"Treeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exquisite beauty and the delicacy of the contrasts between the downs and the richly-foliaged fields through which the Avon winds. It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar and ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... but richly sown, with many sad relics of the storm, mostly deck cargo, which is not so great a loss, as it is always lying, so to speak, upon expectancy or adventure; and when it goes, it is a relief to the ship and a great and especial blessing to these treeless coasts, particularly when it comes ashore well split up and distributed, a few planks at each place, so that the Lensmand [Footnote: Sheriff's officer.] cannot see any greater accumulation at any one place than that he can, with a good conscience, abandon an auction ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... corrugated iron sheets, while to the left, where a similar street crossed the railroad at right angles, there was a one-story cement building proudly labeled "Bank." Both streets suddenly disappeared in a sandy, treeless plain. ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... o'clock in the morning we stopped forty minutes at Tchertchen, almost at the foot of the ramifications of the Kuen Lun. None of us had seen this miserable, desolate country, treeless and verdureless, which the railway was now crossing on its road ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... is utterly treeless! I once knew a particularly awkward, homely, and freckled young lady named "Lily." The circumstance always seemed grimly humorous to me, and I remembered it as we strolled through the town that couldn't live ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... knew—the European shops, the big, cool houses, the Maidan—and drove through native streets, airless, treeless, drab-coloured places, until we despaired of ever reaching anywhere. When at last our man did stop, we found Mrs. Gardner's cool, English-looking drawing-room a welcome refuge from the glare and the dust; and she was kindness itself. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... be no mistake as to your course; the plain is perfectly level and treeless, and we ought easily to get there for our mid-day halt. How far do ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like. Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he was withal fond of a well-turned story ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure: that is to say, when it is of the kind to my taste. I enjoyed that day, though we travelled slowly, though it was cold, though it rained. Somewhat bare, flat, and treeless was the route along which our journey lay; and slimy canals crept, like half-torpid green snakes, beside the road; and formal pollard willows edged level fields, tilled like kitchen-garden beds. The sky, too, was monotonously gray; the atmosphere was stagnant and humid; yet amidst all these deadening ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... a hand inside his coat and clutched at the papers that Jean de Gravois had read. Then he drew them forth, slowly, and held them crumpled in his fingers, while for many minutes he stared straight out into the gray gloom of the treeless plain. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... coast had a singularly wild, bare, and storm-beaten appearance. We beheld the rugged and treeless sides of barren hills; and here and there, where vegetation struggled with sterility, its stunted growth and northern inclination caused by the prevailing winds testified to an ungenial clime; high, bare-faced peaks ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... all hope of life. And at last they touched the ground, and when daylight came they waded to the shore; and saw nothing round but sand, and desolate salt pools; for they had come to the quicksands of the Syrtis, and the dreary treeless flats, which lie between Numidia and Cyrene, on the burning shore of Africa. And there they wandered starving for many a weary day, ere they could launch their ship again, and gain the open sea. And there Canthus was killed while he was trying to drive off sheep, by a ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... much as we left it,— the large bay without a vessel in it, the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach, the white Mission, the dark town, and the high, treeless mountains. Here, too, we had our southeaster tacks aboard again,— slip-ropes, buoy-ropes, sails furled with reefs in them, and rope-yarns for gaskets. We lay at this place about a fortnight, employed in landing goods and taking off hides, occasionally, when the surf was ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless wastes and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches from between the Qu'-Appelle to the Saskatchewan rivers. Through it the great trail to the North lays its long, winding course, and over it broods the loneliness of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Environment: treeless, sparse and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; lacks fresh water; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for seabirds, shorebirds, and ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him—quaint, treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low balsam shrubs. Now and again they passed a straggling white village roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there would be a few trees, and on these the early ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... shorn, And the roads are gay with the riders, and the bull in the stall is left, And the plough is alone in the furrow, and the wedge in the hole half-cleft; And late shall the ewes be folded, and the kine come home to the pail, And late shall the fires be litten in the outmost treeless dale: For men fare to the gate of Giuki and the ancient cloudy hall, And therein are the earls assembled and the kings wear purple and pall, And the flowers are spread beneath them, and the bench-cloths beaten with gold; And the walls are strange and wondrous with the noble stories ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the width of the river actually separating the faces of the two works. At the time the fleet arrived, the woods on the west bank had been cleared away below Jackson almost to the extreme range of its guns, thus affording no shelter from observation; the east bank was nearly treeless. Extending across the river from below Jackson, and under the guns of both works, was a line of obstructions which ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... made his way a score of miles southward from the big dune on the Barren. For a day and a night he made his camp in the scrub timber which edged the vast treeless tundras reaching to the Arctic. He believed he was safe, for the unceasing wind and the blasts of shot-like snow filled his tracks a few moments after they were made. He struck a straight line for his cabin after that first day and night in the scrub timber. The ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... as I say, was grassy and quite treeless, although it rose like a truncated sugar-cone out of a wilderness of trees which stretched for miles below us, north, south, east, and west, bordered on the horizon by towering blue mountains, their distant ranges enclosing the forests as in a ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... January De Vlaming quitted the anchorage near Rottnest Island, and followed the coast until 30 deg. 17' S. lat. was reached. Two boats were there sent to the shore and soundings were taken. The country near the landing-place was sandy and treeless, and neither human beings nor fresh water were to be seen. But footmarks resembling those of a dog were seen, and also a bird which the Journaal calls a 'Kasuaris' and which must have been ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... little door, and carefully cleans the plants. Constant heat, damp, and moisture, shelter from solar beams, from scorching heat, and from nocturnal radiation, are thus all procured for the plant, which would certainly not live twenty-four hours, if exposed to the climate of this treeless district. Great attention is paid to the cultivation, which is very profitable. Snakes frequently take up their quarters in these hot-houses, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of Vendee and Maine-et-Loire. Its surface is irregular and covered with hedges and clumps of wood or forests. The systematic application of lime has much improved the soil, which is naturally poor. The Plaine, resting on oolite limestone, is treeless but fertile. The Marais, a low-lying district in the extreme south-west, consists of alluvial clays which also are extremely productive when properly drained. The highest points, several of which exceed 700 ft., ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... is a creature of the woods. On the prairies and in treeless regions it is not known. It prefers heavy "timber," where there are huge logs and hollow trees in plenty. It requires the neighbourhood of water, and in connection with this may be mentioned a curious habit it has, that of plunging all its food into the water before ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... from Pernatty. North of the Gawler Range he found available pastoral country, which became known as Swinden's country. During this year also, Miller and Dutton explored the country at the back of Fowler's Bay. Forty miles to the north they saw treeless, grassy plains stretching far inland, but could find no permanent water. Warburton afterwards reported in depreciatory terms of this region; but Delisser and Hardwicke, who also visited it, stated that it would make first-class pastoral country if only surface water could be obtained. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... distant sky-line (Now pansy-blue and clear), We know a land is waiting, A brown land, very dear: A land of open spaces, Gaunt forest, treeless plain: And if we once have loved it We must come ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... highest ground the crests of the bare Cevennes were seen against the cloudless sky to the south. A little to the east, beyond the valley of the Cernon, which I intended to cross, were high hills or cliffs, treeless and sterile, with hard-cut angular sides, terminating upwards in vertical walls of naked stone. These were the buttresses of the Causse de Larzac. The lower sides of some of the hills were blue ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... rye. But, nevertheless, that dry jungle obviously supplied food for a great number of animals, for several times each day the travelers met considerable herds of antelopes, hartbeests, and particularly zebras. The heat on the open and treeless plain became unbearable. The sky was cloudless, the days were excessively hot, and the night did ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... The land around was treeless and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... third day they passed into a stretch of barren, treeless, rolling country, and before midday turned upon a well-beaten komatik trail, which they followed for a couple of miles, when it swung sharply to the left towards the river, and as they turned around a ledge of rocks at the top of a low ridge a view met Bob that made him shout with ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... Orange Free State and of the Transvaal lies wholly within this table-land. In this region, and throughout Africa south of 25 deg., there are river beds, but no navigable rivers. The country is generally treeless, and there is a great deficiency of steady natural water supply. During the rainy season, from October to March, the naked ground fails to retard the running off of the waters, which therefore escape rapidly by the rivers, swelling them to momentary torrents that quickly and fruitlessly subside. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... grand perron. The proprietors were of all degrees: here was the great house of a lord, there a miserable dramshop. The enclosure consisted of no less than thirteen acres, making Stephen's Green the largest public square in Europe. It was simply a great treeless field, with an equestrian statue of George II. stuck in the middle of it. The principal entrance to the ground is described as "decorated with four piers of black stone crowned with globes of mountain granite, once respectable, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... treeless on either hand the river, but it rose, about a couple of miles off, curving into a front of glaring chalk, with a small well known town sparkling in the distance like a handful of frost in a white split. The horizon astern was broken by the moving bodies of many ships in full sail, and the ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow, treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge of the sky,—it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense of imponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I was vaguely aware as the jumper—rigorous vehicle!—disappeared ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... rainfall. The bush, or great forest, which is almost impenetrable in the coastal belt, becomes somewhat more open in patches in the middle belt, while on the plateau open, park-like country alternates with treeless, grassy plains, and the forest is confined to the deep valleys or the mountain-slopes. The rainfall, which is fair on the coast, becomes very light in the middle belt, which in consequence tends to have an arid character; on the plateau it is high or very high. Because of these marked ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... undergrowth of low bushes; others are covered with tall spruce, fir, and hemlocks, standing up in stately and solemn grandeur, their arms lovingly intertwined, through the everlasting verdure of which the sun never shines; and others still are gigantic rocks, rising up out of the deep water, all treeless and shrubless, remaining always in brown and barren desolation, on which the eagle and osprey devour their prey, and the flocks of gulls that frequent the lake 'light to rest from their almost ceaseless flight. Civilization has not as ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Men carried off their surplus to people who had none. The country that raised corn carried it to the country that could raise no corn. The lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. The vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. It was all service. When all the peoples of the world become developed in the art of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. Business ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... theories seem to be inconsistent with the plain facts of the case. First, we know that these prairies existed in their present condition when the first white man visited them, two hundred years ago; and also that similar treeless plains exist in South America and Central Africa, and have so existed ever since those countries were known. We are told by travellers in those regions, that the natives have the same custom of annually burning the dry grass and herbage for the same reason that our Indians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Thereafter they came amongst great timber-trees with wood lawns betwixt, and but little underwood, and a goodly piece of the world that seemed unto Osberne. Three days it held so, and then came broken ground, whiles with much tangled thicket and whiles treeless, and this was a two days' ride; and many were the wild deer therein, so that their cheer was greatly amended. Thereafter was the wood thinner and more plain, and there was a clear road through it; and on the first day of their riding this way they came upon a sort ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... the native races of South America must be convinced that these have all originated in a common stirps. Many local differences exist, but none capable of invalidating this conclusion. The warmth yet shade-loving Indian of the Amazon; the Indian of the hot, dry and treeless coasts of Peru and Guayaquil, who exposes his bare head to the sun with as much zest as an African negro; the Indian of the Andes, for whom no cold seems too great, who goes constantly barelegged and often bare-headed, through whose rude straw hut the piercing wind of the paramos sweeps ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... arrive on the plains from the South about the last of April, tarry for nearly a month, then hie to the upper mountain parks, stopping there to spend the month of May. By the first of June they have ascended above timber-line to their summer home amid the treeless slopes and acclivities. Laying begins early in July, as soon as the first grass is started. Most of the nests are to be found at an elevation of twelve thousand to thirteen thousand feet, the lowest known being one on Mount Audubon, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... got to the valleys yet," said I, eagerly, connecting Mormons with fertility and jasmine. And I lifted the flaps of the stage, first one side and then the other, and saw the desert everywhere flat, treeless, and staring like an eye without ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... utilitarianism of the first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature. For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is tempted to adopt the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in an open place beside the main road to Muirtown, treeless and comfortless, built of red, staring stone, with a playground for the boys and another for the girls, and a trim, smug-looking teacher's house, all very neat and symmetrical, and well regulated. The local paper had a paragraph ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Maehrchen" and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless, treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge begins ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... seen to-day is an almost treeless, though not unfertile, stretch of rock, with a harbour on the north coast which must always make the place a necessary possession to the first sea power of Europe. Much of its soil is of comparatively modern creation, and four thousand years ago the island may well have had ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin. It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate. The plaster, gnawed away by winds laden with searching sea-moisture, had fallen to earth, exposing the underlying ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... I confess that if I were called upon to camp out in this weather under a tente d'abri, and only given some very smoky green wood to keep me warm, I should not be quite so valorous as I should wish to be. Passing through the Bois, which is rapidly becoming a treeless waste, I went forward in the direction of Fontenay. As the Prussian bombs, however, were falling thickly into the village, I executed a strategical movement to the left, and fell back by a cross ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... in the afternoon when he rode unhesitatingly into the treeless, grassless waste of dry mud and mica studded lava rock, giving no heed to the fact that water holes were few and far between and known only to the initiated. Darkness found him following down a dry coulee into which high-walled, narrow mud cracks led in ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... of which is La Purgatoire. It is about five miles from the post and makes a nice objective point for a short ride, for the clear water gurgling over the stones, and the trees and bushes along its banks, are always attractive in this treeless country. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... monk, standing amid the stunted shrubs on the hill of San Lucido, had looked out on the arid plain before him. It was all brown and grey, the desolate ground strewn with huge granite boulders, treeless; and for the wretched sheep who fed there, thin and scanty grass; the shepherd, in his tattered cloak, sat on a rock, moodily, paying no heed to his flock, dully looking at the desert round him. Brother Jasper gazed at the scene as he had gazed for three ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... creeping around some gaping fissure, that opened across our track—there wading over a sandy swell—and anon rolling briskly along the smooth, herbless plain; for the country we were passing through was a parched and treeless desert. ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... shore a bleak, barren, treeless waste, "without weeds, grass or timber of any sort to make a fire." It was bitter cold. A fierce wind swept the ocean and the land, and the sea ran so high that it was expected every moment the ship would go to pieces. These poor emigrants ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... they are the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... more horrible and dreary, exhibiting the very "palpable obscure," than our course of to-day. As far as the eye can stretch on every side is one vast, solitary, lifeless, treeless expanse of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... The afternoon was wearing away; the sun was very low now and all its strength had gone. The wolf followed us, howling from afar. Once I saw it across the treeless wastes—a gaunt, white, dog-like figure, trotting against the steely ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... bid you cease to enwreathe Brows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Persian's foot, You that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a slave! Rather I hail thee, Parnes,—trust to thy wild waste tract! Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! What matter if slacked My speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to cave No deity deigns to drape with verdure?—at least I can breathe, Fear in thee no fraud from the ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... horse to ride, or the rudest cart to drive in. When, as time went on, gold was found high up the streams amongst the ice-cold rivers and bleak tussock-covered mountains of the interior, the hardships endured by the gold-seekers were often very great. The country was treeless and wind-swept. Sheep roamed over the tussocks, but of other provisions there were none. Hungry diggers were thankful to pay half a crown for enough flour to fill a tin pannikin. L120 a ton was charged for carting goods from Dunedin. Not only did fuel fetch siege prices, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... quivered in the hedge above her; larks were in the air, daisies in the grass, and the march of sunny clouds could be seen in the flying shadows they flung on the pale greens and sheeny purples of the wide treeless basin. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 19th, at about 80 miles to the east of my former track, I found myself on the brink of the Stony Desert. Coming suddenly on it I almost lost my breath. If anything, it looked more forbidding than before. Herbless and treeless, it filled more than half of the horizon. Not an object was visible on which to steer, yet we held on our course by compass like ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... out. It is better to dig wheat and corn from the soil than gold. Only a few days ago I was where they wrench the precious metals from the miserly clutch of the rocks. When I saw the mountains, treeless, shrub-less, flowerless, without even a spire of grass, it seemed to me that gold had the same effect upon the country that holds it, as upon the man who lives and labors only for that. It affects the land as it does the man. It leaves the heart barren without a flower of kindness—without ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... been sent to many of the countries of the Eastern and Western hemispheres for seeds and plants that may be useful to the United States, and with the further view of opening up markets for our surplus products. The Forestry Division of the Department is giving special attention to the treeless regions of our country and is introducing species specially adapted to semiarid regions. Forest fires, which seriously interfere with production, especially in irrigated regions, are being studied, that losses from this cause may be avoided. The Department is inquiring into ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... channel widened, and the river became very shallow, the low rolling hills falling away into a wide green prairie. We camped that night on a small island, low and treeless, but covered with deep, rank grass. Next morning our sleeping-bags were wet with frost and dew. A hard pull against a heavy wind between gradually deepening rocky banks made us more than glad to pitch camp at noon a ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... the Will of God, Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts, Which from this point begin and stretch away, Pathless, treeless, waterless, For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many mighty Nations, 5 Rested from their labors and from great afflictions Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall, And by the favor of KIEN LONG, God's Lieutenant upon Earth, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... flattened and pressed over to one side, and altogether they seemed so piteous, that one wished to say, "Nobody shall do so to you any more, poor things!" Excepting these, the immediate coast, for five or six hundred miles that we skirted it, was absolutely treeless. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... personal defamation—"they will tell you, I say, that our horses of the best blood are derived from the Nesaean pastures of Persia. God gave the first Arab a measureless waste of sand, with some treeless mountains, and here and there a well of bitter waters; and said to him, 'Behold thy country!' And when the poor man complained, the Mighty One pitied him, and said again, 'Be of cheer! for I will twice bless thee above other men.' The Arab heard, and gave thanks, and with faith set out to find ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... X.'s duties compel him to make his home in the jungle. The word has many significations in the East, where it is often used to express a region remote from civilization, although perhaps consisting of barren mountains or treeless plains. Mr. X.'s jungle, however, is one realizing what it represents to the untravelled Englishman. It is a land of hill and dale covered with thickly growing forest trees, with here and there by the side of the rivers, which are Nature's thoroughfares, or the main roads made by man, small oases ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... prairies of South America; while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian word for field. The words are synonyms, but come from different hemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a word descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the flower-sown, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... partly on the banks of Red River, and partly on the banks of a smaller stream called the Assinaboine, in latitude 50 degrees, and extends upwards of fifty miles along the banks of these two streams. The country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... able to last: and the salt is dug up there both white and purple in colour. 168 Above the sand-belt, in the parts which are in the direction of the South Wind and towards the interior of Libya, the country is uninhabited, without water and without wild beasts, rainless and treeless, and there is no ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... heathen who was currying favour with his wooden deity by sitting for some years motionless in a treeless plain, observed a young ivy putting forth her tender shoots at his feet. He thought he could endure the additional martyrdom of a little shade, and begged her to make ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... harbour-mouth's just beneath. We've hit it fine," and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long, treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from Duncan's eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... went to the doorway, looking out over Bud's shoulder at the spiritless donkeys trailing in to water. Beyond them the desert baked in its rim of hot, treeless hills. Above them the sky glared a brassy blue with never a could. Over a low ridge came Monte and Pete, walking with heads drooping. Their hip bones lifted above their ridged paunches, their backbones, peaked sharp ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... a rocky ledge, casts its waters into the northern end of the great Lake Winnipeg, fully 1300 miles from the glacier cradle where it took its birth. This river, which has along it every diversity of hill and vale, meadow-land and forest, treeless plain and fertile hill-side, is called by the wild tribes who dwell-along its glorious shores the Kissaskatchewan, or Rapid-flowing River. But this Kissaskatchewan is not the only river which waters the great central region lying ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... their situation the Eskimos led a very different life from that of the Indians to the south. They must rely on fishing and hunting for food. In that almost treeless north they had no wood to build boats or houses, and no vegetables or plants to supply them either with food or with the materials of industry. But the very rigour of their surroundings called forth in them a marvellous ingenuity. They made ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... obvious between Kooner and Cabul, that the transition from absolutely treeless mountains to well-wooded ones occurs nearer to Kooner than Cabul, because the Hindoo-koosh about Cabul, and to the eastward, is said ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... thus much about a picture, we have explained why Californian views, even in our great, almost treeless valleys, grow so into our hearts and imaginations, after the first dash of disappointment at not finding them like the vernal vales of New England or central New York. But Tesoro Rancho was not treeless. Great spreading oaks furnished just the ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... treeless mountain lift up a signal, raise a cry to them, Wave the hand that they may enter the princely gates. I myself have given command to my consecrated ones, to execute my wrath, I have also summoned my ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... with their sky, a sun-field in the day, a gallery of stars at night, and their winds, flying from sea to sea, but gathering no taint, the deserts are treeless, and unknowing the sweetness of gardens and the glory of grass, it was not by accident or forgetfulness; for with him, the Compassionate, the Merciful, there are no accidents or lapses of any kind. He is all attention and ever present. Thus the Throne verse—'Drowsiness overcomes him not nor ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the secondary from the primary and schistose rocks of the peninsula of Araya. Each of these coasts is washed by a tranquil sea, of azure tint, and always gently agitated by a breeze from one quarter. A bright clear sky, with a few light clouds at sunset, reposes on the ocean, on the treeless peninsula, and on the plains of Cumana, while we see the storms accumulate and descend in fertile showers among the inland mountains. Thus on these coasts, as well as at the foot of the Andes, the earth and the sky present the extremes ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters, in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have changed ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... has been acknowledged for untold ages, when our forefathers sought for images of that which they felt to be the most terrible in life; thus originated the fable of the subterranean dwelling of Hela, of the terrors of the shore of corpses—in one word, the "Hell of the North, with its infinite, treeless wildernesses; with cold, darkness, mist, clammy rivers, chill, distilling poison, cities resembling clouds filled with rain, feetless ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... Bivouacked on the treeless plain, so far from the old trail and from the timber ahead that they could see no sign of the Black Hillers or the troops, the next morning's sun rose on the band of Sioux led by Persimmon Bill. Used to all kinds ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... country as usual—malaria, marshes, mosquitoes, misery; far as the eye can reach, vast treeless marshes perfectly lifeless. At times progressing slowly by towing, the men struggling through the water with the rope; at other times by running round the boat in a circle, pulling with their hands at the grass, which thus acts like the cogs of a wheel to move us gradually forward. One of my ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... the farther wilderness, the vaster unknown. When news of the finding of gold in the Rockies came across the plains, legions of adventurers trailed westward. The few roads that led across the rolling prairies to the Rockies were soon deep-cut. Wagons trains strung out across the treeless land like huge, creeping serpents moving lazily in the sun. Joyfully the adventurers went—happy, courageous. They were the vanguards of civilization, pushing ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... Snow might have been as transported with delight over the aspect of the valley as he professed to be, others of the party could see only a desolate, treeless plain, with sage brush supplying the vegetation. To the women especially the outlook was ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Mississippi is a very different country from the hot and treeless prairies of Illinois. As Stephen alighted at the little station at Glencoe and was driven away by Ned in the Colonel's buggy, he drew in deep breaths of the sweet air of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... colour, caused by the woody fibre mixed with the pure starch which forms the tapioca. There were also several cabbage-palms, always a welcome addition to our vegetables. Among the fruit were some pine-apples, which had been procured in a dry treeless district—so we understood—some miles in ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... Pelee is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor; but the great mountain, treeless, wrinkled, implacable, seemed to Stuart to throw a solemn shadow of threat upon the town. The secret of St. Pierre, as Stuart wrote to his paper, "lies in the hope of its inhabitants, but its real future lies ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 1872.—A continuous covering of forests is a sign of a virgin country. The earlier seats of civilization are bare and treeless according to Humboldt. The civilization of the human race sets bounds to the increase of forests. It is but recently that sylvan decorations rejoice the eyes of the Northern Europeans. The old forests attest the youthfulness of our ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... this lonely land, This stony, treeless waste, Where East, due East, across the sand, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... the sheep-proof fence of the smaller paddock they came out upon a wide plain, almost treeless, save for the timber along the creek, where their cattle track still led them. Far as they could see no fence broke the line of yellow grass. There were groups of cattle out on the plain. These were store bullocks, Jim explained, a draft ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... find pasture there. And as the mountains decline into hills, and the hills into downs and flats, the covering of herbage becomes less and less scanty. When the colonists came to the east coast, they found plains and dales which were open, grassy, almost treeless. Easy of access, and for the most part fertile, they were an ideal country for that unaesthetic person, the practical settler. Flocks and herds might roam amongst the pale tussock grass of the slopes and bottoms without fear ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... mountains which cluster round the famed Mount Erix, on which once stood a temple dedicated to Venus. On leaving Alcamo, which may be called a city of convents, midway between Palermo and Segeste, the broad slopes of an ample valley lie before the traveller, which though almost treeless, are waving with beans, and grain and grass. In the depth, is a river meandering among fragrant oleanders; on the left, the valley is intersected by a range of distant mountains; on the right is a beautiful ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... prairies, and there were officers who forbade their senseless slaughter to make food only for the worthless, prowling coyotes. No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... tenth day, as I remember,—though it may have been later, for I have no writing to guide me concerning dates,—when we emerged into a broad valley, treeless save for a thin fringe of dwarfed growth skirting the bank of a shallow stream which ran almost directly westward. I cannot describe how sweet, after our gloomy journey, the sunlight appeared, as we first marked it play in golden waves over the long grass; ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... reached from Colorado Springs by an electric road which runs along the mesa south of the town. As the car nears the end of the line, one begins to look around for the grove. Not a tree is in sight; right and left as far as can be seen stretches the treeless plain to the foot of the eternal hills; not even the top of a tall pine thrusts itself above the dead level. Before you is Cheyenne—grim, glorious, but impenetrable. The conductor stops. "This is your place," he says. You see no place; you think he ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... terrible Noche Triste, it was concealed by him in the place where it was afterwards discovered. At all events, the image disappeared, and nothing further was known of it until, on the top of a barren and treeless mountain, in the heart of a large maguey, she was found by a fortunate Indian. Her restoration was joyfully hailed by the Spaniards. A church was erected on the spot. A priest was appointed to take charge of the miraculous image. Her fame ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... in the tomb, For I would die among the hills of Spain, And o'er the treeless, melancholy plain Await the coming of the final gloom. But thou — O pitiful! — wilt find scant room Among thy kindred by the northern main, And fade into the drifting mist again, The hemlocks' shadow, or ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Haguna wended her lonely way to the bleak hill. It was so stony and bare and treeless,—jutting out against the gray cold sky like a giant sentinel stripped naked, yet still with dogged obstinacy clinging to his post. The hard path pushed up over jagged stones that cut her tender feet, and they left bleeding waymarks on the difficult ascent. Woe, woe to poor trembling Haguna! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... soil. In the pockets of the foothills, where a greater depth of soil had accumulated from the washings of the slopes above, beautiful little groves of trees might be found, and the islands of the Platte River were heavily wooded. Everywhere else was a treeless waste. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... down entirely the night after poor Micah was buried, Mrs. Challen said I went crazy; that I'd kneel down at the side of the bed an' cry as if my heart would break; that again an' again I went to the front door an' looked up an' down the lonely, treeless road, an' then to the back door, where I would call "Micah!" "Micah!"—just as I'd been used to callin' him to his meals, an' I'd listen, with my hand to my ear, to hear him answer. Last of all, worst of all, she said, I went staggerin' ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... thoughts. How often in my long voyages, by canoe or steamer, among the thousand islands of southeastern Alaska, the intricate channels of Prince William's Sound, the great rivers, and multitudinous lakes of the Interior, and the treeless, windswept coasts of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean; or in my tramps in the summer over the mountains and plains of Alaska, or in the winter with my dogs over the frozen wilderness fighting the great battle with the fierce cold or spellbound under the magic of ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... itself borrowed from a higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... with ships and junks, and closed on the opposite side by a semi-circle of hills, bold, rugged, and bare, and glowing in the bright sunset.... When we got beyond the town, the hill along which we were walking began to remind me of some of the scenery in the Highlands—steep and treeless, the water gushing out at every step among the huge granite boulders, and dashing with a merry noise across our path. After somewhat more than an hour's walk we turned back, and began to descend a long and precipitous path, ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... meals, nor during the shopping tour that occupied the whole of the following day, nor yet upon the long homeward drive, did he appear. The return trip was slower and more monotonous even than the journey to town. The horses crawled along the interminable treeless trail with the heavily loaded wagon bumping and rattling in the choking ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Magellan varies from three to seventy miles in width. The scenery along its shores, low and treeless in the eastern part, elsewhere is mountainous and heavily wooded—mainly with beech. In various places lofty precipices rise abruptly from the water's edge; throughout most of its extent the shore line is ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the way was leading. He only knew that he had wandered for some time, when a prospect of white, open country began to show in peeps through the trees ahead. Presently he came to the edge of the forest, and saw that the cast of his dagger had led him wide of his mark. A long stretch of treeless country opened out before him, getting wider and wider in the distance. Near at hand a narrow lake began, and stretched for a mile or two down the snow- fields, and, like the greater lake they had passed, it was frozen and shining white. Less than ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott and Peary who have fought ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... campaign here than in Egypt. The sun seems to scorch into your very brain, and you are suffocated by dust. Drink as much as you will, you are always tormented by thirst. It is a level plain, for the most part treeless, and with nothing to break the view but the mud villages, which are the same colour as the soil. Bah! we loathed them. And yet I ought not to say anything against the villages, for, if it had not been for one of them, I should not ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... month afterwards Swinden started again from PERNATTY, and found available pastoral land north of the Gawler Ranges, which became known as Swinden's country. During this year, also, Messrs. Miller and Dutton explored the country at the back of Fowler's Bay. Forty miles to the north they saw treeless plains stretching far inland, but they found no permanent water. Warburton afterwards reported deprecatingly of this country, but Messrs. Delisser and Hardwicke in their turn stated that it was first-class pastoral ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... relief produces a monotonous existence, necessarily one-sided, needing a complement in upland or mountain. To the pioneer settlers in the lowlands of Missouri the Ozark Plateau was a boon, because its streams furnished water-power for much needed saw and flour mills. Treeless Egypt even before 2500 B. C. depended upon the cedars of the Lebanon Mountains for the construction of its ships; so that the conquest of Lebanon, begun by Thutmose I. and completed by Thutmose III. in about 1470 B. C., had a sound geographical basis.[1033] Similarly the exploitation ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... morning in 1883, two wagons moved slowly out of Boomtown, the two-year-old "giant of the plains." As the teams drew past the last house, the strangeness of the scene appealed irresistibly to the newly arrived immigrants. The town lay behind them on the level, treeless plain like a handful of blocks pitched upon a russet robe. Its houses were mainly shanties of pine, one-story in height, while here and there actual tents gleamed in the half-light with infinite ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... beautiful and gracious use of the cloud was to shelter them from the fiery sun. Like a great umbrella, that majestic pillar spread its canopy above the camp, and became a shielding shadow from the burning heat in the treeless desert. No one who has never felt an Oriental sun can fully appreciate how much this means—a shadow ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... the hunters were! They did not know what these strange animals were. They did not know from what place they had come. They wondered why they had come to their land. Perhaps you would like to know. They were musk sheep that had come from the cold, cold north. They were used to treeless, desolate places. They were used to eating moss and young shoots of the willow. They looked something like sheep and something like oxen. Sometimes they are called musk oxen. They looked something like the bison. ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... time he was intent upon the minute details of the landscape that ran swiftly northward beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter. He tried to make out places he had known within the hollow basin of the world below, but at first he could distinguish ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... a small treeless valley near a range of hills. Although I did not wear anything but the isar, I was never annoyed out of doors. The bazaars are less beggarly than those at Ravandus, the chan is large and comfortable. I found the appearance ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... started, she relapsed into silence. The sunshine was flooding the treeless hills and mellowing the cool, clean air. Up and down, as far as the eye could follow, which was very far in this land of great distances, the trail sought the big dominant hills that broke the sky-line before them. The outlook ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... guide to the faithful through all the circling years: murderers who had gained sanctuary with barbaric jewels in their blood-stained hands: once tortured men and women who had cast away terrible recollections in the wastes among the dunes and in the treeless purple distances, and who had been granted the sweet oases of forgetfulness to dwell in: ardent beings who had striven vainly to rest content with the world of hills and valleys, of sea-swept verges and murmuring rivers, and who had been driven, by the labouring ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... first raising young trees in nurseries and later setting them out in their permanent locations in the forest. This method is applicable where quick results are desired, where the area is not too large, or in treeless regions and large open gaps where there is little chance for new trees to spring up from seed furnished by the neighboring trees. It is a method extensively practiced abroad where some of the finest forests are the result. The U.S. government, as well as many of the States, ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... Wilderness. First thing, on clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small windows. Last thing, at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through open doorway, or flimsy curtain from within. They stood alone, but curiously united and self-sufficing, upon the treeless inhospitable piece of land, ringed by the rivers, the great whispering reed-beds and the tide. Their life was strangely apart from, defiant of, that of the mainland and the village. It yielded obedience to traditions and customs of an earlier, wilder age; and in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the mountain-sides themselves and reaches to the very borders of eternal snow. Over this vast forest with its treasures of tree and plant, animal and insect life, tropical, temperate, and alpine, the eagle might have soared; and then, passing over the Himalayan watershed, have looked down upon the treeless, open, undulating, almost uninhabited plain of Tibet, and in the distance seen the great Brahmaputra River, which, circling round Bhutan, cuts clean through the Himalaya and, turning westward, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... beat down heavily in the treeless parts, but Nic heeded it not. He was anxious to reach the convict, give him a word of warning, and get back as rapidly as possible, unseen; and how to do this exercised ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... rocks, and treeless valleys, and bare stony plains, are objects without interest, except in a geological point of view. But it is very different with the Haghar and Azgher. In their eyes, a plain of stones and sand holds the place of a heath of growing ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... barbarian, after persuading Crassus, drew him away from the river, and led him through the plains by a track at first convenient and easy, but which soon became toilsome; for it was succeeded by deep sand, and plains treeless and waterless, not bounded in any direction by any object that the eye could reach, so that, not only through thirst and the difficulty of the march, was the army exhausted, but even the aspect of all around caused the soldiers to despond past all comfort, seeing neither plant, nor stream, nor ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Dogilani plains. On the west the cultivated districts of Sotik and Lumbwa, broken by wooded heights, fall towards Victoria Nyanza. The Mau plateau reaches a height of 9000 ft. on the equator, north of which is the somewhat lower Nandi country, well watered and partly forested. In the treeless plateau of Uasin Gishu, west of Elgeyo, the land again rises to a height of over 8000 ft., and to the west of this is the great mountain mass of Elgon (q.v.). East of Lake Rudolf and south of Lake Stefanie is a large waterless steppe, mainly volcanic in character, from which rise mountain ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Geography - note: treeless, sparse, and scattered vegetation consisting of grasses, prostrate vines, and low growing shrubs; primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... mad. Mile after mile the glistening rails sped backward into a shimmering haze of red dust. The glow of the breathless forenoon was like the blinding brightness of a forge-fire. To right and left the great treeless plain rose to bare buttes, backed by still barer mountains. Let the train speed as it would, there was always the same wearying prospect, devoid of interest, empty of human landmarks. Only the blazing ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... Standing on the ridge top she could see, far off through one of the treeless glades that are found so often in the spruce forest, the long path of a snowshoe trail. Instinctively she ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... demons described by Paul Lessingham, had, that night, at last come to an end, and that these things which lay scattered, here and there, on that treeless plain, were the evidences of its final destruction, is not a hypothesis which I should care to advance with any degree of certainty. But, putting this and that together, the facts seem to point that way,—and it is a ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... as I thought of them, whether the cultured monks and the uncivilized Britons delighted as much in the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking corn-lands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in excellent spirits, and in a few hours turned abruptly to the west on the broad Trail to the mountains. The great plains in those early days were solitary and desolate beyond the power of description; the Arkansas River sluggishly followed the tortuous windings of its treeless banks with a placidness that was awful in its very silence; and whoso traced the wanderings of that stream with no companion but his own thoughts, realized in all its intensity the depth of solitude from which Robinson ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... phenomena are repeated in the most distant regions; and, instead of designating those vast treeless plains in accordance with the nature of the plants they produce, it seems natural to class them into deserts, steppes, or savannahs; into bare lands without any appearance of vegetation, and lands covered ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... stacks flying through the yard, and lifted the ends of the roof shingles threateningly. It had gradually strengthened to a gale toward midday, and the steady downfall of flakes had been turned into a biting scourge that whipped up the soft cloak from the face of the open, treeless prairie and sent it lashing through the frigid air. Long before night had begun to settle down, no eye could penetrate the scudding snow a foot beyond the window ledges, except when a sudden stilling of the tempest disclosed ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... a wide fair unsheltered road, on each side spread away treeless tracts of country, flat and wide, over which the fresh cold wind blew listlessly. To the left the horizon was bounded by the wide expanse of the grassy Berkshire downs. They rose and fell, a vast undulating plain, covered with short ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... find as much in the way of supplies and ammunition as we had hoped. The Turk had destroyed the greater part of his store. We did find great quantities of wood, and in that barren, treeless country it was worth a lot. Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession. Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform of poles, cut in the up-stream forests. On these, starting from ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... stretches a wide treeless waste like a turf moor, with a background of sombre forest. The moor, which is broken into humps and hillocks, smokes and boils and babbles like the hell-broth of Macbeth's witches, and across it winds, snake-wise, ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... situation it has! Vast waves of undulating meadow and farm land appear with fields of gleaming grain and clamps of elm, oak and maple to break its smoothly flowing billows. Farther away rise higher treeless ridges or wooded slopes, but ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... through a narrow strip of dense jungle vegetation the man-thing broke through into an almost treeless area of considerable extent. For an instant he hesitated, glancing quickly behind him and then up at the security of the branches of the great trees waving overhead, but some greater urge than fear or caution influenced his decision apparently, for he moved off again across the little plain leaving ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... traveler had spoken with prophetic wisdom. Dry Bottom was trying as best it knew how to wallow in the depths of sin. Unlovely, soiled, desolate of verdure, dumped down upon a flat of sand in a treeless waste, amid cactus, crabbed yucca, scorpions, horned toads, and rattlesnakes. Dry Bottom had forgotten its morals, subverted its principles, and ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... throb of the ship under his feet. It was his fight, and brain and muscle reacted to it almost as if it had been a physical thing. And his end of that fight he was determined to win, if it took every year of his life. He, with a few others, would prove to the world that the millions of acres of treeless tundras of the north were not the cast-off ends of the earth. They would populate them, and the so-called "barrens" would thunder to the innumerable hoofs of reindeer herds as the American plains had never thundered to the beat of cattle. He was not thinking of the treasure he would find at the ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... roots of my trees, for I knew that most of my neighbors were completely out of sympathy with my tree cultivation. In fact, farmers living in that section of the country were always poking fun at my nut tree plantings and orchard work, for their idea of what was proper on a farm was a treeless field of plowed ground. As I thought of all these things, I pulled up many other trees; in fact, there were dozens that were chopped off so that they could be completely pulled out. Others still had one or two roots clinging to the main ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... foe to be attacked. In Ohio and Indiana, for example, the frontier line of homemakers had to cut, roll, and burn thousands of trees before they could put out a crop of any size. Beyond the Mississippi, however, there were all ready for the breaking plow great reaches of almost treeless prairie, where every stick of timber was precious. In the other parts, often rough and mountainous, where stood primeval forests of the finest woods, the railroads made good use of the timber. They consumed acres of forests themselves in making ties, bridge ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... of a certain "bald" among the Great Smoky Mountains there lie, just at the verge of the strange stunted woods from which the treeless dome emerges to touch the clouds, two great tilted blocks of sandstone. They are of marked regularity of shape, as square as if hewn with a chisel. Both are splintered and fissured; one is broken in twain. No other rock is near. The earth in which they are embedded is the rich black ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and of the part of North America east of Behring's Straits, whose natural state gave occasion to the golden glamour of tradition with which the belief of the common people incorrectly adorned the bleak, treeless ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... those already more than once dwelt on—Consuelo's and Anzoleto's debate about her looks, and that of Germain and Marie in the midnight wood by the Devil's Mere—are first-rate, and there is no more to say. Some of her descriptions, again, such as the opening of the book last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain with its various labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in Lucrezia Floriani, or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous grumble of Un Hiver a Majorque, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited to mere paysage. The famous account of Chopin's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... greater part of the way through a very desolate region. For hundreds of miles there are no white people, except the operators and repairers at the stations, and in many places it is unlikely that there will ever be any inhabitants, as the country is a treeless waste, and, at some of the stations, water has to be brought from a considerable distance. Artesian wells have been bored at many of the stations; at some of them successfully, while at others it was ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... his captivity the rain ceased and it was sunny and warm but somewhat hazy, so that naught could be seen afar, but the land near-hand rose in long, low downs now, and was quite treeless, save where was a hollow here and there and a stream running through it, where grew a few willows, ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... seventy pounds, and is the perfection of muscular development. No person who has seen the gazelles in confinement in a temperate climate can form an idea of the beauty of the animal in its native desert. Born in the scorching sun, nursed on the burning sand of the treeless and shadowless wilderness, the gazelle is among the antelope tribe as the Arab horse is among its brethren, the high-bred and superlative beauty of the race. The skin is as sleek as satin, of a colour difficult to describe, as it varies between the lightest ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker |
