"Tufa" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in one sense, and the first in another; but to watch the diggers at Pompeii is fascinating, even when there is no reasonable expectation of a find. Herculaneum was buried with lava, or rather with tufa, and it is so very hard that the expense of uncovering of only a small part of that ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... New York.—"To day, a Quaker from Sempronius, New York, has shown me some fine tufa. I mention it, because you may, in your travels, be able to see it. He says it covers an acre or more to a great depth, is burned into excellent lime with great ease, and is very valuable, as no good limestone ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... scenery or in the products of Touraine, until Lydia directed his attention to the curious caves in the low hills that look like chalk cliffs. This white, chalky soil, M. La Tour had explained to us, is hard, much like the tufa used so much for building in Italy. We thought that these caves were only used for storing wine, but our chauffeur told us that most of those which are provided with a door and a window are used as dwelling houses, and they were, he assured ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... some piston. It was evident that the crust of the earth was subjected in this part of the globe to a frightful pressure. The atmosphere was saturated with gases and carbonic acid, mingled with aqueous vapors. Cyrus Harding felt the volcanic tufa with which the plain was strewn, and which was but pulverized cinders hardened into solid blocks by time, tremble beneath him, but he could discover no traces of ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... telegraph-station;—to the Burnt Mountain, with its colored cliffs;—to visit the few aged nuns who still linger in what was once a convent;—to Porto Pim, with its curving Italian beach, its playing boys and picturesque fishermen beneath the arched gateway;—to the tufa-ledges near by, where the soft rocks are honeycombed with the cells hollowed by echini below the water's edge, a fact undescribed and almost unexampled, said Agassiz afterwards;—to the lofty, lonely Monte da Guia, with its solitary chapel on the peak, and its ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... country is a plain, it is not monotonously flat. With the exception of the sea-beach which is sandy and formed in part by the accumulations of the Tiber, the level is everywhere broken by hills of tufa moderate in height though often somewhat steep, and by deep fissures of the ground. These alternating elevations and depressions of the surface lead to the formation of lakes in winter; and the exhalations proceeding in the heat of summer from the putrescent organic substances ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... escaped the demolition in 1547, may be seen in the gable of the new library. The substructure was a fine building, 148 feet by 78 feet; the vaulting was, as described by Professor Willis, "of the earliest kind; constructed of light tufa, having no transverse ribs, and retaining the impressions of the rough, boarded centring upon which they had been formed." A second minor dormitory ran eastward from the larger one, while outside this was the third dormitory, fronting the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... in his "Report on Geology of the Philippine Islands"—in Twenty-first Annual Report of U.S. Geological Survey (Washington, 1901), part iii, pp. 487-625—cites (p. 622; cf. also p. 517) the geologist R. von Drasche thus: "Layers of tuff [or tufa—a volcanic rock formed of agglutinated volcanic earth or scoria] are also exposed (Fragmente zu einer Geologie der Insel Luzon, pp. 29-31) at many points between Aringay and Benguet, but these tuffs toward the interior, even at ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... ponderous for modern hinges. At first we could distinguish nothing in the darkness, but by the uncertain flaring of two candles, which the guide waved about incessantly, we saw a chamber hewn in the rock, with a roof in imitation of beams and rafters, all of solid tufa stone. A low stone seat against the wall on each hand and a small hanging lamp were all the furniture of this apartment, awful in its emptiness and mystery. On every side there were dark openings into cells whence came gleams of white, indefinite forms: a great Gorgon's head gazed at us from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... geraniums and mignonette, snapdragons, gazenias and stocks, exceeding bright and fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte Epomeo for a background and Vesuvius for far distance. There are wonderful bits of detail in this garden. One dark, thick-foliaged olive, I remember, leaning from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered waist-high in huge acanthus-leaves. The whole rich orchard ground of Casamicciola is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may be called the raison d'etre of Ischia; for this island is nothing but a mountain lifted by the energy of fire ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... curvatures, while the depth of the whole might possibly a little exceed the greatest width. He will then occupy the spot of which we wish to present to him one of the fairest panoramas of earth. On his right stands a high, rocky island of dark tufa, rendered gay, amid all its magnificent formations, by smiling vineyards and teeming villages, and interesting by ruins that commemorate events as remote as the Caesars. A narrow passage of the blue Mediterranean separates this island from a bold cape on the main, whence ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... western openings are either narrow gaps, or access to them is barred by colossal walls and pillars of volcanic rocks. The entire formation of the chain, as far as it faces the Rio Grande, is volcanic, the walls of the gorges consisting generally of a friable white or yellowish tufa containing nodules of black, translucent obsidian. The rock is so soft that in many places it can be scooped out or detached with the most primitive tools, or even with the fingers alone. Owing to this peculiarity the slopes exposed to the south and east, whence most of the heavy rains strike ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... lagoon where all the waterbirds that love both the sea and the marsh came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were cliffs of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... light and friable, and below lay a bed of silicious tufa; therefore, even without tools, the aperture deepened quickly. It soon became evident that a man, or men, clinging to the sides of the "pah," were cutting a passage into its exterior wall. What could be the object? Did they know of the existence of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Do you know that when I am out here, and stumble over the door-way of an old Roman tomb, or find one of those thousand caves in the tufa rock, I often have a curious feeling that from out that tomb or cave will stalk forth in broad daylight some old Roman centurion ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... entire width of the building, and a buffalo-team could have passed in without let. Outside stood a wine-cart, from which they were unloading several small casks of wine. The driver's seat had a hood over it, protecting him from the sun, as he lazily sleeps there, rumbling over the tufa road, to or from the Campagna, and around the seat were painted in gay colors various patterns of things unknown. In the autumn, vine-branches with pendent, rustling leaves decorate hood and horse, while in spring or summer, a bunch of flowers often ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... contact. By such means, at rare intervals, leaves, seeds, and fruits have been sealed up for future inspection, and from a careful study of all such instances much valuable information has been obtained. At one place in the valley of the Seine was discovered, under a bed of tufa, the remains of a forest growth. It is not doubted that the deposit belongs to ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... never been on the back of any animal before, and was nevertheless not surprised or daunted at falling off frequently, though an interlude of being dragged along with one foot in the stirrup over lava beds made no little impression upon him. Fodder of all kinds is very scarce in the volcanic tufa of which all that land consists, and any moment that one stopped was always devoted by our ponies to grubbing for blades of grass in the holes. On our return to the ship the crew could not help noticing that the skipper for many days ceased to patronize ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to stone villages. To this latter type belong a number of cavate lodges on the northern side of Clear creek, about 4 miles above its mouth. The cavate lodges of the Verde differ in some particulars from those found in other regions; they are not excavated in tufa or volcanic ash, nor are the fronts of the chambers generally walled up. Front walls are found here, but they are the exception and ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff |
