Word: silt
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...ruins of some 7,000 small stone castles, it was a prosperous, well-populated land 1,000 years before Christ. Carthage conquered the island in 450 B.C. and reduced its people to a relatively barbaric state. Soon much of Sardinia's ancient sculpture lay buried under layers of silt and rubbish, not to be uncovered again until Italian archeologists began digging it up a century...
...time some 15 attempts have been made to salvage the Florencia's treasure. They yielded handfuls of gold and silver coin, a cannon designed by Benvenuto Cellini, the skeleton of a boy, some silver plate etched with Spanish arms, religious medals, ammunition and boarding pikes. But under the silt of years the bulk of the Spanish treasure still, presumably, lies where it sank, tucked securely "beneathe ye sell of ye gunroome...
...angry: she "looked through scarlet lace." A soldier does not feel regret: "hands were wringing in his brain." Snowy's leg is not suddenly weak: it goes to "laughing gristle." Other Llewellynisms that would flood any ordinary carburetor: "A quick thrust of pity alchemised her feeling to a silt of motherly impatience"; "she rolled over, drinking coffee...
...When silt sinks slowly to the bottom of an ocean or lake, the magnetic particles in it line up with the earth's magnetic field like tiny compass needles. When the silt hardens into rock, the magnetic particles are "frozen" so that they cannot move. The Carnegie scientists found that even when the rock layer is folded by geological forces, the magnetic particles keep their alignment, pointing accurately around the curves of the folds. Even in layers known to be 200 million years old, the rock keeps its magnetism...
...series of rock samples 10 million to 100 million years old which they took from flat-lying strata in the western U.S. proved to have a magnetism pointing in about the same direction as present-day compass needles. The conclusion was that when the rocks were laid down as silt, the earth's magnetic field was about as it is today...