"Steppe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... background representing the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays soaring above a golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is a "national ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... you there, even if it be not alive! I will not abandon your body for the Lyakhs to make merry over you, and cut your body in twain and fling it into the water. Let the eagle tear out your eyes if it must be so; but let it be our eagle of the steppe and not a Polish eagle, not one which has flown hither from Polish soil. I will bring you, though it be a corpse, to ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... even to watch a fine horse gallop, the long stride, the rush of the wind as he passes—my heart beats quicker to the thud of the hoofs, and I feel his strength. Gladly would I have the strength of the Tartar stallion roaming the wild steppe; that very strength, what vehemence of soul-thought would accompany it. But I should like it, too, for itself. For I believe, with all my heart, in the body and the flesh, and believe that it should be increased and made ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... his wife's side, but if he had his way he'd put that Manya in a sack and drop her in the water. It's dull with one's wife, it's mere foolishness. And it's no better with one's children, I make bold to assure you. I have two of them, the rascals. There's nowhere for them to be taught out here in the steppe; I haven't the money to send them to school in Novo Tcherkask, and they live here like young wolves. Next thing they will be murdering someone ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... wept; she could not bear to say, "Sail forth, my mariners, and slay The liegemen of my foe." Meanwhile on Russian steppe and lake Are women weeping for the sake Of ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... days all travel was on foot or on horseback. The wealthy and noble rode, the poor footed it. Great highways cut Europe from end to end; though there were tracts in Stanislaus' country where the roadway was only the broad steppe, where the grasses waved and tossed like the sea, where men were few and ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... Lavretsky went out into the garden, and was well pleased with it. It was all overgrown with steppe grass, with dandelions, and with gooseberry and raspberry bushes; but there was plenty of shade in it, a number of old lime-trees growing there, of singularly large stature, with eccentrically ordered branches. They had been planted ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... unfailing, inexhaustible as the sight of the ocean, is the view from the cliffs. Beyond the silver sweep of the river at their feet, animated with steamers and small boats, stretches the illimitable steppe, where the purple and emerald shadows of the sea depths and shallows are enriched with hues of golden or velvet brown and misty blue. The steppe is no longer an unbroken expanse of waving plume-grass and flowers, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... devoted a lot of energy to it. I can remember his planting the huge apple orchard at Yasnaya and several hundred acres of birch and pine forest, and at the beginning of the seventies, for a number of years, he was interested in buying up land cheap in the province of Samara, and breeding droves of steppe horses and flocks ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... the Cape. There is usually a holm adjacent to the river, studded with villages and gardens. The holms are but partially cultivated, and on the other parts grows rank and weedy grass. There is then a second terrace, on which trees and bushes abound; and I thought I could detect a third and higher steppe. But I never could discover terraces on the adjacent country, such as in other countries show ancient sea-beaches. The path runs sometimes on the one and sometimes on the other of these river terraces. Canoes are essentially necessary; but I find that they here cost too much for my means, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... uninterrupted activity. This immense chain of mountains, which has never even been named, stretches from the fifty-first to the sixtieth degree of latitude in one almost continuous ridge, and at last breaks off abruptly into the Okhotsk Sea, leaving to the northward a high level steppe called the "dole" or desert, which is the wandering ground of the Reindeer Koraks. The central and southern parts of the peninsula are broken up by the spurs and foot-hills of the great mountain range into deep ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places it may resemble one or other of these. 'Moss Steppes' some one has attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense."—Brehm.] ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Asiatic horses, which are bred in the steppes, and are private property, although he calls them quite wild.—"Only in the heart of Tartary can the horse be found perfectly in a wild state. One herd in the steppe will consist of 1000 horses; but the keepers of herds will have several. Dressed in leather, with a girdle which contains the implements of his veterinary art; a black lambskin cap on his head, the tabuntshik, or herdsman, eats, drinks, and sleeps in his saddle; has no ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... South-African. We connect the idea of the desert with that of sand; whilst steppe is a term which is limited to the vast tracts of central Asia. Now the Kaffre, and still more the Hottentot, area, dry like the desert, and elevated like the steppe, is partially a karro. Its soil is often a hard, cracked, and parched clay rather than a waste of sand, and it constitutes an argillaceous table-land. Its vegetation has strongly marked characters. Its Fauna has ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... the easier life of the battalions! But there an enemy, more fearful than the peasantry, began to show itself. The weather had changed to storms of rain and bitter wind; the plains of Champagne, never famed for fertility, were now as wild and bare as a Russian steppe. The worst provisions, supplied on the narrowest scale—above all, disgust, the most fatal canker of the soldier's soul—spread disease among the ranks; and the roads on which we followed the march, gave terrible evidence of the havoc that every hour made among them. The mortality at last ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... scarcely a species being found which does not also occur in the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Among the birds most characteristic of Africa are the ostrich and the secretary-bird. The ostrich is widely dispersed, but is found chiefly in the desert and steppe regions. The secretary-bird is common in the south. The weaver birds and their allies, including the long-tailed whydahs, are abundant, as are, among game-birds, the francolin and guinea-fowl. Nany of the smaller birds, such as the sun-birds, bee-eaters, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Among the haunted Apennines. And he who treads the cobbled street To-day in the cold North may meet, Come month, come year, the dusky East, And share the Caliph's secret feast; Or in the toil of wind and sun Bear pilgrim-staff, forlorn, fordone, Till o'er the steppe, athwart the sand Gleam the far gates of Samarkand. The ringing quay, the weathered face Fair skies, dusk hands, the ocean race The palm-girt isle, the frosty shore, Gales and hot suns the wide world o'er Grey North, red South, and burnished West The goals of the old tireless quest, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circumstances, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... desert sand so much dreaded by travellers. The rest of the country is left to nature's own devices and, wherever it is not cut up by mountains or rocky ranges, offers the well-known twofold character of steppe-land: luxuriant grassy vegetation during one-third of the year and a parched, arid waste the rest of the time, except during the winter ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... has thus progressed, "because it hath had the helpe of such rare and singular wits, as from time to time myght still adde some amendment to the same. Among whom I think there is none that will gainsay, but Master John Lyly hath deservedly moste high commendations, as he hath stept one steppe further therein than any either before or since he first began the wyttie discourse of his Euphues, whose works, surely in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... about two and a half miles away from the Terek, from which it is separated by a dense forest. On one side of the road which runs through the village is the river; on the other, green vineyards and orchards, beyond which are seen the driftsands of the Nogay Steppe. The village is surrounded by earth-banks and prickly bramble hedges, and is entered by tall gates hung between posts and covered with little reed-thatched roofs. Beside them on a wooden gun-carriage stands an unwieldy cannon captured by the Cossacks at some time or other, and which has not ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... devote my life to spread it far and wide among the nations of the earth. It should bring comfort, I swore, to the king in his palace and the peasant in his hut. It should be a household word in the London slum and on the Tartar steppe. Sypher's Cure could go with the Red Cross into battle, and should be in the clerk's wife's cupboard in Peckham Rye. The human chamois that climbs the Alps, the gentle lunatic that plays golf, the idiot that goes and gets scalped by Red Indians, the missionary that gets ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays above a soaring golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Shan, and Altai to the north. Between the Himalayas and the Kuen-lun is the great Plateau of Tibet, which runs into a sort of cul-de-sac at its western end in Kashmir. Between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan we have the Gobi Steppe of Mongolia, running west of Kashgar and Yarkand; while between the Thian Shan and the Altai we have the great Kirghiz Steppe. It is clear that only two routes are possible between Eastern and Western Asia: that between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan via Kashgar and Bokhara, and ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... you French Zanies you, you will follow the French steps so long, till you be not able to set one sound steppe oth ground all the daies of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... saddle, yet obey the rider's hand Which wields the guiding switch: the hunter, too, Who wanders forth, his home a fragile hut, And blinds with flowing robe (if spear should fail) The angry lion, monarch of the steppe. ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Nandi country, well watered and partly forested. In the treeless plateau of Uasin Gishu, west of Elgeyo, the land again rises to a height of over 8000 ft., and to the west of this is the great mountain mass of Elgon (q.v.). East of Lake Rudolf and south of Lake Stefanie is a large waterless steppe, mainly volcanic in character, from which rise mountain ranges. The highest peak is Mount Kanjora, 6900 ft. high. South of this arid region, strewn with great lava stones, are the Rendile uplands, affording pasturage for thousands of camels. Running ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Dniepr on the other, which neither government was able entirely to restrain. But the oppression to which the Polish nobles attempted to subject their Cossack allies, whom they pretended to regard as serfs and vassals, was intolerable to these freeborn sons of the steppe; and an universal revolt at length broke out, which was the beginning of the evil days of Poland. For nearly twenty years, under the feeble rule of John Casimer, the country was desolated with sanguinary civil wars; the Czar Alexis Mikhailowitz, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Hull. In 1872, cattle brought to the same port infected the cattle of the East Riding of Yorkshire, but this outbreak was checked before much damage had been done, and since 1877 there has been no trace of this dreaded disease in the kingdom. The cattle plague, rinderpest, or steppe murrain, is said[659] to have first appeared in England in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, and reappeared in 1714, when it came from Holland, but did little damage, being chiefly confined to the neighbourhood of London. The next outbreak was in 1745, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me now. Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams—such beams were brought at that epoch from the Zhizdrin pine forests; there is no trace of them nowadays!—it ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... into the "Monte Formation," or sterile pampa—a sandy, more or less barren district, producing a dry, harsh, ligneous vegetation, principally thorny bushes and low trees, of which the chanar (Gurliaca decorticans) is the most common; hence the name of "Chanar-steppe" used by some writers: and this formation extends southwards down into Patagonia. Scientists have not yet been able to explain why the pampas, with a humid climate, and a soil exceedingly rich, have produced nothing but grass, while the dry, sterile territories on their ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... with eyes shut. This was the majestic entrance into Castile; but it raised my hopes only to dash them down. Once past the serrated needles and fingers of Dolomite rock which made the grandeur of the gorge, we came again to monotony of outline, and began to realize Castile as it is; a vast and lonely steppe, wind swept, bounded ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... now become manager of an estate near Taganrog, in the wild steppe country of the Don Cossacks, and here the boy spent his summers, fishing in the river, and roving about the countryside as brown as a gipsy, sowing the seeds of that love for nature which he retained all his life. His evenings he liked best ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... one carrying with it some portion of his wasted strength; and that if death should overtake him with his labor uncompleted his name and memory must perish from the world. So, like one who flies across a Russian steppe pursued by starving wolves, Gabriel sped on his task, seeking to out-distance the grim and noiseless wolf that ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... post-road was attended with only the usual vicissitudes of ordinary travel. Wading in our Russian top-boots through the treacherous fords of the "Snake" defile, we passed the pyramidal slate rock known as the "Gate of Tamerlane," and emerged upon a strip of the Kizil-Kum steppe, stretching hence in painful monotony to the bank of the Sir Daria river. This we crossed by a rude rope-ferry, filled at the time with a passing caravan, and then began at once to ascend the valley of the Tchirtchick toward Tashkend. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... fashion), the offices and house-serfs' huts surrounded the manorial house on all sides, and the garden was close to it—a small garden, but containing fine fruit-trees, juicy apples, and pipless pears. The flat steppe of rich, black earth stretched for ten miles round. No lofty object for the eye; not a tree, nor even a belfry; somewhere, maybe, jutting up, a windmill, with rents in its sails; truly, well-named Suhodol, or Dry-flat! Inside ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... had hidden her aeronautic activities behind the dreary curtain of miles of steppe and marsh that shut her off from the watchfulness of Western Europe. Professional aviators, indeed, had gone thither to make exhibition flights for enormous purses and had brought back word of huge ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Caspian. This occupation was limited to a line of outposts along the Ural, the Irtish, and in the intervening district. During Catharine's reign the frontier nomads became reduced in numbers, by the departure from the steppe between the Ural and Volga of the Calmucks, who fled into Djungaria, and were nearly destroyed on the road, ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... within her reach, which she swallows for the gratification of her ever-raging appetite. She has several young and handsome daughters whom she keeps in a deep well beneath her izbushka or cabin, which has neither door nor window, and stands upon the wildest part of the steppe upon crow's feet and is continually turning round. Whenever Baba Yaga meets a person she is in the habit of ...
— The Story of Yvashka with the Bear's Ear • Anonymous
... no heat on the glittering snow. Below stretched the expanses of roofs—the tiles of the Army Bakehouse, and the slates of the houses on the quay—like sheets of white cloth fringed with black. On the other bank of the river, the square stretch of the Champ-de-Mars seemed a steppe, the black dots of the straggling vehicles making one think of sledges skimming along with tinkling bells; while the elms on the Quai d'Orsay, dwarfed by the distance, looked like crystal flowers bristling with sharp points. Through ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... country pass this time? Walking? The landscape tires the eye In winter by its blank and dim And naked uniformity. On horseback gallop o'er the steppe! Your steed, though rough-shod, cannot keep His footing on the treacherous rime And may fall headlong any time. Alone beneath your rooftree stay And read De Pradt or Walter Scott!(47) Keep your accounts! You'd rather not? Then get mad drunk or wroth; the day Will pass; the same ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... rein half a verst from the Church of St. Andrea. Though his shaggy little horse showed no signs of distress, Malcolm kicked his feet free from the stirrups and descended, for his journey had been a long one, the day was poisonously hot and the steppe across which he had ridden, for all its golden beauty, its wealth of blue cornflour and yellow genista, had been wearisome. Overhead the sky was an unbroken bowl of blue and at its zenith rode a ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... analysis in the ordinary way. But whenever some quick and sure hop test shall have been found, appearance and aroma will still be most important factors in any estimate of the value of hops. Here a question arises as to whether hops from a warm or even a steppe climate, like that of South Russia, contain the same proportion of ethereal oil—that is, of aroma—as those from a cooler climate, like Bavaria and Bohemia, or like certain other fruit species of southern growth, they are early in maturing, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... The steppe wind was sighing over the tombs, and causing long stems of grass to rock to and fro, and freighting the heated air with the silken rustling of birches and limes and other trees, and leading one to detect amid the humming of summer a note ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... places. I had to give up the intention however on account of the great difficulty attending the journey and the little fruit that it promised. In that country they travel only with small vehicles drawn by great dogs. For the steppe is covered with ice, and the feet of men or the shoes of horses would slip, whereas the dogs having claws their paws don't slip upon the ice. The only travellers across this wilderness are rich ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa |
