"Obsidian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and driver, they came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor left,—some driven by bearded, solemn white men, some by careless, saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or obsidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road; then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and get up, when the first ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the remote southeastern outskirts of the island world of the Pacific, a parallel is presented by little Easter Isle. Once it was densely populated and completely tilled by a people who had achieved singular progress in agriculture, religion, masonry, sculpture in stone and wood carving, even with obsidian tools, and who alone of all the Polynesians had devised a form of hieroglyphical writing.[836] Easter Isle to-day shows only abandoned fields, the silent monuments of its huge stone idols, and the shrunken ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... thick slime mixed with petrified branches, but it changed little by little near four o'clock in the afternoon; it grew rockier and seemed to be strewn with pudding stones and a basaltic gravel called "tuff," together with bits of lava and sulfurous obsidian. I expected these long plains to change into mountain regions, and in fact, as the Nautilus was executing certain turns, I noticed that the southerly horizon was blocked by a high wall that seemed to close off every exit. Its summit obviously ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... particularly in the province of Victoria, in the neighborhood of Port Western, which reproduces in a remarkable manner, the characters of the Canstadt race." Not the least interesting result of this discovery is the similarity of weapons and implements. "With Mr. Lartet, we see in the obsidian lances of New Caledonia the flint heads of the lower alluvium of the Somme. The hatchet of certain Australians reminds us, as it did Sir Charles Lyell, of the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... now proved to be a very historical personage indeed; some of his bones are in the museum of Cairo, and the objects disinterred in his tomb show that he belonged to an age of culture and intercourse with distant lands. The hieroglyphic system of writing was already complete, and fragments of obsidian vases turned on the lathe indicate commercial relations with ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Following Zoraida he passed along a broad walk winding through low shrubs and lined on each side with uniform stones of various colors that were like jewels. These boundaries were no doubt of choice fragments of finely polished chalcedony and jasper and obsidian; they were red and yellow and black and, at regular intervals, a pale exquisite blue which in the rays of the lamps were as beautiful as turquoises. They passed about a screen of dwarf cedars and came upon a tiny lakelet across which a boy might have hurled a stone; ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... "Obsidian is a volcanic rock—a sort of combination of glass and flint for hardness," Tom explained. "It is brittle, black in color, and the natives of the Admiralty Islands use it for tipping their spears with which they slay ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton |
