"Unscalable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he slowly resolved that meaning. There were the measureless distances to narrow the eye and teach restraint; the untrodden trails, the shifting sands, the thorny brakes, the broken lava to pierce the flesh; the heights and depths, unscalable and unplumbed. And over all ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... struck a small mountain stream up which they followed until in a natural cul-de-sac they came upon its source and found their farther progress barred by precipitous cliffs which rose above them, sheer and unscalable. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... edge of this devil's dooryard of bare rocks and no less dry and sterile ravines Slade gave over the lead to the oldest of his Navahos. A white man could have found his way only by blind chance through the maze of twisted clefts that seamed the unscalable cliffs and crags. ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the afternoon we reached a part of the coast locally famous or infamous, for the two were one; a stretch of some miles where the mountains made no apology for falling abruptly into the sea. Sheer for several hundred feet, the shore is here unscalable. Nor did it use to be possible to go round by land, for the cliffs are merely the ends of mountain-chains, themselves utterly wild and tractless. A narrow strip of sand was the sole link between Etchiu on the one hand and Echigo on the other. The natives call the place Oya shiradzu, ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... was bowed down by the feeling of that prodigious height of unscalable, and often overhanging, cliff. Between the channel and the summit of the far extended precipices, were perpetually flying rooks and wood pigeons, and now and then a hawk, filling the profound abyss with their wild cawing, deep murmur, or shrilly ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... their women and children had crossed the sandy, alkali and waterless deserts. For days and weeks they had not had water enough to keep their faces clean, to wash the sand from their eyes. Now, though they had come to a land of apparently unscalable mountains and impassable rock-barriers, they had grass for the stock, and water,—delicious, fresh, pure, refreshing water for themselves. I can imagine that when they reached here they felt it was a new paradise, and that God was especially ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... into Messire de la Foret's camp. Now I shall use these knaves quite otherwise. They will arrive within two days, and to the rear of Messire de la Foret, who is encamped before an impregnable fortress. To the front unscalable walls, and behind him, at a moderate computation, three swords to his one. All this in a valley from which Daedalos might possibly escape, but certainly no other man. I count this Perion of the Forest ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... half over the verge of the rock. The fall was sheer for fifty feet at least. It was a narrow cut in the hill, with apparently unscalable sides and open only ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... him by a fence of brush and ropes and hobbled them to make doubly sure; but in the morning they were there, waiting to receive their bait of grain as if Tank Canyon was their customary home. Another day dragged by and Wunpost began to fidget and to watch the unscalable peaks, but no Indian's head appeared to draw a slug from his rifle and again the night passed uneventfully. He spent the third day in a fury, pacing up and down his cave, and at nightfall he ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... pass opened and descended into a valley half a mile wide, perhaps twice that in length. It had apparently unscalable slopes of weathered rock leading up to beetling walls. With floor bare and hard and white, except for a patch of green mesquite near the far end it was a lurid and desolate spot, the barren bottom ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and buy in the marketplace and go back to your homes laden with goods and provisions: but me the wild winds of unscalable heights have touched and kissed—Oh, I ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... basket and went, And travelled, and sang as he travelled, a lad that was well content. Still the way of his going was round by the roaring coast, Where the ring of the reef is broke and the trades run riot the most. On his left, with smoke as of battle, the billows battered the land; Unscalable, turreted mountains rose on the inner hand. And cape, and village, and river, and vale, and mountain above, Each had a name in the land for men to remember and love; And never the name of a place, but lo! a song in its praise: Ancient and unforgotten, songs of ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the service of Love; Ami offers his consolations; at length the lover is again admitted to the flowery precinct, finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around the rose; the serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and with a long lament of the lover, the poem ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry. Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The "shades of the prison-house" closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly watch the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... frowning across the gulf separating him and his quarry, there seemed but one conceivable reason why a human being should have sought to win a way to that rocky aerie. From its nature it was all but unscalable; from its position it commanded in limitless, sweeping view all possible paths of approach. Did Sefton's party seek a hiding place where defence even against great numbers would be a simple matter, this nest upon the cliff tops was ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... a strong iron-bound door, opened it, and thrust the old man inside. In a moment the heavy door had swung to with a crash, and Grein found himself in a narrow, paved court, with high, unscalable walls on every side. And from a dark corner there bounded forth to meet him a huge lion! With a pious prayer for help the Burgomaster drew his sword, wrapped his rich Spanish mantle round his left arm, and prepared to defend himself against his adversary. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... were within the temple, which had a roof like an umbrella over the central, revolving portion of it, but which was somewhat open to the skies around the rim. There were two concentric enclosing walls, the inner one was unscalable, and the outer one about five feet six inches high. A second loud man was calling out: "Couples please. Ladies and gentlemen. Couples if you please." Obediently, numbers of the crowd disposed themselves in pairs in the attitudes of close ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... beyond doubt that they were miry, by getting him in to the knees in spite of his violent objections. They left deep tracks behind them when they got out. The calves had not gone investigating the bank, for there was not a trace anywhere. And the bluff was absolutely unscalable. Billy Louise herself would have felt doubtful of climbing out that way. The gray rim-rock stood straight and high at the top, with never a crevice, so far as she could see. And the gorge was barred, ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... enthralled Dorn. As a boy he had loved to watch the soaring of the golden eagles, and once he had seen a great wide-winged condor, swooping along a mountain-crest. How he had envied them the freedom of the heights—the loneliness of the unscalable crags—the companionship of the clouds! Here he gazed and marveled at ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... It is navigable for more than 2000 li (600 miles). The Yangtse drains a continent; the Little River drains a province larger than a European kingdom. Chungking is built at a great height above the present river, now sixty feet below its summer level. Its walls are unscalable. Good influences are directed over the city from a lofty pagoda on the topmost hill in the vicinity. Temples abound, and spacious yamens and rich buildings, the crowning edifice of all being the Temple to the God of Literature. Distances are prodigious in Chungking, and the streets ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the gorges deeper. It required some engineering to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,—a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rose a hundred-foot precipice; his clothes and his friend were on the southern bank. The bridge was four miles above, but unscalable walls made it impossible for him to reach that. Furthermore, night ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... crossing the Blue Mountains inland. Nobody would entertain such a suggestion, the failures had been too many: every one to whom he broached the subject declared it to be impossible, prophesying that the extension of the settlement westward would forever be obstructed by their unscalable heights. Blaxland, however, was not intimidated by these disheartening predictions; and, in 1811, he started out on a short journey of investigation, in company with three Europeans and two natives. On this trip he found that by keeping on the ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc |
