the nation will have available in the late 1980's the option to undertake commercial development of synthetic fuels if that becomes necessary. The ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter

... were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... they say, was passed upon Adam, in case he ate of the apple, was not, that thou shalt surely be crucified, but, thou shale surely die. The sentence was death, and not the manner of dying. Crucifixion, therefore, or any other particular manner of dying, made no part of the sentence that Adam was to suffer, and consequently, even upon their own tactic, it could make ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... that particular chamber, Tommy selected a large round piece of "gob," placed it in the center of the open space, and laid another small piece of shale on ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman

... to catch her on the other side. We had our eyes on her as we ran, for we feared that she might catch, or capsize; and we were so intent upon our ship that we noticed nothing else. Now when we came to the end of the causeway, and turned to the right, along the shale and rubble tipped there from the quarry, we saw a man coming down the slope to the water, evidently bent on catching the Snail when she arrived. We could not see his face very clearly, for he wore a grey slouch-hat, and the brambles were so high just there that ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... places where they are found. They consist of oblate spheroids and are found in many parts of the earth totally detached from the beds in which they lie, as at East Lothian in Scotland. Two of these, which now lie before me, were found with many others immersed in argillaceous shale or shiver, surrounded by broken limestone mountains at Bradbourn near Ashbourn in Derbyshire, and were presented to me by Mr. Buxton, a gentleman of that town. One of these is about fifteen inches in its equatorial ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... glimpse. But sometimes glimpses make more vivid memories than longer acquaintance. At the end of our hour we left Vence and hurried down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick with violets. We went through the deep pine-filled ravine over which we had crossed on the viaduct. ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... Suspension Bridge under the Falls at the level of the water. It is 6700 yards long, and of a horseshoe section, 19 feet wide by 21 feet high. It has been cut 160 feet below the surface through the limestone and shale, but is arched with brick, having rubble above, and at the outfall is lined on the invert or under side with iron. The gradient is 36 feet in the mile, and the total fall is 205 feet, of which 140 feet are available for use. The ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... used by the Zunians in the manufacture of pottery is a dark, bluish, carbonaceous, clayey shale found in layers usually near the tops of the mesas. Several of these elevated mesas are situated near Zuni, from which the natives obtain this material. This carbonaceous clay is first mixed with water and then kneaded as a ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson

... of poetry and prose Father wrote. They are still very legible on the face of the landscape and cannot be easily erased from it. Gathered out of the confusion of nature, built up of fragments of the old Devonian rock and shale, laid with due regard to the wear and tear of time, well- bottomed and well-capped, establishing boundaries and defining possessions, etc., these lines of stone wall afford a good lesson in many ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... years in outlawry in Iceland, and outlawry there in that terrible climate, with no house to cover his head, would seem an ordeal impossible for human endurance. Between the autumn of 1022 and the spring of 1024, that is to say during two winters, he lived in a cave in the west of the island. A steep shale slide was below a cliff, and above this a hollow in the rock. He built up the mouth of the cave, and hung grey wadmal before the entrance, so that none below could notice anything peculiar, or any one living there. Whatever fuel he wanted, all he had to eat, everything ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... snow, and places where the track along the mountain-side was undiscoverable. Walking was tiresome enough on the loose shingle and shale, but it became worse when I actually had to cut each step into the frozen snow. The work was tedious to a degree, and the progress slow. After a while I noticed a series of lofty snow tunnels over the raging stream, which is earlier in the season covered ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... known as kerosene and mineral oil, is a mixture of saturated hydrocarbons obtained by the distillation of shale. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... thorn trees. It was not a forest, yet neither was it open country. The eye penetrated the thin screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile or more, but was brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered by irregular patches of shale that tinkled when stepped on. Well-defined paths, innumerable, trodden deep and hard, cut into the iron soil. They nearly all ran in a northwesterly direction. The few traversing paths took a long slant. These paths, so exactly like those crossing a village green, had in all probability never been ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... sand below is compressed by the weight above; water exercises its petrifying influence from the base upward, and from the centre outward, and more sand accumulates on the upper surface until they become actual hill ranges of a compact shale-like formation in horizontal strata, each stratum being slightly less hardened than the underlying, and each showing plainly defined the actions of water and sun to which they were exposed when uppermost. Then, above these hills, further accumulations have formed, which solidifying ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... to be the fountain of riches I had anticipated. As a matter of fact we never found another diamond in it. Under its thin crust of limestone was an inconsiderable layer of very poor diamondiferous gravel. Beneath this lay a mass of blue shale, of the variety known as "floating reef." The latter filled the claim, as well as several of those adjoining it, to a depth, as it turned out, of between forty and fifty feet. Below the shale the ground proved to be rich enough. But within a few weeks of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... clear; and in the evening the schooner was far on her way back, while we were digging a cachette to conceal the baggage which we could not carry. Even my saddle was wrapped up in a piece of canvas, and deposited in a deep bed of shale. Among other things presented to me in Monterey, were two large boxes covered with tin, and containing English fire-works, which, in the course of events, performed prodigies, and saved many scalps when all hope of succour had been entirely given up. The Montereyans are amazingly fond of these ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... perfect. Mr. R. HENDON as Sir Rupert de Malvoisie (the Crusader) suggested, by his accent and gestures, that he must have come from the East—how far East, it boots not to inquire. Miss FLORENCE DARLEY was a good Lady Alice, and Mr. J. A. SHALE an efficient "Craven." Later on an operatic performance is threatened. If the thrilling series of arrangements on the back of the Programme is to be accepted as authentic, the members of the Club will be invited to have Patience. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate accessory ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... fuel, firing, combustible. [solid fuels] coal, wallsend[obs3], anthracite, culm[obs3], coke, carbon, charcoal, bituminous coal, tar shale; turf, peat, firewood, bobbing, faggot, log; cinder &c. (products of combustion) 384; ingle, tinder, touchwood; sulphur, brimstone; incense; port-fire; fire-barrel, fireball, brand; amadou[obs3], bavin[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... was Smith. The kind of rock He sat upon was shale. One feature quite distinguished him— He ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... road. These baths are much higher than Luz, and the way is a steady incline throughout. The valley soon shows itself in marked change from the fertile basin we have quitted; it grows bleak and less cultivated; rubbly slopes of shale and slate cover the hills; the vegetation becomes scanter. We are nearing now the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, the summit seen so plainly from Pau, far eastward of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It is not as yet in sight from this valley, however, though we are approaching it nearly and though ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... to dig. The inside of the cave is a shale that no one could dig into. It would have ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo

... worked. Some slippery pine-needle slopes we had to run across, for light quick steps were the only means of safe travel. And that was not safe! When we surmounted to the crest we found a jumble of weathered rocks ready to slide down on either side. Slabs, pyramids, columns, shale, rocks of all shapes except round, lay toppling along the heaved ridge. It seemed the whole ridge was ready to thunder down into the abyss. Half a mile down and out from the rim we felt lost, marooned. But there was something ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... engulfing. Creeks become rivers, rivers impassable torrents, and marshes bottomless abysses. Pits of quicksand develop in most unexpected places. Driven from smooth lake margins, the trailers' ponies are forced to climb ledges of rock, and to rattle over long slides of shale. In places the threadlike way itself becomes an aqueduct for a ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... prehistoric. They represent geological periods. Mine is the oldest. It is formed in strata of Old Red Sandstone, volcanic tufa, ignis fatuus, and bicarbonate of hornblende, superimposed upon argillaceous shale, and contains the prints of prehistoric man. It is in No. 149. Thousands of scientists come to see it. They consider it holy. They want to blast out the prints but cannot. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... chaotic confusion of separate heaps, which at a distance resemble volcanic cones. We rode up precipitous paths edging upon deep chasms between these conical hills, and emerged upon metamorphous rocks and shale mingled in curious irregularity. The strata of shale were in some instances nearly vertical, proving the disturbance that had been occasioned by a subsequent upheaval. About 200 feet above this formation we entered upon the dark grey jurassic ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... to consist chiefly of the Glossopteris brownii (of Brongniart) a fern which occurs in a stratum of ironstone at Newcastle, and in one of the same mineral on the southern coast, also in sandstone in the valley of the Hunter, and abundantly in the shale near the coal ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... a madman," said the sheriffe, "Thou sholdst have had a knightes fee; But seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad, Well granted it shale be." ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards

... Cumberland, and Lebanon, or in the great corn belt having a naturally calcareous soil, is prosperous, or that a multitude of owners of such lime-deficient areas as the belt in a portion of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania, or the sandstone and shale regions of many states, have not overmatched natural conditions with fine skill. We treat only of averages when saying that a "lime country" shows a prosperity in its farm buildings and general appearance that does ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee

... were the mineral resources of the soil? It is not necessary to enlarge on these. The use of coal as a fuel is wholly recent. On the other hand, certain varieties of it were used as ornaments—the cannel coal, and the bituminous shale of Dorsetshire (Kimmeridge clay). So ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... as they journeyed down along the steep, heavily wooded river bank, its soft shale sides slid into mighty terraces, but in his heart was a murder thought, as he eyed the great bulk of his Brother Outcast, that he would also ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser

... of shale obtained in 1955 by Mr. Russell R. Camp from a Pennsylvanian lagoon-deposit in Anderson County, Kansas, has yielded in the laboratory a skeleton of the small amphibian Hesperoherpeton garnettense ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton

... One group was planted under the canopy of a locust grove, another on an exposed hilltop which faces the prevailing westerly winds. The third is on a broad hilltop field which does not have the best drainage since the top soil is clay underlaid with sandstone shale. All of these groups grow on land abandoned some years ago. The soil fertility is generally low. Volunteer native growth of cheery, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... led the way along a narrow passage, roofed with rock and floored with slate-coloured shale and shingle, and winding in and out, until we stopped at a great stone block or boulder, lying across the floor, and as large as my mother's best oaken wardrobe. Beside it were several sledge-hammers, battered, and some ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... descended under the rim. It was up and down over rough shale, and up steps of broken rocks, and down little cliffs. We crossed the ridge twice, many times having to lend ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... and Fats, Fatty Oils and Fats, Hydrocarbon Oils, Uses of Oils.—II., Hydrocarbon Oils. Distillation, Simple Distillation, Destructive Distillation, Products of Distillation, Hydrocarbons, Paraffins, Olefins, Napthenes.—III., Scotch Shale Oils. Scotch Shales, Distillation of Scotch Oils, Shale Retorts, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

... danger. Noiselessly, and with every faculty painfully alert, we closed the land, sprang on to the rocks, and at once set about the tedious task of breasting the hill. Hill climbing, under the vertical sun of North Australia, is by no means an enjoyable undertaking, more particularly when the loose shale and rock gives way at every stride, bringing down an avalanche of rubbish on the heads of the rearmost of the party. Encumbered with our carbines, we made but slow progress, and it was nearly six o'clock before we attained the summit, from whence we saw several ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden

... reached one end of the many small valleys into which the larger vale was divided. They had been following the trail of the cattle that had been driven off—it was plain enough until they reached a rocky and shale-covered defile between two small hills. Then, for some reason or other, all "sign" came to an abrupt end. There were no further marks of hoofs in the earth, and none of the ordinary marks to indicate that cattle and horses had been beyond ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker

... other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... climbing the steep side of the gorge, choosing a spot where it was well wooded, for the sake of the foothold. For some distance the ground was green with moss and wood-sorrel; but the tug-of-war came when the vast banks of loose stones—hot, bare, and shale-like—were reached. On gaining the plateau, I threw myself down upon the heather and looked at the scene below. The mingling of rock, forest, and stream was superbly desolate. Even the naked steeps of slate-coloured broken stone had an ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... lastly, if further proof was needed, by the fact that in the "dirt-bed" of the Isle of Portland and the neighbouring shores, stumps of trees allied to the modern sago-palms are found as they grew in the soil, which, with them, has been covered up in layers of freshwater shale and limestone. A tropic forest has plainly sunk beneath a lagoon; and that lagoon, again, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... fields are found to be converted into coal, then the only difference between coal shale, and coal will consist in the very small proportion of vegetable ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... were found to be part of a horizontal, stratified series of sandstones underlying the igneous rock. There were bands of coarse gravel and fine examples of stream-bedding interspersed with seams of carbonaceous shale and poor coal. Among the debris were several pieces of sandstone marked by black, fossilized plant-remains. The summits of the beacons were platforms of very hard rock, baked by the volcanic overflow. The columns, roughly hexagonal ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... o'er the Zodiac's scroll From fane to fane in adoration pace. The rapt Equator's crimson cincture holds Me close; my emerald ocean-robes flow free, And purple soar my mountains, folds on folds, With vale and plain. My bondmaid Moon to me Reveals her marbled snow in cusp and shale— Whilst in my flinty womb the valiant strife Of Fire proclaims me thine and bans the pale Usurper Death beyond my fields of Life. In Winds that wrap my path, lo, I shall sing To thee a choral eternal, Lord of Days, And ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer

... door looked out upon the central plaza, where stood a large church of typical colonial design and construction, and with a single lateral bell tower. The building was set well up on a platform of shale, with broad shale steps, much broken and worn, leading up to it on all sides. Jose stepped out and mingled with the crowd, first regarding the old church curiously, and then looking vainly for the little girl, and sighing his disappointment when he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... had left the train since entering the mountains, and she understood now why some one in the coach had spoken of the Miette Plain as Sunshine Pool. Where-ever she looked the mountains fronted her, with their splendid green slopes reaching up to their bald caps of gray shale and reddish rock or gleaming summits of snow. Into this "pool"—this pocket in the mountains—the sun descended in a wonderful flood. It stirred her blood like a tonic. She breathed more quickly; a soft glow coloured her cheeks; her eyes grew more ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... on the banks of the Quilo or Kweelo, here a stream of about ten yards wide. It runs in a deep glen, the sides of which are almost five hundred yards of slope, and rocky, the rocks being hardened calcareous tufa lying on clay shale and sandstone below, with a capping of ferruginous conglomerate. The scenery would have been very pleasing, but fever took away much of the joy of life, and severe daily intermittents rendered me very weak and always glad ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... from clay or ground shale, are burned until the materials begin to fuse superficially, forming their own glaze. Other forms of brick and tile are not glazed at all, but are left porous. The red color of ordinary brick and earthenware is due to an oxide of iron formed in the ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson

... restricted our movements. South of us, about a mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes, which I have mentioned, and to which, though with difficulty, we made our way. This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale about one thousand feet in height; its sides nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned with spires so slender that ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... pucaurcu, or red hill) consisting of fine laminated clays of many colors—red, orange, yellow, gray, black, and white. This is the beginning of that vast deposit which covers the whole Amazonian Valley. It rests upon a bed of lignite, or bituminous shale, and a coarse, iron-cemented conglomerate. The latter is not visible on the Napo, but crops out particularly at Obidos and Para. The Indians prepare their paints from these ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... Nimrod with a carbine, I with the rifle, along a treacherous, shaly bank which ended, twenty feet below, in the steep rocky bluffs that formed the face of the cliff. Every step was an agony of uncertainty as to how far one would slide, and how much loose shale one would dislodge to rattle down over the cliff and startle the antelope we hoped were there. To move about on a squeaking floor without disturbing a light sleeper is child's play compared with our progress. A misstep would have sent ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... balsam and spruce was only the rock behind which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open. And his rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was under him. The wash sand that covered it like a carpet was not more than four or five inches deep. He could not dig in. There was not enough of it within reach to scrape up as a protection. And his enemy, a hundred yards or ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood

... would go anywhere that Slone led him. Gradually Slone worked down and away from the bulging rim wall. It was hard, rough work, and risky because it could not be accomplished slowly. Brush and rocks, loose shale and weathered slope, long, dusty inclines of yellow earth, and jumbles of stone—these made bad going for miles of slow, zigzag trail down out of the cedars. Then the trail entered what appeared ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this wild-eyed dragon was plainly ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... of the whole scene, save for that running stream, produced the effect of a world burnt out. The hills of shale might have been vast heaps of ashes. It was a waste place of terrible unfruitfulness. And yet, not very far below the surface, the precious metal lay buried in the rock—the secret of the centuries which man at last had wrenched from ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. Every one who has done even a small amount of climbing ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... above the Death Trail loosed at last and crashed downward in an all-consuming rush of destruction. Trees gave way before the constantly gathering mass of white, and joined in the downfall. Great boulders, abutting rocks, slides of shale! On it went, thundering toward the valley and the gleaming lake, at last to crash there; to send the ten-foot thicknesses of ice splintering like broken glass; to pyramid, to spray the whole nether world ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... until he made an inspection, Tad walked ahead. He found the narrow trail filled with dirt and shale rock; there were many tons of it heaped up ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin

... but she smothered her cry for her good sense told her that this experienced man would not endanger the lives of himself or his guests. The coal had been taken out very cleanly, and above them they saw not coal but shale. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood

... of the ground about him, and presently saw at a short distance a dark, arched cavity in the face of a mass of gravelly rock which rose up on his left hand. It had the appearance of a cave, and Tom got off and carefully examined the loose shale round the mouth of it for the trace of recent footsteps. He did not want to fall into the hands of ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green

... issues: air heavily polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; contamination of soil and groundwater with petroleum products, chemicals at former Soviet military bases; Estonia has more than 1,400 natural and manmade lakes, the smaller of which in agricultural areas ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... in the order or rowe of the first, playes and daunses: I meane such playes as by which man draweth or getteth to hymselfe, his neighboures money. It is true that wee fynd not in the Scripture these words. Thou shalt not play, but wee find indeede these wordes. Thou shale not steale: Now that to gayne or get an other mans money at play shoulde not be a most manifest & plaine thieuery: none of sound iudgement will denie it. For hee which hath wonne or gotten it, by what title or right ...
— A Treatise Of Daunses • Anonymous

... of a thousand worlds in visions bright, Fear's dim terrific train, Guilt's midnight schemes, Strange peeping eyes, soft smiling fairy faces, Dark consciousness of fallen angels nigh, Sad converse with the dead, or headlong races Down the straight cliffs, or clinging on a shelf Of brittle shale, or hunted thro' the sky!— O, God of mind, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... for general crop production are on limestone, basalt, dolemite, dolerite, diorite and gabbro formations, whereas sandstones, aplites, granites, pierre shale, cretacious rocks and volcanic formations weather into inferior soils. Gneiss can be sometimes good, sometimes unfavorable for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... medal Bluestone International Graphite Co., Ticonderoga Graphite International Pulp Co., Gouverneur Talc International Salt Co., Ithaca Salt Interstate Conduit & Brick Co., Ithaca Brick Jamestown Shale Paving Brick Co., Jamestown Brick Jewettville Pressed Brick & Paving Co., Jewettville Brick R. Jones, Prospect Graphite J. F. Kilgour, Lordville Bluestone F. H. Kinkel, Bedford Feldspar Quartz A. Gracie King, Garrisons Granite Francis Larkins, Ossining Granite B. B. Mason, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis



Words linked to "Shale" :   oil shale, humic shale, sedimentary rock, shale oil



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