"Trackless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plagues? After giving various hypotheses he adopts the one which assigns their origin to Medusa's hairs which fell from Perseus's hand as he sailed through the air. In order not to lure people to certain death by appearing in an inhabited country, he chose the trackless wastes of Africa over which to wing his flight. The mythological disquisition ended, one on natural history follows. The peculiar properties of the venom of each species are minutely catalogued, first in abstract terms, then in the concrete by a description ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... deep To dim sea-caves where bright treasures sleep, And dareth with curious quest explore The ancient wonders of Ocean's floor. It fearless roams over Deserts vast, Where destruction rides on the Simoom's blast, And trackless sands have for ages frowned O'er cities in ancient song renowned. It climbs where the dazzling glaciers lie, Changeless and cold, 'neath a glowing sky, And leaves the trace of its triumphs proud Above the regions ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of all that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at a very ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... fairway so that Afiola might reckonize his relations in the rigging. You might wonder that such an unmitigated black villain would care what Coe did, so long as he had his wicked way with Mrs. Tweedie, and a whole trackless mountain to lose himself in; but there's an awful soft streak in Kanakas for their own blood, and we had his whole family in our hands, not to speak of the two kids. It seemed almost like a waste of lives to look up and see not a speck, or the least sign whatever, that ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... It does not depend on books, and it is superior to culture. It is the perception of analogy—the instinct of causation. It guides the savage through trackless forests, and the astronomer through infinite space. It makes the burnt child dread the fire, and a Darwin see in a few obvious facts the solution of a mystery. It built the first hut and the last palace; the first canoe and the last ocean steamer. It constructed ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... were in. The horse was plodding its way through the snow-drifts and it was evident that the animal would soon become exhausted. The blizzard might last all night, or it might continue for three days. On those trackless wastes in such a storm death by freezing was almost certain, unless they reached a place of shelter. The hours dragged by. He kept up an incessant talking with Annie, lest she should fall into the fatal sleep. The girl ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... come back to me!" she said bravely and proudly, for a moment stopping to face the sun. "He will come back from beyond those hills and trackless woods! He will ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... witness, that the range was impassable. It seemed that Nature had tumbled down an impenetrable bewilderment of rock, the hillsides cracking into deep, dark crevices, and the crests of the mountains showing behind and beyond a massed confusion of crags and hollows, trackless and untraversable. Governor King declared himself satisfied that the effort to cross the range was a task "as chimerical as useless," an opinion strengthened by the fact that, as Allan Cunningham had related,* the aboriginals known to the settlement were "totally ignorant of any pass ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... no time like Spring, When life's alive in everything, Before new nestlings sing, Before cleft swallows speed their journey back Along the trackless track,— God guides their wing, He spreads their table that they nothing lack,— Before the daisy grows a common flower, Before the sun has power To scorch the world ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... saw that they had come out of the trackless waste and that though still a long way from the city they were riding on a desert road which had been trodden by multitudes of feet. There were many footprints here. On either side were low banks of sand, beaten into a rough symmetry by implements of men, and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... be several months before she moved again. It was then before the gold rush, and in winter Alaska was practically cut off from all communication with the south. No man would have attempted to traverse the tremendous snow-wrapped desolation of almost impassable hills and trackless forests that lay between them and the nearest of the commercial factories on the north, or the canneries on the other hand. Besides, the canneries were shut up in winter time. They were prisoners, and could only wait with what patience they could muster ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Kurus thou hast turned thy righteous wrath, Safely, with a mother's blessing, tread the trackless ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... fell upon my ear, I was a dreamer wrapped in pleasant thoughts, Dwelling in themes apart from common life, Nor needed aught for bliss save my still hours, My studies, and the poet's golden lyre. The stars revealed to me their trackless paths, The flowers whispered me their secrets sweet, And science oped her ways of calm and light. Yet love, like ancient scroll, was closely rolled; I had no wish to read its mystic page; Its wooing wakened in me wondering scorn, Its homage insult to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the point proposed for the junction of the northern and southern divisions of the army, a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, the intermediate country was a trackless forest, so rugged and mountainous as to render the progress of the army, at once, tedious and laborious. Under the guidance of Capt. Matthew Arbuckle, they however, succeeded in reaching the Ohio river after a march ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... then down they went again by a steep incline into the bed of an ice-buried stream, to find a similarly steep ascent on the other side. Occasionally, coming to a wall-like cliff surrounded by a tangled and trackless forest, they were forced to seek the shores of the sea, and there, among rocks and ice-drift, pick ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The children lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, although the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... with which Cooper never shewed himself conversant—namely, the household life of England. Like his latest works, Precaution was a failure, and gave scanty indications of that genius which was to find its true sphere and full scope in the trackless prairies of his native land, and its path upon the mountain-wave he had ridden in buoyant youth. But the same year produced The Spy, still considered by many to be his masterpiece, and from that production his fame was secure; and not only America but British ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... alarmed—the rapid up and down motion of the boat gave me a sensation of pleasure I had never before experienced. To say the truth, I should have greatly enjoyed being thus at the mercy of the winds and waves, in the midst of a black and stormy night on the trackless ocean, had it not been for my constant thoughts of my companion, and my bitter self-reproaches for having led her into ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... little consolation to these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers of Pennsylvania ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... was one of the peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut; a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air, the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... to tell about those few weeks spent at Botany Bay before the navigator and his companions "vanished trackless into blue immensity," as Carlyle puts it. A fragment of conversation is preserved by Tench. A musket was fired one day, and the natives marvelled less at the noise than at the fact that the bullet made a hole in a piece of bark at which it was aimed. To calm them, ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... are!" Jimmie made out a speck of smoke upon the horizon, and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, leaving a boiling white wake behind. Seeing ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... stretch of lonely plain. As we journeyed through it, viewing the trackless hills and rockribbed mountains not far away on either side, mostly barren and uninviting, it was difficult to conceive of that territory ever becoming the permanent homes of men. Yet it is possible, and probable, that the grave of Dr. Kidd's little boy is today within the limits of a populous ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... swift to battle, swift to cross the coastal water, Swift to war and swift of weapon, swift to paddle trackless miles, Crept with stealth along the canyon, stole her from her love and brought her Once again unto the ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... an eagle fleeth to his crag High in the stillness of the dim cloudland, Fled I from man into the trackless woods, To sate my soul with quietude and song. Then, too, ye saw me, ye pure orbs of heaven, And sent your blessed radiance to my heart In the still twilight of my calm content! Then came an answer to the unseen voice— ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... discover some changes in the heavy forest growth, stretching for many miles north and west of the lumber camp for which Tom Gray had headed. Yet Jean was not in the least dismayed by the magnitude of his task. More than once he had served as tracer of persons lost in the trackless wildernesses. More than once he had wandered about in the dense, pathless forests, a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... by this rushing river in the midst of a gloomy and trackless forest, far removed from any other people of any sort. They were but a handful of human souls. As they spoke little Chinook and almost no English, it was difficult to converse with them. They had lost the sign language or seemed not to use ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... his oxen being rested, Robert Moffat bade adieu to Mr. and Mrs. Kitchingman, whose friendship he much valued, and with a guide and drivers for the oxen started onward. Their way led through a comparatively trackless desert, and they travelled nearly the whole night through deep sand. Those were not the days of railway trains, and travelling had to be undertaken in cumbrous, springless bullock-waggons, several spare oxen being taken to provide for losses and casualties. Towards morning the ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... acquainted. More circumspect, or less slaves to the imagination than myself, they had contented themselves with in-door observations. But their enthusiasm was none the less inflamed. In astonishment they looked at each other; in restless bewilderment they glanced out of the windows on the desert, trackless plane traversed by the "Flying Cloud," and spoke with a species of awe of the shock which the announcement of what they were then witnessing would give to sober men's minds; and suggested, in broken sentences, some of the consequences which would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... foraging flock, startled from their security, screamed wildly and flapped off unhurt to remoter regions of the marsh. But the lonely captive, the wise old gander who had piloted his clan through so many hundred leagues of trackless air, lay limp and mangled on the stained water, torn by the heavy charge of the duck gun. The whimsical fate that seems to play with the destinies of the wild kindreds had chosen to let him save one flock from the slaughterer, and expiate ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... for the entire day has been most trying, leading us through a trackless forest of pines encumbered on all sides by prostrate trunks of trees. The difficulty of urging forward our pack train, making choice of routes, extricating the horses when wedged between the trees, ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... band of followers to cheer them on; to urge them forward on their perilous and dreary enterprise? What surrounding circumstances encouraged them to face unknown dangers? He should think that many a wearisome day and night in crossing the arid, trackless desert-path he was traversing, he would, on laying down his head to rest, say, "Would for bedtime in Perth, and all well!" Nothing daunted, however, by perils, privations, and difficulties, he carried his enterprise successfully through; and ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... cities—this man who can find his way on the trackless desert, the untrodden glaciers, and in the most remote and inaccessible mountain heights. He will never admit that his wanderings were lonely: "You can always have the best part of your friends with you," he said; ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... harbors of refuge. To appropriations by Congress for such objects no sound objection can be raised. Happily for our country, its peaceful policy and rapidly increasing population impose upon us no urgent necessity for preparation, and leave but few trackless deserts between assailable points and a patriotic people ever ready and generally able to protect them. These necessary links the enterprise and energy of our people are steadily and boldly struggling to supply. All experience affirms that wherever ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... during the week they returned and slept at the long-house, hoping each time to learn that the natives had received some news of her they sought, through the wonderful channels of communication that seemed always open across the trackless jungle and up and down the ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... warmer climate it is a rare thing to find them. Sometimes a few weary land-birds that have strayed from their homeward way, skim over the ocean, or rest upon the masts; how they maintain themselves on the wing cannot be conjectured, but certain it is, they have been seen on the trackless ocean, when no point of land was within ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outside the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap. But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid the thunders of a ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... away! For the Leader's eye is on us, Never off us, still upon us, Night and day! Wide the trackless prairies round us, Dark and unsunned woods surround us, Steep and savage mountains bound us; Far away Smile the soft savannas green, Rivers sweep ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... again, a century of hardship confronts us. If the readers endure it with me, as I have endured it again and again, they will have added again to their France and their United States memories more precious than the titles to boundless prairies and trackless forests. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the sunset sky or moon I watched that moving zigzag of spread wings In unforgotten Autumns gone too soon, In unforgotten Springs! Creatures of desolation, far they fly Above all lands bound by the curling foam; In misty lens, wild moors and trackless sky These wild things have their home. They know the tundra of Siberian coasts. And tropic marshes by the Indian seas; They know the clouds and night and starry hosts From Crux to Pleiades. Dark flying rune against the western glow— It tells the sweep and loneliness of things, Symbol of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... beautiful species found in our woods,—breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill Mountains, an off-shoot of the Catskills. We had been travelling, three of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in among the mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless forest, and, weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed log. The chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the parent birds, soon arrested my attention. The entrance to the nest was on the east side of the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... difficulty. It comes before us in two characters; first, as a philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that great trackless ocean the Eastern Roman history. Now under either shape, this work traverses so much ground, that by mere multiplicity of details it denies to us the opportunity of reporting on its merits with that simplicity ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... an else trackless waste, but across the desert Jesus Christ has thrown a way; too high for ravenous beasts to spring on or raging foes to storm; too firm for tempest to overthrow or make impair able; too plain for simple hearts to mistake. We may all journey on it, if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... great mirth that do desire Hazard of trackless ways, In with content to wait their watch And ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Sword been given, Hard are the palms with the kiss of the hilt; Through the trackless waste hath the road been riven For the blade to seek to ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... and the short winter day was drawing to a close. On every side of the two young hunters arose the almost trackless woods, with here and there a small opening, where the wind had swept the rocks clear of snow. Not a ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... attendant on his perch behind was a fur-clad statue of servitude and silence. Maggie, leaning back, hidden to the eyes in her sables, had nothing to say to her companion. The way lay through forests of pine—trackless, motionless, virgin. The sun, filtering through the snow-laden branches, cast a subdued golden light upon the ruddy upright trunks of the trees. At times a willow-grouse, white as the snow, light and graceful on the wing, rose from the branch where he had been laughing to his mate with ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... for me to walk over. At length we reached the skirt of that tremendous wood, to my unspeakable relief, and came upon the white sand hillocks of the beach. The trees were all strained crooked, from the constant influence of the sea-blast. The coast was a fearful-looking stretch of dismal, trackless sand, and the ocean lay boundless and awful beyond the wild and desolate beach, from which we were now only divided by a patch of low coarse-looking bush, growing as thick and tangled as heather, and so stiff and compact that it was hardly possible to drive through it. Yet ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... trees were confiding secrets to each other. One can become intimately acquainted with it, and learn to love its quiet solitude, only by living in or near it, and wandering at will through its trackless, leaf-carpeted aisles. Your eyes must be trained to constant watching, you must learn to be a close observer, to note the flowers, vines, and tangled shrubbery that are seldom mentioned by botanists, and your ear must be tuned to catch the elfin music that ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... otherwise impassable snows of this terrible region. It was necessary, to insure success, that by some means hitherto unknown to military transportation guns weighing tons should be moved about the trackless, roadless country almost like playthings. Only thus could a commander hope to secure that preponderance of heavy gunfire without which the modern offensive is doomed to defeat ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon in the moonlight to the invisible country ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... mournfully since sun-set, from some dwelling in the forest's depths, whose locality, but for the sounds, would not be known. Some member of the family has been lost in the woods, and the horn is blown to guide him homewards through the trackless wilderness. How sweet must those sounds be to the benighted wanderer, bearing, as they do, the voice of the heart, and telling of love and affectionate solicitude! But Melancthon has driven his ox-team to the ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... Tales was toying pensively with spectral forms and "dark ideas," Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror. Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards. He sought untiringly for ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... besides which there are large patches of bushes, and even trees. It is remarkably flat, but interesected in different parts by the beds of ancient rivers; and prodigious herds of certain antelopes, which require little or no water, roam over the trackless plains. The inhabitants, Bushmen and Bakalahari, prey on the game and on the countless rodentia and small species of the feline race which subsist on these. In general, the soil is light-colored soft sand, nearly pure ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... narrow fringe of mountainous coast land, it is completely buried beneath a sheet of ice, in shape like a vast white shield, whose convex surface rises to a height of nine thousand feet above the sea. The few explorers who have crossed the ice cap found it a trackless desert destitute of all life save such lowly forms as the microscopic plant which produces the so- called "red snow." On the smooth plain of the interior no rock waste relieves the snow's dazzling whiteness; no streams of running water are seen; ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Beneath thee is the boundless earth, above thee is the boundless heaven, an iron soil and brazen sky. Speed, swiftly speed, thou courser bold, and track the desert's trackless way. Ah! dost thou deem these salty plains[6] lead to thy Yemen's happy groves, and dost thou scent ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the last of them, without interruption even from the justice of the peace who lived along the road. As a matter of fact, De Launay had left the road as soon as the fences permitted and had taken to the trackless sage. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... to his captors perforce. Where he was bound for was beyond conjecture; he only heard, faintly through his hood, the cheeping and rustling of the canes; bush tendrils swept along his body and told him that he was being carried through the trackless part of the jungle. His journey was short. In ten minutes he was laid on the ground, still with no word from his captors, and in two long breaths no sound remained near him except the voices of the foliage. He lay still a moment, wondering what his fate was to be; then, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... my way as birds their trackless way— I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow, In some time—his good time—I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In His ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... See, vast trackless spaces, As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill, Countless masses debouch upon them, They are now cover'd with the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... waning moon burst fitfully, only to be immediately swallowed up again. The hungry waves rolled high above the little vessel, and seemed as if they would overwhelm her; but she gallantly ploughed along, feeling her way like a thing of life across the trackless ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... always remarked it as a very extraordinary circumstance, which I impute to the natur' of British Institutions and their tendency to suppress that popular inquiry and information which air so widely diffused even in the trackless forests of this vast Continent of the Western Ocean; that the knowledge of Britishers themselves on such points is not to be compared with that possessed by our intelligent and locomotive citizens. This is interesting, and confirms my observation. When you say, sir,' he continued, addressing ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... magnificent snow-clad mountain called Lekakisera, which has never, to the best of my belief, been visited before by a European, but which I cannot now stop to describe. There we rested a fortnight, and then started out into the trackless and uninhabited forest of a vast district called Elgumi. In this forest alone there are more elephants than I ever met with or heard of before. The mighty mammals literally swarm there entirely unmolested by man, and only kept down by the natural law that prevents any animals increasing beyond the ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually; for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war, and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he might have walked into "a flock of sheep in a plain," and found some asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no recommendation to insinuate himself among ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... silver and gold, was thought to be a new Indies indeed. To the idealizing mind of the age America already spelled opportunity; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the maritime states of Europe established their spheres of influence there—still seeking, through its trackless forests, a waterway to the South Sea, still seeking gold, falling back at last upon the prosaic business of colonization and the exploitation of its less attractive resources. The Spaniards found no lack of treasure, but in North America gold ever turned to ashes, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... bare limbs above; and the open spaces were beginning to give the woods quite a wintry aspect. Guir House was visible from a greater distance than he had ever seen it, and Paul sat down upon a fallen log to take in the picture of the quaint old mansion, buried in the depths of a trackless, almost impenetrable forest. He sang a verse of a familiar song in a loud voice, with the hope of attracting attention, but the distant echo of the last words was the only response that he got. Then he threw himself upon ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... and secondly, what clew there is, visible, or conceivable to thought of man, by which, to her living conscience and errorless pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt afar beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through concealing clouds, and over trackless lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and desolate hills travellers often lost their way. Hence crosses were set up to guide them along the trackless heaths. They were as useful as sign-posts, and conveyed an additional lesson. You will find such crosses in the desolate country on the borderland of Yorkshire and Lancashire. They were usually placed on the summit of hills. In Buckinghamshire there are two crosses cut in ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Philadelphia, while the knife is at the James V. Brown Library, Williamsport, together with his Ketland pistol. As symbols of a bolder and broader day the firearms of backwoods Pennsylvania will always exercise a peculiar charm, typifying as they do the period of trackless forests, Indians, panthers, wolves, unbridled romance. Also, that strangely picturesque period of the Civil War, when the sharp-shooting Pennsylvania mountain boys (and older ones) went forth to snip; for did not ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... the horses, one of these boots had fallen down; I saw therefore that it would be necessary to let him and a native go back the next day upon the two horses we had with us for the purpose of finding it. To Europeans it would seem rather a visionary task to travel twelve or fourteen miles in a trackless forest in the hope of recovering a boot, but the natives' eyes are so keen that their finding it amounted to a matter ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... nothing usual about this meeting of ours. Miss Barb, my finding you and your friendship is as if I'd been lost at midnight in a trackless forest and had all at once found a road. I only wish"—he gnawed his lip—"I only wish these three last days had come to me years ago. You might have saved me some ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... Izzy coherent at first. He certainly had trouble with his vocal chords, poor fellow. There was one of those African explorer men used to come to Geisenheimer's a lot when he was home from roaming the trackless desert, and he used to tell me about tribes he had met who didn't use real words at all, but talked to one another in clicks and gurgles. He imitated some of their chatter one night to amuse me, and, believe me, Izzy Baermann started talking the same language now. Only he didn't ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... stands, and should stand until its light shall have penetrated the gloom of Africa, and until the heathen shall gather to the brightness of its shining. May it stand through the ages as a Christian Republic, as a faithful light-house along the dark and trackless sea of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the hoof-prints then through the trackless bush, painfully slow going over the stones and the fallen trunks, with many a pitfall concealed under the smooth moss. After an hour of this he finally came upon them all five standing dejectedly about in a narrow opening, as if ashamed of ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the celebrated cajeput oil is made. Such districts are absolutely destitute of interest for the zoologist. A few miles further on rose higher mountains, apparently well covered with forest, but they were entirely uninhabited and trackless, and practically inaccessible to a traveller with limited time and means. It became evident, therefore, that I must leave Cajeli for some better collecting ground, and finding a man who was going a few miles eastward to a village on the coast ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... view of the great chain of mountains, called Carmarthen hills, extending from north to south farther than the eye can reach. Here we paused, surveying "the wild abyss; pondering our voyage." Before us lay the trackless immeasurable desert, in awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north, by compass, the make of the land in that quarter indicating the existence of a river. We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an European foot. Save ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... to prove my soul. I see my way, as birds their trackless way. In some time, God's good time, I shall arrive He guides me and the bird. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... storms that swept through. Garbage littered the alleys; its odor was strange but still foul in the alien atmosphere. The small, darting creatures were here too, foraging in the alleys and the outskirts of the town, where the streets ended in garbage heaps and new cemeteries or faded into the trackless flat where the spacers ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... emperor Thou wagest with the emperor's own army? O God of heaven! what a change is this. Beseems it me to offer such persuasion To thee, who like the fixed star of the pole Wert all I gazed at on life's trackless ocean? O! what a rent thou makest in my heart! The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obediency, Must I pluck life asunder from thy name? Nay, do not turn thy countenance upon me— It always was ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... carefully governed as those of the sea-birds, and though many days in the open water he never forgets the direct course to his favorite haunts. How marvelous the instinct that guides with unerring certainty over the trackless waters! ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... time like Spring, When life's alive in everything, 20 Before new nestlings sing, Before cleft swallows speed their journey back Along the trackless track— God guides their wing, He spreads their table that they nothing lack,— Before the daisy grows a common flower, Before the sun has power To scorch the world up in ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... automobile which can run across broad, almost trackless plains at the rate of fifteen miles an hour will bring within quick reach of civilisation many localities in which at present, for lack of such communication, rough men are apt to grow into semi-savages, ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... of his father, the father of all fathers, to whom the captain kneeled as a little child, sailed through the heaven of heavens the huge ship of the world, guided fleet upon fleet innumerable through trackless space! And over an infinitely grander sea than the measureless ocean of worlds, the Father was carrying navies of human souls, every soul a world whose affairs none but the Father could understand, through many a storm, and waterspout, and ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... soon told. The driver had been wandering over that trackless prairie for ten days and nights, without food or shelter, and with ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... human, so warm to the heart, and yet only a few days ago there was nothing here but the rocks and the cold and trackless sea. Then she noticed that to-day the bulls were not sunning themselves lazily, although the sun was out. They seemed disturbed, moving about aimlessly, lifting themselves on their flippers and now and then raising their ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... till this comparatively advanced stage of the nautical art—when man had obtained a faithful guide in his most devious and trackless wanderings—when he was apparently set free from the unsteady dominion of the seas and of the fickle winds—and amid his labyrinthine course could ever and at once turn his face towards his happy and expectant home;—it was not till this period that science began to lend her most useful and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation. Thus loom on my imagination those happier days of our city, when as yet New Amsterdam was a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and willows, and surrounded by trackless forests and wide-spreading waters, that seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... ankles in spotless white, their black boots looking blacker by comparison, they proceeded in the general direction of the distant village, with the order and decorum of sea lords descending on a dockyard for inspection purposes. The trackless sand proved hot and sharp; the dog proved in poor condition from the voyage and the morning's incidental martyrdom, and Byng was generous-hearted. He picked up the dog and carried him; and Scamp displayed his ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the slender library of his friend. In the peaceful evening hours he listens to weird stories of the lonely land of the Far West—early discovery, zealous monkish exploration, daring voyages in trackless unknown seas, and the descent of curious strangers. Bold Sir Francis Drake, Cabrillo, Viscaino, Portala, the good Junipero Serra of sainted memory, live again in ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... McAlpine, the man who years before had come to the Glen, and with his message from the Eternal roused the place to a better life. But he was an old man now, and retired from his labours, and how came he to be wandering in this trackless wilderness ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... direction that man has lost is clearly proven by the seals, birds, polar bears, and our northern migratory animals generally, who every year follow in their season the right trails to their destinations, even though thousands of miles distant and over pathless seas or trackless snows and barrens. That instinct is nowhere more keenly developed than in our draught dogs; and amongst these there are always now and again, as in human relationships, those that are peerless among their fellows. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... that Egypt—the most defensible country in the world, bounded on the south by inaccessible mountains, on the east by the Red Sea, on the west by the trackless, burning desert; able to defend the mouths of her river with a powerful navy, and to drown an invading army every year by the inundation of the Nile; which had not only maintained her independence, but extended her conquests ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the country was entirely unexplored. Except that the direction was west, he had no knowledge whatever. He had often inquired of the shepherds, but they were perfectly ignorant. Anker's Gate was the most westerly of all their settlements, which chiefly extended eastwards. Beyond Anker's Gate was the trackless forest, of which none but the Bushmen knew anything. They did not understand what he meant by a map; all they could tell him was that the range of mountainous hills continued westerly and southerly for an unascertained distance, and that the country was uninhabited ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... Trackless pine forests—some belonging to the communes, others to private individuals,—clothe the lower ranges of the mountains through all this part of the island. Vizzavona, which we crossed on our way to Ajaccio, and Aitona, lying to the south-west ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... differed greatly from anything that she had ever beheld. Every night previous to the one just passed they had encamped in the great forests; but now they looked upon a vast expanse of level plain which to the north and east, stretched trackless and unbroken by mountain or ravine to an infinitude—the boundless prairies soon to be mellowed and turned to a golden brown by the shafts of a burning sun already just below the edge of an horizon aglow with ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... London. One of the works most largely laid under contribution in this manner was of the sort to interest Allan: it was a highly spiced narrative of Traveling Adventures in the wilds of Australia. Pouncing on an extract which described the sufferings of the traveling-party, lost in a trackless wilderness, and in danger of dying by thirst, Allan announced that he had found something to make his friend's flesh creep, and began eagerly ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... as to the whereabouts of the fugitives whom I had been despatched to capture by the commanding officer himself. Of course forbidding them to follow me, they all trailed after me. Supposing that you had followed the bypath, I plunged right through the most trackless part of the wilderness, to keep the pursuit as far from you as possible. What my fate would be when they discovered I had cheated them, I didn't stop to weigh; if I knew Her Grace was safe, I ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... not conquered again, into whose conquest no one in this world enters, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the trackless? ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have been upon the wide, open prairie, the trackless plain of sand, the frozen lake, the thin scattering woods of the North, or the treeless snow-clad "Barrens." Now we are about to enter a great forest,—a forest where the leaves never fade, where the flowers are always in bloom,—a ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... vairs in abundance; and vast multitudes of the Pharaoh's rat, on which the people live all the summer time. Indeed they have plenty of all sorts of wild creatures, for the country they inhabit is very wild and trackless. [NOTE 2] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... regret! Her world, her universe grew dark to her; she was driven from her firm stand. She was lost, she was whirled away—away with the storm, landmarks obliterated, lights gone; away with the storm; out into the darkness, out into the void, out into the waste places and wilderness and trackless desolation. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... footstool; that they came to Michigan and rescued the country from the invaders, the English and savages, long before some of us knew that there was such a place as Michigan. When Michigan was almost a trackless wilderness they crossed Lake Erie, landed at Malden, drove the redcoats out of the fort and started them on the double quick. They made for the Canadian woods, and the British and Indians, who held Detroit, followed suit. They ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... downward into the black. And with all that mighty activity, with an omnipresent sense of motive and design, this snow-clad desolation of mechanism seemed void of all human presence save themselves, seemed as trackless and deserted and unfrequented by men as ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... fair-seeming structure of wood, surprisingly and surpassingly new. In fact that was its one dominant feature; nowhere else had youth and freshness ever shown itself as unconquerable and all-conquering. The spice of virgin woods and trackless forests still rose from its pine floors, and breathed from its outer shell of cedar that still oozed its sap, and redwood that still dropped its life-blood. Nowhere else were the plastered walls and ceilings as white and dazzling in their unstained purity, or as redolent ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... was a fearful hour For one so young and fair: The woods had not one sheltering bower, The earth was trackless there, The very boughs in silver slept, As the sea-foam had o'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... passing keel. The mystery of the overarching heavens swims far above with mazy constellation and revolving sphere. Between the mystery of the sky and the mystery of the sea he steers right on, in calm and tempest confident, in night and noonday secure. For he there, on the trackless wastes that girdle in the great wide world, alone with the silence of Nature and God, knows the facts of his position, the realities of his place. The charts lie spread before him. Island, continent, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... tumuli of stones, more than eight feet high, evidently placed to direct the caravans over the trackless portions of Sahara. I wonder what the people of Europe will say when I tell them, that The Desert—pictured in such frightful colours by the ancients, as teeming with monsters and wild beasts, and every unearthly and uncouth thing and being, not forgetting the dragons, salamanders, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Fulkeward being quite too much for the patience of those sweet but still unengaged "girls" Muriel and Dolly. One night when the great ship was speeding swiftly over a calm sea, and Denzil, lost in sorrowful meditation, was gazing out over the trackless ocean with pained and passionate eyes which could see nothing but the witching and exquisite beauty of the Princess Ziska, now possessed and enjoyed by Gervase, Dr. Dean touched him on the arm ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... only a very few years since it came into use, and no one ever thought it was going to turn a trackless scrub into a huge garden. But now from the South Australian border right through to the Murray, farms and comfortable homesteads have taken the place of dense scrub. This last harvest, over three hundred thousand bags of wheat were delivered at ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... man's steps if possible. But, on that very morning, many vessels which had been kept by contrary winds back in port, had put to sea, all destined to distant lands and other climes; the grey man had disappeared trackless as a shade. ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... grew. But you must have learned to study the stars to some purpose before you dare to neglect your roses, and omit to fill the air with their cultivated fragrance. You must know your way through the trackless air, and from thence to the pure ether; you must be ready to lift the bar of ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... them, now, one of the great railroad kings, not one of your Western bounders, but the real Eastern, New York patriotic brand, one of the brave, daring pioneers who risked all to push great transcontinental railroads through the trackless deserts of the West—with millions furnished by the government—which they dumped into their own pockets while the world was shouting their praises for ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the moon and those brilliant wandering objects known to us as the planets, the individual stars in the heaven remained apparently fixed with reference to each other. These seemingly changeless points of light came in time to be regarded as sign-posts to guide the wanderer across the trackless desert, or the voyager upon ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... weeks was like the face of a man lost in a trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life. Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... water had not yet distinctly separated, huge misshapen amphibious creatures walked the trunk-less forests growing on the oozing silt. Thus do the passions of the dim ages of the immature mind, as disproportionate and curiously shaped, haunt the unending shades of its trackless, nameless wildernesses. They know not themselves, nor the aim of their wanderings; and, because they do not, they are ever apt to imitate something else. So, at this age of unmeaning activity, when my undeveloped powers, unaware of and ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore |
