"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of shallow water, filled with the tall graceful plant, named by the Jesuits 'folle avoine,' and by the English 'wild rice.' The long drooping ears filled with very large grains, black outside and white within, shook down their contents into the silt at bottom with every movement which waved their seven-feet stems. Arthur knew it as a noted haunt of wild duck, a cloud of which arose when ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Colorado River. The main stream of the district is the Virgin, with a drainage area of 11,000 square miles, Muddy River and Santa Clara Creek being its main tributaries. It is a torrential stream, subject to sudden floods and carrying much silt. A section of its valley in the northwestern corner of the present Arizona, near Littlefield, is to be dammed in the near future for the benefit of small farms that have been cultivated for many years and for carrying out irrigation plans of much ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Pompeii above ground, whose avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still. It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the sea: the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... conscious, now the Country's King That, at his beck, the blood for Freedom spilt Shall be accursed, and I, then, for the guilt Of dropping not with thud, as he with ring At Darkness' feet, be shut in mud and silt Forever and with ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Pentheus massacred. The lake set free Flowed forth in many rivers: to the west Aeas, (18) a gentle stream; nor stronger flows The sire of Isis ravished from his arms; And Achelous, rival for the hand Of Oeneus' daughter, rolls his earthy flood (19) To silt the shore beside the neighbouring isles. Evenus (20) purpled by the Centaur's blood Wanders through Calydon: in the Malian Gulf Thy rapids fall, Spercheius: pure the wave With which Amphrysos (21) irrigates the meads Where once Apollo served: Anaurus (22) flows Breathing no vapour ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... to a dredger, which, gathers up all the silt of a harbour, and carries it out to sea, leaves it there and then returns to repeat the operation. If such an operation is necessary in a harbour, and if without it the best anchorages in the world would often get choked with rubbish ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... these fissures water was ejected, carrying with it large quantities of sand and silt, and so abundantly that every stream-bed, even though generally dry in summer, was flooded. By the passage of the water, some part of the fissures was often enlarged into a round hole of considerable size, ending in a craterlet at the surface. Certain belts within the fissured ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Mississippi of North Russia moves down to the sea, sweeping with deep wide current great volumes of reddish sediment and secretions which give it the name Dvina. And the arm of the Arctic Ocean into which it carries its loads of silt and leachings, and upon which it floats the fishermen's bottoms or the merchantmen's steamers, is called the White Sea. Rightly named is that sea, the Michigan or Wisconsin soldier will tell you, for it is white more than half the year with ice ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... gentleness; the subduing force Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course Gliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt, Impetuous, o'er Himalah's rifted side, To ravage blind and wide, And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;— Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea In tranquil ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... shade, In primal wastes set precious seed of rapture and of pain; All the strongholds that he built For the powers of greed and guilt— He must strew their bastions down the sea and choke their towers with silt; He must make the temples clean for the gods to come again, And lift the lordly cities under ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... a half dozen trails of large parties, and he felt sure that, according to arrangement, they were converging on the Ohio, at the point where the Licking emptied the waters and silt of the Kentucky woods into the larger stream. Timmendiquas, no doubt, would be there, and Henry's heart throbbed a little faster at the thought that he would meet ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... perspective, for I am studying the Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. I love my Bowery. It was my ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... boundary that the Creator has elsewhere fixed between land and water. For the Station which, if I can allow myself an apparent Irishism, is a moveable one, has to be pushed forward almost day by day as the sands of the Volga silt up far beyond the choked-up lands of the Delta, encroaching with a steady inroad on the depths of the waves; the Steppe everywhere widening as the sea dwindles, and suggesting the thought that the whole region that is now Steppe must in remote ages have been sea, and that ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... their touch and silt rose into the water around them. But Rick persisted and felt fabric under his hands. He pulled it out and recognized a seaman's jacket, brass buttons corroded and fabric nearly rotted through. Apparently they had found a sea chest, but their exploring hands ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either hemisphere consist really ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... classes, three of which are active acoustics, lidar and magnetic anomaly detectors. Broadband underwater active acoustics could address pressing needs such as shallow-water anti-submarine warfare and mine detection (both buried and silt covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, foliage penetration ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... appeared. The compressor plant was hard at work forcing the water back in the caissons, the pulsometer pumps were sucking up streams of water that flowed without ceasing into the settling tank and off into the city sewers, the men in the caissons were sending up buckets full of silt-like gruel. The lawyer watched operations for a few minutes, then he asked for the owners' boring plan. When he had examined this he grunted twice, twitched his lower lip humorously, and said: 'I'll put you out of this. If the owners wanted ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have also the great group of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form deposits ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... built upon. The marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and on the south a basin constructed by the ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... think when the antiquary, grubbing in the dust and silt of five thousand years ago to discover some traces of infant effort—some rude specimens of the ages of Magog and Mizraim, in which we may admire the germ that has since developed into a wonderful art—breaks his shins against an article so ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was a King and a Mason— A master proved and skilled, I cleared me ground for a palace Such as a King should build. I decreed and cut down to my levels, Presently, under the silt, I came on the wreck of a palace Such as ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... east, it is deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass of gypsum on the left bank, and it bends to the east of south, having thus formed a ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the tide ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... living from the soil; but the other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... covering of yellow silt away and adjusted the instrument's controls as best he could, centering it on where Judd's craft had last been. Then he peered through—and saw that which ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... steersman, one Ebibi, "there are many banks hereabout, large sands, which silt up in a night, therefore we must make a passage for the puc-a-puc, by going from shore ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... the trees which surround it. Seaton Sluice owes its name to the Delaval who placed the large sluice gates upon the burn, in order to have a strong current which, in rushing down to the sea, would be able to wash the mouth of the stream clear from the silt and mud brought in by the incoming tide. A later baronet, Sir John Hussey Delaval, made the cutting through the solid rock which is so striking a feature of the harbour. It was ready for the entrance ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... saw its importance in a moment. "That," he 'said, "is the very thing that I want to enable me to complete my contract satisfactorily." Thousands of enormous piles had to be driven down into the deep silt of the Shore; and to have driven them down by the old system of pile-driving would have occupied a long time, and would also ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... rate. Courtenay at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful current whose existence he suspected had cut out for itself a deep-water channel towards the land, and the ship had struck on the silt of its back-wash. Anyhow, the Kansas was still living. The lights were all burning steadily. He could detect the rhythmic throb of the donkey-engine. He felt it like the faint beat of a pulse. In her new position the ship presented less of a solid wall to the onslaught of ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... city-sewage, uniting at the Battery, are deflected a little to the westward by Governor's Island, and thus thrown out into the middle of the bay, where they receive the full force of the tidal impulse, retarded by the Narrows only long enough to disengage and drop their finer silt on the flats between Robin's Reef and the Jersey shore. The depurating process of the New World's grandest community lies ready for use in this natural drainage-system. If there be a standing pool, a festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... around the coast of Florida and through her keys, until it joins the other branch. Inside the Gulf stream, along the coast of Texas, is the counter-current before referred to, making down the coast at the rate of two to three miles per hour, and bringing down the silt and mud of the Mississippi, Sabine, etc. I have seen the water off the Island of Galveston the color of chocolate, after a ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great cities stud its shores; ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Sea-captain loved, the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia — Power on silt, Death in my hands, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... cubic yards of sediment, discharging it along the lower course, or pushing it into the Gulf. As one thinks of the small amount of sediment held in a gallon or two of river water, a comprehension of this vast amount of silt is impossible. It is enough to cover a square mile in area to a depth of 268 feet. In five hundred years it would build above the sea level a State as large and as high as Rhode Island. Thus, by means of this sediment, the river has pushed its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... the two Rockley girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their lives and ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... natural reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential condition of ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... Paul, as usual, following closely. Now and then he dived under a big log, and came up on the other side, his head well hidden among upthrust boughs and among the weeds and grass that had grown in the soil formed by the silt of the river. And ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... next six, scouring and cleansing and carrying mud and sand far out to sea. Just at present the currents set strongest on the Birkenhead side of the river, and accordingly a "Pluckington bank" unfortunately grows under the Liverpool stage. Should this tendency to silt up the gates of our docks increase, land can be reclaimed on the other side of the river between Tranmere and Rock Ferry, and an embankment made so as to deflect the water over Liverpool way, and give us a fairer proportion ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... white-crested roller, higher than the rest. The drenching rains which fall each year have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed. The silt and sediment have filled the valleys which lie between, and made their surface sandy, level and broad. Again the rain has cut wide, deep and constantly-changing channels through this soft deposit; great gutters, which are sometimes seventy feet deep and two or three hundred yards across. ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to the level ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... judged upon the principle of opposing most strongly anything that was supposed to find favour with the Government. Last session a strong wish to do SOMETHING caused the Legislature to advocate a scheme which many persons think would cause the mouth of the River Swan to silt up, and expose the town of Fremantle to danger, lest the river in flood should burst out (as no doubt it did formerly) into the South Bay over the town site. The question, however, is referred to the Victorian Government engineer, and the Melbourne Government ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... a three weeks or more. For I have a project to bring down a leat of fair water from the hill-tops right into Plymouth town, cutting off the heads of Tavy, Meavy, Wallcomb, and West Dart, and thereby purging Plymouth harbor from the silt of the mines whereby it has been choked of late years, and giving pure drink not only to the townsmen, but to the fleets of the queen's majesty; which if I do, I shall both make some poor return to God for all His unspeakable ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... employed. The fine aggregate of whatever character must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent will pass ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... had perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... eight miles from Ponce, in a hollow among limestone hills, now environed by a coffee plantation. Here are found three basins—results of erosion, most likely—that are described as natural bath-tubs. The middle and largest of these pools is partly filled with silt, probably occluding the entrance to a cavern which formerly opened into it, a fathom or so below the water-surface. This cave was the hiding-place of a native woman whose father had discovered her love for one of Ponce de Leon's soldiers. He forbade her to have anything to do with the enemies ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the central truth, so amply established, of the vast antiquity ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... back, sniffing the air and pawing the ground. Boyton raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, Paul followed as fast as the cumbersome rubber pants ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... sort of strange little gully, where the silt had washed down more heavily during the period of erosion than at any other place. Looking up, the boys could see that it afforded a steep but accessible avenue by means of which an agile person could ascend the otherwise impregnable ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... no, not Medeland with its wealth of woods, Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, Can match the praise of Italy.... Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks: Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit. Mark too, her cities, so many and so proud, Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town Up rugged precipices ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... valley was silt, sand and gravel—they would find nothing there. They set out on a circuit of the chasm's walls, following along ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... of the Nile a turbid convection was taking place, as if the river silt had been stirred up, but the fuming current was assuming a dull red tinge. The action had been rapid. Already the stain had predominated, streaks of clear water, only here and there, clarifying the opaque ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... went to Cardiff. They came; they saw; and they narrowly escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... of this river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... Riobamba, we discovered in a deep ravine numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The bones were drifted to this spot and deposited (many of them in a broken state) in horizontal ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... our horses, as they had travelled forty miles under a hot sun without drawing bit. The honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us at twenty-five ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... were thick and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A shoal had barred ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... found—as you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... now being made to restore some of its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and never once ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... shown abandoned because the mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, as if it had sunk in a storm.... Almost every one of these ancient ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... flows without an affluent; in the spring it falls so low that its channel becomes almost unnavigable; but in the late summer, its waters, swollen by the rains and melted snows of Central Africa, and laden with the fertilising silt of the Abyssinian mountains, spread over the cultivated country, and bring fertility wherever ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The bluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher, with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed, swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bank and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the river a ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... some of the dirt or silt that is brought down by the creek goes," said Uncle Robert. "And all this must have been left here since the flood in the spring. Frank is right. The creek is really building ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... (two in number) are in private grounds belonging to Mrs Law. They have probably been created by the action of water, and when discovered were filled with the bones of wild animals (many of them now extinct) embedded in silt, which had been washed into them. In one of them there is now stacked a quantity of these bones, whilst a selection of them is deposited in Taunton Museum. The caves are shown by some of the outdoor servants of the house. Unlike the caves at Cheddar and Burrington, they open upon the summit ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... there is a roofed chamber, into which the air is pumped, and in which the men work when excavating, this roof being supported by ample main and cross lattice girders. Shafts with air-locks and pipes for admitting water and ejecting silt are provided. The air-locks are fitted with sliding doors, worked by hydraulic rams, or by hand, the doors being interlocked in a manner similar to that in which railway points and signals are interlocked, so that one door cannot be opened until the other is closed. The hoisting of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... away from the body as it floated in water in a state of decomposition. The jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are as a record, the account of contemporaneous vital ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... flows through the Level, called the Old Nene. Below the point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath her feet ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Half burying dead wood snapped off from tossed trees, Since right along the foreshore, out of reach Of furious driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets stirring. That woman's gaze toils worn from remote years, Yet forward yearns through the bright spacious noon, Beyond the farthest isle, whose filmy shape Floats ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... channel was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus. The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous progress to ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... speedily, but still studying what he could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish, allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray—perhaps even white. He ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... a single day. Southern streams are not perennial. On the Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in their season. When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of silt and dries the stones ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... monarchy have we, Without the useless silt and dross; And like our cousins, all are free, Yet we have no election boss. No union here of Church and State, Yet Church and State full well agree That nations never can be great If they refuse ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... are soon driven by the waves up the shore, and beyond the reach of further wear;[2] and "the rivers carry only silt to the ocean."[3] ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... at all seasons. In autumn, the swollen waters pour down as from a cornucopia; in winter, folk from the town come driving over the frozen flood, racing one against another; in spring, the river overflows its banks, spreading silt on the meadows as in the land of the Nile; and in summer, the haymakers are lulled by the song of the grasshoppers and the scent of the hay to dream of paradise, where the children of men even now may enter in for some few days in ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats. So I went ashore with three or four Malays, and the Old Boy's time we had poking in and out over the silt to find fairway, even for the gig. At last we could make round toward a little clearing in the bamboos, with a big canary tree in the middle. All was going well, when suddenly the mate grunted, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Sea the Jordan is fordable at thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. This spot was probably the scene of the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... a damp hollow behind it where ice-plants grew green and rank; and as he crept along the thunder of his exhaust started tons of sliding silt. His wheels raced and burrowed as he struck a soft spot, and then abruptly they sank. He dug them out carefully and backed away, but a mound of drifted sand barred his way. Twist and turn as he would he could not get around it and at last he climbed to its summit. ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... a good deal of disconnected information—silt bands, crevasses were mentioned. Finally he put the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... foundation—still less a foundation of Dionysius I. of Syracuse. Imported vases of the second half of the 5th century B.C. prove the existence of trade with Greece at that period; and the town was famous in Aristotle's day for a special breed of fowls. Even at that period, however, the silt brought down by the rivers rendered access to the harbour difficult, and the historian Philistus excavated a canal to give free access to the sea. This was still open in the imperial period, and the town, which was a municipium, possessed its own gild of sailors; but its importance gradually ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... been removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it a thin silt of black dust had gathered—the light showed it plainly. All these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But it was words, words, words, that he read; the subject mattered not at all. His head leaned ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... slid along by me now, so that I could read her name repeated on her stern—"James Silt, ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with suddenly widened vision beheld the lake's sapphire expanse ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss—a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... northern Luzon is made up of four distinct types. First is the coastal plain — a consistently narrow strip of land, generally not over 3 or 4 miles wide. The soil is sandy silt with a considerable admixture of vegetable matter. In some places it is loose, and shifts readily before the winds; here and there are stretches of alluvial clay loam. The sandy areas are often covered with coconut ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... of the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed falls ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... be free from the lighter silt which now finds its way to the sea; slowly filling up the river-mouth harbor, and finally destroying the commerce of the city which depends upon it. In this way, every individual, child or adult, who plants a tree, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... along the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy gasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... river and it formerly flowed through a fertile valley. During countless ages it has stripped from the plateau and carried into the Gulf of California a deposit of rock waste from the land surface of its basin many feet deep, and abraded billions of tons of material from its channel. All this silt and detritus have served to fill up the northern part of the gulf, the result of the deposit being an immense land area. At length a great bar was formed across the northern part of the gulf, making a sort of inland sea. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... high, are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... only four feet in a thousand years, all the alluvial portion of Egypt has been deposited from the waters of that river. A natural register thus re-enforces the written records, and both together compose a body of evidence not to be gainsaid. Thus the depth of muddy silt accumulated round the pedestals of monuments is an irreproachable index of their age. In the eminent position he occupied, Eusebius might succeed in perverting the received book-chronology; but he had no power to make ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished from the recent mud, sand, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... one or more streams, descending from the mountains, discharge themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that village—I forget its name—which was evidently the old port of the district in pre-Seaton ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the irrigation was carried on by the gravity system, by which canals were built from intakes from the river and extended throughout the cultivated district. In Egypt for a long time the periodical overflow of the Nile brought in the silt for fertilizer and water for moisture. When the flood subsided, seed was planted and the crop raised and harvested. As the population spread, the use of water for irrigation became more general, and attempts were made to distribute its use not only over a wider range of territory but more regularly ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... into the gully. The wash widened and opened out into a sandy flat. Link crossed this and turned up on the opposite side. Rocks impeded the progress of the car, and these had to be rolled out of the way. The shelves of silt, apparently ready to slide with the slightest weight, the little tributary washes, the boulder-strewn stretches of slope, the narrow spaces allowing no more than a foot for the outside wheels, the spear-pointed cactus ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... comeliness anywise, nor that armour beautiful, which deep beneath the flood shall be o'erlaid with slime, and himself I will wrap him in my sands and pour round him countless shingle without stint, nor shall the Achaians know where to gather his bones, so vast a shroud of silt will I heap over them. Where he dieth there shall be his tomb, neither shall he have need of any barrow to be raised, when the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... soft, its several parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of Agriculture has issued a bulletin "Soil Survey of Niagara County, N. Y." By referring to this, I find that the soils that have produced thrifty, and prolific Persian walnut trees are, Dunkirk loam, Dunkirk sandy loam, Dunkirk silt loam, Clyde ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... month after the ceremony. His widow belonged, then, to the husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the presence ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... flow is a cliff or steep slope varying in height from a few feet to that of a good-sized tree. Between the silt plain and the general level of its bed rises a terrace. In front of it Prince stopped and distributed the men he had reserved to search the lava bed. He gave ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... founded on the drift and silt of ages, through which water habitually percolates, to be increased by the pressure of the 85-foot lock when made, have been referred to by many of our technical advisers as another element of danger. The vast masses of ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... crust-movements, and Lamarck's idea of the formation of elevated plains on land by the accumulation of debris of organisms is manifestly inadequate, our aerial or eolian rocks and loess being wind-deposits of sand and silt rather than matters of organic origin. Thus he cites as an example of his theory the vast elevated plains of Tartary, which he thought had been dry land from time immemorable, though we now know that the rise took place in the quaternary or present period. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard |
