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Escarpment   /ɛskˈɑrpmənt/   Listen
Escarpment

noun
1.
A long steep slope or cliff at the edge of a plateau or ridge; usually formed by erosion.  Synonym: scarp.
2.
A steep artificial slope in front of a fortification.  Synonyms: escarp, protective embankment, scarp.






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"Escarpment" Quotes from Famous Books



... numerous iron roads laid by the Republican Government in what had hitherto been forgotten parts of France. Close to these works a magnificent cascade is seen, a sheet of glistening white spray pouring down the dark, precipitous escarpment. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... and the verdigris of copper, and everywhere the rusty ocher of iron pyrites. The cliff-tops, though ragged, were of such uniform height as to suggest the boundaries of a great plateau, and now and again we caught glimpses of verdure topping the rocky escarpment, as though bush or jungle-land had pushed outward from a lush vegetation farther inland to signal to an unseeing world that Caprona lived and joyed in life beyond her ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Erratic erara. Erratum eraro. Erroneous erara. Error eraro. Eructation rukto. Erudite (person) instruitulo, klerulo. Eruption ekzantemo. Eruption, volcanic elsputo, vulkana. Erysipelas erisipelo. Escape forkuri. Escarpment krutegajxo. Eschew eviti. Escort gardistaro. Escort gardi. Escutcheon blazono. Especial speciala. Especially precipe. Espouse edzigxi. Espouse (adopt) alpreni. Espy vidi, ekvidi. Essay (trial) provo. Essay provi. Essence esenco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... is of a variable breadth, from one to four, and sometimes six miles. Fifteen miles from the Chimney rock we reached one of those places where the river strikes the bluffs, and forces the road to make a considerable circuit over the uplands. This presented an escarpment on the river of about nine hundred yards in length, and is familiarly known as Scott's bluffs. We had made a journey of thirty miles before we again struck the river, at a place where some scanty grass afforded an insufficient pasturage to our animals. About twenty miles ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... are of the usual type seen throughout the Port Jackson district, recesses in the escarpment, overhung by thick, more or less tabular masses of rock, in some cases dry and habitable, in others wet and apparently never used ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... covers nearly the whole of the western half of the Hills proper, where erosion has been less active on account of its distance from the main channels of drainage. Usually, from the broken interior edge of this slope or sedimentary plateau one descends a bluff or escarpment, and enters the central area of slates, granite, and quartzites, which is carved into high ridges and sharp peaks cut by many narrow and deep valleys and ravines and generally thickly timbered with the common pine of the Rocky Mountains. Toward the south, ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... ft.). The Sattima (Settima) range, or Aberdare Mountains, has a general elevation of fully 10,000 ft. To the west the fall to the rift-valley is marked by a line of cliffs, of which the best-defined portions are the Kikuyu escarpment (8000 ft.), just south of 1 deg. S., and the Laikipia escarpment, on the equator. One of the main watersheds of East Africa runs close to the eastern wall of the rift-valley, separating the basins of inland drainage from the rivers of the east coast, of which the two largest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... struggled to regain her breath. It seemed to her there was no way of descending into the chaos of rock between the gloomy walls of the kloof, and she gave a little cry when Alan caught her by her hands and lowered her over the face of a ledge to a table-like escarpment below. He laughed at her fear when he dropped down beside her, and held her close as they crept back under the shelving face of the cliff to a hidden path that led downward, with a yawning chasm at their side. The trail widened as they descended, and at the last they reached the bottom, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... has made famous, but one of much less archaic aspect and more questionable history. A little book which we bought tells us all we care to know about it. "It is formed by excoriating the turf over the steep slope of the northern escarpment of Salisbury Plain." It was "remodelled" in 1778, and "restored" in 1873 at a cost of between sixty and seventy pounds. It is said that a smaller and ruder horse stood here from time immemorial, and was made to commemorate a victory of Alfred over the Danes. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... back downstream a little, until clear of the patch of heavy down timber. Then he turned and swung up above the bed of the stream, angling up on the side of the mountain, and finally heading close to the foot of a tall escarpment which barred the horses for a way. Here he hugged the cut face for a few yards and by good fortune found the way passable beyond ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough

... scattered tufts of brown wiry grass are supported, and still more rarely, some low thorny bushes. The weather is dry and pleasant, and the fine blue sky is but seldom obscured. When standing in the middle of one of these desert plains and looking towards the interior, the view is generally bounded by the escarpment of another plain, rather higher, but equally level and desolate; and in every other direction the horizon is indistinct from the trembling mirage which seems to rise from the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... specially suited to the clove, which is raised in great quantities, the crop forming four-fifths of the total clove crop of the world. The seaboard lying opposite the island of Zanzibar is level and swampy, and the many rivers which flow from the escarpment of the great inland plateau have brought down a vast deposit of rich alluvial matter, upon which, aided by the moist, warm climate, a dense growth of tropical vegetation flourishes. A native growth of this region is the copal tree, famous as yielding ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... noble bedroom, with an outlook over the garden-vale and the escarpment to the far line of the plains, now blue and saffron in the sunset. I dressed in an ill temper, for I was seriously offended with Lawson, and also seriously alarmed. He was either very unwell or going ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... mood he was detached by the next bend of the road. The way, hitherto winding through narrow glens, now swung to a ledge overhanging the last escarpment of the mountains; and far below, the Piedmontese plain unrolled to the southward its interminable blue-green distances mottled with forest. A sight to lift the heart; for on those sunny reaches Ivrea, Novara, Vercelli lay like sea-birds on a summer sea. It was the future unfolding ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... as far as the open space in front of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, he will see that on his left above him the slope of the mountain was not only precipitous by nature but that also it has been rendered entirely unassailable by scarping.[32] From the lower end of this steep escarpment there is a cyclopean wall, of the same date as the upper side walls of the town, and the wall of the arx, which runs entirely across the city to within a few yards of the wall on the east, and to a point just below a portella, where the upper cyclopean wall makes a slight change ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin

... along the northeastern shore of Lake Erie in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, is the second most important grape region in America. The "belt" is a narrow strip of lowland averaging about three miles in width, lying between Lake Erie and a high escarpment which bounds the belt on the south throughout its entire length of a hundred or more miles. Here climate and soil seem to be exceptionally favorable for grape-growing. Climate is the chief determinant of the boundaries ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... curve of the gulch into sight of the ranch. In a semicircle, crouched behind the shelter of boulders and cottonwoods, the Indian line stretched across the gorge and along one wall. The buildings lay in a little valley, where an arroyo ran down at a right angle and broke the rock escarpment. A spurt of smoke came from a window of the stable as the rescuers galloped ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... by reason of a hollow in the ground, and the projecting cliff immediately at hand covered the path in its rise. His footsteps were now heard striking sharply upon the flinty road at a distance of about twenty or thirty yards, but still behind the escarpment. To save time, Cytherea prepared to ascend ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... in the rear and on one of their flanks by enemies six times their number; shut in between the rocky escarpment occupied by the Russians and the depths of the Danube, the French soldiers, crowded on the narrow roadway, did not despair. The gallant Marshal Mortier set them an example, for, when it was suggested that he ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... gloamings. The features of the town had a keen interest for Elizabeth's mother, now that the human side came to the fore. As soon as they had wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the abodes ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... age of the giant reptiles, the remains of one of which has recently been found embedded in this sandstone, near the river's edge. As the traveler's eye follows along the even, almost level line of this escarpment of the Palisades, let it re-create for him the strata of the old Triassic sandstone that were millions of years ago piled high upon it,—how high can only be conjectured,—but which have been removed ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... said, "that ought to interest you, for there is a somewhat similar formation in Scotland. You see this is an escarpment, or cliff, over sixty miles long, and varying from about 600 feet to 900 feet ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... boulder clay lies upon the Kimeridge clay, which normally underlies the chalk. Mr. Jukes Brown (“Geological Journal,” No. 162, p. 117) says: “The Boulder clay is bedded against the slope of the chalk, shewing that this escarpment had retired to its present position in pre-glacial times.” By what precise process this was effected must be left to our savants to decide; but the remarkable fact remains, that a solid stratum, or rather series of allied strata, from 500ft. to ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... abroad we frequently managed to meet as if by accident. Half a league outside the Porta Romana the high road traverses a hollow way between melancholy uplands on either hand, relieved only by a few gloomy larches. Under the clayey slope of the northern escarpment and close by the roadside, a dry well rears its light canopy of ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France



Words linked to "Escarpment" :   incline, protective embankment, side, fortification, slope, escarp, munition



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