"Bituminous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carven capitals of its loggia columns, and looked at a handsome child swinging shyly against the half- opened door of a room whose impenetrable shadow, behind her, made her, as it were, a sketch in bituminous water-colours. We talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a well-to-do air that didn't in the least deter his affability from a turn compatible with the acceptance of small ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... manner of European milestones were erected at stated intervals of somewhat more than a league all along the route. Its breadth scarcely exceeded twenty feet. It was built of heavy flags of freestone, and in some parts, at least, covered with a bituminous cement, which time has made harder than the stone itself. In some places where the ravines had been filled up with masonry, the mountain torrents, wearing on it for ages, have gradually eaten a way through the base, and ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... detect in it few traces of fossils; now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin vein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem, converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the rocks, in which a bed of clay has ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... be right in attributing them to the water; but whether the poisonous quality of the water be imparted to it by bitumen from below, or by the putrid leaves of the forest trees from above, is uncertain; the people drink from the bituminous spring waters at this season, as well as from stagnant pools in the beds of small rivers, which have ceased to flow during part of the Cold, and the whole of the hot, season. These pools become filled with the leaves of the forest trees which ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... specimens: the sandstone which prevailed everywhere was in a decomposed state, but there was a very decided dip in the strata to the south-east, of about 30 degrees. On the east side of Water Valley, I found the same kind of slate, noticed before at Curiosity Peak: but what most interested me was a bituminous substance found near the bottom of the wells recently dug, and 23 feet from the surface of the ground. It was apparently of a clayey nature when first brought up, but became hard and dark upon exposure to the air, and ignited quickly when put into the flame of a candle. The sides of Water ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
|
