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Trek   Listen
noun
Trek  n.  (Written also treck)  The act of trekking; a drawing or a traveling; a journey; a migration. (Chiefly South Africa) "To the north a trek was projected, and some years later was nearly carried out, for the occupation of the Mashonaland."
Great Trek, the great emigration of Boers from Cape Colony which began in 1836, and resulted in the founding of the South African Republic and Orange Free State.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Trek" Quotes from Famous Books



... grass of the banks and river bottoms they could hear the bells and contented blethering of the flocks; for Sims had determined to rest his animals for a few days before starting again the long trek north. ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan

... the Sinai Desert when they were not winning fame on Gallipoli, since the early days of the war. They had proved sterling soldiers in the desert war, hard, full of courage, capable of making light of the longest trek in waterless stretches of country, and mobile to a degree the Turks never dreamed of. There were six other regiments of Australian Light Horse and three first-line regiments of yeomanry in the Australian Mounted Division, ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey

... looks they resumed their homeward trek. It was hard luck to have to leave the treasure when, perhaps, they had almost found it, but Mamma's word was law, and if they broke their promise about getting home, or at least meeting Papa, it was quite possible that to-morrow would be ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton

... mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I actually felt light-hearted. I might have been a boy out for a spring holiday tramp, instead of a man of thirty-seven very much wanted by the police. I felt just as I used to feel when I was starting for a big trek on a frosty morning on the high veld. If you believe me, I swung along that road whistling. There was no plan of campaign in my head, only just to go on and on in this blessed, honest-smelling hill country, for every mile put me in better humour ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan

... frontier, with its profound effects upon American life, is not a part of our early history. It ended with the World War. The trek of early settlers in covered wagons, the swift and colorful growth of the cattle kingdom, the land rush at Cimarron are a part of our familiar history. But the greatest of all these expansion movements was at its height within the twentieth century with 100,000,000 ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... at Flers in the midst of heavy falls of snow put the wind up the men at the knowledge of a longer march on the morrow, but the alarm was false and a trek of four kilos materialised—hard going the whole way—to Le Parcq, a town situated on the top of a hill, the discovery of a short cut causing the break from schedule. The "cut" was made up a steep incline that proved a severe obstacle to the wildly struggling horses of transport waggons ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... a trek over such dangerous jungle land, we should finish, not in the city of saints, but in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... incident on the 8th to Brakfontein, on the 9th to Strypan, reached Springs on the 10th. The last two marches were long and tiring, and what little strength was left in the oxen was exhausted. The men likewise required a rest and a refit after their long trek from Lydenburg, which had extended through Secoconi's country in the Northern Transvaal, down south to Middleburg, thence east to the Swazi border and over the Eastern Transvaal, reaching as far south as Bethel, to Springs, near Johannesburg. Eighty per cent of the men had on arrival at Springs ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson

... secretly, avoiding the larger caravans, making the long trek across the great plateau, partly by ox wagon, partly on foot. The trail led through a wild, desolate country, and gradually they left civilization hundreds of miles behind them. As far as the eye could reach in every direction was a monotonous desert of stone and sand, broken every now and then ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... room without any inconvenient crowding. But the burghers passed beyond their borders in every direction. The President cried aloud that he had been shut up in a kraal, and he proceeded to find ways out of it. A great trek was projected for the north, but fortunately it miscarried. To the east they raided Zululand, and succeeded, in defiance of the British settlement of that country, in tearing away one third of it and adding it to the Transvaal. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... turn out its contingent ready and equipped for war, and this can only be done by seizing goods right and left. One unfortunate will have to find a waggon, another to deliver his favourite span of trek oxen, another his riding-horse, or some slaughter cattle, and so on. Even when the officer making the levy is desirous of doing his duty as fairly as he can, it is obvious that very great hardships must be inflicted under such a system. Requisitions are made ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... giving us "the route." Such a youth was gipsying, and if any original fever of the blood led to wandering, such a training heightened the tendency. To this day even, after painful and laborious travel, Fate cannot persuade me that my stakes should not be pulled up at intervals. I understand "trek fever," which, after all, is only Eldorado hunting. With the settler unsatisfied a belief in ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... story are English, and they get pulled into helping an Inca chieftain, Manco, in his flight from the Spaniards. This seems to mirror several other books by Kingston. There is always a long trek overland, the point of which usually eludes me, but which gives rise to all sorts of difficult situations, with Spaniards, with serpents, with dangerous bridges, with rafts on rivers and so forth. Dated 1853 this must ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston

... to have intruded," he said. "I left Marlinstein two and a half months ago, with twenty boys and plenty of stores. We were doing a big trek after lions. I took some new Askaris in and they made trouble,—looted the stores one night and there was the devil to pay. I was obliged to shoot one or two, and the rest deserted. They took my compass, damn them, and I'm nearly a hundred miles out of my bearings. You couldn't ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... but only for the few cold months of terrestrial midwinter. It would be impossible to do during a winter that is longer than an Earth year. With all the physical needs taken care of, boredom became the enemy of any Anvharian who was not a hunter. And even the hunters could not stay out on solitary trek all winter. Drink was one answer, and violence another. Alcoholism and murder were the twin terrors of the cold season, after ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... find him living in a remote district beyond the great Orange River, leading the life of a "trek-boer,"—that is, a nomade farmer, who has no fixed or permanent abode, but moves with his flocks from place to place, wherever good pastures ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... had to be left behind, it would have been smashed to pieces in the night march. Rhes pulled him up into the saddle before him, locking his body into place with a steel-hard arm. The trek continued. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison

... satisfy the horrible native superstition. Then those regiments that remained upon the field began the work of plunder. Most of the bodies they stripped naked, clothing themselves in the uniforms of the dead soldiers. They stabbed the poor oxen that remained fastened to the 'trek-tows' of the waggons, and they drank all the spirits that they could find, some of them, it is said, perishing through the accidental consumption of the medical stores. Then, when the sun grew low, they retreated, laden with plunder, taking with them the most of their dead, of ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... trapping, exploring, cabin-building and guiding, my boyish dreams of striking it rich and sending home trainloads of glittering nuggets to my parents, who had been frustrated by illness in their trek across the plains to the golden mountains of Colorado, began to fade into the background. I was engrossed in getting acquainted with my wild neighbors, in learning their habits and customs, and in trying to photograph them in their natural habitat. Moreover there was no rich ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... the black-handled knife and fork from the coils of his putties. In the orderly surroundings of Maitland Camp, there was no especial need of his adopting the storage methods of the trek; nevertheless, he had taken to the new idea with prompt enthusiasm. Up to that time, it had never occurred to him to bandage his legs with khaki, and then convert the bandages into a ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... watching them pass, wondering why the great trek. The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the reddish tint left ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... seven o'clock when we inspanned for the trek to Papeete, a balmy, brilliant morning. The banks and cliffs were masses of ferns, the living imposed upon the dead, and hibiscus and gardenias and clumps of bamboo in a dissolving pageant mingled with plots of taro and yams, pineapples and bananas. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... posted before we leave by the night train for our next trek. We came back late last night from Misanpore after a nice but very queer time. On Saturday, when, after a long dusty drive of eight miles from the station, we arrived at the bungalow of Boggley's friend, there was every evidence that no visitors were expected. Just think! Boggley had never let him ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... cattle up the river, the Staked Plains on his right. The herd was a little gaunt from the long journey and he took the last part of the trek in easy stages. Since he had been awarded the contract for beeves at the Fort, by Department orders the old receiving agent had been transferred. The new appointee was a brother-in-law of McRobert and the owner of the Flying V ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... Thalma had garnered the gist of the world's treasures before commencing this last trek. Gold and precious stones were common objects to them, because for countless ages man had made them at will, but around those they had brought clustered sacred memories of loved ones gone before. The biological machine in the chemical laboratory of the ship—the machine that brought forth life ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow

... an arm round the room, and went on: "You come in and go out of my room, you sleep in the same cart with me, you eat out of the same dish on trek, and yet you do the Judas trick. Slim—god of gods, how slim! You are the snake that crawls in the slime. It's the native in you, I suppose.... But see, I mean to do to you as Oom Paul did. It's the only thing you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Scout (No. 7) is field engineer, carpenter, bridge builder, the general maker, mender, patcher, splicer and tinker; cares for tools and trek-cart, mends the tents and clothing, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... bunch, they took all the food they could carry and nothing else, and they didn't make any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they'd been building fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting around them for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strength for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probably the lad who started it. Had a dream from ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper

... minutes with a gash over my eye to the bone. I was carried to my tent and kindly stitched up by Dr. Campbell of the Imperial Light Infantry, and being much shaken I was obliged to hand over command of my guns to poor Steel who was only just recovering from jaundice and had to trek off at 3 p.m. to Sunday's River Drift. By keeping very quiet in the 4.7 camp in Hunt's tent I got over my fall better than I expected, and was able to move on, with a bandaged head and a sore body, with the 4.7 ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne

... dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself, "Would you do it again if you ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... burnt of good Russia leather colour, like mine, Dyke. Well, what do you say? Shall we pack the wagon, give it up, and trek ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn

... had been signed but a month when Garrison pointed out in The Liberator that a northward trek of free people of color was already under way. "Alarmed at the operation of the new Fugitive Slave Law, the fugitives from slavery are pressing northward. Many have been obliged to flee precipitately leaving behind them all the little they have acquired since they escaped from ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall best realize the fact by fancying ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... Well, since you look at it that way, there's nothing more to be said. I see you're ready for bed, so I'll take my lamp and bit of pottery, and trek." ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... times together, old pal, you and I," said he. "We thought it was all over, didn't we, for a while? But it's not! Life's not done, yet. It's maybe just beginning! We're going out on the long trek, again!" ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... you can't choose your time to rest the horses. For example: on those never-to-be-forgotten days, 23-26 September last, we used to move at a rapid trot for hours on end—for the expectation then was that the Boche line might be broken. This latest "trek" had not the urgency or the wild excitement of that, and we were able to take our ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... the vague thing driving here and there with pleasant torture. It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek. That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if uncompleted way. It was a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... groom took his bride by the arm, and made an effort to induce her to leave her maids of honour and "trek" towards the cabin which henceforth was to be her home. The lady pouted, and shook his hand off her arm; whilst the maidens laughed and clapped their hands, dancing in the dust-strewn sunlight with such high kicking action as would win fame for any ballet dancer in Europe. The young men jeered the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... the United States government was only awaiting a time most propitious for itself is evident from the fact that, when, in the spring following, refugees from the Neutral Lands were given an opportunity to begin their backward trek, they were told that they would not be permitted to linger at their old homes but would have to go on all the way to Fort Gibson, one hundred twenty miles farther south.[664] That was one way of ridding Kansas of her Indians and a way not very creditable ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... the slowness of an army's movement out here. The standard of speed is the trek-ox, lurching pensively along under his yoke, very exacting about his mealtimes, and with no high notions about supreme efforts, when he has to get his waggon out of a bad drift. He often prefers to die, and while he is making up his ponderous ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... we next came upon a native trek and heard the same old story of prosperity on a Dutch farm: they had raised an average 800 bags of grain each season, which, with the increase of stock and sale of wool, gave a steady income of about 150 Pounds per year after the farmer had taken his share. There ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... preliminaries, he commenced by suggesting how natural it would be if the Dutch families living in Kimberley desired to betake themselves to more congenial surroundings. The Colonel thought it would be natural. Mr. Wessels would take it as a favour if said families were permitted to trek. Mr. Kekewich would gladly grant the favour; but the people concerned could not take a natural view of the matter at all; they decided to remain where they were. Mr. Wessels next graciously proposed that all women and children, irrespective of race, should be expatriated. The ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan



Words linked to "Trek" :   Republic of South Africa, travel, South Africa, journey



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