"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on and, happening to slide on a piece of shale at that moment, I sat down unexpectedly and the horse put its ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. Better the engine had struck me then and spared ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... engulfing. Creeks become rivers, rivers impassable torrents, and marshes bottomless abysses. Pits of quicksand develop in most unexpected places. Driven from smooth lake margins, the trailers' ponies are forced to climb ledges of rock, and to rattle over long slides of shale. In places the threadlike way itself becomes an aqueduct for ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side—while all Simla, that is to say as much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading- room and Peliti's veranda,—I was aware that some one, apparently at ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the road again, the team plodding heavily through the red shale. "It's a damned soil," said the doctor for the second time. He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt that resentful sense of youth and inexperience. "I don't know how you've been brought up," said the elder man. "I don't want to infuse heretic notions into ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... mostly used by the Zunians in the manufacture of pottery is a dark, bluish, carbonaceous, clayey shale found in layers usually near the tops of the mesas. Several of these elevated mesas are situated near Zuni, from which the natives obtain this material. This carbonaceous clay is first mixed with water and then kneaded as a baker kneads ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... merit. His descriptions of new species were clear and precise. In his paper on the coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having been ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... but she smothered her cry for her good sense told her that this experienced man would not endanger the lives of himself or his guests. The coal had been taken out very cleanly, and above them they saw not coal but shale. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... the south-east coast of Arabia, and therefore the same as those of Cutch; and it is exceedingly interesting to find that among the blue-coloured fossils which are accompanied by specimens of the blue shale, composing the beds from which they have been weathered out, are species of Terebratula Belemnites, identical with those figured in Grant's Geology of Cutch; thus enabling us to extend those beds of the Jurassic formation ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... scene, save for that running stream, produced the effect of a world burnt out. The hills of shale might have been vast heaps of ashes. It was a waste place of terrible unfruitfulness. And yet, not very far below the surface, the precious metal lay buried in the rock—the secret of the centuries which man at last had wrenched ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... zone—that is to say, the lower hills and mountains—is chiefly of miocene formation; but beneath this, and showing itself at the surface in various parts, are strata of what Lyell calls 'a subordinate member of that vast deposit of sandstone and shale which is provincially called "flysch," and which is believed to form part of the Eocene series.'[16] In this region, which is called by the Roumanians the region of vines, are to be found marl, sandstone, chalk, and gypsum, with rock-salt, petroleum, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... reined up and leaped from his horse. Below him he saw Challenge, riderless, and galloping along the edge of the hillside. On the trail lay Eleanor Loring, her black hair vivid against the gray of the shale. He plunged toward her and stooping caught her up in his arms. "Nell! Nell!" he cried, smoothing back her hair from her forehead. "God, Nell! I—I didn't ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... compose the secondary formations of a large portion of Canada, and of nearly all that vast extent of country in the United States drained by the Mississippi. At Niagara the interposing structure of slate is nearly forty feet thick, and fragile, like shale crumbling away from under the limestone, thus strengthening the opinion that there has been for many ages a continual retrocession of the Great Falls. Around Lake St. Clair, masses of granite, mica slate, and quartz are found in abundance. The level shores of Lake ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... we started from the town, and rode down the crest of long, gently-sloping ridges, which seemed interminable. The rock over which we passed was red sandstone, mottled and streaked with green, red shale, and occasional patches of conglomerate. Crossing a little stream by a pretty bridge, we made an abrupt ascent, and soon saw the little town, Cuaquitepec, at the base of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... have sold his country to the British, and a half-crazed priest from out beyond the borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and preached a djehad. But above all it was the road—Linforth's road. It came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... Those of North Carolina surpass any in the Union. In the last Report on the Geology of the State one hundred and seventy-eight are numbered and described. Among these are gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, mica, corundum, graphite, manganese, kaolin, mill-stone grits, marble, barytes, oil shale, buhrstones, roofing slate, etc. The most of these are the subjects of great mining industries, which are daily ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... extending north and south. If you walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely curve of debris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor. The descending water ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... brought us on to an alluvial fan, the ascent to which was short and steep; it was covered with boulders and intersected with nullahs; the road led across this fan and then along the foot of steep shale slopes and shoots, within five hundred yards of the line of sangars crowning the opposite side of the river bank, and totally devoid of any sort or description of cover for some two miles; it could also be swept by avalanches of stones set in ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... thin or thick seams, with other rock-layers between, telling each its history of centuries long past. In one place no less than sixteen such beds of coal are found, one below another, each divided from the next above and the next underneath by beds of clay or sand or shale. The forests could not have grown in the sea, and the earth-layers could not have been formed on land, therefore many land-risings and sinkings must have taken place. Each bed probably tells the tale of a ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... air polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; however, the amount of pollutants emitted to the air have fallen steadily, the emissions of 2000 were 80% less than in 1980; the amount of unpurified wastewater discharged to water bodies in 2000 was one twentieth the level ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... uses rather large words about the precipices, and it is a matter of observation that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. Every one who has done even a small amount of climbing has met ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... what he was standing on—a little ledge of shale not over five or six feet in length and two feet wide—for in lower water I had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was impossible to wade to the spot, impossible ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... careful slow work. The incline was steep, of soft earth and loose shale. But Blinky knew where to feel his way, and eventually they reached the flat, to find easier progress. Blinky made a detour, and finally, as they gradually approached several lamplights, far apart, he whispered: "You wait heah. I ain't so darn shore ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... only half a mile away, and it proved as interesting as the wood. Being Saturday afternoon the men were not working, so they had the place to themselves, and wandered about examining heaps of shale, and tapping likely-looking stones with their hammers. Garnet and Winona knew nothing of geology, so they listened with due meekness while the instructed few discoursed learnedly on palaeozoic rocks, stratified conglomerates and quartzites. They rejoiced with Miss Lever, however, when ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... it. Ah, I do trust that you never may, which is to say, so to speak, as I do trust as you'll never meet that black doctor. If ever a man, had the evil eye, that black doctor's got it, and old Mother Shale what lives in the cottage on the heath down against the windmill, she warned me, she did, three days after he come here. 'Mr. Corder,' she says, 'that black doctor has the evil eye!' And never was a truer word spoke. He's been ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... voice came pealing down the cliff, waking the echoes on the shore, and with a sort of incredulous joy Mrs. Beauchamp listened to the sturdy steps coming slowly, surely, carefully down, with a little ripple of shale ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... They fringe the northern boundary and appear on the south-eastern boundary as a narrow strip of hilly ground near Woore. The oldest rock exposed in the county is the small faulted anticline of Carboniferous limestone at Astbury, followed in regular succession eastward by the shale, and thin limestones and sandstones of the Pendleside series. These rocks extend from Congleton Edge to near Macclesfield, where the outcrop bends sharply eastward and runs up the Goyt valley. Some hard quartzites in the Pendleside series, known locally as "Crowstones," have contributed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Noiselessly, and with every faculty painfully alert, we closed the land, sprang on to the rocks, and at once set about the tedious task of breasting the hill. Hill climbing, under the vertical sun of North Australia, is by no means an enjoyable undertaking, more particularly when the loose shale and rock gives way at every stride, bringing down an avalanche of rubbish on the heads of the rearmost of the party. Encumbered with our carbines, we made but slow progress, and it was nearly six o'clock before we attained the summit, from whence we saw several canoes making their ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... of the way of the miniature avalanche that followed, and for some minutes stood reviewing with a truculent eye the face of the hillside. But nothing moved thereon, it was quite bare of good cover, little more than a slant of naked earth and shale, dotted manywhere with boulders, cousins to that which sought his life—none, however, so large. If human agency had moved it, the stone had come from the high skyline of the hill; and by the time one could ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... to my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns neatly gummed on white paper. . . . This time I took a piece of coal- shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . . I told each to examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was. W. gave so bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he said they were ferns, like what I showed them last week, but he thought they were chiselled ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the beautiful valley of Fond du Foret, above Chaudefontaine, not far from the village of Magnee, where one of the rents communicating with the surface has been filled up to the brim with rounded and half-rounded stones, angular pieces of limestone and shale, besides sand and mud, together with bones, chiefly of the cave-bear. Connected with this main duct, which is from 1 to 2 feet in width, are several minor ones, each from 1 to 3 inches wide, also extending to the upper country or table-land, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... of these monster Dinosaurs is recovered. While our western states, in certain places, are rich in fossil remains, there is very seldom a complete skeleton unearthed. At best there are but a few bones, or the impressions of bones, in the sandstone rocks or shale. But from these bones, from the impressions of those that have been eaten by time, and by their knowledge of what sort of anatomy was needed to keep these wonderful creatures on earth, it is possible for scientists to almost completely and perfectly ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... urged in commercial circles that the Government should secure men with laboratory experience, plus a complete absence of practical knowledge, to report on shale ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... could have produced this singular-looking, black, inflammable rock? How many times was this question asked before Science could return an answer? This she can now do with confidence. Coal was once growing vegetable matter. On the surface of the shale, immediately above the coal, you will find innumerable impressions of leaves and branches, as perfect as artist ever drew. But how could this vegetable matter ever accumulate in such masses as to make beds of coal of such vast extent, some not less than 30 feet thick? It would ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... examined some of the old red sandstone which underlies all that part of Cape Breton Island, found some good specimens, and some very plain and deep glacial scratches. There is also some coal and a good deal of shale ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... them could catch the sounds below now. Whoever came up the rock ladder must be unused to negotiating such a stairway, for they rattled small bits of loose shale down at times; and Frank felt sure he could hear a panting sound, very much like that which tired Bob had been making a ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... back and forth to make easier work for the pony, until he was high above the live-oak belt and coming into shale rock and rubble that made hard going for the horse. He dismounted, led the pony to a shelving, rock-made shade, and tied him there. Then, with canteen and food slung over his shoulder, Johnny climbed to the peak and sat down puffing on the shady side of ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... a wave receded. They ran dizzily forward in the shifting, wet gravel of the beach. When the next incoming comber was beginning to curl down from the top, Jean dashed to the bluff. Shielding the little fellow below her, she clung to the uneven shale of its base, presenting her back to the billow that crashed with a deafening roar ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... valley the ancient demon of water-force had excelled himself in enchantments. The slopes of the alluvial soil were dotted with little buttes of mingled sandstone and shale, varying from five to twenty feet in height, many of them bearing a grotesque likeness to artificial objects. There were columns, there were haystacks, there were enormous bells, there were inverted jars, there were junk bottles, there were rustic seats. Most of these ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... one phase of the Katanga mineral treasure. Coal, iron, and tin have not only been discovered in quantity but are being mined commercially. Oil-shale is plentiful on the Congo River near Ponthierville and good indications of oil are recorded in other places. The discovery of oil in Central Africa would have a great influence on the development of transportation since it would supply fuel ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... eye in all but dangerous proximity. The voices of birds and insects being hushed, nothing is audible but the harsh roar of the rivers, and occasionally, rising far above it, that of the forest fires. At night we were literally surrounded by them; some smouldering, like the shale-heaps at a colliery, others fitfully bursting forth, whilst others again stalked along with a steadily increasing and enlarging flame, shooting out great tongues of fire, which spared nothing as they advanced with irresistible might. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Jack's famous beanstalk, and where the old proverb about the steed starving whilst his grass is growing falls completely to the ground. There are numerous drives, made level by a coating of smooth black shale, and bordered by a double line of syringas and oaks, with hedges of myrtle or pomegranate. In some places the roads run alongside the little river—a very muddy torrent when I saw it—and then the oaks give way to great drooping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... difference in altitude between this point and its outlet be explained. The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms. Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces. The evidence of a recession of the river through the canon is designated by the ridges apparent on its sides, and it is not improbable ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... Corne is fully ripe, and ready for the Sickle, so that instantly he shall prouide his Reapers, according to the quantitie of his graine: for if hee shall neglect his Rye but one day more then is fit, it is such a hasty graine, that it will shale forth of the huske to the ground, to the great losse of the Husbandman. When hee hath prouided his shearers, which he shall be carefull to haue very good, he shall then looke that neither out of ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... no word, but a few steps farther brought them to a towering rock around the base of which the path turned, and then seemed to cease abruptly in a mass of loose shale. It was too clear now. They had lost their road and turned, whilst they were indulging those golden fancies, into a mere cattle-path worn by the numerous herds of goats and oxen, the music of whose jangling bells still came to them now and then in low ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the post-office on the right, filthy with the foot tracks of the Fairbridge children who crowded it in a noisy rabble twice a day, and perpetually red-stained with the shale of New Jersey, brought in upon the boots of New Jersey farmers, who always bore about with them a goodly portion of their native soil. On the left, was the City Hall. This was vacant except upon the first Monday of ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hill there is a subaqueous deposit of the Lias formation, never yet explored by geologist, because never yet laid bare by the ebb; though every heavier storm from the sea tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark bituminous shale. I soon ascertained that the shale is so largely charged with inflammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common experiment of producing ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... top of the unwary Indian riding ahead and the one that the Chief's horse directly behind would bump me off the trail. It was a cheerful situation. The Canyon walls closed in upon us, and the trail grew worse, if that could be possible. The firm rock gave way to shale that slipped and slid under the feet of the horses. It was so narrow that one slip of a hoof would send the horse crashing on the rocks hundreds of feet beneath. Still this is the only path it has been possible to make down to the Indian retreat. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... minutes and my feet touched bottom. I pulled myself out upon a weed-covered rock, and along it to a slate-strewn foreshore overhung by a low cliff of shale, grey and glimmering in the darkness. But even in the darkness a ridge of harder rock showed me a likely way. I remembered that the cliff hereabouts was of no great height and scalable in a score of places. Very cautiously, and sometimes sitting and straddling the ridge while my fingers ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Ben led the way along a narrow passage, roofed with rock and floored with slate-coloured shale and shingle, and winding in and out, until we stopped at a great stone block or boulder, lying across the floor, and as large as my mother's best oaken wardrobe. Beside it were several sledge-hammers, battered, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... fell upon deaf ears. A task that would have appeared impossible when viewed in daylight, lost half of its terrors because we only vaguely apprehended the dangers that threatened us when a layer of shale crumbled beneath our feet. Our descent became a wild toboggan. Slipping and sliding, clutching wildly at every little projection that would decrease the speed at which we were travelling, we rolled with bruised and bleeding bodies on to a small platform, and lay half stunned for a ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... place, I do not know where I can more conveniently describe this little group of small islands. The lowest bed is a sandstone with ferruginous veins; it weathers into an extraordinary honeycombed mass; above it there is a dark-coloured argillaceous shale; above this a coarser sandstone—making a total thickness of about sixty feet; and lastly, above these sedimentary beds, there is a fine conformable mass of greenstone, in some parts having a columnar structure. All the strata, as well as the surface ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... its scarred face well. There were outcropping boulders, gravel pits, ledges of shale, brush clumps and a few ragged trees clinging ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... interview the farmer, sparsely bearded, lank, and long-necked and seamy-skinned, his face ineffectual yet shrewd, a poor white of the South strung on wiry nerves, instead of lax muscles, the outcome of the New Jersey soil. He shuffled determinedly in his great boots, heavy with red shale, standing guard over his fine vegetables. He nodded phlegmatically at Anderson. He never smiled. Occasionally his long facial muscles relaxed, but they never widened. He was indefinably serious by nature, yet not melancholy, and absolutely acquiescent in his life conditions. The farmer ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... evidently understood by the others, for they could be heard tearing along down the shale heading for ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... properties of shale was the subject of a remarkable trial in the Court of Session soon after Mr. Young began to work the raw material at Bathgate. The proprietor of the estate of Torbanehill, Mr. Gillespie, disputed with the ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... as forms. The rocks at Wolgan Gap are a coarse sandstone stained almost black by an iron oxide derived from included bands of ironstone. These black surfaces were selected by the artists. Nearby in the rock is a band of shale which had disintegrated at its exposed edge to a white powder. The native artist put some of this white powder in his mouth, placed his hand or foot upon the rock, and blew the moistened powder upon and around his outstretched fingers or toes. When he removed ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... students, in search of fossils connected with the carboniferous system, and who must have frequently met with the substance which has caused all this excitement, but never imagined it to be gold. The face of the quarry, to the depth of twenty feet from the top, is an accumulation of shale or slate, lying in regular layers, and easily broken. It has been turned to good account of late in the manufacture of slate-pencils of superior quality. Among this shaly accumulation, there are frequent layers of a soft, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... himself. "Well, there's another way out. The Producers & Developers Shale and Oil Company have a suite of offices that run into the Rockford Building. They've built an alley to connect between the two buildings. It's on the ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... measures of Coalbrookdale, with their alternating beds of coal, clay, and iron ore, are rich in specimens of the fauna and flora of the carboniferous age; the best places for discovering them being the spoil banks of the mines, where shale, and ironstone nodules, will be found the most productive. One of the richest beds yielding fossils is the Penneystone, which may be seen on the surface near Coalbrookdale and Ketley; remains of the Megalicthys, Gyracanthus, and Holoptychus being occasionally found there, whilst ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... aspect: in the formation of its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate, and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... branches of Bear Forks that start up on the side of the mountain, are choked, and the waters rushed in every direction, starting smaller slides by up-rooting trees and loose stones and shale. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... in every detail. It rose to the left of the road through the pass, above a hollow where great boulders stood out in the snow. Its sides were steep, so that the snow had slipped off in patches, leaving stretches of glistening black shale. The kranz at the top did not rise sheer, but sloped at an angle of forty-five, and on the very summit there seemed a hollow, as if the earth within the rock-rim had been beaten ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... of that name whose waters run through a green shale, and while not discoloring the water impart that shade to ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... was prompt and profound. It seemed to him but a few minutes after he had laid his head on the pillow when Jack Shale's voice again resounded in ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... the marks his shoes made in the shale," said Trapper Jim, pointing to the ground in front, which sloped ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... tell me he never heard of Fellsgarth? I am surprised. Where can you have been brought up that you have never heard of the venerable ivy-clad pile with its watch-tower and two wings, planted there, where the rivers Shale and Shargle mingle their waters, a mile or more above Hawkswater? My dear sir, Fellsgarth stood there before the days when Henry the Eighth, (of whom you may have possibly heard in the history books) abolished the ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... o'er the Zodiac's scroll From fane to fane in adoration pace. The rapt Equator's crimson cincture holds Me close; my emerald ocean-robes flow free, And purple soar my mountains, folds on folds, With vale and plain. My bondmaid Moon to me Reveals her marbled snow in cusp and shale— Whilst in my flinty womb the valiant strife Of Fire proclaims me thine and bans the pale Usurper Death beyond my fields of Life. In Winds that wrap my path, lo, I shall sing To thee a choral eternal, Lord of Days, And Life with myriad hearts ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... the very foundations of the summit and created the Willis Wall which drops avalanches thirty-six hundred feet to the glacier below. Willis Wall is nearly perpendicular because the lava rock at this point was homogeneous. But in the alternating shale and limestone strata of Glacier National Park, on the other hand, the glaciers of old dug cirques of many shelves. The monster ice-streams which dug Glacier's mighty valleys have vanished, but often tiny remainders are still seen upon the cirques' ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... shale oil (kukersite), peat, phosphorite, amber, cambrian blue clay, limestone, dolomite, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the overturning of the smallest stone or bit of shale which might betray their position, they ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... town now that would be just the thing to blast out your trench. Of course, it will scatter the dirt around some, for dynamite is usually used to make an open ditch rather than one that is to be re-filled, but it will be less work to gather up the dirt than to dig through the hard shale, and that reminds me," he continued, "when you come to put in your concrete fence posts, don't break your back digging holes if you strike hard shale; just put in a stick of dynamite and loosen her up—you'll find it will save ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... Phonolite is broken shale, a thin, sharp rock that gives forth a pleasant, metallic sound when struck, like shattered crockery. For a mile this deposit lay along the trail across the width of the pass. For the bare-footed pony there was cruelty in every step. The barrier of rock ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the end we have an entirely different thing. The clay soils are often called mud soils because of the amount of water used in their formation. The slate that Myron brought for road making belongs to the clay family, and so does shale. ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... confined to the creek and river bottoms. In connection with wells that have been opened, there is a superincumbent stratum of earth, varying from ten to sixty feet in thickness: underlying this is a stratum of argillaceous shale, generally about one hundred and eighty feet in thickness, and then a stratum of white sandstone. Sometimes this sandstone is intermingled with red, presenting a ruddy appearance as the sand is withdrawn from the well in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the station or timber-yard. The very stumps and roots will be dragged out for sale; the earthy banks, raw and torn, will fall in, muddying and clogging that pure mountain brook; and the hillside, turning into sliding shale, will dam it into puddles with the refuse from the quarries above. And thus, for less guineas than will buy a new motor or cover an hour of Monte Carlo, a corner of the world's loveliness and peace will be gone as utterly as those chairs and tables and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... shale; carapace, plastron; cockle, conch, periwinkle, cowrie, whelk, mitre shell, abilone shell; exuviae (cast-off); conchite (fossil). Associated Words: conchology, conchologist, malacology, testaceous, cockled, mollusk, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... from oil which comes from wells bored deep down in the ground in Pennsylvania, in the south of Russia, in Burma, and elsewhere. Also it is distilled in Scotland from oil shale, from which paraffin oil and wax and similar substances are produced. When the oil is brought to the surface it contains many impurities, and in its native form is unsuitable for motor engines. The crude oil is composed of a number of different kinds ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... be walking along its Southern edge, when, suddenly, several pieces of rock and shale were dislodged from the face of the cliff immediately beneath me, and fell with a sullen crash through the trees. I heard them splash in the river at the bottom; and then silence. I should not have given this incident more than a passing thought, had not Pepper ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the earth. (3) Metamorphic rocks. These, by the combined action of heat, pressure, water, and chemical agents, have been crystallized and chemically altered. The rocks of the first class, such as chalk, limestone, shale, and sandstone, are distinguished by the existence of fossils in them, or by the successive layers of the material which goes to make up their structure and to give them a stratified appearance. The rocks of the second class are recognized by their resemblance to ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... with a carbine, I with the rifle, along a treacherous, shaly bank which ended, twenty feet below, in the steep rocky bluffs that formed the face of the cliff. Every step was an agony of uncertainty as to how far one would slide, and how much loose shale one would dislodge to rattle down over the cliff and startle the antelope we hoped were there. To move about on a squeaking floor without disturbing a light sleeper is child's play compared with our progress. A misstep would have sent us flying over the cliff, ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... a footing or skated awkwardly with tiny hoofs desperately set to check their descent, to be steadied and encouraged by the booming voice, deep as a bell, of the man nearest them. Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... guard had been smashed down by a most unconventional attack, and Walter himself had been knocked senseless by a swing on the side of the jaw, Bill Shale leaped gaily forth ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... directive force is greatest, and the longest diameter of the body sets axial. On the other hand, when the body was suspended so that the laminae were vertical, the longest diameter set equatorial. Now, we know that the crust of the earth is composed of laminae, just as the piece of shale in Doctor Tyndal's experiments, and that these layers are disposed horizontally. And whatever force originally arranged the land and water on our globe, it is evident that the continents are longest from north to south, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... separate from each other the little farms in this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the Ostrea deltoidea, but greatly less in size. The nearest ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the light. This time it burned suddenly clear and large and very bright, away off to the left of him where he had by daylight noticed a bare shale slide. The light seemed to stand in the very center of the slide, no more ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... in a field which belonged to the Vaughan, and upon which a great tip of rubbish and shale was gradually encroaching. Here choosing sides they played at rounders for a couple of hours, and then flung themselves down on the grass. Some of them lighted pipes, and all enjoyed the quiet of the ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... barren rocks and sun-baked shale to a valley where the principal crops seem to be alfalfa and clover, and which is flanked on the south by dense forests of pine, encroaching downward from the mountain slopes clear on to the level greensward, is rather ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... glimpse. But sometimes glimpses make more vivid memories than longer acquaintance. At the end of our hour we left Vence and hurried down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick with violets. We went through the deep pine-filled ravine over which we had crossed on the viaduct. Then the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... time had no water in its sandy channel for the first eight or ten miles. Willows, however, grow on the banks, and water soon began to appear in the hollows; and a few miles further up it was a fine flowing stream deliciously cold. As in many other streams from Chicova to near Sinamane shale and coal crop out in the bank; and here the large roots of stigmaria or its allied plants were found. We followed the course of the Zungwe to the foot of the Batoka highlands, up whose steep and rugged sides ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... carried her willingly. Even her impatience could find no fault with the manner in which he climbed steep pitches, slid down slopes as steep, jumped narrow washouts, and picked his way through thickets of quaking aspens or over wide stretches of shale rock and lava beds. He was wet to his ears when finally he shuffled into Ward's trail up the creek bottom; but he breathed evenly, and he carried his head high and perked his ears knowingly forward when the corral and haystack came ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the north-east of the site of old Camp Almy a ridge of rock and shale stretches down from the foothills of the Black Mesa and shuts off all view of the rugged, and ofttimes jagged, landscape beyond—all save the peaks and precipitous cliffs of the Mogollon, and some of the pine-crested heights ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... perfect. Mr. R. HENDON as Sir Rupert de Malvoisie (the Crusader) suggested, by his accent and gestures, that he must have come from the East—how far East, it boots not to inquire. Miss FLORENCE DARLEY was a good Lady Alice, and Mr. J. A. SHALE an efficient "Craven." Later on an operatic performance is threatened. If the thrilling series of arrangements on the back of the Programme is to be accepted as authentic, the members of the Club will be invited to have Patience. It would be difficult to find ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... a madman," said the sheriffe, "Thou sholdst have had a knightes fee; But seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad, Well granted it shale be." ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... may take place throughout the entire progress of the decomposition. Marsh gas and carbonic acid are seen escaping from the surface of pools where recent vegetable matter is submerged, and they are also eliminated in the further decomposition of peat, lignite, coal, and carbonaceous shale. Fire damp and choke-damp, common names for the gases mentioned above, are produced in large quantities in the mines where Tertiary or Cretaceous lignites, or Carboniferous coals or anthracites are mined. It has been said that these gases are simply locked up in the interstices ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... fuel, firing, combustible. [solid fuels] coal, wallsend[obs3], anthracite, culm[obs3], coke, carbon, charcoal, bituminous coal, tar shale; turf, peat, firewood, bobbing, faggot, log; cinder &c. (products of combustion) 384; ingle, tinder, touchwood; sulphur, brimstone; incense; port-fire; fire-barrel, fireball, brand; amadou[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beetles; and lastly, if further proof was needed, by the fact that in the "dirt-bed" of the Isle of Portland and the neighbouring shores, stumps of trees allied to the modern sago-palms are found as they grew in the soil, which, with them, has been covered up in layers of freshwater shale and limestone. A tropic forest has plainly sunk beneath a lagoon; and that lagoon, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... Tinto, and are adapted for cattle and sheep grazing and for dairy-farming. The lower north-western portion is very rich in coal and iron, the extensive mining and manufacture of which has given rise to many busy towns such as Glasgow, Motherwell, Hamilton, Coatbridge, and Airdrie; fireclay, shale, and lead are also found; the soil is various; comparatively little grain is grown; there are large woods. The orchards of the river side have given place mostly to market gardens, which the proximity of great ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... hounds yelped sharply and Scott spurred forward. The hunters were threading a grove of quaking asp and the dogs had come up with the bear on an opening of shale rock surrounded by down timber. Throwing his reins and advancing cautiously on foot, Stanley, followed by his companions, who spread themselves in a wide semicircle, took his place, the others, as they ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... were found to be part of a horizontal, stratified series of sandstones underlying the igneous rock. There were bands of coarse gravel and fine examples of stream-bedding interspersed with seams of carbonaceous shale and poor coal. Among the debris were several pieces of sandstone marked by black, fossilized plant-remains. The summits of the beacons were platforms of very hard rock, baked by the volcanic overflow. The columns, roughly hexagonal ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... it was so impossible that I could come to any harm this way, that I grew more confident, and passing my hand over the rough shale chips that were spread around amongst the short grass, I began to wonder how my uncles could have been so timid, and not have made a brave effort ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... rapidly when brought to the surface, the recovery of the specimens embedded in it was difficult. A haul made on the 26th brought a prize for the geologist in the form of a lump of sandstone weighing 75 lbs., a piece of fossiliferous limestone, a fragment of striated shale, sandstone-grit, and some pebbles. Hauling in the dredge by hand was severe work, and on the 24th we used the Girling tractor-motor, which brought in 500 fathoms of line in thirty minutes, including stops. One stop was due to water having run over the friction ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... would be pounced upon by a tribal medicine-man or some other jealous enemy, and used to discredit me. A few days after telling the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I was on a walk-about with Yamba in my mountain region, when I suddenly discovered that shale existed in very considerable quantities, and I thereupon conceived the idea of demonstrating to the blacks that, not only was the Bible narrative a true one, but that it was quite possible to ignite stone; and I would even show ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... calcines when subjected to fire and is, therefore, objected to by many engineers for building construction. The harder and denser sandstones, mica-schists, granites and syanites make good stone for concrete and occasionally shale and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... mountain trough. From an altitude of four or five hundred feet, the country falls in sharp steeps to a narrow alluvial bench, and then a broad beach of shale and pebble; the slopes are broken, here and there, where deep, shadowy ravines come winding down, bearing muddy contributions to the greater flood. The higher hills are crowned with forest trees, the lower ofttimes checkered with brown fields, recently planted, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... ground of the fault, which consists of decomposed sandstone, shale, feldspar, calcite, etc., interspersed with masses of harder sandstone and baked shale, gradually merges into a compact granular sandstone, which, at a distance of 460 ft. from the shaft, was self-supporting, and did not require timbering, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... saw fit to let go its tenacious grip about that time, of course Noodles was soon drawn in triumph over the edge of the shale, protesting more or less because he was scratched in several places by ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... but sat looking off across the jumbled foothills, rock-studded and gray with sage. Some distance from them a bare shale-slide extended for half a mile along a sidehill, barren and devoid of all vegetation. Here and there, far off across the country, vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch growing below spring seeps. A few scattered cedars sprouted from the rocky ledges of the more broken ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... shape floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this wild-eyed dragon was plainly bent on ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... a mile above him he could see the white spume between the chasm walls, darkening with the approach of night. He could hear more clearly the roar of the death-floods. But close to him was smooth water, and he stood now on a shelving tongue of rock and shale, upon which the current had flung him. In front of him was a rock wall. Behind him was another. There was no footing except where he stood. And Marette was ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... of the deep weathered, narrow strata that here formed a fifty-foot terrace. These terraced strata gave back for half a mile in uneven and brittle striations that were not unlike rude steps. Above them rose a sheer orange wall, straight to the sky. Far below a great shale bank sloped from the river's edge up to a gigantic black butte, whose terraced front seemed to Enoch to offer some hope ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as a knife-thrust, between the region where trees may grow and snows ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... purpose put there I cannot guess; and in the jet-excavations I found nothing. A little further south is the chief alum-region, as at Sandsend, but as soon as I saw a works, and the great gap in the ground like a crater, where the lias is quarried, containing only heaps of alum-shale, brushwood-stacks, and piles of cement-nodules extracted from the lias, I concluded that here could have been found no hiding; nor did I purposely visit the others, though I saw two later. From round Whitby, and those rough moors, I went on to Darlington, not far now from my home: ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... in the great corn belt having a naturally calcareous soil, is prosperous, or that a multitude of owners of such lime-deficient areas as the belt in a portion of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania, or the sandstone and shale regions of many states, have not overmatched natural conditions with fine skill. We treat only of averages when saying that a "lime country" shows a prosperity in its farm buildings and general appearance ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... are most striking, and point to a time when the sandy clay which imbedded them was borne by water in a very tranquil manner, to be deposited where the ferns had grown, enveloping them gradually, and consolidating them into their mass of future shale. In one species known as the neuropteris, the nerves of the leaves are as clear and as apparent as in a newly-grown fern, the name being derived from two Greek words meaning "nerve-fern." It is interesting to consider the history ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... hither on listless wings, Careless vagabond of the sea, Little thou heedest the surf that sings, The bar that thunders, the shale that rings,— Give ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... of the ground—so embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow. All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful—owing to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to Chapiu about seven—itself one of the most desolately-placed ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... into sight, galloping down the steep trail at breakneck speed, flinging down a small avalanche of shale with them. One of them caught sight of the girl, drew up so short that his horse slid to its haunches, and leaped from the saddle ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... the similar boiling mud-pits of the Yellowstone Park country, called from their brilliant colours the "Paint-pots." It is, at any rate, from circular clay basins, inclosed within a harder rock (basalt, black shale, and quartzite) that the stones are obtained. Some of the mines are worked even to a depth of 1200 feet by shafts and subterranean galleries. Some are open, and these, particularly that called the Wesselton Mine, are an interesting sight. This deep hollow, one-third of a mile in ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... as kerosene and mineral oil, is a mixture of saturated hydrocarbons obtained by the distillation of shale. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... it open country. The eye penetrated the thin screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile or more, but was brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered by irregular patches of shale that tinkled when stepped on. Well-defined paths, innumerable, trodden deep and hard, cut into the iron soil. They nearly all ran in a northwesterly direction. The few traversing paths took a long slant. These paths, so exactly like those crossing a village green, had in all probability ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... he found the excavations for a new apartment house. No watchman was in sight, in the mist of falling flakes, so the criminologist disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy attempt to scale the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... could, and followed Gunson, who showed me the way he had descended by the help of the rocks, and projecting roots of the dwarf firs which began to grow freely as soon as the slaty shale ceased. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... upon the central plaza, where stood a large church of typical colonial design and construction, and with a single lateral bell tower. The building was set well up on a platform of shale, with broad shale steps, much broken and worn, leading up to it on all sides. Jose stepped out and mingled with the crowd, first regarding the old church curiously, and then looking vainly for the little girl, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... * * Beyond the gateway a lush level canyon into which you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you found always other summits yet to be climbed, and all at once, like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... too late. With bated breath and tense muscles she watched the race. Would they reach the summit? Would the Kor-ul-lul overhaul them? They climbed well, but, oh, so slowly. Now one lost his footing in the loose shale and slipped back! The Kor-ul-lul were ascending—one hurled his club at the nearest fugitive. The Great God was pleased with the brother of Pan-at-lee, for he caused the club to fall short of its target, and to fall, rolling and bounding, ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... couple of miles. Pausing to rest for a moment, we could turn and see the entire valley outspread below us. Gradually the trail grew steeper, in spots pitched almost at a 50-degree angle, and was scattered with gravel, loose rock and shale, so that we placed our feet carefully, leaning forward to catch at handholds and steady ourselves against rocks. I tested each boulder carefully, since any weight placed against an unsteady rock might dislodge it on somebody below. One of the Darkovan brothers—Vardo, I thought—was behind ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches,—a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns,—a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart is inclined to deem it related; but no specimen ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp, November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill near me, and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is of good size, and the color of a tea rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes, which I have mentioned, and to which, though with difficulty, we made our way. This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale about one thousand feet in height; its sides nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... Strange peeping eyes, soft smiling fairy faces, Dark consciousness of fallen angels nigh, Sad converse with the dead, or headlong races Down the straight cliffs, or clinging on a shelf Of brittle shale, or hunted thro' the sky!— O, God of mind, I ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... on the slope, rebounded, and at the same time started half a dozen other stones. In a moment a rock avalanche was roaring down the steep. The great stone led the way. In a series of gigantic leaps, each longer than the last, it thundered downwards, at each jump starting fresh tons of the loose shale which covered the bank. ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... immediately following amid the ancient granite and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the oolite; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reds and tree ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... boys had reached one end of the many small valleys into which the larger vale was divided. They had been following the trail of the cattle that had been driven off—it was plain enough until they reached a rocky and shale-covered defile between two small hills. Then, for some reason or other, all "sign" came to an abrupt end. There were no further marks of hoofs in the earth, and none of the ordinary marks to indicate that cattle and horses had ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... next morning brought us to Charlie's Knob, and beyond it the range, which on close examination was not imposing, being a series of detached sandstone hills, their summits flat and slightly sloping to the South, capped with a hard reddish-brown rock (baked shale). On the cap, loose fragments of shale and thick scrub; forming its sides sheer cliffs, at most fifteen feet high, perforated by holes and caves, above rough, stony banks. The whole covered with tufts of spinifex, barren, wretched, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... vegetation seems to consist chiefly of the Glossopteris brownii (of Brongniart) a fern which occurs in a stratum of ironstone at Newcastle, and in one of the same mineral on the southern coast, also in sandstone in the valley of the Hunter, and abundantly in the shale near the coal ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... small quantities. The most common and the most important mineral elements of the soil of New York State are carbon, silicon, aluminum, and calcium, which combine in various ways to make either sand, sandstone, clay, shale, limestone, or other rock. The particular form which these mineral elements assume is of interest in choosing a location for a house, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... the bend beneath the city of Niagara Falls, and terminates below the Suspension Bridge under the Falls at the level of the water. It is 6700 yards long, and of a horseshoe section, 19 feet wide by 21 feet high. It has been cut 160 feet below the surface through the limestone and shale, but is arched with brick, having rubble above, and at the outfall is lined on the invert or under side with iron. The gradient is 36 feet in the mile, and the total fall is 205 feet, of which 140 feet are available for use. The capacity of the tunnel is 100,000 horse- power. ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... of the rocks was a steep declivity of loose shale sprinkled over with large and small boulders of radically different formations, and in no manner resembling the friable, uncertain ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... (with Wine).— Boil 1 cup sugar with 3 cups water and the peel of 1 lemon for 10 minutes, when cold add 1 bottle white wine, the juice of 2 lemons and 1/4 pound rice which has been boiled in 2 waters till tender; place the kalte Shale on ice ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke
... old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... abutments a thick stratum of shale had been exposed that air-slaked as fast as it was uncovered. Jim gave orders that drifts be driven through the stratum until a safe distance from possible exposure was reached. These were to be filled with concrete immediately. It was careful and important work. The concrete of the dam ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... sea; certain portions of this precipice seem in imminent danger of falling into the water, so much do they overhang the beach. At Kimmeridge Bay the cliff takes the sombre hue seen near Chapman's Pool and the beach and water are discoloured by the broken shale that has fallen from the low cliff. It is thought that a sort of jet jewellery was made here in Roman times; quantities of perforated discs have been found about the bay—termed "coal money" by the fishermen. The ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... embayed window of leaded glass Mistress Yordas and her widowed sister sat for an hour, without many words, watching the zigzag of shale and rock which formed their chief communication with the peopled world. They did not care to improve their access, or increase their traffic; not through cold morosity, or even proud indifference, but because ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... give the reason. Dean gathered from what she could tell that a gas of some sort was formed, perhaps by the decomposing vegetation. Perhaps it combined with the sparkling white shale. But all this was of no consequence compared with his own problems. He did not argue the matter but ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... on unflinchingly, and surely no goat could have climbed quicker than he did. Now standing over an abyss which made you silly to look down into; now pulling himself up by bush or branch; at other times scrambling over loose shale as though he had neither hands nor knees to cut, he might well have scared the coolest who had met him without warning on such a road. As for the four men he had saved from the devils in the thickets below, I don't believe there was one of them who didn't trust ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... foam, brawled among the rocks, for the track had been dug out of a steep hillside. Festing knew this was difficult work; one could deal with rock, although it cost much to cut, but it was another matter to bed the rails in treacherous gravel, and the fan-shaped mounds of shale and soil that ran down to the water's edge showed how loose the ground was and the abruptness of the slope. Above, the silver mist drifted about the black firs that clung to the side of the mountain, and in the distance there was a gleam of snow. Some of ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... (squalling, no doubt, in special robe, and impatient for the christening), the waiting relatives, the inevitable decanter, and the thick cuts of indigestible bun. The minister, I say, trudged home with his treasure-trove of petrified ferns and foot-marked shale—a greater fossil than any under his own cases of glass. His memory was stirred by his wife's catechising, but it was too late to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... various limestones of which it is composed being known as the "Bird's-eye," "Black River," and "Trenton" Limestones, of which the last is the thickest and most important. The thickness of this group is variable, and the bands of limestone in it are often separated by beds of shale. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... a mineral. "A resinous, reddish-brown, translucent, hydrocarbon derivative (C40H6202S), found in certain laminated shales of Tasmania, Resiniferous shale." ('Standard.') ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Sandstone (Medina) Hudson River Bluestone Co., Ulster county. Silver medal Bluestone International Graphite Co., Ticonderoga Graphite International Pulp Co., Gouverneur Talc International Salt Co., Ithaca Salt Interstate Conduit & Brick Co., Ithaca Brick Jamestown Shale Paving Brick Co., Jamestown Brick Jewettville Pressed Brick & Paving Co., Jewettville Brick R. Jones, Prospect Graphite J. F. Kilgour, Lordville Bluestone F. H. Kinkel, Bedford Feldspar Quartz A. Gracie King, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... with my laig busted, forty miles from even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and things generally kept gettin' no better right along ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept; there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes, the canzone which may stand for an elegy ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... were the mineral resources of the soil? It is not necessary to enlarge on these. The use of coal as a fuel is wholly recent. On the other hand, certain varieties of it were used as ornaments—the cannel coal, and the bituminous shale of Dorsetshire (Kimmeridge clay). So ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham |
