"Obsidian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the enlisted men and two wagons were back of us, so we thought we could safely stay there by ourselves. The so-called mountain is really only a foothill to a large mountain, but is most interesting from the fact that it is covered with pieces of obsidian, mostly smoke-color, and that long ago Indians came ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... men, with powerful, bulging muscles. They surveyed her and the room with a quick sweep of eyes that were like glittering obsidian, their mouths thin, cruel slashes in the flat, brutal planes ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... Cotocachi, Chiles, and Imbabura, imitate Cotopaxi; Pichincha, Atacatzo, and Guamani are irregular. The Ecuadorian volcanoes have rarely ejected liquid lava, but chiefly water, mud, ashes, and fragments of trachyte and porphyry. Cotopaxi alone produces pure, foam-like pumice, and glossy, translucent obsidian.[62] The paucity of quartz, and the absence of basalt, are remarkable. Some of the porphyroids are conglomerate, but the majority are true porphyries, having a homogeneous base. Dr. T. Sterry Hunt calls them porphyroid trachytes. They have a black, rarely ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... distributed particularly in the province of Victoria, in the neighborhood of Port Western, which reproduces in a remarkable manner, the characters of the Canstadt race." Not the least interesting result of this discovery is the similarity of weapons and implements. "With Mr. Lartet, we see in the obsidian lances of New Caledonia the flint heads of the lower alluvium of the Somme. The hatchet of certain Australians reminds us, as it did Sir Charles Lyell, of the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... and awe at the grandness of the scene, they began to make their way along the well-defined rim of the crater. But slowly, for inside there was not a level space, all being a chaos of riven and scattered masses of slag, obsidian, and scoria, ragged, sharp and in part glazed ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... ruby, nor the sapphire; but with these exceptions, the domain of the lapidary was almost as extensive as at the present day. That domain included the amethyst, the emerald, the garnet, the aquamarine, the chrysoprase, the innumerable varieties of agate and jasper, lapis lazuli, felspar, obsidian; also various rocks, such as granite, serpentine, and porphyry; certain fossils, as yellow amber and some kinds of turquoise; organic remains, as coral, mother-of-pearl, and pearls; metallic ores and carbonates, such as hematite and malachite, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... in Greece, including obsidian of very clear texture, probably of inner Asiatic, not Aegean production. Bone needles ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... filled her pockets with specimens of obsidian, jaspers, and chalcedonies, of colors most beautiful, with a deep-dyed opaqueness, a shell-fracture, and a satiny polish like jade. And she consulted us about them very prettily—the little fraud! Of course she was ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... case is mentioned and figured by Judd, where one of the Lipari Isles, composed of pumice and rising out of the Mediterranean, has been breached by a lava-stream of obsidian.—Loc. ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... 1897 the largest Beaver pond in the Park was at Obsidian Cliff. I should say the dam there was over four hundred yards long. But now it is broken and the pond is drained. And the reason as before—the Beavers used all the food and moved on. Of course the dam is soon broken when the hardworking ones are not there in their ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... chin to ankles, can easily be traced. The nature of the attack expected may be inferred from the nature of the defence employed. Body-covering shields were, obviously, at first, defences against showers of arrows tipped with stone. "In the earlier Mycenaean times the arrow-head of obsidian alone appears," as in Mycenaean Grave IV. In the upper strata of Mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 206.] No man going into battle naked, without body armour, like the Mycenaeans (if they had none), could protect himself with a small ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... to a system of barter similar to that which still exists amongst tribes more rude and savage than the Swiss lake-dwellers. Numerous facts of a like tendency are on record, such as the finding in the mounds of the Mississippi valley, side by side, obsidian from Mexico and mica from the Alleghanies, and in the mounds around the great northern lakes large tropical shells two thousand miles from their native habitat. The ancient inhabitants of China and India found at a very ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and driver, they came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor left,—some driven by bearded, solemn white men, some by careless, saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or obsidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road; then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and get up, when the first public wagon that came along would hitch him on, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vein,—its bar of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This curious rock,—so nearly akin in composition and appearance to obsidian,—a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which, in its lighter form, exists as pumice,—constitutes one of the links that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one mineral may be seen beside smoking ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... as stern as it was humane: "I should wish my sheep to be sheared, but not to be flayed." On the death of one of the prefects, there was found among his property at Rome a statue of Menelaus, carved in Ethiopian obsidian, which had been used in the religious ceremonies in the temple of Heliopolis, and Tiberius returned it to the priests of that city as its rightful owners. Another proof of the equal justice with which this province was governed was to be seen in the buildings then carried on by the priests in ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... dumb with grief, and Lirou bade her go to her sleeping-place, telling her to rest, and that he would have speech with her later on when he was in the mood. She obeyed, and when she was unobserved she picked up a short, broad-bladed dagger of talit (obsidian) and hid it in her girdle, and then lay down and pretended to sleep. But through the cane lattice-work of ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... The conquerors made use of the gold, and broke the idols in pieces, by order of the first bishop of Mexico. Unfortunately, our time was too limited to give them more than a passing observation. Fragments of obsidian, in the form of knives and of arrows, with which the priests opened the breasts of their human victims, are still to be found there; and numerous small idols, made of baked clay, are to be seen both there and in the plains adjoining. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... rocky plain on which he had landed the ship: Smooth and shiny as obsidian in places, again it was spongy gray, the color of volcanic rock, bubbling with imprisoned gases at the instant of hardening. It stretched out and down, that gently rolling plain, for a thousand yards or more, then ended ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... fire of which had been extinguished as remotely as that of Monte Cavo, near Rome; but scarcely had we reached the plain covered with pumice-stone, when the landscape changed its aspect, and at every step we met with large blocks of obsidian thrown out by the volcano. Everything here speaks perfect solitude. A few goats and rabbits only bound across the plain. The barren region of the peak is nine square leagues; and as the lower regions ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... more than fifty acres of land; and one embankment is fifty miles long. Among the relics associated with those works are articles of pottery, knives, and copper ornaments, hammered silver, mica, obsidian, pearls, beautifully sculptured pipes, shells, and stone implements. The mounds found in some of the Gulf States seem to confirm a theory that the mound-builders were the ancestors of the Choctaw Indians and their allies, and ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... of the Chinese in the days of Fo-hi. [Footnote: Abel Remusat tells us that of the two hundred primitive Chinese 'hieroglyphs' none showed a knowledge of metal.] The chief weapons were small triangles of close-grained basalt and iztli (obsidian flakes) for tabonas, or knives, both being without handles. They carried rude clubs and banot, or barbed spears of pine-wood with fire-charred points. The garrotes (pikes) had heads like two flattened semicircles, a shape preserved amongst negroes ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... obsidian arrowhead. The Bannacks and Shoshonis got that black, glassy stuff at one place—the Obsidian Cliff, in Yellowstone Park! Those old trails that Lewis saw to the south were trails that crossed the Divide south of here. They put the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... lance, achcayupil,[18-1] and especially the blow-pipe, pub, a potent weapon in the hands of an expert, the knowledge of which was widely extended over tropical America. Their arrow points were of stone, especially obsidian, bone and metal. Other weapons were the wooden war club, [c]haibalche; the sling, ica[t]; ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... more nor less than a gigantic rock of obsidian, of a dark greenish hue, having its flanks irregularly furrowed by vertical fissures and ridges. This peculiar kind of rock, under the sun, or in a very bright moonlight, gives forth a sort of dull ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... clear that the Ohio mound-builders had commercial intercourse with the natives of distant regions, for among the buried articles some are made of native copper from Lake Superior, and there are also found mica from the Alleghenies, sea-shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian from ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... forest country. From the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest bit of land in the United States, exclusive of Alaska, one looks down two miles in altitude to Owen's Lake almost directly beneath. I picked up, on the plateau of the summit, a bit of obsidian Indian chipping, refutation in itself of the frequently repeated statement that Indians do not climb high peaks. A month was spent with great profit in and about the Sierra Reserve, and one might go there many summers, ever ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... but a meagre result. However, to take them seriatim, we can assume, I think, with some show of evidence, that the Ethiopian stone, mentioned as being used to make the first incision in the corpse, might have been a piece of obsidian or basalt, but most probably was merely an ordinary sharp ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... silicates, are not crystalline, but rather they are amorphous, that is, without any definite structure. Nature's silicates, on the other hand, are usually crystallized or at least crystalline in structure. (In a few cases we find true glasses, volcanic glass, or obsidian, for example.) ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... inscriptions relating to the name and titles of the deceased, painted in red and green. The face was carved out of a separate piece of wood, with the conventional beard attached to the chin; the eyelids were of bronze; the eyes of obsidian; wooden hands were crossed on the breast. Inside the lid were pictures of apes in yellow on a purple background, symbolising the Spirits of the East adoring the Gods of the Morning and Evening. The mummy itself was enclosed in a handsome cartonnage case ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... might almost walk on it; so unlike any liquid, as seen near shore or inland, is this leaping, heaving plain, reminding one, by its innumerable conchoidal curves, not of water, not even of ice, but rather of obsidian. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the sulphur beds too in this region are beyond calculation: they reproduce themselves every few years. In the vicinity of 'Krafla' is a curious rock, composed of obsidian, a substance which closely resembles ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... distance to my left was a huge obsidian cliff, the glassy walls of which rose in a precipice to a considerable height. On account of its peculiar formation, this crag of natural glass had several times attracted my attention, and on any other occasion ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... They had another stuff which was curious enough, of which they made knives, razors, arrow heads, and saw-edged swords as keen as razors—and that was glass. They did not make the glass—they found it about the burning mountains, of which Mexico is full; itztli they called it; we call it obsidian. It is tougher than our glass, and chips to a fine razor edge. I have seen arrows of it, which I am certain would go clean through a man, and knives which would take his arm off, bone and all. I want you to remember these glass weapons, for Cortez's Spaniards ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... greater part in American than in other mythologies. An emerald was worshipped in the temple of Pachacamac, who was, according to Garcilasso, the supreme and spiritual deity of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala(1) makes much of a mysterious, primeval and animated obsidian stone. In the Iroquois myths(2) stones are the leading characters. Nor did Aztec myth escape ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... against the spot where the force should be applied, and braced against the breast of the operator, while he held the stone between his feet. This latter operation is described as used by the Mexicans to get flakes of obsidian.[206] By carrying further the process of chipping or pressing the stone could be shaped more perfectly, and by rubbing it on another stone it could be given a cutting edge. The rubbing process could also be applied to the surface to make ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner |
