"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Iceland, and outlawry there in that terrible climate, with no house to cover his head, would seem an ordeal impossible for human endurance. Between the autumn of 1022 and the spring of 1024, that is to say during two winters, he lived in a cave in the west of the island. A steep shale slide was below a cliff, and above this a hollow in the rock. He built up the mouth of the cave, and hung grey wadmal before the entrance, so that none below could notice anything peculiar, or any one living there. Whatever fuel he wanted, all he had to eat, everything he needed, had to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... way, a shaft or pit, fifteen feet wide and two hundred feet deep, was dug on the western side of the river. From the bottom of this the boring or 'heading' (as the beginning of a tunnel is called) was worked east and west through rock and shale. Gunpowder was exploded in small holes drilled at frequent intervals to shatter this material; and when we remember that the 'heading' was only about six feet high and six feet wide we can imagine how uncomfortable this work must have been. Various kinds of drills have been invented for ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... way, and descended under the rim. It was up and down over rough shale, and up steps of broken rocks, and down little cliffs. We crossed the ridge twice, many times having to lend a hand to ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... In shale and sandy soil, even in the gravel of hillsides, one finds the narrowly divided, finely cut leaves and the bicolored beardless blossom of the BIRD'S-FOOT VIOLET (V. pedata), pale bluish purple on the lower petals, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... only lines of poetry and prose Father wrote. They are still very legible on the face of the landscape and cannot be easily erased from it. Gathered out of the confusion of nature, built up of fragments of the old Devonian rock and shale, laid with due regard to the wear and tear of time, well- bottomed and well-capped, establishing boundaries and defining possessions, etc., these lines of stone wall afford a good lesson in many things besides wall building. They are good literature and good philosophy. They ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... was 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 every month, when the janitor ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 which one of them ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... have spent the season 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 ferns of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... bed is not made up entirely of pure coal, especially if it be very thick. Sometimes there are layers of shale or clay, which makes a large amount of ash. This can never be sold as regular marketable coal; but it is rich in carbon, and much of it might be used if it could be marketed near the mines and sold as low-grade coal. In the past there has been ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... gathered 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 ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... permitted. When the slopes gave a southern exposure they were covered with grape-vines, planted with the utmost precision and regularity. Every corner and cranny among the rocks was utilized. The original planting must have been difficult, for the soil was covered with slabs of shale. The cultivator should develop excellent lungs in scaling those hillsides. The leaves had fallen and the bare vines varied in hue from sepia brown to wine color, with occasional patches of evergreen to set off the ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... 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 ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... was in 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 ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... it, this thing has been, or will be, the subject of discourse and dissection amongst your friends. It may not be told in an injurious or exaggerated manner, and it may not travel far; but none the less do you walk on treacherous shale, which may give way at any moment under your feet. The art of living, if you are afraid of the passing of your secret from the few who know to the many who welcome a new scandal, is to go on walking with the light and confident step of youth, never so much as quailing in your own mind at the thought ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sworn 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
... loose, half a mile off the nearest town. Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed until half-past nine at night. Full of consideration for the new mates now fast wedded to his heart by an accident. Matthew Shale proposed to Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the honest Susan, to be rowed ashore off the Swin to Felixstowe sands ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... Mariano di Lugo," paused here before it, and then vanished. It is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... issues: air heavily polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; contamination of soil and groundwater with petroleum products, chemicals at former Soviet military bases natural hazards: flooding occurs frequently in the spring international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 been beyond ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... whole 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 ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... enough 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 Forest • Stewart Edward White
... to 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
... 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 in with ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... 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, Garrisons ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole village is lighted by it. Elsewhere, a farm-house ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 they had been so brought up, and so ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore |
