aspect or conformation of land
landscape
particular extensive locale of land
area, region, tract, expanse
area of land with respect to its physical features
terrain
detailed description or representation of a region with respect to relative locations or elevations
topography
long strip of terrain
swath, swathe
relating to or of the earth, or relating to land or ground as opposed to sea or air
terrestrial
on or close to the earth’s surface
subaerial
extensive area of uncultivated, little-populated, and often uncharted terrain
wilderness, the wild, the wilds, the bush, backcountry, hinterland (Australia: outback)
region or demarcation at the edge of settled or known territory
frontier
area of unclaimed or uninhabited land or one not suitable for either
no-man’s-land
country that is level and low in altitude
lowland, lowlands
country that is elevated or mountainous
highland, highlands, upland, uplands
country’s or region’s central or interior part
midland, midlands
country having few or no trees
open country
region abounding in trees
forest, woods, wood, woodland, forestland
mature woodland ecosystem having old trees, shrubs, and long-present wildlife
old growth forest
corridor-like strip of forest near a river or wetland in an area otherwise having few trees
gallery forest, fringing forest
wet tropical forest with constant cloud cover throughout the year, usually at the canopy level
cloud forest, fog forest
open space in woodland or a forest
clearing, glade
extensive tropical wet woodland with tall trees that form a light-blocking canopy
rain forest
tropical terrain overgrown or thick with vegetation
jungle
describing a tree or forest with foliage that falls off annually rather than with needles or scales
deciduous, broad-leaf, broad-leaved
describing a tree or forest with foliage that stays and remains green throughout the year
evergreen, coniferous (for the most part)
small group or grouping of trees (usually without undergrowth)
grove
patch of thick or twisted growth
tangle
grove or thicket of small trees
copse, coppice, arbustum (British: spinney)
leafy tree-enclosed nook or recess
arbor, bower
dense thicket of shrubs or dwarf trees
chaparral
growth or array of one type of tree (shrub, or plant) in an area
stand
uncultivated land covered with stunted vegetation
scrub, scrubland
cluster of shrubs or small trees
shrubbery, thicket
loss of leaves
defoliation
large-scale loss or clearing of trees
deforestation
something, as a branch or ripened fruit, blown down by the wind
windfall
plant growth or life
vegetation, flora, foliage
green plant life or trees
greenery, verdure
clump of grass
tussock
grass-covered tract of level land
meadow
land constituting or used as a meadow
meadowland
grassland for grazing
pastureland, pasturage
greenery as cover or food for deer
vert
thicket where game hide
covert
small trees, bushes, or shrubs that are part of a forest
underbrush, brush, undergrowth
decaying leaves, twigs, and other organic matter covering a forest floor
duff
grassy (or non-woody) vegetation
herbage
green tract of grassland
sward, greensward, turf
extensive area of treeless grassland (with tall grasses)
prairie, plain, champaign, campagna, pampa (South America)
extensive area of treeless grassland (with short grasses) and less rainfall than a prairie
steppe
steppe with scattered trees and shrubs (esp. in Africa)
veld, veldt
extensive grazing grassland with scattered trees and shrubs
savanna, savannah, campo
extensive treeless plain in the southeastern U.S.
savanna, savannah
extensive plain with few trees in the southwestern U.S.
llano
extensive northern (subarctic) evergreen forest that is moist
taiga, boreal forest
extensive northern (arctic and subarctic) treeless plain with mucky soil
tundra
tundra treeless because of elevation (rather than latitude)
alpine tundra
barren, erosionally “sculpted” region with picturesque or fantastic formations, hills, or mesas
badlands
alpine forest having stunted trees
krummholz, elfinwood
level area of terrain
flatland, flats
area of burned terrain
burn
tract of open and rolling land with poor soil
moor, heath, moorland
high moor or barren field
fell
barren land
waste, wasteland, barren, barrens
tract of sandy ground where topsoil has been blown away by the wind
sandblow
extensive area of barren and arid land
desert
desert at high elevation (2,000 feet or more above sea level)
high desert
broad desert area of wind-blown sand
erg, sand sea, dune sea
flat-bottomed desert basin that at times becomes a shallow lake
playa
illusory optical phenomenon, as experienced at a distance in the desert, in which one sees a body of water or reflected inverted objects, caused by distortion of light rays in alternate layers of hot and cold air
mirage, fata morgana
opening or recession in terrain
hole, cavity, depression, hollow, basin, pan
open longitudinal depression
trench, ditch, cut
valley
vale, dale
small and nestled (usually wooded) valley
dell, glen, dingle
deep and narrow valley
hollow, combe, comb, coombe
deep and steep-sided valley (often with a river)
canyon, cañon
small steep-walled canyon to which access is possible only through its mouth
box canyon
small and narrow steep-sided valley (often with a stream)
gorge, ravine, flume, gulch, barranca, barranco, clough, quebrada (South Africa: kloof)
geological fracture in the earth’s crust
fault, rift
uplift of the earth’s crust
upthrust
deep, elongated valley between two roughly parallel faults
rift valley
pass between mountains
notch, gap
place suitable for crossing or zigzagging
traverse
divide between valleys or side of a valley
coteau
small ravine sometimes having rainwater flowing in it
gully, clough, draw, coulee, nullah, wash, wadi (South Africa: donga)
flat-bottomed gulch or gully sometimes having rainwater flowing in it
arroyo
long hollow or depression
trough
deep drop or hollow
gulf, chasm, abyss
chasm formed by receding ice
randkluft
underground or rock-walled chamber
cave, cavern, grotto
icicle-like calcium carbonate formation hanging in a cave
stalactite, dripstone
irregular, convoluted stalactite
helictite
icicle-like calcium carbonate deposit on the floor of a cave
stalagmite, dripstone
drainage depression or hollow
sinkhole, sink, swallow, swallowhole, dolina, doline
limestone sinkhole with a pool or deep natural well
cenote
extensive or deep mucky or mossy basin
mudhole, muskeg
level area covered by shallow water at high tide
mudflat
high point
elevation, eminence
top of a hill
hilltop, rise
elevated place affording an extensive or scenic view
overlook
projection at the top of a hill
brow
small and rounded hill
knoll, hillock, hummock, monticule, monticle, mound (England: barrow)
hill with a broad top
loma
lower hills beneath mountains
foothills
narrow or oval hill
drumlin
rounded elevation
swell
rounded solitary hill usually with steep sides
knob
steep bare slope
cutbank
mound in permafrost terrain
pingo
African veld’s small and scrubby hill
kopje, koppie
ground that slants upward or downward
slope, incline, grade
upward slope
acclivity, rise
downward slope
declivity
gentle slope
glacis
precipitous slope
steep
hill steep on one side but with a gentle slope on the other
cuesta
open upland of rolling hills or open country
wold
rolling grassy upland with few trees
down, downs
one of successive indentations (from slumping soil) on a hillside
catstep, terracette
tree deformed by wind
wind cripple
parapet-like natural formation atop a wall
battlement
projecting or support-like natural formation
buttress
extensive flat-topped land elevation that rises steeply on at least one side
plateau, table, tableland
small and isolated plateau
mesa
small mesa
mesilla
isolated steep hill or small mountain (flat, rounded, cone-like, or pointed)
butte
solitary and fragmentary mountain
inselberg
series of mountains
range, chain
system of mountain chains (sometimes parallel)
cordillera
chain of mountains with sawtooth-like peaks
sierra
chain of hills or mountains
ridge, chine
ridge dividing drainage directions and regions
watershed, divide
area at the foot of a mountain range
piedmont
side of a formation or mountain
flank
top of a mountain
peak, summit, pike, crest
long and narrow crest-like elevation
ridge
exposed rock surface
face
rugged and sharp-crested mountain ridge
arête, hogback
pyramidal peak usually with concave faces (where three or more arêtes meet)
horn
elevation overlooking other terrain
heights
elevated place
aerie, eyrie
high and rugged mountain
alp
mountain range section or mass
massif
projection laterally or on an angle from a mountain
spur
mountain or hill protuberance
buttress
area near the top or to the side of a mountain
shoulder
short mound or ridge
kame
winding ridge that is gravelly or sandy
esker
cliff formation or line of cliffs
scarp, escarpment, palisade, palisades
jagged glacial ridge or pinnacle (as in an icefall)
serac
steep vertical facing
wall, cliff, bluff, crag, face
precipitous place
steep, precipice
very steep descent or wall
drop-off
small space like a recess in a wall
niche
projection of rock
outcrop, outcropping
steep and bare rocky outcrop or cliff
scar
flat layer of rock
shelf
narrow level space along or projecting from a cliff or slope
ledge, shelf
cliff or wall projection viewed from below
overhang
pointed rock formation
pinnacle
long narrow opening
fissure, cleft, rift, crevice
channel or scoop-like depression between mountains
pass, col, saddle
narrow pass between hills or cliffs
defile, gorge
mountainside gorge or gully
couloir
cleft that is steep and narrow in a cliff or mountain face
chimney
bowl-like mountain basin with steep walls
cirque, cwm, corrie, corry
steep wall of a cirque
headwall
roughly circular or oval flat area enclosed at one end by a curve of higher ground
amphitheater
high and craggy hill or rocky peak
tor
colossal single rock or rock formation
monolith
oddly or fantastically shaped (eroded) rock column
hoodoo
single rock or boulder carried to where it lies by a glacier
erratic
rounded or hump-like natural formation
dome
notably arched or bridge-like formation
natural bridge, arch
smooth and slippery rock
slickrock
downward slide of earth or rocks
landslide, slump, rockfall
swift, massive, and overwhelming fall of ice, snow, earth, rocks, or other material down a mountainside
avalanche
rocky detritus (debris) on a mountain slope
scree, talus
glacial deposit of boulders and stones
moraine
wall-like ridge of rocks, ice, or other debris
rampart
volcanic activity
volcanism, vulcanism
mountain (with a crater) formed by ejected material
volcano
bowl-like depression at the top of a volcano or (from an impact) in the earth’s surface
crater
wide volcano crater (formed by eruptions or rim collapse)
caldera
moving mass of volcanic debris and water or resultant deposit from such a landslide or mudflow
lahar
fast-moving downhill current of hot gas and rock resulting from a volcanic eruption
pyroclastic flow, pyroclastic density current
volcanic vapor hole
fumarole, vent
spring that at times throws up jets of hot water or steam
geyser
extinct volcano crater often containing a lake or marsh
maar
molten rock that issues from a volcano or other surface fissure
lava
molten rock material beneath the earth’s crust that, when cooled, forms igneous rock
magma
solid matter ejected into the air by a volcanic eruption
tephra
underground layer containing and yielding water
aquifer
upper limit of an underground area saturated with water
water table, water level
ledge-like plain above a river or body of water
terrace
moist land
wetland, wetlands
low terrain along a watercourse
bottom, bottomland
tract of low-lying soggy soil
morass
tract of low and wet or spongy ground
marsh, marshland, bog, fen, swamp, swampland, wash, slough, slew, slue
swampy grassland with branching waterways
everglade
low land subject to flood tides
tideland, tidelands
flat and usually muddy tideland
tidal flat, mud flat
body of water, subject to tides, whose water level is controlled artificially
tidal basin
creek affected by ocean tides
tidal creek
high wave in an estuary caused by colliding tidal currents or an upstream flood surge
bore, eagre
flat land having brackish water
salt marsh
body of water separate, held back, or immured from the main current of a larger body
backwater
rough or marshy tract of land with one kind of vegetation (shrubs or ferns)
brake, bracken
sunken and wet tract of land
swale
marshy sluggish or stagnant creek or body of water
bayou
moist low-lying land (usually pineland)
flatwoods
continent or appreciable part of it, as opposed to an extension of it or an island
mainland
land body surrounded by water
island, isle
large group or chain of islands (or their ocean area)
archipelago
small island
islet, ait, eyot
low coral island or visible reef
cay, key
ringlike coral island or reef surrounding a lagoon
atoll
long sandy island parallel to the mainland’s shore and protective against erosion or tides adversely affecting that coastline
barrier island
land arm almost completely surrounded by water
peninsula, chersonese
land formation jutting into the sea or other large body of water
cape
narrow projection of land
tongue
narrow stretch or connecting piece of land
neck
land tip or projection
point
crescent-shaped arm of land
horn
elevated land area jutting over the sea or other large body of water
headland, promontory, ness, naze
neck or strip joining two larger masses of land
isthmus
land inland from the coast
hinterland
strip of land (sometimes prehistoric or submerged) between two relatively large landmasses
land bridge
land along the sea temporarily covered by tides or saturated during floods
tideland
tract or region drained by a river or river system
basin
land along a river subject to flooding
floodplain
flat area encrusted with salt
salt flat
river mouth’s (debouchment’s) often fan-shaped sedimentary plain
delta, alluvial plain
river (alluvial) land between a levee and its lower-water stage
batture
sandbar connecting two islands or an island and its mainland
tombolo
small jutting of sand or gravel at water’s edge
spit, sandspit
area suitable for landing goods from a boat
landing
land border along water
coast, coastline, shore, shoreline, seaboard, littoral
sandy margin along water
beach, strand, lido
pebbled or stony beach
shingle
swampy coastline
maremma
mound of accrued or windblown sand
dune
crescent-like dune that shifts
barchan, barchane, barkhan
ocean, sea
the deep, the briny deep, blue water
ocean beyond territorial waters
high seas, main, open sea, international waters
connecting passage between two large bodies of water
strait, narrows
wide strait or navigable connecting waterway
channel
narrow passage or channel
gut
sea inlet that is extensive
gulf
sea inlet that is long or separates an island from a mainland
sound
sea inlet smaller than a gulf
bay, embayment
bay at a coastal bend
bight
usually sheltered coastal area suitable as an anchorage or port
harbor
shoreline indentation that is sheltered
cove, creek, hole, basin
shallow pond near a body of water
lagoon
long lagoon near the sea
haff
sea inlet or arm
estuary, firth, frith
sea inlet that is narrow and has steep slopes or cliffs
fjord, fiord
sea inlet or creek shallower inland
ria
arm of the sea or of a river
wash
sea’s juncture with a river’s mouth
estuary
channel or passage that runs beneath cliffs from the shore inland
gat
pool of water left after the tide recedes
tidal pool, tide pool
pool of water between two beaches
beach pool
body of shallow water
shallows
dangerously cross-currented or turbulent patch of water
rip, riptide, rip current
submerged (or partly so) bank of sand or gravel obstructive to navigation
bar, sandbar, sandbank, shoal
coral ridgelike growth usually near the surface in warm seas
reef
sea rock opening through which water intermittently spouts
blowhole, gloup
giant circular rotating system of surface currents in the ocean
gyre
water moving in an inward (centripetal) circle
whirlpool, maelstrom, gurge, vortex
small whirlpool
eddy
submarine (undersea) mountain
seamount
flat-topped seamount
guyot
lengthy shallow depression in the ocean floor
trough
lengthy deep, usually steep-walled depression in the ocean floor
trench
any flowing line of fresh water
watercourse, course, channel, waterway, stream (archaic: freshet)
junction of two rivers
watersmeet
inland-flowing course of fresh water smaller than a river
stream, brook, creek, kill, run, quebrada
dry bed of an intermittent stream
dry wash, wash, streambed
small stream
streamlet, brooklet, rivulet, rill, runnel, burn, bourn, bourne
winding stream
meander, serpentine
winding stream dividing around a neck of land
oxbow
river or stream feeding a larger river
tributary, feeder
open stretch of river
reach
river’s source or upper tributary
headwaters, headwater
onrushing or raging stream
torrent
turbulent and rock-obstructed part of a river
rapid, rapids
steep rapids
cataract
turbulent frothy water
white water
abrupt or steep river descent
chute
waterfall
cataract, cascade
narrow channel or strait with swift and dangerous waters
euripus
river or stream channel in a mountain ridge gap
water gap
trough for water
run
shallow area of water that can be waded across
ford
inland body of (usually) fresh water
lake, loch, mere
small lake or standing body of water
pond, lakelet, pondlet, pool, water hole
small mountain lake with steep banks
tarn
artificial pond subject to the tides of a river or stream
tidal basin
stagnant pool
stagnum
dam in a stream
weir
vast moving or spreading mass of ice
glacier
mantle of perennial ice and snow, as at the earth’s two poles
ice cap, ice sheet
extensive area of floating (sea) ice
ice field
floating extension of an ice sheet beyond coastal waters
ice shelf, shelf ice
sheet of floating ice smaller than an ice field
floe
hill in an ice field
hummock
mountain-like mass of floating ice
iceberg
massed array of ice formations at sea
ice pack, pack ice
narrow path of open water through sea ice helpful to wildlife and vessels
lead
path of open water through sea ice, larger and more uniform in size than a lead
polynya
sloping area of jumbled glacial ice blocks, or an avalanche that produces such a perilous area
icefall
glacial fissure or crevice that is deep
crevasse
series of crevasses
bergschrund
granular or ice-like mountain (glacial) snow
névé, firn
permanently frozen subsurface layer in polar or frigid regions
permafrost, pergelisol
thin coating of ice, as on rock
verglas
runoff of water from melted snow
snowmelt
oldest and densest ice, pale blue in color, in a glacier
blue ice
vertical shaft (worn by falling surface water through a crack) in a glacier
moulin
elongated mound or ridge of glacial drift
drumlin
mass of floating ice fragments
brash
fragment of thin ice near shore
pan
fog composed of ice particles
ice fog
pertaining to or like the ocean
oceanic, marine, pelagic, thalassic, maritime
pertaining to the ocean depths or bottom
benthic, benthonic
pertaining to or like a lake
lacustrine
pertaining to or like a river
riverine, fluvial, amnic
pertaining to or like a riverbank
riverain
pertaining to or like a shore
littoral, riparian
pertaining to or like a swamp
swampy, marshy, quaggy, boggy, paludal
pertaining to or like a plain or field
campestral
pertaining to or like a mountain
montane
pertaining to or like an island
insular
pertaining to a shore region moist but always above water
supralittoral
pertaining to a shore region between the high-water and low-water line
littoral
pertaining to an ocean zone from the low-water line to the edge of the continental shelf
sublittoral, neritic
pertaining to an ocean zone from the continental shelf to a depth of some 13,000 feet (4,000 meters)
bathyal, bathypelagic
pertaining to an ocean zone from some 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) to 20,000 feet (6,500 meters)
abyssal
pertaining to an ocean zone deeper than 20,000 feet (6,500 meters)
hadal
CULTIVATED AREAS AND MAN-MADE STRUCTURES
land covered by grass
grassland, parkland
public or park-like promenade bordered with trees
alameda
planned or mall-like alley whose trees are at least twice as high as the route’s width
allée
narrow tree- or branch-covered pathway
tunnel
tree-bordered or hedged and park-like walk
alley
country route or path
trail, lane, track
zigzagging path or road
switchback
grassland tract for grazing or hay
pasture, lea
hedge-forming line of bushes or small trees that separate or enclose fields
hedgerow
enclosed field or pasture for animals, esp. racehorses
paddock
group of planted fruit or nut trees
orchard
thicket of cane
canebrake
wet land cultivated for growing rice
paddy, padi
yard or field used as a household kitchen garden or for a few farm animals
croft (British)
artificial lake often maintained as a water supply
reservoir
artificial waterway for navigation or irrigation
canal
embankment to prevent river or sea flooding
levee, dike
beach- or harbor-protective structure offshore
breakwater, mole, seawall
excavated earthen construction, as for protection or a fortification
earthwork, embankment
Common Modifiers for Terrain or Landscape
impenetrable
tropical
varied
broken
pastoral
bucolic
bleak
panoramic
fertile
intimidating
scorched-earth
stunted
vast
arid
featureless
gentle
idyllic
majestic
scenic
stark
unearthly
unrelieved
decaying
pristine
verdant
lush
sylvan
virgin
arcadian
icy
magical
uncharted
weed-choked
beautiful
overgrown
rolling
wild
blighted
parched
impassable
towering
familiar
rugged
daunting
primordial
colorless
dense
forbidding
intransigent
pitiless
ravaged
scrubby
surreal
fantastical
ruined
austere
mountainous
uniform
colorful
hard
picturesque
stony
unspoiled
variegated
ancient
harsh
luxuriant
unchanging
unworldly
barren
elysian
off the beaten track
rough
frozen
spectacular
craggy
primeval
unreal
desolate
dreamlike
rocky
insular
unchanged
variable
inhospitable
unbroken
windswept
sun-drenched
blasted
flat
lofty
withered
remote
serene
Then they crossed a stone stile on to the moor, and followed a pony-trail northwards, with the screes of the mountain rising steeply on the left. Beyond a spinney of birches, they came to a barn and longhouse, standing amid heaps of broken wall.
—BRUCE CHATWIN, On the Black Hill
I moved to Beaufort, South Carolina, in the early sixties, a town fed by warm salt tides and cooled by mild winds from the sea; a somnolent town built on a high bluff where a river snaked fortuitously.
—PAT CONROY, The Water Is Wide
We now come abreast of the gap on the right, and it ends the tedium of the reach upriver. It is a broad window into stands of cypress, their wide fluted bases attached to their reflections in still, dark water. “How I love them,” says Houck, who is a conservationist of the sunset school, with legal skills adjunct to the force of his emotion. Pointing into the beauty of the bayous, he informs General Sands, “That’s what it’s all about.”
—JOHN MCPHEE, The Control of Nature
The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants and eighteenth-century laborers, still visibly patterned the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence, and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with his advisers and sent his men all over England.
—IAN MCEWAN, Solar
An immediate result of this self-inflicted ecological disaster was that the islanders no longer had the logs needed to transport and erect statues, so carving ceased. But deforestation also had two indirect consequences that brought starvation: soil erosion, hence lower crop yields, plus lack of timber to build canoes, hence less protein available from fishing. As a result, the population was now greater than Easter could support, and island society collapsed in a holocaust of internecine warfare and cannibalism.
—JARED DIAMOND, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
The coast for the fifty miles west of Bognor was full of pleats and tucks—harbors, channel, inlets, and Southampton Water, and the bays of Spithead. The coastal footpath around Selsey Bill gave out at one of the two Witterings. Beyond it were inconvenient islands and not enough causeways and a path made impossible by the scoops and cuts of all this water. There were no walkers here. This territory was for sailors—full of fine bays, friendly harbors, and the waterlogged geography of the Solent; all the blowing boats.
—PAUL THEROUX, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain
Boardwalks skirt the edge of the marsh, rough-hewn planks of silvered cedar spiked together only a few inches above the water: I set out on one of them. The occasional catfish swifted itself into the depths. A quarter mile behind me a crowd of mourners was still about, but from the trough where I walked I could see none of it; I crossed the central bog, hidden to shoulder height by cattails, then climbed to the ridge that runs above the creek.
—ETHAN CANIN, America America
Even though he was relatively safe up there in the Chittagong Hills, the highest point of that low-lying, flatland country, still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies. . . .
—ZADIE SMITH, White Teeth
The traveler from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reached the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed on a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass.
—THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
There was not much work to be got out of Duny. He was always off and away; roaming deep in the forest, swimming in the pools of the River Ar that like all Gontish rivers runs very quick and cold, or climbing by cliff and scarp to the heights from which he could see the sea, that broad northern ocean where, past Perregal, no islands are.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN, A Wizard of Earthsea
Near to the foot of the hill arose the short spiky spears of a sweet chestnut plantation, and beyond it a little patch of woodland, where the wild cherry was but lately over, half veiled a group of conical oast houses in a blur of green.
—IRIS MURDOCH, An Unofficial Rose
To level out the meadow, they crimped blasting caps to fuses, shattered boulders with dynamite, leveled walls and fences, removed hillocks. It was summertime but still there was a chill in the air. Flocks of birds moved fluidly across the sky.
—COLUM MCCANN, TransAtlantic
In the middle of what’s known as Far West Texas, there is Marfa: a hardscrabble ranching community in the upper Chihuahuan desert, sixty miles north of the Mexican border, that inhabits some of the most beautiful and intransigent countryside imaginable: inexhaustible sky over a high desert formed in the Permian period and left more or less alone since. It’s situated in one of the least populated sections of the contiguous United States, known locally as el despoblado (the uninhabited place), a twelve-hour car-and-plane trip from the east coast, and seven from the west.
—SEAN WILSEY, “The Republic of Marfa,” McSweeney’s, March 1999
Behind and over us towered Sheba’s snowy breasts, and below, some five thousand feet beneath where we stood, lay league on league of the most lovely champaign country. Here were dense patches of lofty forest, there a great river wound its silvery way. To the left stretched a vast expanse of rich, undulating veldt or grass land, on which we could just make out countless herds of game or cattle, at that distance we could not tell which.
—H. RIDER HAGGARD, King Solomon’s Mines
Now, as they came out of the hills, they faced the plain and the far wall of the Gila Mountains. Mauve and yellow cliffs. A volcanic cone called Raven’s Butte that was dark, as if a rain cloud were hovering over it. It looked as if you could find relief on its perpetually shadowy flanks, but that too was an illusion. Abandoned army tanks, preserved forever in the dry heat, stood in their path, a ghostly arrangement that must have seemed like another bad dream. Their full-sun 110-degree nightmare.
—LUIS ALBERTO URREA, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story
We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.”
—DONALD BARTHELME, “The Indian Uprising,” Sixty Stories
Stepping ever so carefully, edging forward in the dark, I make my way across the narrow creek bed. With no recent rain, it’s almost dry, apart from a thin trickle down the center, the sound of which is all that’s to be heard—that, and the rustling of Geert settling into his sleeping bag behind me.
My bare feet probing forward, I pull back from contact with the cool moss tempting me to slide across its surface, and search instead for dry rock before shifting my weight forward. A few more steps and I’m across, reaching out in the dark for the granite bank I need to climb if I’m going to get any distance from this creek. This is turning into a bit of a mission just to go for a leak, but having had more than one dose of giardia, I’m not about to break the golden rule and urinate anywhere near the water.
—WARREN MACDONALD, A Test of Will: One Man’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival
At the foot of the palatial facade was strewn, with careful art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive rock, looking as if it might have lain there since the deluge. Over a central precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from a hundred crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops. . . .
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Marble Faun
There are a few “hidden forests” where the topography allows mostly scrub oaks. It resembles southern Scotland more than it does the neighboring island of Martha’s Vineyard or the mainland. It is best explored on foot, off the roads, in September and October, when the moors change colors, veering toward purple, and the sunlight turns winey. Some find it too bleak, but many, like myself, do not.
—FRANK CONROY, Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket
So we went along by the hurrying brook, which fell over little cascades in its haste, never looking once at the primroses that were glimmering all along its banks. We turned aside, and climbed the hill through the woods. Velvety green sprigs of dog-mercury were scattered on the red soil. We came to the top of a slope, where the wood thinned. . . . There was a deep little dell, sharp sloping like a cup, and a white sprinkling of flowers all the way down, with white flowers showing pale among the first inpouring of shadow at the bottom.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, The White Peacock
Going up, the day was fine but the trail deep-drifted and slopping wet at the margins. They left it to wind through a slashy cut, leading the horses through brittle branchwood, Jack, the same eagle feather in his old hat, lifting his head in the heated noon to take the air scented with resinous lodgepole, the dry needle duff and hot rock, bitter juniper crushed beneath the horses’ hooves. Ennis, weather-eyed, looked west for the heated cumulus that might come up on such a day but the boneless blue was so deep, said Jack, that he might drown looking up.
—ANNIE PROULX, “Brokeback Mountain,” Close Range: Wyoming Stories
I followed a cattle path through the thick underbrush until I came to a slope that fell away abruptly to the water’s edge. A great chunk of the shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet, and the scar was masked by elder bushes, growing down to the water in flowery terraces.
—WILLA CATHER, My Ántonia
For the present generation of battlefield tourists, the most important hill on the battlefield is the cone-shaped moraine known as Little Round Top. Oddly, this was not the name by which it was known at the time of the battle. People referred to it variously as Wolf’s Hill, Sugar Loaf, or simply the “rocky hill,” and after the battle, John B. Bachelder (who set himself up almost at once as the official chronicler of Gettysburg) tried to fix the name “Weed’s Hill” to it, in honor of the most senior Union officer killed there during the battle, Stephen Weed.
—ALLEN C. GUELZO, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
In order to get the Project, the beachfront owners would have to sign easements giving the government the rights to build the dunes on their property. The landward toe of the dune would sit on the non-buildable, riparian portion of their real estate, and the crest of the dune would block their view of the ocean from the main floor, unless the house was elevated.
—JOHN SEABROOK, “The Beach Builders,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2013
But above all it is the fantastic colouring of the beaches that as an image overpowers the minutiae. Above the tide-line the grey rocks are splashed gorse-yellow with close-growing lichen, and with others of blue-green and salmon pink. Beneath them are the vivid orange-browns and siennas of wrack-weeds, the violet of mussel-beds, dead-white sand, and water through which one sees down to the bottom, as through pale green bottle-glass, to where starfish and big spiny urchins of pink and purple rest upon the broad leaves of the sea-tangle.
—GAVIN MAXWELL, Ring of Bright Water
The Vosges massif loomed like a granite glacis thirty miles deep and seventy miles wide; cleft by few passes, the range was so thickly wooded that a Guadalcanal veteran like Patch was reminded of jungle fighting.
—RICK ATKINSON, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945
She had not been beyond the town hitherto; very soon she discovered that a road was where the car drove across country. The land was parched and dry with the heat of summer, covered with thin tufts of scorched grass. It was a wooded land, covered thinly with spindly, distorted eucalyptus trees averaging twenty to thirty feet in height; these trees were fairly widely spaced so that it was possible for a car or truck driven across country to find a way between them. This was the road, and when the surface of the earth became too deeply pitted and potholed with traffic the cars and trucks would deviate and choose another course.
—NEVIL SHUTE, A Town Like Alice
It was mid-day when I emerged from the forest into an open space at the foot of the peninsula. A broad lake of beautiful curvature, with magnificent surroundings, lay before me, glittering in the sunbeams. It was full twelve miles in circumference. A wide belt of sand formed the margin which I was approaching, directly opposite to which, rising seemingly from the very depths of the water, towered the loftiest peak of a range of mountains apparently interminable. The ascending vapor from innumerable hot springs, and the sparkling jet of a single geyser, added the feature of novelty to one of the grandest landscapes I ever beheld.
—TRUMAN EVERTS, Thirty-Seven Days of Peril—from Scribner’s Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871
For a while the country was much as it had been; then, climbing all the time, we crossed the top of a Col, the road winding back and forth on itself, and then it was really Spain. There were long brown mountains and a few pines and far-off forests of beech-trees on some of the mountainsides. The road went along the summit of the Col and then dropped down. . . . We came down out of the mountains and through an oak forest, and there were white cattle grazing in the forest. Down below there were grassy plains and clear streams.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Sun Also Rises
Sonam Kesang pointed his driver at the blue sky. He explained that the course remained green and soft until mid-October because the monsoon season usually extends until the middle of September and there is plenty of runoff after that. By early fall, the temperatures begin to cool, dropping into the low sixties during the day, and it hardly rains again until late the following spring, so the grass begins to wither and the fairways become rock hard. “We used to try to fertilize the course in winter to keep it green and playable,” Sonam Kesang said. “But that didn’t work. The only fertilizer we could get was cow manure, but that brought up cloves, so we gave up. Now we just don’t play in January and February.”
—RICK LIPSEY, Golfing on the Roof of the World
The DC-8 took off again and the sea fell away behind it; it climbed over a floor of rain forest and cleared the wall of the cordillera—range after range broken by sunless valleys over which the clouds lowered, brown peaks laced with fingers of dark green thrust up from the jungle on the lower slopes. And in less than an hour—in a slender valley refulgent and shimmering—the white city of Compostela, on twin hills, walled in by snow peaks and two spent volcanoes.
—ROBERT STONE, A Flag for Sunrise
In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators—land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.
Those wetlands that could not be dried, paved or planted were eventually trenched out and diked into vast reservoirs by the U.S Army Corps of Engineers. Billions of gallons of freshwater that for eons had flowed freely as a broad marshy river toward Florida Bay was now held captive for siphoning by agriculture, industry and burgeoning municipalities. First one cross-state highway and then another transected the southern thumb of the peninsula, fatally interrupting the remaining southbound trickle from Lake Okeechobee.
—CARL HIAASEN, Skinny Dip
Tuesday morning: the country east of Heber was a desert of sagebrush and globe-shaped junipers and shallow washes with signs warning of flash floods. I turned north at Snowflake, founded by Erastus Snow and Bill Flake, and headed toward the twenty-five thousand square miles of Navajo reservation (nearly equal to West Virginia) which occupies most of the northeastern corner of Arizona. The scrub growth disappeared entirely and only the distant outlines of red rock mesas interrupted the emptiness. But for the highway, the land was featureless.
—WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON, Blue Highways: A Journey into America
He slowed down to make the road last longer. He had passed the big pines and left them behind. Where he walked now the scrub had closed in, walling in the road with dense sand pines, each one so thin it seemed to the boy it might make kindling by itself. The road went up an incline. At the top he stopped. The April sky was framed by the tawny sand and the pines.
—MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS, The Yearling
On these days of winter I climb to the top of a sky-raking spine of sandstone and sit beside a juniper tree. The ridge runs from a crumpled mountain range in southern Utah to the Arizona desert, jumping a river along its way. It is an elongated, asymmetrical reef of Mesozoic sandstone with a face and a flank, two sides so different you think that you are somewhere else when you are in the same place. The face rises brick-red from a broad wash, nearly vertical but for a skirt of boulders along its talus. The flank is the crazy side: an abruptly sloped flexure of ancient rock beds tilted upward into a jagged crest.
—ELLEN MELOY, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
We traveled on, past the settlement that lay behind Santa Rosa, the sloping shacks and the huts on stilts and the rows of overturned canoes on the riverbank. We passed the gate-like entrance of a green lagoon, and pushed on, struggling in the river that brimmed at our bow. It was hotter here, for the sun was above the palms and the storm clouds had vanished inland. There were no mountains or even hills. There was nothing but the riverbank of palms and low bushes and yellow-bark trees, and the sky came down to the treetops. The high muddy river had flooded the bushes on the bank.
—PAUL THEROUX, The Mosquito Coast
In other places, scraps of life are frozen in death at midstride, as Lot’s wife was petrified to salt while fleeing to higher ground. Here is a wood-framed shack buried by sand, with only the roof joists still visible. In the distance is a copse of skeletal trees, the bones of orchards dried to a brittleness like charcoal. And is that a schoolhouse, with just the chimney and two walls still standing?
—TIMOTHY EGAN, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
The sun fell behind the right side of the gorge, and the shadow of the bank crossed the water so fast that it was like a quick step from one side to the other. The beginning of darkness was thrown over us like a sheet, and in it the water ran even faster, frothing and near-foaming under the canoe.
—JAMES DICKEY, Deliverance
On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned.
—CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Road
It’s summer, and when it’s summer, there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guesthouses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north.
—JESMYN WARD, Salvage the Bones
It lay in the blue Pacific like a huge left-handed gauntlet, the open wristlet facing westward toward the island of Oahu, the cupped fingers pointing eastward toward Maui. The southern portion of Molokai consisted of rolling meadow land, often with gray and parched grasses, for rainfall was slight, while the northern portion was indented by some of the most spectacular cliffs in the islands.
—JAMES A. MICHENER, Hawaii
Chee left his hiding place, and walked back to the arroyo where he had left his patrol car. He drove it, with no effort at all at concealment, up the wash to the crash location. He parked it beside the basalt upthrust. His shovel was in his pickup truck but he didn’t really need it. He dug with his hands, exposing the two suitcases, and pulled them out. They were surprisingly heavy—each sixty to seventy pounds.
—TONY HILLERMAN, The Dark Wind
At our backs rose the giant green and brown walls of the sierras, the range stretching away on either hand in violet and deep blue masses. At our feet lay the billowy green and yellow plain, vast as ocean, and channeled by innumerable streams, while one black patch on a slope far away showed us that our foes were camping on the very spot where they had overcome us.
—W. H. HUDSON, The Purple Land
Three men were standing in the narrow opening of the bush. One of them was the man with the huge gilded palm hat. They stood for a while rather bewildered, seeing the place bare and no sign of a human being near. They called back to the other men coming into the clearing. It seemed they had left their horses on a little plateau, located some hundred and fifty feet below on the road, where there was a bit of thin pasturage.
—B. TRAVEN, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The chain is a place renowned for its winter fisheries: from January to April the best cod on earth comes from the Lofoten waters. The seas off the archipelago are exceedingly complex, with black deeps and sudden shallows, weird currents and dense fogs. The seamen who occupy their business here are skilled, wary, courageous. And they know full well the dangers of the whirlpool that rages between Lofoten Point and the tiny off-island called Værøy. Not for nothing, they say, is the long-abandoned village that overlooks the swirling torrents called Hell.
—SIMON WINCHESTER, “In the Eye of the Whirlpool,” Smithsonian, August 2001
Winged by her own impetus and the drying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, In the South Seas
I am interested enough in that whopping statistic to spend most of the day being driven around the immense battlefield. Interested enough to walk down a spur on Little Round Top to see the monument to the 20th Maine, where a bookish but brave college professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ran out of ammo and ordered the bayonets that held the Union’s ground. Interested enough to stop at the Copse of Trees—where the Confederate General George Pickett aimed his thousands of soldiers who were mowed down at the climax—and sit on a rock and wonder how many Southern skulls were cracked open on it.
—SARAH VOWELL, “What He Said There,” The Partly Cloudy Patriot
High up on the plateau at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she saw rolling red hills wherever she looked, with huge outcroppings of the underlying granite and gaunt pines towering somberly everywhere. It all seemed wild and untamed to her coast-bred eyes accustomed to the quiet jungle beauty of the sea islands draped in their gray moss and tangled green, the white stretches of beach hot beneath a semi-tropic sun, the long flat vistas of sandy land studded with palmetto and palm.
—MARGARET MITCHELL, Gone with the Wind
Once the team arrived at Base Camp, they had to contend with the Khumbu Icefall, a half-mile-wide glacier flowing down from Everest’s Western Cwm and blocking the path to Camp I. The mess of constantly shifting and teetering blocks, which moves some four feet every day, has killed more than two dozen climbers over the years. Nowadays, the icefall is tamed each climbing season with aluminum ladders placed by a group of Sherpas whose sole job is to maintain a safe passage through it.
—GRAYSON SCHAFFER, “Lost on Everest,” Outside, April 2013
A world of uneven ground, of treeless hills and mist-filled hollows, of waterlogged paths and heather-clad slopes, of high tors capped with broken granite, of hut circles and avenues of stones left by ancient peoples, Dartmoor extends over an area of between 200 and 300 square miles.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE, Springtime in Britain
Tenzin Taklha walked me to a spacious waiting room adjacent to the Dalai Lama’s reception hall, up a hillock. Around the knoll were dramatic views of the valley dropping sharply below and the seventeen-thousand-foot peaks behind. Crows cawed from the wooded thickets around the complex, and hawks soared in the sky overhead, gliding on summer thermals. Tall, thin evergreens, known as deodars, cloaked the hill.
—TIM JOHNSON, Tragedy in Crimson
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the mountains the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing heat of the day.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, Nostromo
Nantucketers had good reason to be superstitious. Their lives were governed by a force of terrifying unpredictability—the sea. Due to a constantly shifting network of shoals, including the Nantucket Bar just off the harbor mouth, the simple act of coming to and from the island was an often harrowing and sometimes catastrophic lesson in seamanship.
—NATHANIEL PHILBRICK, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Viewed from the seaward scarp of the moors, the marsh takes form as the greener floor of a great encirclement of rolling, tawny, and treeless land. From a marsh just below, the vast flat islands and winding rivers of the marsh run level to the yellow bulwark of the dunes, and at the end of the vista the eye escapes through valleys in the wall to the cold April blue of the North Atlantic plain.
—HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House
Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom and the whippoorwills cry in the wind-whipped limbs of the tulip tree. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the mountainsides not yet strip-mined for their coal, atop the lone green knobs of Mars. The Southern Highlands, this region was once called; we now call it Appalachia.
—WILLIAM GIBSON, Neuromancer
The glen of Tior will furnish a curious illustration of this. The inhabited part is not more than four miles in length, and varies in breadth from half a mile to less than a quarter. The rocky vine-clad cliffs on one side tower almost perpendicularly from their base to the height of at least fifteen hundred feet; while across the vale—in striking contrast to the scenery opposite—grass-grown elevations rise one above another in blooming terraces.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Typee
It was dark by the time I hobbled with the last of my gear up the steep, narrow path to the top of the headland. My feet were swollen. Like an idiot, I’d left my sandals on Bob and Tanya Lamb’s porch. I slumped in the windswept grass, utterly spent, head lolling against a leathery tussock. The Southeast Trade Winds hushed to a whisper, and droves of mosquitoes appeared from nowhere, zinging in my ears. I had no intention of sleeping. Far below, glowing orange in the beam of my headlamp, a pair of sleepless eyes patrolled back and forth.
—JASON LEWIS, Dark Waters: True Story of the First Human-Powered Circumnavigation of the Earth (The Expedition trilogy, Book 1)
Following the ridge, which made a gradual descent to the south, I came at length to the brow of that massive cliff that stands between Indian Cañon and Yosemite Falls, and here the far-famed valley came suddenly into view throughout almost its whole extent. The noble walls—sculptured into an endless variety of domes and gables, spires and battlements and plain mural precipices—all a-tremble with the thunder tones of the falling water. The level bottom seemed to be dressed like a garden—sunny meadows here and there, and groves of pine and oak; the river of Mercy sweeping in majesty through the midst of them and flashing back the sunbeams.
—JOHN MUIR, My First Summer in the Sierra
Forty-two miles south of the Sitka city limits, a house crafted from salvage planks and gray shingles teeters on two dozen pilings over a slough. A nameless backwater, riddled with bears and prone to methane flatulence. A graveyard of rowboats, tackle, pickup trucks, and, somewhere deep down, a dozen Russian fur hunters and their Aleut dog-soldiers.
—MICHAEL CHABON, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
They were in the hills now, among pines. Although the afternoon wind had fallen, the shaggy crests still made a constant murmuring sound in the high sere air. The trunks and the massy foliage were the harps and strings of afternoon; the barred inconstant shadow of the day’s retrograde flowed steadily over them as they crossed the ridge and descended into shadow, into the azure bowl of evening, the windless well of night; the portcullis of sunset fell behind them.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Hamlet
To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado—a sea of desert.
—EDWARD ABBEY, Desert Solitaire
Some of the blocks can be as big as footballs, some as big as refrigerators or cars or houses. The blocks drop fast, bouncing, grinding, colliding down the cliff or slope like rocks in a rockfall. (Glacial ice is a type of metamorphic rock.)
The icefall is pursued by a turbulent dust cloud hundreds of feet high. The cloud can have a runout miles past where the icefall stops.
The most prominent hanging glacier on K2 is the one that sits brooding over the Bottleneck. It is a serac—defined, in the dictionary, as an irregular-shaped pinnacle of ice on a glacier, formed by the intersection of crevasses, or deep-running fissures.
—GRAHAM BOWLEY, No Way Down: Life and Death on K2
This regarded the request of the academy to widen the saltwater river and dredge a deeper low-tide channel at a point in the Squamscott that would improve the racing course for the academy crew; several shells had become mired in the mud flats at low tide. The part of the river the academy wished to widen was a peninsula of tidewater marsh bordering the Meany Granite Quarry; it was totally unusable land, yet Mr. Meany owned it and he resented that the academy wanted to scoop it away—“for purposes of recreation!” he said.
—JOHN IRVING, A Prayer for Owen Meany
On either side rocks, cliffs, treetops and a steep slope: forward there, the length of the boat, a tamer descent, tree-clad, with hints of pink: and then the jungly flat of the island, dense green, but drawn at the end to a pink tail. There, where the island petered out in water, was another island; a rock, almost detached, standing like a fort, facing them across the green with one bold, pink bastion.
—WILLIAM GOLDING, The Lord of the Flies
It was another glaring day. The arid hills loomed desolate on every side while to the north the white cone of Etna shimmered in distant splendour. The road looped and labored over a wild landscape. Villages of prehistoric origin hung on their pinnacles of sun-blasted rock. Decaying fortresses—relics of war that had raged through Sicily for three millennia—looked down upon yet one more invading army. Brown fields burned under the smoking dust stirred by our column, and here and there little groups of desiccated peasants straightened backs and stared impassibly at our military might as they probably had at the guns and armour of the retreating Germans short hours earlier.
—FARLEY MOWAT, And No Birds Sang
A part of the land towards the north rises more than a thousand feet perpendicularly from the sea. A tableland at this height extends back nearly to the center of the island, and from this tableland arises a lofty cone like that of Teneriffe. The lower half of this cone is clothed with trees of good size, but the upper region is barren rock, usually hidden among the clouds, and covered with snow during the greater part of the year. There are no shoals or other dangers about the island, the shores being remarkably bold and the water deep. On the northwestern coast is a bay. . . .
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The island in sight was Flores. It seemed only a mountain of mud standing up out of the dull mists of the sea. But as we bore down upon it, the sun came out and made it a beautiful picture—a mass of green farms and meadows that swelled up to a height of fifteen hundred feet, and mingled its upper outlines with the clouds. It was ribbed with sharp, steep ridges, and cloven with narrow cañons, and here and there on the heights, rocky upheavals shaped themselves into mimic battlements and castles; and out of rifted clouds came broad shafts of sunlight, that painted summit, and slope, and glen, with bands of fire, and left belts of sombre shade between.
—MARK TWAIN, Roughing It
What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except for the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, The Maine Woods
Sharp hills rose immediately behind the town. The town is in a saddle of the hills, slipping down to the river in terraces of white, chrome, and blue houses. The Rio Tapajos, a black water tributary and a noble river, enters the main stream by Santarem, its dark flood sharply contrasted with the tawny Amazon. But the Amazon sweeps right across its mouth in a masterful way. There is a definite line dividing black from yellow water, and then no more Tapajos.
We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de Caapim) and trees adrift, evidence, the pilots said, that the river was rising. These grass islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to believe they are really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates.
—H. M. TOMLINSON, The Sea and the Jungle
With a jerk the cart moved off, gathering speed: They hurtled past Travers, who was wriggling into a crack in the wall, then the cart began twisting and turning through the labyrinthine passages, sloping downward all the time. Harry could not hear anything over the rattling of the cart on the tracks: His hair flew behind him as they swerved between stalactites, flying ever deeper into the earth, but he kept glancing back.
—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
It was an impressive lookout point. To the eastward the main valley lay outspread. On the opposite side the land fell away in gullies and precipitous ravines to the sea. Several small cascades, the result of recent heavy rains, streamed down the rocky walls, arching away from them, in places, as they descended. Small as the island was, its aspect from that height had in it a quality of savage grandeur, and the rich green thickets on the gentler slopes, lying in the full splendour of the westering sun, added to the solemnity of narrow valleys already filling with shadow, and the bare precipices that hung above them.
—CHARLES NORDHOFF AND JAMES NORMAN HALL, Pitcairn’s Island
Odell suffered terribly, and Mallory took note of it, but eventually he and Lhakpa joined the others, and they continued on, traversing the face and straddling, at one point, a narrow ridge of ice that fell away on one side to the blackness of a fathomless crevasse and on the other to open space and the head of the glacier, thousands of feet below.
—WADE DAVIS, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning: it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created great Fata Morgana.
—ISAK DINESEN, Out of Africa
There is no trail up this gray valley, only dim paths that lose themselves in bogs and willow flats and gravel streams. Several hours pass before we come to the rock outwash of a chasm in the northern walls where the torrent comes down from the ice fields of Kang La. Even at midday the ravine is dark, and so steep and narrow that on the ascent under hanging rocks the torrent must be crossed over and over.
—PETER MATTHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard
To truly grasp what this sea journey meant, what bravery and audacity it required, one must understand how the world was seen and known at that time. Though George Ashby and his contemporaries had been born in the Age of Discovery (1500–1700), most of the world was still terra incognita for Europeans. Maps were often sketchy and inaccurate. Two continents, Australia and Antarctica, had not been traced at all, and vast areas were still blank. The interiors of South America, Africa and Asia had scarcely been explored. Beyond the eastern fringe of North America, which George’s fellow pioneers had begun to document, were millions of square miles of uncharted wilderness.
—ANDREA STUART, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire
This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth, the great Salinas Valley stretching south for nearly a hundred miles, the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills. Mount Toro, on the brother range to the west, was a rounded benign mountain, and to the north Monterey Bay shone like a blue platter.
—JOHN STEINBECK, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
He looked at the miles of ocean between the boat and the beach at the foot of the mountains. Far off to the right he could see white water, the current running swiftly over the top of a reef that extended southwesterly, at a 45-degree angle to the beach. Beyond the reef was a sandspit where the island tapered to its narrow southern end. On their left, the base of the mountains extended to the edge of the sea, forming a rock wall against which the waves broke. According to the charts, the wall plunged to a depth of ten fathoms, and the ocean concealed a network of submarine caves and grottoes in the volcanic rock of which the Pitons were composed. Across the towering ridge, completely out of sight, was the celebrated resort.
—ROBERT STONE, “Under the Pitons,” Bear and His Daughter
There were miles of pastures and tens of miles of wasted, washed-out land abandoned to the hardier weeds. The train cut through deep green pine forest where the ground was covered with the slick brown needles and the tops of the trees stretched up virgin and tall into the sky. And farther, a long way south of the town, the cypress swamps—with the gnarled roots of the trees writhing down into the brackish waters, where the gray, tattered moss trailed from the branches, where tropical water flowers blossomed in dankness and gloom. Then out again into the open beneath the sun and the indigo-blue sky.
—CARSON MCCULLERS, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
He crawled up a small knoll and surveyed the prospect. There were no trees, no bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss scarcely diversified by gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets.
—JACK LONDON, “LOVE OF LIFE,” Love of Life, and Other Stories
A film of mist hung over the inlet. A family of red-fronted geese rippled the water, and at the first gate more geese stood by a puddle. I passed along the track that led up into the mountains. Ahead was Harberton Mountain, black with trees, and a hazy sun coming over its shoulder. This side of the river was rolling grass country, burned out of the forest and spiked with charred trees.
—BRUCE CHATWIN, In Patagonia
Overall, leaf quality is an important influence in recruitment and harvesting intensity in leaf-cutting ants. Its parameters include leaf tenderness, nutrient contents, and the presence and quantity of secondary plant chemicals. In one experiment, harvest preference in Atta cephalotes was tested by offering the ants fresh leaves of forty-nine plant species from a tropical deciduous forest in Costa Rica.
—BERT HÖLLDOBLER AND EDWARD O. WILSON, The Leafcutter Ants
Above the tongue is North Otter Bay, which is deep; below it is South Otter Bay, so shoal as to be dangerous, in spots, to anything but a canoe. It was through the shallows of South Otter Bay that we dragged our boats ashore on the tongue of land along which the river pours itself into the lake; and it was across this tongue of land that we were obliged to carry the boats in order to get to the northward of the French.
—KENNETH ROBERTS, Northwest Passage
The river was squeezed into a twisty crevice between high bluffs, and the wind, thickened with sand from the bars, went scouring into every cranny and backwater. The forest came down sheer into the water on both sides, broken by outcrops of ribbed limestone, staring out of the solid cliffs of green like the faces of Easter Island statues.
—JONATHAN RABAN, Old Glory
Now, after fourteen hours in the stream, a night of naps, and a soaking rain, we stand in the outlet of Allagash Lake. The most distant point we can see is perhaps four miles away—a clear shot down open water past a fleet of islands. The lake is broad in all directions, and is ringed with hills and minor mountains. Its pristine, unaltered shoreline is edged with rock—massive outcroppings, sloping into the water, interrupting the march of the forest.
—JOHN MCPHEE, The Survival of the Bark Canoe
The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark. Abandoning my hope of comprehending what had happened, I shouldered my backpack and headed down onto the frozen witchery of the Icefall nervous as a cat, for one last trip through the maze of decaying seracs.
—JON KRAKAUER, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
As Ice Ages came and went and glaciers repeatedly advanced and retreated, a distinctive, fiercely-glaciated landscape was created. Valley troughs were deepened, smoothed and straightened; at the heads of the valleys, basin-like corries—the lofty nurseries of the glaciers—were slowly scooped out; knife-sharp aretes were honed as the steep corrie backwalls retreated and met; hummocks of ground-up rock debris were then dumped as moraine when the glaciers began to recede; and in the aftermath of glaciation, lakes formed in the hollows which the ice had gouged in the valley bottoms. Gradually, the deposition of river silts is filling up the lake basins, and eventually the lakes will disappear.
—RICHARD MUIR, The Stones of Britain
The path unfurls through a rolling broad-leaf forest peppered with Siberian stone pines, larches, and silver fir and inhabited, Andrei says, by at least several hundred sables, those bearers of the golden fleece, still hanging on in these old woods. The air is as clear and dry and sweet and warm as a June day in Maine, and it fills every few minutes with the distant rumble of a train clattering along the Trans-Siberian tracks down by the lake, a couple of kilometers away.
—PETER THOMSON, Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal
The sheer flanks of the cañon descended in furrowed lines of vines and clinging bushes, like folds of falling skirts, until they broke again into flounces of spangled shrubbery over a broad level carpet of monkshood, mariposas, lupines, poppies, and daisies.
—BRET HARTE, The Youngest Miss Piper
The mountains of the Pennines are not particularly tall and by some definitions not even mountains, Cross Fell being the highest at just short of 3,000 feet, and are often referred to as fells, pikes, or simply hills. . . . Their unique characteristic is that of moorland, and I say unique because for all my wanderings, I have never come across anywhere in the world which resembles the moors of my own country. These are wide and undulating expanses of high altitude, treeless hillsides, often boggy, usually with very poor or “peat” soil, incapable, on the face of it, of sustaining anything but the hardiest of grasses or the most adaptive of species.
—SIMON ARMITAGE, Walking Home
The path, a rather dubious and uncertain one, led us along the ridge of high bluffs that border the Missouri; and by looking to the right or to the left, we could enjoy a strange contrast of opposite scenery. On the left stretched the prairie, rising into swells and undulations, thickly sprinkled with groves, or gracefully expanding into wide grassy basins, of miles in extent; while its curvatures, swelling against the horizon were often surmounted by lines of sunny woods. . . .
—FRANCIS PARKMAN, The Oregon Trail
The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called—a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.
—CHERYL STRAYED, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail