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Rubble   /rˈəbəl/   Listen
Rubble

noun
1.
The remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up.  Synonyms: debris, detritus, dust, junk.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rubble" Quotes from Famous Books



... much like another, it will not be worth while describing the one at Dallington Burn. The reader will have the kindness to imagine a couple of roads crossing an open common, with an armless sign-post on one side, and a rubble-stone bridge, with several of the coping-stones lying in the shallow stream below, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... sense in the construction of works. This will be observed if, in the first place, the architect does not demand things which cannot be found or made ready without great expense. For example: it is not everywhere that there is plenty of pitsand, rubble, fir, clear fir, and marble, since they are produced in different places and to assemble them is difficult and costly. Where there is no pitsand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea; the lack of fir and clear fir may be evaded by using cypress, poplar, elm, or ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... has told me, I know that the house in which he was born and spent his youth was a three-storied building with thirty-six rooms. On the spot where it stood, between the two wings, the remains of the old stone foundation are still visible in the form of trenches filled with rubble, and the site is covered with big sixty-year-old trees that ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy

... sheathing of the coffer-dam, strengthening the derrick-guys, tightening the anchor-lines, and clearing the working-platforms of sand, cement, and other damageable property. The course-masonry, fortunately, was above the water-line, but the coping was still unset and the rubble backing of much of the wall unfinished. Two weeks of constant work were necessary before that part of the structure contained in the first section of the contract would be entirely safe for the coming winter. Babcock doubled his gangs, and utilized every hour of low water to the utmost, even when ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith

... clambered 'round it cautiously, and, on the further side, came upon a mass of fallen stones and rubble. The ruin itself seemed to me, as I proceeded now to examine it minutely, to be a portion of the outer wall of some prodigious structure, it was so thick and substantially built; yet what it was doing in such a position I could by no means conjecture. Where was the rest of the ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson

... and finally is concreted over into a storm sewer to subdue it and get it out of sight. The stone cottage that a town's founder built with his own hands two hundred years ago gets in the path of a new highway and is pushed down, and its rubble used for fill beneath an exit ramp. What was once, when someone was fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back to seek ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... 28 feet wide, and faced the street. They were divided (one or two of them at least) into apartments by means of arches. The lower courses of the walls, to the height of several feet, are of squared stones, while the upper portions and the roofs are of rubble work, which was covered with a heavy coating of plaster. The threshold of one has been exposed, which is 6 feet in the clear, and the sides of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... each is a cist made of four large slabs, and containing as many as eight or ten urns full of calcined bones. The excavation of a tumulus in the plain of Tarbes brought to light an enormous block of granite resting on blocks of quartz. The spaces between these blocks were filled in with rubble made of small stones cemented into one mass with clay. Edwin-Harness Mound, near Liberty (Ohio), is 160 feet long by eighty or ninety wide, and thirteen to eighteen high in the middle. It contained ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... the proffered weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of Mr. Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like some giant mushroom. Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose stones; the carriage was swung sideways. The scared horses, straining asunder, leaped forward, and sped downwards, in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... was the underpinning of a part of the Columbus Monument near the southwest entrance to Central Park. This handsome memorial column has a stone shaft rising about 75 feet above the street level and weighs about 700 tons. The rubble masonry foundation is 45 feet square and rests on a 2-foot course of concrete. The subway passes under its east side within 3 feet of its center, thus cutting out about three-tenths of the original support. At this place the footing was ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... in summing of money is this: as we say in England, halfpenny, penny, shilling, and pound, so say they, poledenga, denga, altine, and rubble (rouble). There goeth two poledengas to a denga, six dengaes to an altine, and twenty-three altines and ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt

... mound containing altogether about twelve acres. The excavations have disclosed a large part of the encircling wall. It was a construction of excellent workmanship which still stands practically intact, testifying to the accuracy of the early Hebrew tradition. Its foundation is a wall of rubble sixteen feet high and six to eight feet thick, sloping inward. On the top of this foundation, which rested on the native rock, was built a supplemental wall of burnt brick six or seven feet in thickness ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... looking at it with the eye of a connoisseur, "was doubtless a Greek. Time, and the mutilations and additions of the Moor, have not effaced all the beauty of this structure, planned by the genius and reared by the hands of men who lived nineteen centuries ago. The rubble work and plaster wall that fills the space between those columns, so requisite in their proportions—the pinnacles which crown the structure in place of the entablature which has been destroyed, are the work of the Moors, who strove in vain to unite in harmony ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... they were the work of a people of far higher intelligence than the Mashonas—that they must indeed have been built by a race having some pretensions to civilisation. For, while the walls were for the most part built of dry rubble masonry, the lintels and doorposts were of dressed stone, and—most remarkable circumstance of all—were in many cases adorned with sculptures in low relief, of a character strongly resembling those which I had seen portrayed in pictures of Egyptian ruins. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... attempted by the Dominican Friars, it seems that, instead of re-opening the cloister-arch to its full extent, they contented themselves with inserting a smaller doorway within it, the jambs and lintel of which were discovered in the rubble masonry when the arch was opened out in 1905. On the suppression of the Dominicans by Queen Elizabeth, the cloisters passed again into secular hands, and disappear from history until the year 1742, when there is a record of the stabling ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... from the lime it can receive none. [In August 1847, I observed a large and venerable ash tree growing out of and united with the ancient Roman walls of Caistor, near Norwich. The whole of the base of the trunk was incorporated with bricks, rubble, and mortar; but the roots no doubt extended many yards into the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... still shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters, flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and the what-not that litters the path of construction. Without, in the avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... gave her a queer little thrill of the heart, for a dozen strange fancies crossed her mind in rapid succession. If he had really killed Ned Joselyn, it was probable he had buried the man in this neglected place, amongst the rubble of stones. Josie had inspected every foot of ground on the Kenton Place and satisfied herself no grave had been dug there. Indeed, at the time of Joselyn's "disappearance" the ground had been frozen so hard that the old man could not have dug a grave. ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)

... southern gable. Sockets in the walls, on either side, where massive beams had once lodged, showed that the building had been in three stories, though all the floors had fallen in and made a mound of rubble in the centre of the ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... the buildings there are no signs of mortar, the intervals between the beds being chinked with stones of the minutest thinness. The filling and backing are done in rubble masonry, the mortar presenting no indications of the presence of lime. The thickness of the main wall at base is within an inch or two of three feet; higher up, it is less, diminishing every story by retreating jogs ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... RUBBLE-WORK. A mass of masonry, formed of irregular stones and pebbles imbedded in mortar. It is used in the interior of docks, piers, and other erections, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... quite near you, swooping irresistibly, as if the devil had kicked it. You come to watch for shells—to listen to the deafening rattle of the big guns, the shrilling whistle of the small, to guess at their pace and their direction. You see now a house smashed in, a heap of chips and rubble; now you see a splinter kicking up a fountain of clinking stone-shivers; presently you meet a wounded man on a stretcher. This is your dangerous time. If you have nothing else to do, and especially if you listen and calculate, you are done: you get ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... buildings fashioned of structural steel, and these showed twisted girders like the skeletons of primeval monsters, supporting sections of sagging floors. Houses, hotels had melted into shapeless heaps of rubble, which filled the streets to a depth of a dozen yards, burying everything beneath them. Yet here and there could be seen the forms of dead pedestrians, motor-cars emerging out of the debris, lying in every conceivable position; horses, horribly mangled, were shrieking ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... swept on forward in a wave that nothing could have stopped this time—but their charge was too late. The entire rocky projection collapsed with a final sickening lurch, and slid to the pit's floor, carrying Joan and Powell with it in a miniature avalanche of rocky rubble. ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... gap in the crowd below. The pavement was blackened and shattered to rubble. In and around the open space sprawled dozens of tiny ...
— Mutineer • Robert J. Shea

... before he gained the summit, and the young women grew tired of sitting still in one place. Anna, true miner's daughter that she was, spied some scattered bits of carnelian in the rubble near by, and pointed them out to Blanka. Agate and chalcedony were also to be found among the loose stones, and often the three occurred together. Both Anna and her companion were soon busy gathering these treasures and pocketing the rarest specimens. Indeed, so intent were they ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... certain point that would be so. But suppose they are six inches thick, you may take it for granted that underneath there will be rubble, loose stuff, except where any chambers may be built. If we were to bore a hole through this top layer the powder, instead of splitting the stones up, would expend its force among the loose stuff beneath it; and besides, instead of remaining ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty

... pile of rocks resting where he'd parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble. ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak

... shrapnel-seeded meadows The jagged rubble-heap of La Boiselle; Blood-guilty Fricourt brooding in the shadows, And Thiepval's chateau empty as a shell. Down Albert's riven streets the moon is leering; The Hanging Virgin takes its bitter ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service

... tend to form cliffs, that are brightly colored with many shades of red. The color which is characteristic of E. q. hopiensis seems to be helpful in adapting this subspecies to this habitat of red sandstone, for these chipmunks are generally found in the rubble and among the pinon at the base of the cliffs. At many places in Utah above these cliffs of red sandstone there are forests predominantly composed of yellow pine. Kelson (1951:42-43) states that "these two habitats ...
— Taxonomy of the Chipmunks, Eutamias quadrivittatus and Eutamias umbrinus • John A. White

... city they saw the first signs of destruction. Broken rubble on the streets. The smell of greasy smoke in their nostrils. More and more people appeared, going in the same direction they were. The normally deserted streets of Hovedstad were now almost crowded. Disans, obvious by their ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... same type, although there are some variations. It does not compare with the fine work found on the San Juan and its tributaries, although belonging to that type—the walls being composed of two faces with rubble filling, and the interstices of the large stones being filled or chinked with spalls. This chinking is more pronounced and better done in the northern part of the region than in ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... part of the stronghold of the Mountfiquets. This interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous descent by a flight of break-neck stone steps. At the right-hand side of the same street stands an old rubble chalk wall, even older. It is just past the new house of the Bible Society, and seems to have formed part of the old City wall, which at first ended at Baynard Castle. The rampart advanced to Mountfiquet, and, lastly, to please and protect the Dominicans, was pushed forward outside ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... shops are more city-like, and, being newer than those beyond, are more ornamented as to the stucco of their windows and doors. Here, as elsewhere in this stoneless land, with rare exceptions, the buildings are of brick or rubble, stuccoed and washed, generally in light yellow, with walls three feet or more apart, warmly filled in, and ventilated through the hermetically sealed windows by ample panes in the centre of the sashes, or by apertures in the string-courses ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... abruptness of expression due to the suddenness with which the subject suggested itself to me. It is as though I were building a loose wall in which one must be content to pile the stones haphazard without filling the interior with rubble, levelling the front, or making all lines true to rule. For in building up this speech I shall not bring stones from my own quarry, hewn foursquare and planed on all sides with their outer edge cut smooth and level, so that the nail slips lightly over it. No! at every point I must fit ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... hatch of the original mill yet formed a cascade which had raised its terrific roar for centuries. The cottage itself was built of old stones from the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the rubble of the walls. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... in the village, was built of the large rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed by the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken here and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly black. A band of cement, in which no ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... apprenticeship; and to him he went accordingly. The business carried on by his new master was of a very humble sort. Telford, in his autobiography, states that most of the farmers' houses in the district then consisted of "one storey of mud walls, or rubble stones bedded in clay, and thatched with straw, rushes, or heather; the floors being of earth, and the fire in the middle, having a plastered creel chimney for the escape of the smoke; while, instead of windows, small openings ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... to the city's tutelary divinities. It is called the Tour de Vsone, and, indeed, it was supposed for centuries to have been originally a tower. Its cylindrical shape and its height (ninety feet) give it all the appearance of one. It is built of rubble, faced inside and out with small well-shaped stones, and has chains of brick in the upper part. The circle of the tower is no longer complete, for about a fourth of the wall has been broken down ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... of difference between impossibilities and great difficulties"; that "a great scheme cannot be carried unless made the business of successive administrations"; that "virtuous and able men are the fittest to serve their country"; all this I look on as no more than so much rubble to fill up the spaces between the regular masonry. Pretty much in the same light I cannot forbear considering his detached observations on commerce; such as, that "the system for colony regulations would be very simple, and mutually beneficial to Great Britain and her colonies, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... three minutes, and while the Freja's men stood watching, the level stretch toward which since morning they had struggled with incalculable toil was ground up into a vast mass of confused and pathless rubble. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... Sadok in his place. After this, when the Temple of God was in shameful wise polluted through the naughtiness and negligence of the priests, King Hezekiah commanded the same to be cleansed from the rubble and filth, the priests to light up candles, to burn incense, and to do their Divine service according to the old and allowed custom; the same king also commanded the brazen serpent, which then the people wickedly worshipped, to be ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel

... wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... down for forty feet, in order to lay a perfectly secure foundation on which the heavy wall could be superimposed. This required much additional labour, and great risk and damage was encountered during the progress of the work at the date of the impending rise of the waters of the Nile. Rubble dams were raised to ward off the waters from the point where it was necessary to excavate. The holes were gradually filled with solid blocks of granite; then the base of the structure, one hundred ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... with you to help the workers who are building the wall; carry up rubble, strip yourself to mix the mortar, take up the hod, tumble down the ladder, an you like, post sentinels, keep the fire smouldering beneath the ashes, go round the walls, bell in hand,(1) and go to sleep up there yourself; then d(i)spatch two heralds, one to the gods above, the other ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes

... this, back before 1969." The memories of all those other tests, each ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end result—the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little red dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry. "Forgive ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper

... when the Tescheron coach drew up at the old port-cochere, and no one but the night clerk was about. He swung the great door open and welcomed them to the hotel office, a large living-room, with a wide brick and rubble fireplace in one corner, dimly lighted by a log fitfully blazing, fed by scant draughts, so deeply was it choked by the pile of ashes from the logs that had served to brighten the busy room the night ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose. But the beginning and the end, like the strong stone outer walls of mediaeval buildings, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines. At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... unfinished railway station. The style of building is peculiar, and looks so temporary as to keep one constantly in mind of the threatening earthquake. Most of the edifices, large and small, public and private, are constructed of rubble set in cement, with an occasional big, rough-squared stone to give an appearance of solidity, and perhaps a few courses of bricks in the old Roman style. If the building is of importance, this work is hidden beneath stucco; ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning

... houses, and their evident want of repairs, in fact, their general tumble-down look, relieved here and there by a handsome middle-age doorway or window on the first floor, while the second story would show a confused modern wall of rubble-work and poverty-stricken style of architecture generally; all these contrasts brought out the picturesque element in force. As they passed a row of iron-grated windows a rough, hairy hand was thrust nearly into Rocjean's face, with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... proposed to "flute" the columns, but, finding that the pillars consisted of a stone casing filled with rubble, he ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse

... are mostly in brick and rubble masonry, exhibit poor workmanship, and have undergone considerable repair, especially on the east. On the south there are two thicknesses of walling. The outer thickness has arched recesses at intervals along its length, corresponding ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... an examination of the tides. In the first place let us consider the energy produced by the tides. We see evidences of this energy all round the word's coastlines. Estuaries are scooped out, great rocks are gradually reduced to rubble, innumerable tons of matter are continually being set in movement. Whence is this energy derived? Energy, like matter, cannot be created from nothing; what, then, is the source which makes this ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... from his belt and brought an automatic frown ... then the glance toward the gunsmith's shop, and across the parade ground ... the glance including the houses into which so much labor had gone, the wall that had been built from rubble and topped with pointed stakes, the white slabs of marble that marked the graves of the First Tenant and the men of the ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... "Yes. The rubble came in handy for filling in that nullah. Hullo!" Parker's glasses went to his eyes. "You're right, by Jingo! They're gathering for an assault. Gad! what a beautiful mark for shrapnel. I wish ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... beforehand, and decided that if there was any possibility of being knocked overboard unawares, he would prefer to go over the much gentler slope on the right, where one might even at a pinch find lodgment among the rubble and bushes, than over the sheer fall into Coupee Bay, where you could drop a stone ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham

... to haue beene verie auncient, and first wrought by the Iewes with Pickaxes of Holme, Boxe, and Harts horne: they prooue this by the name of those places yet enduring, to wit, Attall Sarazin, in English, the Iewes offcast, and by those tooles daily found amongst the rubble of such workes. And it may well be, that as Akornes made good bread, before Ceres taught the vse of Corne; and sharpe Stones serued the Indians for Kniues, vntill the Spaniards brought them Iron: so in the infancie of knowledge, these poore instruments ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew

... made his way through the metal litter until he was close enough to make out the source of the light. It came from the center of a shallow area that had been cleared of rubble. A rusted misshapen mass of metal lay in the center of the cleared space. The greenish glow was coming from an opening in ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer

... down to the foreshore, a broadening scree of rubble, ruined masonry, broken beams of timber—some of them smouldering; and over the top of it shone the blaze of the town. But the actual gap appeared to be undefended, and, better still, the rubbish on the near side had so piled itself that for half the way up the stormers could ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... Nature must have been in when she planted free gold in that little wrinkle on the side of Two Peak, and set the bushes in the mouth of the draw, and piled an iron ledge across the top and spread barren mountainside all around it. In the hiding Injun Jim had done his share, too. He had pulled rubble down over the face of the bank of richness, and eyes less keen than Casey's would have passed it by without a ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... a bigger task than he had anticipated. A few inches at a time, resting in between, he dragged him over the ground and up a broken rubble of ice to the side of the boat. But into the boat he could not get him. Elijah's limp body was far more difficult to lift and handle than an equal weight of like dimensions but rigid. Daylight failed to hoist him, for ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... was when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and TRAVELLERS, and HEADERS, and RUBBLE, and POLISHED ASHLAR, and PIERRES PERDUES, and even the thrilling question of the STRING- COURSE, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation of years; youth ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... through gangs of Martinique "muckers." I slid down the face of government-made cliffs on the seat of my commissary breeches. I fought my way up again to stalk through long lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. I rolled down in the sand and rubble of what threatened to develop into "slides." I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted negroes—negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color—while dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie" blasts and rocks of the ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... extensive hills (about fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea) are composed almost entirely of granite rocks, with occasional tracts of quartz; and the surface is generally strewn over with a hard loose rubble. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which, walking behind our kuruma, it took us exactly four minutes to cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places hillsides were pointed out to me ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... came to it, proved a trig little edifice of far greater comfort than most of the common houses of the Highlands—not a dry-stone bigging but a rubble tenement, very snugly thacked and windowed, and having a piece of kail-plot at its rear. It was perched well up on the brae, and its light at evening must have gleamed like a friendly star far up the glen, that needs every ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... the hill in a narrow coombe. The earth at the top hung over the verge, and beech-trees stood as it seemed in the act to topple, their exposed roots twisting to and fro before they re-entered the face of the precipice. Large masses of chalky rubble had actually fallen, and others were all but detached. The coombe, of course, could be overlooked from thence; but a moment's reflection convinced me there was no risk, for who would dare to go near enough to ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... into the opening, holding the candle, and could scarcely check a cry of joy as I perceived that our task would henceforth be much lighter than I had supposed. At the end of the hole, instead of another stone cemented like the first, as I expected, there was a mass of rubble. I could not doubt that the whole of the interior of the wall consisted of this material, and that we should encounter no more blocks of stone until we came to the ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... Captain Greer's gasp as he turned. He could see through the bedroom door to the wall of the living room. A large section of the ferro-concrete wall had sagged away and collapsed, having suddenly lost its tensile strength. On the top of the rubble, frozen for a long instant, stood the Nipe, watching with ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... we'll slide down, Keno, and work out close to the fire zone," the rider said to his horse, as they began to slither down the precipitous slope, starting rubble at every motion. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... quartz pebbles, having all sunk to the same depth within the same time. Considering the nature of the sub-stratum, which at Leith Hill Place was sandy soil including many bits of rock, and at Stonehenge, chalk-rubble with broken flints; considering, also, the presence of the turf-covered sloping border of mould round the great fragments of stone at both these places, their sinking does not appear to have been sensibly aided by their weight, though ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... supports were somewhat irregularly placed, as it was necessary that they should absolutely touch the stones. As they proceeded with the work, the spaces behind the bamboos were filled tightly up with rubble, so as to ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty

... similar hills, black and fantastic, like the slag-heaps at the shaft of a mine. A silence fell upon the little company, and even Sadie's bright face reflected the harshness of Nature. The escort had closed in, and marched beside them, their boots scrunching among the loose black rubble. Colonel Cochrane and Belmont were still riding ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... though flighty); but the Country was again obtuse in the way of active furtherance, and would not even bring block-and-tackle. The old Doctor had to answer, 'Well, then!' and go on his way on more serious errands. The cattle have much undermined, and rubbed down, his poor Pedestal, which is of rubble-work; his Obelisk still lies mournfully horizontal, uninjured;—and really ought to be set up, by some parish-rate, or effort of the community otherwise." ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... in great detail and awaited Marie's reaction. It was even more encouraging than he had hoped for. "I understand less than before! How could anything reactivate that rubble? They put everything over five years old into the piles, and the stuff's supposed to be decrepit already. You'd almost think we were destroying wealth before its time, because if those disabled mechanisms reactivate—" She ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner

... afterwards saw the said Crowe with a pole or weapon, value threepence, breaking the king's peace, by committing assault and battery against the heads and shoulders of his majesty's liege subjects, Geoffrey Prickle, Hodge Dolt, Richard Bumpkin, Mary Fang, Catherine Rubble, and Margery Litter; and that he saw Sir Launcelot Greaves, Baronet, aiding, assisting, and comforting the said Crowe, contrary to the king's peace, and against the form of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... tinged with iron, and the deeper the tinge the better. I am therefore inclined to think, that iron in the soil is almost necessary for the full development of the plant. If under the before-mentioned soil there be a rubble of iron-stone at four or five feet from the surface (a very common formation in Singapore), forming a natural drainage, the planter has obtained all that he can desire in the ground, and needs only patience and perseverance to secure success. The form of the ground ought to be undulating, to ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... difficult to assign a use for certain areas which have been paved apparently with brick rubble, or, in more evident cases, by flatlaid bricks. Four such paved areas have ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter

... they can be found, and then procure some chalk and sift it through a fine sieve, and also some good tenacious loam; mix both in equal quantities in water; a large garden-pot should then be filled with some rubble of chalk, about one third deep, and then the above compost over it, placing the roots in the centre, at the usual depth they grew before. As the water drains away, the loam and chalk will become fixed ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... infinite caution, giving heed to every foothold, and feeling before him with his hands. Fortunately there was little snow to obstruct him; for what had descended into the gorge was lodged in the crevices of the stones. He crawled over heaps of rubble, digging his toes in, to keep from sliding into the water; and there were great hundred-ton boulders, over which he dragged himself on his stomach. Above the canyon there were no stars visible; and below, it was wrapped in darkness, thick, velvety, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... ever saw," Lute called back, as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of rubble ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... spiteful noise. The castle gate shuddered and fell halfway from its hinges. The thing made a second noise. Stones splintered and began to collapse. Hoddan admired. Three more unpleasing but not violently loud sounds. Half the wall on either side of the gate was rubble, collapsing partly inside and partly ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... matches with me, and in the light of one I found a small cavern with a flat roof and floor which followed the cleavage of the strata. Pieces of the roof had fallen at some long-distant date, as was evidenced by the depth of the filth and rubble in which they were embedded. Even a superficial examination revealed the fact that nothing had ever been attempted that might have improved the livability of the cavern; nor, should I judge, had it ever been cleaned out. ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... see the wreckage of the city—shattered walls, tumbled buildings, streets with rubble still piled in them. Weeds and creeping vines grew over the broken bones of this city as if they were attempting ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams

... the wires of the interpreter. Rynason moved to unplug the wires, but Horng stopped at the base of the stairs, looking up along the curving ramp to where it ended in a blunt, weathered break two-thirds of the way up. Rubble ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr

... Escorts dispatched from Paris to meet convoys;[42133] requisition "all the carts and all the horses whatever to effect transportation in preference to any other work or service." All communes traversed by a highway are ordered to put rubble and manure on the bad spots and cover the whole way with a layer of soil, so that the horses may drag their loads in spite of the slippery road. The national agents are ordered to draft the necessary number of men to break the ice around the water-mills.[42134] A requisition ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... the characteristics of Christian life on earth prophesy that the orb is crescent, and will one day round itself into its pure silvery completeness. If you see a great wall in some palace, with slabs of polished marble for most of its length, and here and there stretches of course rubble shoved in, you would know that that was not the final condition, that the rubble had to be cased over, or taken out and replaced by the lucent slab that reflected the light, and showed, by its reflecting, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... The long lines of slaves that had been carrying rock and rubble the day before now were being formed into hauling teams. Long ropes were looped around enormous slabs of quarried rock. Rollers underneath them and slaves tugging and pushing at them were the only means of moving them. The huge stones slid remorselessly forward onto the prepared beds ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... were very much thicker, composed of hewn stone, making a kind of casing at each side, called ashlar, the interval being filled with rubble masonry cemented with lime and loam. This stuffing having deteriorated the weight above had split the outer wall, though most fortunately the interior face was perfectly sound ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher

... household servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the wide space between the columns, which had once given ample vista from graceful awnings into tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude rubble and Roman bricks, leaving but a low, round, arched door, that still led into the tablinum. But that tablinum, formerly the gayest state-room of the Roman lord, was now filled with various lumber, piles of faggots, and farming utensils. On either side of this desecrated apartment, stretched, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... pebble; calculus, concretion; flint, granite, marble, quartz, adamant, shale, flag, flagstone, cobblestone, rubble, brash, shingle; monolith, polyolith; cairn, muller, merestone; cromlech; madstone, snakestone; aerolite, meteorite; (of fruit) endocarp, pit, nut, putamen. Associated Words: petrify, petrifaction, lithology, lithography, lithic, lapidary, lithoglypher, lithoglyptic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... he was not prepared to endorse Timmins's following generalization that it didn't much matter what name a man worshipped under. It penetrated down through the aforesaid rubble of disintegration and touched native granite. Stiffly enough he returned that Presbyterianism was good enough for him, but it rested on Timmins to follow the dictates ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors

... trail, plunging headlong down its sharp declivity with quite as much recklessness as his friend had shown, save the advantage of his flash. He played its powerful beam ahead of him as he ran and leaped, until twenty yards from the entrance he suddenly dug his heels hard into the rubble of the path to halt his wild career as the light showed him the body of a man lying face downward in the trail. Its bulk alone ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... precarious before; but now its difficulties were infinitely increased. The clay sub-soil to the rubble turned slippery and adhesive. On the sides of the mountains it was almost impossible to keep a footing. We speedily became wet, our hands puffed and purple, our boots sodden with the water that had trickled from our ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... He brought his charger back to where the others lay concealed, and then went on an exploring-expedition on foot—to discover that the outer city wall was like a sponge, a nest of honey-combed cells and passages wandering interminably in the fifty-foot-thick brick and rubble rampart. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... region of London they are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... and feet pattered along the pavement. But this vulgar storm of life seemed shut out of Helena's room, that remained indifferent, like a church. Two candles burned dimly as on an altar, glistening yellow on the dark piano. The lamp was blown out, and the flameless fire, a red rubble, dwindled in the grate, so that the yellow glow of the candles seemed to shine even on the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... to content themselves with those four stretches of rubble work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone gibbet, meagre and bare, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... with its stairway in the open. He must find another exit, and he inspected the window, opened it, and looked out. With simian agility, laughing with joy at his discovery, he sprang over the embrasure and disappeared, seeking with feet and hands the irregularities of the rubble-work, the deep, stair-like sockets left by the stones when they had fallen loose from the mortar. Febrer looked out and saw him picking up his hat and waving it with a triumphant expression. Then the boy ran around the base of the tower, and soon his steps resounded, trotting noisily ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... little coppice beside the road, is found a place of refuge of which I give the plan as accurately as it was possible for me to take it where one had to crawl on hands and knees, and sometimes wriggle forward lying on one's stomach, over earth that was damp and rubble fallen from above, and in corridors completely filled ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... the winter quarters of the 'Aurora' was at Cape Evans, immediately off the hut erected by Captain Scott on his last Expedition. The ship on March 14 lay about forty yards off shore, bows seaward. Two anchors had been taken ashore and embedded in heavy stone rubble, and to these anchors were attached six steel hawsers. The hawsers held the stern, while the bow was secured by the ordinary ship's anchors. Later, when the new ice had formed round the 'Aurora', the cable was dragged ashore over the smooth surface and made fast. The final moorings thus were ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... that time seems only to redouble— The Banks, Joint-Stocks, and all the flimsy schemes, For rolling in Pactolian streams, That cost our modern rogues so little trouble. No matter what,—to pasture cows on stubble, To twist sea-sand into a solid rope, To make French bricks and fancy bread of rubble, Or light with gas the whole celestial cope— Only propose to blow a bubble, And Lord! what hundreds will ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... wrecked, and many fellows slept under the shells. In one of them a man was selling hot coffee in the evening, at 6d. a cup. It was a striking scene, which I shall always remember—a large building, floorless and gutted inside, and full of heaps of rubble, very dimly lit by a couple of lanterns, in the light of which cloaked and helmeted figures moved. I thought of sleeping in a house, for it was the coldest night I remember; but habit prevailed, and I turned in as usual by my ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... abandoned Medersa to see that, but for French intervention, the charming colonnades and cedar chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by this time be a heap of undistinguished rubbish—for plaster and rubble do not "die in beauty" like ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... elevation which rose not more than a stonesthrow from the logging road. It marked the end of a spur which jutted out from the ridge than ran toward Kinogama Falls. Some by-gone age of upheaval had thrust skyward a huge pillar of granite and the centuries had gathered about its base a rubble of boulders and earth in which the forest growths had taken root and spread up the slopes. On the top of this hill was a basin-like depression which made a natural rampart for defensive purposes and Phil had remarked as much on the day that ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... she was rowed by the old man across the heaving river, which is here more than a mile in width, to the opposite beach, where a little above high-water mark the grave was found. Scraping aside the loose sand and rubble, and raising the unfastened lid of the rough coffin, the mouldering skeleton was unrecognisable. Quick as thought the woman thrust her fingers into the crumbling mass and raised an arm of the dead, on which was seen to ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... duty of attending the burial of British soldiers in the Christian cemetery at Alexandria on Christmas Eve, 1915. Since the outbreak of the War the graveyard had extended from its original site, prettily shaded by foliage, over an adjacent waste of sand and rubble, where over 2500 of our men who died of wounds or disease at this base had already at this date been laid to rest. Here sleep many Manchester Territorials. In the midst of many graves, identified only by numbers, a black cross recalls the memory of ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst

... cattleman examined the side of the canal. The clay showed where a sharp hoof had reached for a footing, missed, and pawed down the bank. Higher up was the faint mark of a shoe on the loose rubble at the edge. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... his pioneers began to smash a breach, twenty fathoms wide, in one of the walls of the city, rolling the rubble into the ditch to fill it up at the spot. When the operation was complete, Charles rode through the gap, as a conqueror, with vizor lowered and lance on thigh at the head of his Burgundians, into his city of Liege, whose fortifications he commanded ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... which they apply to his ear, and through which they whisper what they have to say. They think that at death men have no perception as they had none before they were born. Their houses are small, built of wood and earth, covered partly with rubble and partly with palm-leaves. It is ascertained that there are twenty thousand houses in the city of Porne. They marry as many wives as they can afford to keep; they eat birds and fish; make bread of rice; and drink a liquor drawn from the palm tree—of which we have spoken before. Some carry ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair

... spent at St. Blazey junction the forty odd minutes of repentance ever thoughtfully provided by our railway company for those who, living in Troy, are foolish enough to travel, I spied at some distance below the station a gang of men engaged in unloading rubble to construct a new siding for the clay-traffic, and at their head my friend Mr. Joby Tucker. The railway company was consuming so much of my time that I felt no qualms in returning some part of the ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the storm's battle-fray, Another is he when the sunbeams play In midsummer's splendor, And radiant, happy his heart is tender. Whatever has form, He bears on his breast with affection warm, Mirrors it, fondles it,— Be it so bare as the mossy gray rubble, Be it so brief ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... cathedral. Rio Medio had been a place of some splendour in its time. The ruinous heavy buildings clung to the hillsides, and my eyes plunged into a broad vista of an empty and magnificent street. Behind many of the imposing and escutcheoned frontages there was nothing but heaps of rubble; the footsteps of rare passers-by woke lonely echoes, and strips of grass outlined in parallelograms the flagstones of the roadway. The Casa Riego raised its buttressed and loop-holed bulk near the shore, resembling a defensive outwork; on ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... Mother Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or 8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a single man in the trench to the rear, if he keeps his ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... she looked dreadful, she was so angry! And then I came in to tell you; and, oh Mrs. Lane, I am so sorry I behaved so, I—I never meant to, I never meant Tom and Daisy to have the blame. And, please Mrs. Lane, will you forgive me, and speak to me again? I've been so—so mis'rubble, and I didn't know how to set things right again." But here Mona's voice failed her altogether, and, worn out with the day's events, and the night's alarm, and all the agitation and trouble both had brought, she broke down completely. Mrs. Lane was quite distressed by ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... dry-dock roofs rise at the water's edge. Drake's island carries but a paltry battery, just raised by the man whose name it bears; Mount Wise is a lone gentleman's house among fields; the citadel is a pop-gun fort, which a third-class steamer would shell into rubble for an afternoon's amusement. And the shipping, where are they? The floating castles of the Hamoaze have dwindled to a few crawling lime-hoys; and the Catwater is packed, not as now, with merchant craft, but with the ships who will to-morrow ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... centre and the graceful pointed turrets at each corner. Most of the roof was gone, but enough remained to show that it had been very high-pitched, and that the proportions of the building must have been perfect. The interior was a mass of rubble; here and there direct hits had blown holes in the wonderfully carved walls, and some of the statues of the famous men of the ancient city had been tumbled from their niches between the third tier of windows. None of the woodwork of the famous ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... with at least two entrances in uninhabited country, and claimed a ten-mile radius around it. By that time, the gang working on top had uncovered a vitrified slab over the hundred-foot circle of the vertical shaft and were cracking it with explosives. According to the scanners, it was full of loose rubble for a hundred feet down. Below that, ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... trying to grow some trees, the stranger kept on along the rugged highway, and between the straggling cottages, so that the women rinsed their arms, and turned round to take a good look at him, over the brambles and furze, and the wall of chalky flint and rubble. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... Bay became visible, with its concourse of mountains crowded to the shore. At the base of the dark declivities the combers were bursting, and the spume towered on the gale like grey smoke. Out of the foam rose harsh rubble and screes to incline against broken precipices, and those stark walls were interrupted by mid-air slopes of grass which appeared ready to avalanche into the tumult below, but remained, livid areas of a dim mass which rose into ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... with excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up their conference. Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... great difference now, for the tower itself had completely collapsed under the momentum, and its ruins had fallen down upon the Temple of Time, demolishing it and leaving only ruins. It had also fallen on a strip of the city, taking with it several buildings and leaving only rubble. The King, Wagner, and Bernibus could just barely be seen amongst the crowds that had dashed out of doors to see what was going on, and I could tell that Bernibus was smiling at my escape as he looked at my wind sailor a thousand feet ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... his story, had descended from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... any necessary measures, insolence and violence excepted—but the power of extraction that must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... down as well; a few faint thuds are heard. Then a rumble: I see what is happening, and the sound echoes within me; the rock loosened other rocks, an avalanche goes thundering down the mountain-side, snow and earth and boulders, leaving a smoky cloud in its wake. The stream of rubble seems in a living rage; it thrusts its way on, tearing down other masses with it— crowding, pouring, pouring, fills up a chasm in the valley—and stops. The last few boulders settle slowly into place, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun

... cracked, fell in a heap of pulverized plaster. The car bucked as a blast sent a ripple down the street. A manhole cover popped up, clattered a few feet, dropped from sight. Brett swerved, gunned the car. It leaped over rubble, roared along the littered pavement. Brett looked in the rear-view mirror. A block behind them the street ended. Smoke and dust rose ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer

... Island. These houses show all the peculiarities of the constructive science of their day, which aimed simply to attain solidity and protection from the elements. The chimneys and end-walls were generally built of stone, laid up as random rubble, with mortar composed of shell lime, sand, and gravel, and flakes of broken slate pounded fine. The sides of these buildings, and the ends above the line of roof-plate, were of frame construction, made of heavy oak timber, rudely squared, put together with treenails and boarded with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... of present-day fauna. How on earth did they get to the place where found? There was a good deal of discussion on the point and no very satisfactory solution offered. Cannot help thinking that there is something in the thought that the glacier may have been weighted down with rubble which finally disengaged itself and allowed the ice to rise. Such ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... piercing up to the day, Pale fleck of June to come, just to be seen Through the rough crumble of rubble and clay ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... largely over a broad zone of rough rubble ice, some of my own sledges had suffered slight damage, and the entire party was now halted and the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... 44 feet in diameter. It was founded with large broad stones at a depth of about 2 feet 6 inches, and built to within 10 inches of the surface with rubble work, on which a course of neatly dressed and well-jointed masonry was laid, of the red sandstone from the quarries to the eastward of Arbroath, which brought the platform on a level with the surface of the ground. Here ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... and vexed with a horrible wind. There were the dull inhabitants of the quarter going about their common business; a man was crying "mackerel" in a doleful voice, slowly passing up the street, and staring into the white-curtained "parlors," searching for the face of a purchaser behind the India-rubble plants, stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books that adorned the windows. One of the blistered doors over the way banged, and a woman came scurrying out on some errand, and the garden gate shrieked two melancholy ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... made to bear alike, and should therefore be coursed and bonded together by the mason's art, whether the work be of stone wrought into blocks and gauged to thickness, or of rough dressed or otherwise unshaped rubble ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... often come across Captains of Engineers sitting on debris in the village street. He squatted on a pile of granular masonry before a rudely prepared space surrounded by three small ragged children gazing round-eyed at something he was drawing with half a Nilgiri cane in the powdered rubble. I paused to look, and there arose before me the picture of a man with a boy and girl on a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various

... a little space of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years. The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man. Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better. Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... construction was abundant. The great city of Palae-Tyrus was close at hand, partly in ruins, and with many of the houses deserted by their inhabitants. Its walls would furnish abundance of stone, mortar, and rubble. Behind Palae-Tyrus lay the flanks of Lebanon, cultivated in orchards, while beyond were its dense and inexhaustible forests of fir, pine, and cedar. Human labour could be obtained to almost any extent, for the neighbourhood ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... angular flints, and occasionally Chalk rubble, unstratified, following the slope of the hill, probably of subaerial origin, of very varying thickness, from 2 to 5 feet and upwards. 2. Calcareous loam, buff-coloured, resembling loess, for the most part unstratified, in some ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... though it was, the cowpony found the steep pass with its loose rubble hard going. Melissy took the climb much easier. In the way she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple dips to right and left, there was a ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... a mile from the castle, and as fast as the stones were squared and roughly dressed they were taken in carts to the spot where they were to be used. Guy had the foundations for the walls dug in the first place, to a depth below that of the bottom of the moats, and filled up with cement and rubble. The trenches were then dug at a distance of five feet from the foot of the walls. With so many hands the work proceeded briskly, and before springtime the three works were all completed, with their ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty

... our labourer and his family composed; and before Roger Acton goes abroad at earliest streak of dawn, we will take a casual peep within his dwelling. It consists of four bare rubble walls, enclosing a grouted floor, worn unevenly, and here and there in holes, and puddly. There were but two rooms in the tenement, one on the ground, and one over-head; which latter is with no small difficulty ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... bullets as they sang past him. He saw little spatters of sand flung up where they struck. As his horse slithered down on its haunches through the rubble, the man just in front of him dived headlong from his horse. Bob caught one horrified glimpse of him rolling over and clutching at his breast. Next moment Dillon, too, was down. His mount ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... time that dusk had fallen and work had ceased for the day, Douglas had cleared away several cubic yards of rubble from the tunnel- mouth, and had also impressed the sentry so favourably that the latter not only thought himself lucky in having charge of so docile a prisoner, but also decided that it would not be necessary for him to exercise quite so much vigilance as he had ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... and moved on all fours. The men behind us waited until we had covered about one hundred yards, then they followed. We decided to make for a point in the distance which was at one time a grand old chateau. Now it was nothing more than a heap of rubble. We waited for the remainder of the party to come up before proceeding, the idea being that in case either of us was hit by shrapnel, or picked off by a sniper, no time would be ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... of the salt marsh and steered the launch into the creek, reducing speed as he did so. On their right, the marsh stretched inland along the sluggish creek bank. On their left, the high old bulk of the Creek House rose from a yard that was strewn with rubble and years' accumulation of weeds and litter. A hundred yards up the creek was the gray, rickety piling of ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine

... on her as we ran, for we feared that she might catch, or capsize; and we were so intent upon our ship that we noticed nothing else. Now when we came to the end of the causeway, and turned to the right, along the shale and rubble tipped there from the quarry, we saw a man coming down the slope to the water, evidently bent on catching the Snail when she arrived. We could not see his face very clearly, for he wore a grey slouch-hat, and the brambles were so high just there that sometimes they ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... south, or parallel with the course of the island and river, is the New York Penitentiary, the first public institution erected on the island. It is a gloomy and massive edifice, constructed of hewn stone and rubble masonry. It is four stories in height, and consists of a central building and wings. The central building is 65 by 75 feet, and the wings each 200 by 50 feet in size. The entire building is exceedingly strong. The floors ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... to cross to gain the rearward premises and slip out of sight of the patrols. The gate of this entrance had been torn off its hinges and now lay jammed aslant across the passage; beyond it the patio lay heaped with bricks and rubble, tiles, and charred beams. I paused for a moment and craned in for a better look at ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... 'bluestones,' occur of a quality useful for road-metal, house-blocks, and ordinary rubble masonry." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... misunderstood Abdur Rahman. Their miscalculation was equally great as regards the character of the Afghans and the conditions of life among those mountain clans. Russian officers and administrators, after pushing their way easily through the loose rubble of tribes that make up Turkestan, did not realise that they had to deal with very different men in Afghanistan. To ride roughshod over tribes who live in the desert and have no natural rallying-point may be very effective; but that policy is risky when applied ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... succession the grizzly climbed to a den in an exposed spot on the northern slope of Mount Meeker. It was a low opening beneath a rock, the entrance to which was partially stopped with loose rubble, raked from inside the cave, and every fall he renovated it by chinking the larger cracks and by pawing together loose bits of rock for a bed. As fall approached, his tracks led to it; apparently he napped inside occasionally to try it out. His ultimate ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... edge of the mesilla, descending into the depression mentioned, and again rounding the highest northern point, then crossing over transversely from west to east and running back south along the opposite edge, there extends a wall of circumvallation, constructed, as far as may be seen, of rubble and broken stones, with occasional earth flung in between the blocks. This wall has, along its periphery, a total length of 983 m.—3,220 ft.—according to Mr. Thurston's measurement.[99] It was, as far as can be seen, 2 m.—6 ft. 6 in.—high ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier

... world would certainly choose to be so. As Smiles says—"A dead fish can float with the stream, but it takes a man to swim against it." What could be more noble than the start and the starter of Christianity? How beautiful the upward struggle of an idea, like some sweet flower blossoming out amongst rubble and cinders! But, alas! to say that this idea was a final idea! That this scheme of thought was above the reason! That this gentle philosopher was that supreme intelligence to which we cannot even imagine a personality without ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... right of the road, about twelve miles from Dieppe. I did not see Longueville, and I am told that the ruins are quite insignificant, yet I regret that I did not visit them. The French can never be made to believe that an old rubble wall is really and truly worth a day's journey: hence their reports respecting the notability of any given ruin can seldom be depended upon. And at least I should have had the satisfaction of ascertaining the actual state of the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... upon that I would have you fix your minds to the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been narrow and evil and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite. God is like a precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the rubble from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity; the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... once celebrated town is a tolerably regular parallelogram, of which the long sides run from east to west. The walls, without guns or embrasures, are built, like the houses, of coralline rubble and mud, in places dilapidated. There are five gates. The Bab el Sahil and the Bab el Jadd (a new postern) open upon the sea from the northern wall. At the Ashurbara, in the southern part of the enceinte, the Bedouins encamp, and above it the governor ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... The once-beautiful landscape had the look of a gigantic pockmarked face, so scored was it by shell-scar and crater. Its vegetation was swept away. Its trees were shattered stumps. Its farmsteads were charred piles of rubble. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune

... and is always hot. Quite one-third of the shipping and wholesale business quarter stands on land reclaimed from the swamp by filling up with earth and rubble. The opposite side of the creek, facing the shipping-quarter, is a low marshy waste, occasionally converted into a swamp at certain tides. The creek forms the harbour of Yloilo, which is just as Nature made it, except that there is a roughly-constructed quayway ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... the iron hand closed down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was required, and he ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London



Words linked to "Rubble" :   slack, dust, scrap, rubbish, debris, trash, junk



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