"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... LOAD OF STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; and often by placing his ear close to the bottom ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... joins the other branch. Inside the Gulf stream, along the coast of Texas, is the counter-current before referred to, making down the coast at the rate of two to three miles per hour, and bringing down the silt and mud of the Mississippi, Sabine, etc. I have seen the water off the Island of Galveston the color of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of the second half of the 5th century B.C. prove the existence of trade with Greece at that period; and the town was famous in Aristotle's day for a special breed of fowls. Even at that period, however, the silt brought down by the rivers rendered access to the harbour difficult, and the historian Philistus excavated a canal to give free access to the sea. This was still open in the imperial period, and the town, which was a municipium, possessed its own gild of sailors; but its importance gradually ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fathoms deep in what is now The King's Basin and extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... bank is being washed away, there a broad flat is forming. With the exception of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and the Gila, which joins the Colorado at Yuma, no other river is known to be so laden with silt. No other river is so rapidly removing the ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... depth and that an ample supply of pure water could be counted on. It was known that water was met all through this valley at depths of from six to twelve feet and then that there would be found a layer of finely powdered silt to a depth of about one hundred feet, when another layer of water would be found, and that all the private wells reached this layer. When tested by the city, however, it was found that this water-bearing stratum was of too fine material to yield its water freely, and the supply ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... distance from Baghdad to Basra is about 300 miles, and the area traversed by the Shatt-el-Arab is slowly extending at the rate of a mile every thirty years or so, as a result of the steady accumulation of silt and mud carried down by the Tigris and Euphrates. When Sumeria was beginning to flourish, these two rivers had separate outlets, and Eridu, the seat of the cult of the sea god Ea, which now lies 125 miles inland, was a seaport at the head of the Persian Gulf. A day's journey separated the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... towards Syria, the gulfs boring in so as almost to meet at their extreme points, and passing by one another with but a small space left between. If then the stream of the Nile should turn aside into this Arabian gulf, what would hinder that gulf from being filled up with silt as the river continued to flow, at all events within a period of twenty thousand years? indeed for my part I am of opinion that it would be filled up even within ten thousand years. How, then, in 18 all the time that has elapsed ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... strength avail him nor comeliness anywise, nor that armour beautiful, which deep beneath the flood shall be o'erlaid with slime, and himself I will wrap him in my sands and pour round him countless shingle without stint, nor shall the Achaians know where to gather his bones, so vast a shroud of silt will I heap over them. Where he dieth there shall be his tomb, neither shall he have need of any barrow to be raised, when the Achaians ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Cities, once prosperous, were shown abandoned because the mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and the lower levels ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the current ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... a month after the ceremony. His widow belonged, then, to the husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the presence ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... sniffing the air and pawing the ground. Boyton raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, Paul followed as fast as the cumbersome rubber ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... have been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either hemisphere consist really of nothing else ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the Peary, as is generally thought, is trapped beneath the ice floes or embedded in the deep silt of the polar sea-floor, her margin of safety has passed the deadline, it was pointed out to-day by her designers. Through special rectifiers aboard, her store of air can be kept capable of sustaining life for a theoretical period of thirty-one days. And exactly thirty-one days ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands, like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... hills, now environed by a coffee plantation. Here are found three basins—results of erosion, most likely—that are described as natural bath-tubs. The middle and largest of these pools is partly filled with silt, probably occluding the entrance to a cavern which formerly opened into it, a fathom or so below the water-surface. This cave was the hiding-place of a native woman whose father had discovered her love for one of Ponce de Leon's soldiers. He forbade ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... levels which surround it. The first British capital could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its navigation. The Thames managed better for York's upstart rival London, and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which the reluctance of the indolent stream is sometimes overcome. I ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... this would greatly aid the tidal currents cutting down the passes between the mountains just before, and to the level of, the stationary periods. The currents in the fiords in T. del Fuego in a narrow crooked part are often most violent; in other parts they seem to silt up. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... experiment is made very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... of yellow silt away and adjusted the instrument's controls as best he could, centering it on where Judd's craft had last been. Then he peered through—and saw ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... than a half dozen trails of large parties, and he felt sure that, according to arrangement, they were converging on the Ohio, at the point where the Licking emptied the waters and silt of the Kentucky woods into the larger stream. Timmendiquas, no doubt, would be there, and Henry's heart throbbed a little faster at the thought that he would meet ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... North Frisian islands of Silt and Fohr the following ABC rhymes have been recorded, consisting mostly ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of summer, when the river is at its highest level and overflows the banks for miles, it is no pleasure excursion to steer ungainly boats between banks of sand and silt without pilots. On the second day a strong southerly storm arose, and the dangerous waves in the whirlpools of the current capsized many vessels and damaged others. Alexander made for the bank to look for fishermen who might act as pilots, and under ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of her sleep with readjusted reasoning; ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... because in places it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed that they were of a higher form and better made. Instead of the rude and massive ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... or other flat-bottomed vessel, equipped with a steam-engine and machinery for removing the mud and silt from the bottom, by the revolution of iron buckets in ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Chantrey. A small strip of a fir-tree, a branch of holly, a curled leaf of broccoli, or any other vegetable production, is suspended by one end in a small cylinder of paper which is placed for support within a similarly formed tin case. The finest river silt, carefully separated from all the coarser particles, and mixed with water, so as to have the consistency of cream, is poured into the paper cylinder by small portions at a time, carefully shaking the plant a little after each addition, in order that its leaves may be covered, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... active sensor classes, three of which are active acoustics, lidar and magnetic anomaly detectors. Broadband underwater active acoustics could address pressing needs such as shallow-water anti-submarine warfare and mine detection (both buried and silt covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, foliage penetration (vegetation is translucent in ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... rivers whose currents, running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great cities ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... assumed an easier angle. Now it was possible to walk. There were no rocks here, at any rate. Courtenay at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful current whose existence he suspected had cut out for itself a deep-water channel towards the land, and the ship had struck on the silt of its back-wash. Anyhow, the Kansas was still living. The lights were all burning steadily. He could detect the rhythmic throb of the donkey-engine. He felt it like the faint beat of a pulse. In her new position the ship presented less of ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the alkali crust into thin-lipped ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... dark and drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath her ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... evening,—armor, harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats. So I went ashore with three or four Malays, and the Old Boy's time we had poking in and out over the silt to find fairway, even for the gig. At last we could make round toward a little clearing in the bamboos, with a big canary tree in the middle. All was going well, when suddenly the mate grunted, pointing dead ahead. That man Sidin has the most magnificent eyes: we were ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... meters were tried for some time with a special lift, contrived to grip the meter firmly parallel to the current axis, so as to register only forward velocity, and with a nearly rigid gearing wire. No useful general results were obtained. Ninety specimens of silt were collected, but no connection could be traced between silt and velocity; it seemed that the silt at any point varied greatly from instant to instant, and that the quantity depended not on the mean velocity, but probably on the silt in the supply water. Forty ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy grasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a halt while her ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... or gravel and over all go lengths of roofing paper cut slightly wider than the trench so that, when in place, the paper arches and fits tightly to the sides. The purpose of the stone or gravel is to facilitate water seepage from tile to ground while the roofing paper cover prevents silt from reducing ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... thousand miles north of here and were brought here in a great flood. They floated around for centuries perhaps, and were thoroughly impregnated with the mineral water, doubtless hot water. When the drainage took place, they were covered by silt and sand to a depth of perhaps two thousand feet. Here the petrifaction took place. Silica was present in great quantities. Manganese and iron provided the coloring matter, and through pressure these chemicals were forced into the grain of the wood, which gradually was absorbed and its cell ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... that there was not more than five feet of water over her conning-tower, so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it. And in due time that boat got home with everybody's hair of just the same colour as when ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... of these fissures water was ejected, carrying with it large quantities of sand and silt, and so abundantly that every stream-bed, even though generally dry in summer, was flooded. By the passage of the water, some part of the fissures was often enlarged into a round hole of considerable size, ending in a craterlet at the surface. Certain belts within the fissured area contained large ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... interest to the common observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... and magnificent in guilt, Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream, He paused at last upon the Stygian silt, And raised calm eyes above the angry stream.... Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came, While Hades hummed with gossip of ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he should have been ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia — Power on silt, Death ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... they decided that Vizcaino's description must have been too highly colored, or else that the Bay of Monterey must, since his time, have been filled up with silt or destroyed by some earthquake. At any rate, the bay between Santa Cruz and the Point of Pines was the only Monterey they could find. According to Washburn, Vizcaino's account was far from a correct one. It was no fault of Portola and ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... siding in order to let some great train of laden boats go by, he found fresh enjoyment in every stop, and in blouse and knickerbockers, with bare feet, paddled about on the moist banks, making friends with the half-clothed camel-drivers, whose patient beasts knelt so obediently to be loaded with the silt deposits taken from the bed of the canal, and collecting items of interest in regard to this artery of commerce which might have made even its founder open his eyes. The girls profited by his researches, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... questions; then his story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments and assemble them in their original relations. Very few individuals ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... first place were grown by Mr. Duke Hughes, of Coal Run, Noble County, O. He states the tree is about 50 years old and stands in well-limed permanent pasture near the crest of a ridge, in Muskingum silt loam. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... to Cardiff. They came; they saw; and they narrowly escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... than 1600 miles the Nile flows without an affluent; in the spring it falls so low that its channel becomes almost unnavigable; but in the late summer, its waters, swollen by the rains and melted snows of Central Africa, and laden with the fertilising silt of the Abyssinian mountains, spread over the cultivated country, and bring fertility ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... among the alders lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... the northern coast of South America as the Guiana Current, enters through the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico, where it circles around to the northward; then, colored a deep blue from the fine river silt of the Mississippi, and heated from its long surface exposure under a tropical sun to an average temperature of eighty degrees, it emerges into the Florida Channel ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us at twenty-five ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... of convicts were employed in building a breakwater, connecting a cliffy island at the entrance with the south point of the river, for the purpose of deepening the mouth, but I much question whether it will answer, as the silt that is washed down by the stream not finding its former exit may by meeting the sea ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are as a record, the account of contemporaneous vital phenomena presented ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... we found within the outer barrier of Minie Kloof. A valley small in its proportions, it is true, but none the less fertile. A dainty brook of crystal clearness gave life to the barren hillsides. The silt of a thousand years of summer torrents had furnished each niche and recess with a mould Goshen-like in its richness. Here, amongst luxuriant groves of almost tropical splendour, nestled the inevitable farmstead,—a white residence which ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... free Flowed forth in many rivers: to the west Aeas, (18) a gentle stream; nor stronger flows The sire of Isis ravished from his arms; And Achelous, rival for the hand Of Oeneus' daughter, rolls his earthy flood (19) To silt the shore beside the neighbouring isles. Evenus (20) purpled by the Centaur's blood Wanders through Calydon: in the Malian Gulf Thy rapids fall, Spercheius: pure the wave With which Amphrysos (21) irrigates the meads Where once Apollo served: Anaurus (22) flows ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Nene and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... unannounced, the lawyer appeared. The compressor plant was hard at work forcing the water back in the caissons, the pulsometer pumps were sucking up streams of water that flowed without ceasing into the settling tank and off into the city sewers, the men in the caissons were sending up buckets full of silt-like gruel. The lawyer watched operations for a few minutes, then he asked for the owners' boring plan. When he had examined this he grunted twice, twitched his lower lip humorously, and said: 'I'll put you out of this. If the owners wanted a deep-water lighthouse they should have ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand- reefs, a ferment of delta silt—if science guesses right—had lifted higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward and a deep, slender ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... interesting as an example of the resuscitation of the old waterways of Babylonia. The banks of this channel here take almost a mountainous character for so flat a country. This piling up of mounds has been caused by clearing the silt from the entrance to ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... found—as you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main bottom clay ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... mortuum [Lat.], residuum, sprue, fecula [Lat.], clinker, draff^; scurf, scurfiness^; exuviae [Lat.], morphea; fur, furfur^; dandruff, tartar. riffraff; vermin, louse, flea, bug, chinch^. mud, mire, quagmire, alluvium, silt, sludge, slime, slush, slosh, sposh [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap [Vulg.], shit [Vulg.]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... eastern half is studded with isolated rocky crags, which are crowned with the ruins of ancient strongholds, and broken by the low hills that border the plain of Issus. The plain is watered by the Cydnus (Tarsus Chai), the Sarus (Sihun) and the Pyramus (Jihun), each of which brings down much silt. The Sarus now enters the sea almost due south of Tarsus, but there are clear indications that at one period it joined the Pyramus, and that the united rivers ran to the sea west of Kara-tash. Such appears to have been the case when Alexander's army crossed Cilicia. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and is broken by innumerable rocky islets on different levels, which form the series of rapids and little cascades which give the cataract its name. These little islets are formed by a collection of boulders of red granite filled in with silt, and have a very strange effect, for the boulders are rounded by the action of the water, which, combined with the effect of the hot sun, has caused the red stone to become coated with a hard skin, black and smooth to touch, just as though they had ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting. The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... are natural reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential condition of ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... A few stars glinted above them, winking through the drifting silt that blew across the surface ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... in number) are in private grounds belonging to Mrs Law. They have probably been created by the action of water, and when discovered were filled with the bones of wild animals (many of them now extinct) embedded in silt, which had been washed into them. In one of them there is now stacked a quantity of these bones, whilst a selection of them is deposited in Taunton Museum. The caves are shown by some of the outdoor servants of the house. Unlike the caves ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... preserve my perspective, for I am studying the Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... few years, one result was that those soils tired and thinned and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence that had grown up there, for production and prosperity moved inland and west. And another result was that the Potomac estuary itself grew shallower and different with the silt that washed down off the land, and many a tributary bay that once served as harbor for oceangoing ships is now a rich, reedy marsh with a single narrow gut of shoal water wandering down across it ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... down ashamed on you for a son o' mine!" he said, digging away at his oar savagely, as if trying to dredge up some of the silt from the bottom of the harbour. "You, turned fifteen year old, and been back'ard and forrud 'twixt Hardway and the Gosport shore for a matter of five years or more, and not for to know and read a common signal like that, which you must 'a ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... loose materials which are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... through the Level, called the Old Nene. Below the point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... is deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass of gypsum on the left bank, and it bends to the east of south, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—"as a REAL guest," Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word "real" twice. And after Christmas he must go ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... trying to determine if it was feasible to dam the river at this place. The plan was to flood the hole of Brown's Park and divert the water through the mountains by a tunnel to land suitable for cultivation and in addition, allow the muddy water to settle and so prevent the vast amount of silt from being washed on down, eventually to the mouth of the Colorado. The location seemed admirably suited for this stupendous project. But holes drilled beside the river failed to find bottom, as nothing but quicksand existed even at a depth of nearly three hundred feet; ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... discharge themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that some of you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. The river ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... long has she tarried her bridal day! Pause and think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition's earliest fable—waited still through the long eras of successive empires, while the hard-won light, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... community reaction is especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden waters illustrates the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... filled his bottles; then, with hands and knife, working cautiously and noiselessly he began to enlarge the basin, drawing out stones, scooping out silt and fibre. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... a remarkably productive country. The annual inundation of the rivers has covered its once rocky bottom with deposits of rich silt. Crops planted in such a soil, under the influence of a blazing sun, ripen with great rapidity and yield abundant harvests. "Of all the countries that we know," says an old Greek traveler, "there is no other so fruitful in grain." [5] Wheat ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the sea, though at Isili and some other places it is 1542 feet high. La Marmora considers it analogous to the upper tertiary formations found in the south of France, central and southern Italy, Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and Africa. The plains generally consist of a deep alluvial silt, interspersed with shingly patches, containing boulder stones. Such is the valley of the Liscia, occupying nearly the whole surface from sea to sea towards the northern extremity of the island. This, it may be recollected, we crossed north of the Limbara. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, whilst the sand, being heavier, bulk ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... hygienic principles in a stagnant pool; I look with a delighted eye upon the inexhaustible spray of spreading bubbles; I see in imagination the prehistoric times when seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... tipped on the old bank of the river. Indeed the miners passed through the cellars of old houses and unearthed old water pipes; excavated through a depth of tipped rubbish on which these houses had evidently been built; and then came upon the former strand of the river, beneath which was the blue silt usually found; then a stratum of bowlder clay; and finally the red sandstone rock. Once begun, the works were pushed forward night and day, Sundays excepted, until January, 1884, when the last few ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... beneath the high, cut banks and past the little town, disappearing behind the wooded point below, which masked the up-coming steamers till one heard the sighing labor of their stacks before he saw their smoke. It was a muddy, rushing giant, bearing a burden of sand and silt, so that one might hear it hiss and grind by stooping at its edge to listen; but the slanting sun this afternoon made it appear like a boiling flood of molten gold which issued silently out of a land of mystery and vanished into a valley of forgetfulness. At least so ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... says them paddles would hev' just snatched 'em and slung 'em round and round and buried 'em way down in the ooze of the river bed, with all the silt of the current atop of 'em, and they mightn't come up for ages; or else the wheels might have waltzed 'em way up to Sacramento until there wasn't enough left of 'em to float, and dropped 'em when the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte |
