Word: basalt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thirty years ago a young wife was hauled up a sheer 600-ft. cliff to her new home in the Faroe Islands. She hasn't yet made up her mind to come down again. Six hundred years ago her Viking ancestors on the craggy basalt archipelago, jutting sharply from the sea 250 miles north of Scotland, came under Danish rule. They haven't yet made up their minds to shake...
...Will of Man. By his labor a man imparts a portion of his life to the soil; to leave his land is thus like a touch of death. Nor does a man easily leave the soil his father and forefathers have wrested from the sea. The great basalt dike at Westkapelle had been started 500 years ago. The Germans had built pillboxes on it. Allied bombers had breached it. Commandos had poured through its gaps, in the wake of the rushing sea. Here & there, like beached sea monsters, still sprawled the rusting hulks of dead British armor...
Said the London Times last fortnight in its Literary Supplement: "A book so real, austere, singular, rugged and wild as the world it depicts, as though hewn from the basalt rock, such monumental sculpture as Travels in Arabia Deserta cannot be forever ignored. Yet it needed a world war to awaken the English people to their possession of a treasure which may stand an age and beyond like Stonehenge. . . . He could make no compromise with the English he called 'Victorian and Costermongery.' Forty years ago he wrote to Doctor Hogarth: 'My main intention was not so much...
...great faces are, who carved them, or what their significance was. They will try to find out. They guess that the carvings must have served some purpose in awesome religious rites. The heads have no apparent kinship with any known Mayan sculpture. Biggest mystery: Tabasco heads are made of basalt, and the nearest known source of basalt is 100 miles away. The people who made them must have done a tall job of transportation...
Briefly stated, the most important conjecture is that early in the history of the juvenile earth there was a single continent composed essentially of a granite crust floating on a glassy basaltic substratum. This unique continent was domed and furrowed in response to strains due chiefly to contraction of the cooling earth and to decrease in rotational velocity because of tidal retardation. "At the close of the Paleozoic Era, the east-west geosyncline of the northern hemisphere was intensely crumpled by the sliding-together of the North Polar and the Equatorial dome. The result was the Appalachian-Hercynian system...