"Cairn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... street! The beach ootby at the Saut Pan, whaur there's a free coup for rubbitch, was naething till't! It juist mindit me o' the picture, in oor big Bible, o' Jerusalem when the fowk cam' back frae Babylon till't—it was juist a' lyin' a cairn o' lowse steens an' ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... till at last a clown, with a few grains of more courage than the rest, loaded his gun and put a sixpence into it, with the intention of stealing upon him as he sat most mysteriously chattering on the top of a cairn of stones, and then shooting him with silver, which is known never to fail in finishing the imps of the Evil One. And lucky indeed was it for pug that he chanced, through whim, to abscond from that quarter; for if he had not so disappeared, he might have died by ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... velvet, with diamonds and pearls, and a crown of flowers; the corsage of her gown entirely covered with little bows of ribbon of divers colours, which her friends had given her, each adding one, like stones thrown on a cairn in memory of the departed. She had also short ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... with pardonable pride to a pile of stones which the workmen had there raised to commemorate the event. While nearly all the other marks of the work during its progress had been obliterated, that cairn had been left standing in commemoration of the caution and foresight of ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... wanting, and that, in order to suit the spirit of our age, it should lack something which was part and parcel of popular belief in the age to which it belonged. To a thoughtful mind, therefore, such stories as that of Swan's witchcraft, Gunnar's song in his cairn, the Wolf's ride before the Burning, Flosi's dream, the signs and tokens before Brian's battle, and even Njal's weird foresight, on which the whole story hangs, will be regarded as proofs rather for than against ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... before he left and by paying it out through the end of the prospector lay a telegraph line between the outer and inner worlds. In my letter I told him to be sure to mark the terminus of the line very plainly with a high cairn, in case I was not able to reach him before he set out, so that I might easily find and communicate with him should he be so fortunate as ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I have sworn this braid to stain In the best blood that warms thy vein. Now, truce, farewell; and ruth, begone! Yet think not that by thee alone, Proud Chief! can courtesy be shown: Though not from copse, or heath, or cairn, Start at my whistle, clansmen stern, Of this small horn one feeble blast Would fearful odds against thee cast. But fear not—doubt not—which thou wilt— We try this quarrel hilt to hilt."— Then each at once his faulchion drew, Each on the ground his scabbard ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... crowd was not yet quelled. They hailed the fall of Ben Aboo with a triumphant howl, but their stones continued to shower upon his body. In a little while they had piled a cairn above it. Then they left it with curses of content and went their ways. When the Spanish soldiers, who had stood aside while the work was done, came up with their lanterns to look at this monument of Eastern justice, the heap of stones was still moving ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... in his barrow, buckler on arm and battle-sword by his side. His war-horse stands at the cairn pawing the earth and chafing as though impatient to start on ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... Puntens, in Carlowrie, where a surgeon dressed his wounds, and Mrs. Puntens gave him some warm milk, and he lay in their barn all night. From thence he went to the south, and next Sabbath preached at Cairn-hill, somewhere adjacent to Loudon, in his blood and wounds (for no danger could stop him from going about doing good). His text was in Heb. xi. 32. And shall I more say, for time would fail me to tell of Gideon, &c. At night some persons ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... I have said, we let that unhappy lady lie in her rude grave yonder by the sea, but my husband took men and built a cairn of stones over it and a strong wall about it, and there it stands to this day, for not long ago I met one of the folk from the Old Colony who had seen it, and who told me that the people that live in those parts now reverence the spot, knowing its story. Also, when some months ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... towered a precipice, on the bare crest of which stood a heap of stones piled like a column—the remains, probably, of a cairn. On this commanding point Nicholas perceived a female figure, dilated to gigantic proportions against the sky, who, as far as he could distinguish, seemed watching him, and making signs to him, apparently to go back; but he paid little regard ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... states that after the cremation of his body the Mallas placed his bones in their council hall and honoured them with songs and dances. Then eight communities or individuals demanded a portion of the relics and over each portion a cairn was built. These proceedings are mentioned as if they were the usual ceremonial observed on the death of a great man and in the same Sutta[55] the Buddha himself mentions four classes of men worthy of a cairn or dagoba.[56] We may perhaps conclude that in the earliest ages of Buddhism ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... 45-54, where the writer evidently traces the origin of the word Gilead to Gal-Ed. We gather from the context that the narrative was connected with the cairn at Mizpah which separated the Hebrew from the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Highlands, received a strong proof of sagacity in a ewe, who came piteously bleating to meet him. When near, she redoubled her cries, and looked up in his face, as if to ask his assistance. He alighted from his gig, and followed her. She led him to a cairn at a considerable distance from the road, where he found a lamb, completely wedged in betwixt two large stones, and struggling with its legs uppermost. He extricated the sufferer, and placed it on the green sward; and the mother poured forth ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... tops and thickly-interwoven branches of dwarf pines, which, by the growth of centuries, though mossy with age, had barely reached three feet in altitude. Next, they came to masses and fragments of naked rock heaped confusedly together, like a cairn reared by giants in memory of a giant chief. In this bleak realm of upper air nothing breathed, nothing grew; there was no life but what was concentrated in their two hearts; they had climbed so high ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not a very intellectual or spiritual day after all. Went in the afternoon away to the east. Had a good view and a time of devotion at a cairn from which an eagle rose as I approached. Returned to the camp and bought milk and some cheese. Intended to make porridge, but the fire was not good on account of the blowing, so I drank off my milk, ate some ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... in three unswerving lines from the post planted solidly in a cairn of rocks against a bowlder on the eastern rim of the pond, to the road which cut straight through the ranch, down that to the farthest tree of the grove, then back to the bluff again, shut in that tribute to the sentimental ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Hjort home, laid out on his shield, and he was buried in a cairn there. Many men grieved for him, for he had ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... hill to the north?" the lad asked. "Now, that is Sliab Moduirn," Ibar answered. [3]"Let us go and get there," said Cuchulain. Then they go on till they reach it.[3] [4]When they reached the mountain, Cuchulain asked,[4] "And what is that white cairn yonder on the height of the mountain?" "And that is Finncharn ('the White Cairn') of Sliab Moduirn," Ibar answered. "But yonder cairn is beautiful," exclaimed the lad. "It surely is beautiful," Ibar answered. "Lead on, fellow, till we reach yonder cairn." "Well, ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... wild cairn of immense stones, Keeper suddenly began to bark furiously, and a tall, slight figure leaped from their shelter, raised a stick, and would have struck the dog if David had not called out, "Never strie a sheep-dog, mon! ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... "grand gallops among the hills"—those grave wastes of heather and bent that sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, purior electro, of Yarrow. St. Mary's Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the St. Mary's of North and of the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... master-hand and a pen of gold. But less ambitious labourers in the field of investigation which is only as yet partly cultivated, may each assist, by carefully collecting a little heap of ascertained facts; and it is, indeed, the duty of each as he passes to add his pebble to the slowly accumulating cairn ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... on a flat stone an inscription, in Roman letters, recording the visit of the "Foam" to English Bay, and a cairn having been erected to receive it, the tablet was solemnly lifted to its resting-place. Underneath I placed a tin box, containing a memorandum similar to that left at Jan Mayen, as well as a printed dinner invitation from Lady —, which I happened to have ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... look their last upon the Erebus and Terror, give them three cheers, and go away into the desolate waste—to die! Point Victory their object. They gained it, and then their helplessness came and stared them in the face. In a cairn on the point Fitzjames placed a brief record, and that is all. They have only food for a month more, and day by day the strong are growing weak ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... the 400th anniversary of Cabot's voyage. King's Cove, landlocked as a hole in a wall, mountains meeting sky line, presented on one flat rock in letters the size of a house claim that it was here John Cabot sent his sailors ashore to plant the flag on cairn of bowlders; but when I came back from Newfoundland by way of Cape Breton, I found the same claim there. For generations the tradition has been handed down from father to son among Newfoundland fisher folk that as Cabot's vessel, pitching and rolling ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... would go away, far, far, into the interior. Even into the territory of the great king where a man's life is worth about five cents net. And as day by day passed and no news came of him—as how could it when his habitation was marked by a cairn of stones?—she would grow anxious and unhappy. And presently messengers would come bringing her a few poor trinkets he had bequeathed to her—a wrist-watch, a broken sword, a silver cigarette-case dented with the arrow that slew him—and she would ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... together. Up and up, and then down a little, and then up, and then along a strip of level ground, and then up again. The wind, a wind unknown in the happy valley, blows keen and strong; the rain-mist gets impenetrable; a dreary little cairn of stones appears. The landlord adds one to the heap, first walking all round the cairn as if he were about to perform an incantation, then dropping the stone on to the top of the heap with the gesture of a magician adding an ingredient to a cauldron ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul Rather than that gray King, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey's ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... excite as much marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of which we do not understand, and the use of which we cannot now account for. They will be seemingly as meaningless as any lonely cairn, isolated broken piece of wall, or solitary fragment of a building, of which no principal part remains, and which puzzles us to account for at the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of pity the repentant gold-seeker hurried toward the cairn. The crumpled little figure, so tragic in its loneliness and helpless grief, was lying where he had left it. She did not stir at the sound of his footsteps, nor when he laid his ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... away were the steep cliffs of the river, and at the edge of these cliffs was a great cairn of rocks in which for one night Miki had sought shelter. He had not forgotten the tunnel into the tumbled mass of rock debris, nor how easily it could be defended from within. Once in that tunnel he would turn in the door of it and slaughter his enemies one by one, for only one by one ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... last resting-place of the victims was erected a cone-shaped cairn, twelve feet high. Against its northern base was a slab of rough granite with the following inscription: "Here 120 men, women, and children were massacred in cold blood, early in September, 1857. They were from Arkansas." Surmounting the cairn was ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... slopes, as though piled there by the hands of the giants supposed to have once roved these gloomy wilds. Solitude held sway, but there was more than solitude in that lonely aspect: something prehistoric and unknown, unearthly, incomprehensible. Cairn Brea and the Hill of Fires brooded in the distance; the remains of a Druid's altar showed darkly on the summit of a nearer hill. No sound broke the stillness except the faint and ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... well its whitened ledges and grassy slopes, its low thickets of wild-rose and bayberry, its sea-wall still intact, connecting it with the small island Malaga, opposite Appledore, and the ruined break-water which links it with Cedar Island on the other side. A lonely cairn, erected by some long ago forgotten fishermen or sailors, stands upon the highest rock at the southeastern extremity; at its western end a few houses are scattered, small, rude dwellings, with the square old Haley house near; two or three fish-houses are falling into decay about the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Montenegro, when the traveller is filled with a sense of peace at the grandeur of the wild mountainous scenery, or the beauty of a sylvan forest glade, a rough cross, or cairn of stones, will be pointed out where men have met a sudden and ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... it east or west, One common sign we bear, The tongue may change, the soil, the sky, But where your British brothers lie, The lonely cairn, the nameless grave, Still fringe the flowing Saxon wave. 'Tis that! 'Tis where THEY lie—the men who placed it there, That marks the ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... companies are, as a result of the ceaseless rise in freights, disclosed in the reports of two Newcastle lines published yesterday. The high cost of freights is largely responsible for the dearness of food, coal, and other necessities of life. The gross profits of the Cairn Line of Steamships, Ltd., amounted to L292,108, and the net profits, after deducting the special war taxation and other items, were L162,689. A dividend of 10 per cent, with bonus of 4s. per share, is recommended. This makes a total of 30 per cent, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... They are particularly efficacious for curing barrenness, on which account it is frequently visited by those who are very desirous of offspring. All the invalids throw a white stone on the Saint's cairn, and leave behind them as tokens of their gratitude and confidence some rags of linen or woollen cloth. The rock on the summit of the hill formed of itself a chair for the Saint, which still remains. Those who complain of rheumatism in the back must ascend ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... CAIRN, a heap of stones often, though not always, loosely thrown together, generally by way of a sepulchral monument, and it would seem sometimes in execration ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... knowledge of the earliest period. Pre-eminent among these is the discovery, by Mr William Peppe, on the Birdpur estate, adjoining the boundary between English and Nepalese territory, of the st[u]pa, or cairn, erected by the S[a]kiya clan over their share of the ashes from the cremation pyre of the Buddha. About 12 m. to the north-east of this spot has been found an inscribed pillar, put up by Asoka as a record of his visit to the Lumbini ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... biographical material, and the historical sequence is broken by studying each type of literature (fiction, poetry, etc.) by itself. Other general surveys, containing a small amount of biography sadly interwoven with critical matter, are Trent, American Literature (Appleton); Cairn, History of American Literature (Oxford University Press); Wendell, Literary History of America (Scribner); and the Cambridge American Literature, 2 vols. (announced, 1916, Putnam). There are also a score of textbooks dealing briefly ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the rope-ladder we use in the Golden Eagle. As you know, the only way to locate the cache is to strike a direct line down from the nose of the upturned face. That will bring us to the small cairn or pile of rocks ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... stiff and sore, but feeling stronger and in better temper, the sun was wearing low. Setting to work at his task, he threw the loose rock out of a hollow in the ledge near by, and to this rude sepulchre Wetherford dragged the dead man, refusing all aid, and there piled a cairn of rocks ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... green boughs; behind Soendermark, the large, wealthy village stretched itself out. The sun had set before they reached the Dam-house, where the wild swans, coming from the ocean, build in the fresh water fake. This is the last point of beauty; nothing but lonely fields, with here and there a cairn, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... go that way knocked down a stone from the wall. There was a little cairn there always, though the employees of the Board were constantly ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... the apex of the great crag. Wendot knew that he had not much farther to go. He was able to distinguish the cairn of stones which he and his brothers had once erected on the top in honour of their having made the ascent in a marvellously short space of time. Wendot had beaten that record today, he knew; but his eyes were full of anxiety instead of triumph. He was ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that there was some one much less than a mile away to hear it. And it happened, too, that he was the one person in all the world that Jock would most wish not to hear it, for he was gamekeeper to the Laird of Glen Cairn, and the Laird of Glen Cairn owned all the land for miles and miles about in every direction. He owned the little gray house and the moor, the mountain, and the forest, and even the little brook that sang by the door. To be sure, the Laird seemed to care very little for his ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... silence they reached over mountains and moor, To a heath where the oak-tree grew lonely and hoar: "Now here let us place the grey stone of her cairn: Why speak ye no word?" ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the garden, consulting about its restoration. Sydney declared he would come and work at it every day till it was cleared and planted. He would begin to-morrow with the cairn for the rock-plants. ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Lest bogles catch him unawares: Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. By this time he was 'cross the foord, Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; And past the birks and meikle stane Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane: And through the whins, and by the cairn Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel'. Before him Doon pours a' his floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods; The lightnings flash frae pole to pole; ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Badenoch-men on recognising him removed their doubts; and, amid shouts from both sides, Montrose assumed his place as Lieutenant-general for his Majesty, adopting the tall Macdonald as his Major-general. The standard was raised with all ceremony on a spot near Castle Blair, now marked by a cairn; and, when all was ready, the troops were reviewed. They consisted of about 1,200 Irish, with a following of women and children, and 1,100 Scottish Highlanders (Stuarts, Robertsons, Gordons, &c.). Artillery there was none; three old hacks, one of them for the lame Major Rollo, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... is Mark forgotten, That was wise with his tongue and brave; And the cairn over Colan crumbled, And ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... such traditions have come down to us even from prehistoric times and have proved true. Our archaeologists, for example, after long study of the remains, cannot tell us how long ago—centuries or thousands of years—a warrior with golden armour was buried under the great cairn ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... insects." In another school there was a portrait of a former teacher who had covered the walls of the school with water-colours of local scenery. I noticed in the playground of a third school a flower-covered cairn and an inscribed slab to the memory of a deceased master. Every school possesses equipment taken from the enemy during the Russo-Japanese war, usually a shell, a rifle and bayonet and ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... John Christie saw the black man pass the Muckle Cairn as it was chappin' six; before eicht, he gaed by the change-house at Knockdow; an' no lang after, Sandy M'Lellan saw him gaun linkin' doun the braes frae Kilmackerlie. There's little doubt but it was him that dwalled sae lang in Janet's body; but he was ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... stood crowding along the spacious window. The dogs barked outrageously; but at last above their din floated, as before, the high wailing cries. A heaping cairn of round-bellied, rosy-pink earthen jars came steering past, poled by a naked statue of new copper, who balanced precariously on the edge of his hidden raft. No sound came from him; nor from the funeral ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... rock, bowlder; pebble; calculus, concretion; flint, granite, marble, quartz, adamant, shale, flag, flagstone, cobblestone, rubble, brash, shingle; monolith, polyolith; cairn, muller, merestone; cromlech; madstone, snakestone; aerolite, meteorite; (of fruit) endocarp, pit, nut, putamen. Associated Words: petrify, petrifaction, lithology, lithography, lithic, lapidary, lithoglypher, lithoglyptic, litholatry, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in Ireland; and again, when writing—in his work on the Beauties of the Boyne (1849)—an account of the great old barrows of Dowth, New Grange, etc., placed on its banks above Drogheda, he describes at some length the last of these mounds (New Grange),—stating that it "consists" of an enormous cairn or "hill of small stones, calculated at 180,000 tons weight, occupying the summit of one of the natural undulating slopes which enclose the valley of the Boyne upon the north. It is said to cover nearly ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... was, As cantie as a kittlin; [lively] But och! that night, amang the shaws, [woods] She gat a fearfu' settlin'! She thro' the whins, an' by the cairn, [gorse, stone heap] An' owre the hill gaed scrievin'; [careering] Where three laird's lands met at a burn,[17] To dip her left sark-sleeve in, [shirt-] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... found on Beechey Island with head-boards marking the names and ages of three men of the crew who had died in the winter. Near a cape of the island was a cairn built of stone. It was evidently intended to hold the records of the expedition. Yet, strange to say, neither in the cairn nor anywhere about it was a single ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... for Kalev for one month after another till three months had passed, and the fourth was far advanced. She heaped a cairn of stones over his tomb, which formed the hill on which the Cathedral of Revel now stands. One day she was carrying a great stone to the cairn, but found herself too weak, and let it fall. She sat down on it, and lamented her sad ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... stone cairn, about a foot and a half by three, a foot high. Kellogg said it was just a big toilet pit, but I was sure of what it was. I opened it. Stones under the cairn, and then filled-in earth, and then a dead Fuzzy wrapped in grass. A female; she'd been ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... lake rises a mountain of dark, greenish colour, resembling an immense cairn constructed by the hands of Titans. Upon its summit rests a cloud of white fog collected by evaporation from the surrounding water, which has been condensed by the freshness of the night. The numerous dark fissures distinguishable along the sides of this gigantic hill give it the appearance ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... edge of the terrace he saw a little cairn of broken bricks, and under them a piece of papyrus. He caught it up and read: "We have waited past the midnight, and can delay no longer. We go to find the King. Follow us across ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... ways the attorney did not know, until at last they arrived at a little dell. The night was pitchy dark, and nothing could Ezekiel see but the ghostly figure gliding along ahead of him, all lit by a weird phosphorescent light. In the dell was a small granite cairn, and here the ghost stopped and looked around ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... "There's another stone cairn here!" he said. "I guess I knocked it over, for I can't tell exactly what it is. You can learn that when you come up with your searchlights! I think ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... with the beards, closely resemble those seen on Egyptian monuments. Frequent cuts are made on the trees along all the paths, and offerings of small pieces of manioc roots or ears of maize are placed on branches. There are also to be seen every few miles heaps of sticks, which are treated in cairn fashion, by every one throwing a small branch to the heap in passing; or a few sticks are placed on the path, and each passer-by turns from his course, and forms a sudden bend in the road to one side. It seems as if their minds were ever in doubt and dread ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... together of the wooden structures is a well-known feature in crannogs, as was demonstrated by my investigations at Lochlee and elsewhere. {28a} It would be still more necessary in a substratum of timbers that was intended (as will be afterwards explained) to bear the weight of a superincumbent cairn. Underneath the layers of horizontal woodwork some portions of heather, bracken, and brushwood were detected, and below this came a succession of thin beds of mud, loam, sand, gravel, and finally the blue ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... me in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard nor spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell off my chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished together, and in place of the sweet heather there was the table with the tiresome papers. I reached out yearningly after the heath; I had not seen it for such a long time,—how long it did seem!—and—but in the same breath it was all there again in the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... in the Heart of Midlothian when Sharpitlaw, accompanied by Ratcliffe and Madge Wildfire, go to Muschat's Cairn ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... on each floor, in which the first delighted summer party had divided itself, glad and grateful to occupy them double and even treble bedded, had become the "hotel," with a name up across the gable of the new wing,—"Giant's Cairn House,"—and the eight original rooms made into fourteen. The wing was clapped on by its middle; rushing out at the front toward the road to meet the summer tide of travel as it should surge by, and hold up to ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... better for us all, For them who sleep and us who wake, That never bird at dawn should call Nor golden foam of morning break; That on one high cairn of the dead The ultimate light should be unsealed, Than that the world should live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... 1793, observes that in his day "about two hundred persons afflicted in this way are annually brought to try the benefits of its salutary influence. These patients," he continues, "are conducted by their friends, who first perform the ceremony of passing with them thrice round a neighbouring cairn; on this cairn they then deposit a simple offering of clothes, or perhaps of a small bunch of heath.... The patient is then thrice immerged in the sacred pool; after the immersion he is bound hand and foot, and left for the night in a chapel which stands near. If ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... up a cairn with some of these stones to guide us to the spot when we come to hunt ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... overhead lie the Queen's Park, from Musehat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury's Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design. This ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... was torn into great black rifts and piled in hummocks. This was apparently Nature's work, but Foster could not see how the storms that burst upon the hills could have worked such havoc. Crossing the rugged waste to a distant cairn, they sat down upon the stones, and Pete filled his pipe from ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... lustily; and occasionally a heavy farm-wagon crossed the country bridge which spans the ravine just above us, its rumblings echoing in the quarried glen for all the world like distant thunder. Before turning in, each built a cairn upon the beach, at the point which he thought the water might reach by morning. The Boy, more venturesome than the rest, piled his cairn highest up the slope; and when daylight revealed the fact that the river, in its four-feet rise, had ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... displayed to shew the inscriptions on both sides.[17] It is by the fact of both sides being written upon that we assign to them the character of gravestones, that is upright gravestones; but it is also well authenticated by historical records that the memorial of a Pagan chief in Ireland was a cairn with a pillar stone standing upon it, and there is little doubt that the Irish invaders carried the practice with them into Scotland. It is indeed in Scotland that a large proportion of these stones have been discovered, and there are more than a hundred of them in the Edinburgh Museum. In the ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... for the hills o' the cromlech and cairn, Where blossoms the thistle by hillocks o' fern; There Freedom in triumph an altar has made For holiest rites in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... giant-grace; That wild, though not unhandsome, face; That voice which sometimes in its tone Is softer than the wood-dove's moan, At others, louder than the storm Which beats the side of old Cairn Gorm; {f:33} That hand, as white as falling snow, Which yet can fell the stoutest foe; And, last of all, that noble heart, Which ne'er from honour's path would start, Shall never be forgot by me— So farewell, ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... at their work, and red gleams xan up the vertical steel mast and threads of copper wire towards the zenith. The Prince sat on a rock close by, with his chin on his hand, waiting. Beyond and to the northward was the cairn that covered Von Winterfeld, surmounted by a cross of steel, and from among the tumbled rocks in the distance the eyes of a wolf gleamed redly. On the other hand was the wreckage of the great airship and the men bivouacked about a second ruddy flare. They were all keeping very still, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... clothes we had been wearing all the way from here to the Pole and back. When we had completed all this repacking and had everything ready, two of us went over to Mount Betty, and collected as many different specimens of rock as we could lay our hands on. At the same time we built a great cairn, and left there a can of 17 litres of paraffin, two packets of matches — containing twenty boxes — and an account of our expedition. Possibly someone may find a use for these things ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... day which the Queen calls in her journal "a very happy, lucky, and memorable one"—her Majesty and Prince Albert, with their family, household, tenants, servants, and poorer neighbours, ascended Craig Gowan, a hill near Balmoral, for the purpose of building a cairn, which was to commemorate the Queen and the Prince's having taken possession of their home in the north. At the "Moss House," half-way up, the Queen's piper met her, and preceded her, playing as he went. Not the least welcome among the company already collected were the children ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... horse-chestnuts, and even a few immemorial Spanish chestnuts planted by the old Peterboroughs, now all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with which I am acquainted, and some of the best salmon streams, then woods and sheep pastures and a dozen miles of heather hills—up to Cairn-monearn and Kerloach—giving the best grouse-shooting in the country. It is in truth a charming water-side even in the eyes of a critical old man, or of a tourist in search of the picturesque; but for a boy ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... were developed out of the hedge, or setting of stone, which frequently surrounds the base of a barrow, and was intended to keep the ghost in, and prevent it from injuring the living. By degrees the wall was increased in size while the barrow or cairn decreased; until at last a small mound of earth, or heap of stones, only marked the place of burial, and the huge circle of stones surrounded it. Stonehenge, with its well-wrought stones and gigantic trilitha, is much ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... to remedy, my Father," said the Poor Thing; "for we must go this night to the little isle of sheep, where our fathers lie in the dead-cairn, and to-morrow to the Earl's Hall, and there shall you find a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake? It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... conversation directly, and soon got into the mare magnum of poetry. He told me he had now gotten a subject for a drama, which he was to call Rob McQuechan's Elshin, from a popular story of Robert Bruce being defeated on the water of Cairn, when the heel of his boot having loosened in his flight, he applied to Robert MacQuechan to fit it, who, to make sure, ran his awl nine inches up the king's heel. We were now going on at a great rate, when Mr. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Leith and Portobello in the distance, and of a fertile plain at the foot of the hill. In the course of our drive our cabman pointed out Dumbiedikes' house; also the cottage of Jeanie Deans,—at least, the spot where it formerly stood; and Muschat's Cairn, of which a small heap of stones is yet remaining. Near this latter object are the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel, a roofless gable, and other remains, standing on the abrupt hillside. We drove homeward past a parade-ground on which a body of cavalry was exercising, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... played during nine days. Her keen was sung by poets and harpers, and a cairn ten acres wide was heaved over her clay. Then the keening ceased and the games drew to an end; the princes of the Five Prov-inces returned by horse or by chariot to their own places; the concourse of mourners ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... is safe, safe, Robin, under the dark tree, by the cairn stones. Surely I would not let it ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... shower discontinued, a few laggards fell in scattering confusion over the prostrate city, and the sun climbing the eastern sky sent its peaceful reassuring light upon a cairn-like heap of desolation. The chilled surface of the fallen meteorites were broken up by areas of glowing cinder-like surfaces. The glittering and opaline city of glass, the City of Scandor, capital of the Martian world, was buried beneath the scorching and stony fragments ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... a very firm and durable rampart. It has been built all about the consecrated ground, except where the precipice is deep enough to form an enclosure of itself. The sacred spot contains more than two acres. There are within it the ruins of many houses, none of them large, a cairn, and many graves marked by clusters of stones. Mr M'Queen insisted that the ruin of a small building, standing east and west, was actually the temple of the goddess Anaitis, where her statue was kept, and from whence processions ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at the ends of two tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn? ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the course of the ages some one may have lived here, and we sometimes think that some one must. The coco-palms grow all round the island, which is scarce like nature's planting. We found besides, when we landed, an unmistakable cairn upon the beach; use unknown; but probably erected in the hope of gratifying some mumbo-jumbo whose very name is forgotten, by some thick-witted gentry whose very bones are lost. Then the island (witness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a mile or so they came upon the former campsites of the castaway, each marked by a flat-topped cairn of small stones three or four feet in height. DeCastros was at a loss to explain this. Mr. Wordsley supposed that it was one of the ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... day at about noon they awoke, and had a bath in the warm pool. They saw the armoured mass of the great ant evidently undisturbed, while the bodies of its victims were already shining skeletons, and raised a small cairn of stones in memory of the struggle they ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... sermon." Put that into verse and it would ring well. We thank Miss Barrett for the graphic touch of Virgil's "brown bees," which certainly are better than his gods. "Lucretius" is very finely painted. "Ossian" looms large through the mist, but walk up to him, and the pyramid is but a cairn. "Spenser" and "Ariosto," with their locks blended in one, compose a very sweet picture. "Dante" we will not answer for. "Goethe" is a perfect enigma. What does the word "fell" mean? [Greek: deinos], we suppose—that is, "not to be trifled with." But surely it sounds very strange, although ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... horns rung out, A hundred voices joined the shout; With hark and whoop and wild halloo, No rest Benvoirlich's echoes knew. Far from the tumult fled the roe, Close in her covert cowered the doe, The falcon, from her cairn on high, Cast on the rout a wondering eye, Till far beyond her piercing ken The hurricane had swept the glen. Faint, and more faint, its failing din Returned from cavern, cliff, and linn, And silence settled, wide and still, On the lone wood ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... her dignity to the day of her death. So they now drank together Olaf's wedding and Unn's funeral honours, and the last day of the feast Unn was carried to the howe (burial mound) that was made for her. She was laid in a ship in the cairn, and much treasure with her, and after that the cairn was closed up. Then Olaf "Feilan" took over the household of Hvamm and all charge of the wealth there, by the advice of his kinsmen who were there. When the feast came to an end Olaf gave lordly gifts to the men most ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... ain native land! our ain native land! To hear of her famed ones let none e'er demand, For the hours o' a' time far too little would prove To name but the names that we honour and love. The bard lives in light, though his heart it be still, And the cairn of the warrior stands gray on the hill, And songster and sage can alike still command A garland of fame from ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... when to a maid A young man speaks, his voice was soft and low,— "Alas, no God am I; be not afraid, For even now the nodding daisies grow Whose seed above my grassy cairn shall blow, When I am nothing but a drift of white Dust in a cruse of gold; and nothing know ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Bedwyr sat on a beacon-cairn on the summit of Plinlimmon, in the highest wind that ever was, they looked around them and saw a great smoke, afar off. Then said Kay, "By the hand of my friend, yonder is the fire of a robber." Then they hastened towards the smoke, and they came so near to it that they could ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... by the marriage of two streams, one flowing out of Strath Ardle and the other descending from Cairn Gowar through the long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. The Ericht begins at the bridge of Cally, and its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by railway or factory, reaches almost down to Blairgowrie. On the southern bank, but far above the water, runs the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... of the way, and each of the three starts from a menhir, or long stone. Near Merivale Bridge are two double stone rows, but the stones are small. Close by are a sacred circle, a kistvaen, a pound and hut-circles, and one cairn, besides the ruins of others that have been destroyed. It would be absurd to pretend to enter on such a wide subject here. Some idea of its extent may be gathered by considering one single branch of it: Mr Baring-Gould has stated that no fewer than fifty ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... had come upon this still little town between the mountains and the shore, amid a country shining with yellow gorse, hills clothed with larch, heathery moorland, ferny lanes, and wild heights where the wind roars on crag or cairn. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Fred's beautiful oration and funereal ceremonies with any small idea of my own, but now perhaps I may be allowed to suggest that we each take a beach stone and cast it on those 'turned' sods, and so erect a cairn in memory ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... hillock of mishapen stones Is not a ruin of the ancient time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanc'd, Sir William having learn'd That from the shore a ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... guidance of one who had evidently been in the last expedition, they took their way to the valley where the fight had taken place. Here all was still. There were no signs of their foes. They found, in the gorge, a great cairn of stones; with a wooden cross placed over it, and the words in ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... his love. And he came and stood over the body and said: "I have naught to do to hate him now: if he hated me, it was but for a little while, and he knew naught of me. So let his bones be covered up from the wolf and the kite. Yet shall they not lie alongside of her. I will raise a cairn above him here on this fair little plain which he spoilt of all joy." Therewith he fell to, and straightened his body, and laid his huge limbs together and closed his eyes and folded his arms over his breast; and then he piled the stones above him, and went on casting ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... the plateau which was invisible from the plain, and here in feverish haste they built a little cairn. Many flaky slabs of stone were lying about, and it did not take long to prop the largest of these against a rock, so as to make a lean-to, and then to put two side-pieces to complete it. The slabs were of the same ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... bury her, boys,' said the priest, 'over there under that cairn of stones, and bring me down the trap and harness ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... was, As canty as a kittlin; But, och! that night, amang the shaws, She got a fearfu' settlin'! She thro' the whins, an' by the cairn, An' owre the hill gaed scrievin, Whare three lairds' lands met at a burn,[41] To dip her left sark-sleeve ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... from the cave last mentioned is a rock grave on a ledge which projects at about 40 feet (vertically) below the top of the hill. As near as can be judged, in its present torn-up condition, the cairn was originally about 10 by 20 feet in dimensions; so there were probably two graves covered by the ordinary conical heaps of stone, the depression between them being filled up ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke |
