Shallow

“ Brook-only for a jest.
HOST. My hand, bully; thou shalt have egress and regress-
said I well?-and thy name shall be Brook. It is a merry
knight. Will you go, Mynheers?
SHALLOW. Have with you, mine host.
PAGE. I have heard the Frenchman hath good skill in his
rapier.
SHALLOW. Tut, sir, I could have told you more. In these
times you stand on distance, your passes, stoccadoes, and
I know not what. 'Tis the heart, Master Page; 'tis here,
'tis here. I have seen the time with my long sword I would
have made you four tall fellows skip like rats. ”

“ We may expect to find banks of sand and gravel in shallow seas and near land, but not in the middle of the ocean.
You may form some notion, on a small scale, as to how the materials are arranged on the sea bottom by examining the channel of a river in a season of drought. At one place, where the current has been strong, there may be a bank of gravel; at another place, where the currents of the river have met, you will find, perhaps, a ridge of sand which they have heaped up ”

“ Master Robert Shallow, choose what office thou wilt in the land, 'tis thine. Pistol, I will double-charge thee with dignities. BARDOLPH. O joyful day! I would not take a knighthood for my fortune. PISTOL. What, I do bring good news? FALSTAFF. Carry Master Silence to bed. Master Shallow, my Lord Shallow, be what thou wilt—I am Fortune's steward. Get on thy boots; we'll ride all night. O sweet Pistol! Away, Bardolph! [Exit BARDOLPH] Come, Pistol, utter more to me; and withal devise something to do thyself good. Boot, boot, Master Shallow! I know the young King is sick for me. ”

“ ORLANDO.
Did you ever cure any so?
ROSALIND.
Yes, one, and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress, and I set him every day to woo me; at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour ”

“ He looked down at her as he would have looked at the slumbering ignorance of a child, but the life within him had the fierce beat of supreme moments. Near by, the eddies sighed along the reefs, the water soughed amongst the stones, clung round the rocks with tragic murmurs that resembled promises, good-byes, or prayers. From the unfathomable distances of the night came the booming of the swell assaulting the seaward face of the Shallows. ”

“ Anyone passing by the water when it is so shallow can hardly fail to notice long narrow grooves in the sand of the bottom. These grooves begin near the edge—perhaps within a foot of it—and then run out into the deeper part. ”

“ It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company. I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms, or two actions; and 'a shall laugh without intervallums. O, it is much that a lie with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders! O, you shall see him laugh till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up! SHALLOW. [Within] Sir John! ”

“ Lingard passed through the deep obscurity made by the outspread boughs of the only witness left there of a past that for endless ages had seen no mankind on this shore defended by the Shallows, around this lagoon overshadowed by the jungle. In the calm night the old giant, without shudders or murmurs in its enormous limbs, saw the restless man drift through the black shade into the starlight. ”

“ Even during the months of storms, the great clamour rising from the whitened expanse of the Shallows dwelt high in the air in a vast murmur, now feeble now stronger, that seemed to swing back and forth on the wind above the earth without any one being able to tell whence it came. ”

“ In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it. ”

“ The shallows may easily be distinguished at a considerable distance: being composed of light, shifting sand, and acted upon by a strong current, the water above them appears discolored; assuming a dun, or yellow hue, sufficiently contrasted with the deeper parts, to enable the eye at once to trace their respective limits. ”

“ We do not act that often jest and laugh;
'Tis old but true: Still swine eats all the draff. Exit
Re-enter MISTRESS FORD, with two SERVANTS
MRS. FORD. Go, sirs, take the basket again on your shoulders;
your master is hard at door; if he bid you set it down, obey
him; quickly, dispatch. Exit
FIRST SERVANT. Come, come, take it up.
SECOND SERVANT. Pray heaven it be not full of knight again.
FIRST SERVANT. I hope not; I had lief as bear so much lead.
Enter FORD, PAGE, SHALLOW, CAIUS, and SIR HUGH EVANS
FORD. Ay, but if it prove true, Master Page, have you any
way then to unfool me again? ”

“ Through this whole extent of country we rarely meet with any remarkable falls of water; the obvious reason of which is, that the rocks are so soft that they are easily worn down to the level of the beds of rivers. But shoals, or shallows, are frequent, and are formed by beds of rounded sandstone, spread out into a broad base, over which the water often rushes with no small violence and noise. ”

“ Here we managed with extreme difficulty and great peril to get again out of the shallows aforesaid, into which we had sailed as into a trap, between them and the land, for which happy deliverance God be praised; the shallows extend South and North, from 4 to 9 miles from the mainland, and are 10 miles in length from East to West. ”

“ We should pass the slope of shale in silence, glance upward at the treacherous ledge with a sigh, a shudder. Even on the brightest day, spring flowers carpeting our approach, this must be so. Nor would this emotion bear much relation to the wooden cross the peasants erect with reverence. The spot would be haunted by the shadow of an adventure against awful odds.
Half on the shale, half on a patch of turf where gentians actually brushed one cheek, we found him⁠—motionless. Just before the darkness came the glasses picked out the significant outline. ”

“ Like thin, sharp rocks stood on edge, they covered [Pg 8] hundreds of miles with every variation of light and shadow, and we looked across their tops to a far-away wave of snow that broke high against the sky. The depths between the mountains were hazy blue; out of the blueness sharp cliffs and huge flat slopes of rock thrust upward, streaked with the rose and purple and Chinese green of decomposing shale, and from their tops a thousand streams poured downward, threading them with silver white. ”

“ The village of Thethis is built on the plateau that tops the gigantic, shiplike rock wedged in the narrow head of Shala Valley. All around it rise the mountains, snow capped, seamed with white waterfalls like rich quartz with streaks of silver; the shadows of them lie almost all day long across the village. Thethis itself is perhaps thirty large, oblong stone houses scattered at wide intervals on the flat land, and all the land is divided neatly into squares by stone fences—some fields for corn, some for grain, some for meadow. ”

“ By some trick of light reflected from peak or cloud, the trail and the valley below it were visible in a green-gray ghost of daylight, which made us seem unreal even to ourselves. And we climbed, interminably, forever, putting one foot before the other with the patient deep attentiveness of trudging animals, while rain dripped unheeded from forehead to cheek to chin. We climbed, absorbed in detail of slippery shale and stubborn bowlder, till Perolli’s exclamation shocked us as though a rock had spoken. ”

“ There was too little land for the tribe of Shala, and the making of land is slow among mountains where stone walls must be built to catch the little earth that remains when rain melts limestone. He had heard that in the valley of Scutari there was soil, as there had been in Kossova, and his voice sank into silence as though it were a burden too heavy to lift. ”

“ If it be easy to read the origin of conglomerate and sand in the external character of their ingredients, and the mode in which these have been arranged, we shall find it not less easy to discover the origin of shale. Shale is, like sandstone, a granular non-crystalline rock. The particles of which it is built up are usually too small to be distinguished without the aid of a lens, but when put under a sufficient magnifying power, they exhibit evident marks of attrition. In structure it differs widely from sandstone. ”

“ A cliff of shale seldom shows much of the picturesque, though often a good deal of the ruinous. The rock is easily undermined by streams, and a shale ravine usually exhibits in consequence either heaps of crumbling rubbish, or, where the stream comes past with a more rapid current, perpendicular walls, jointed and laminated, but without much variety of outline. Such cliffs, however, merit the careful attention of the observer, - 153 - for from their friability they are most easily decomposed and washed down by streams, to form new accumulations of similar soft argillaceous matter. ”

“ But sometimes I think the whole world is stupid.”
We agreed with little assenting sounds, our minds too much occupied with the difficulty of the way to spend energy on words. We were absorbed in the narrow, slippery trail running rust red along a cliff that wept iron. Only when we paused for breath did we see the beautiful valley of the Lumi Shala beneath us. The rain was falling gently now, a wavering veil of gray chiffon over the mountains that ran a scale of paling blues to the white peaks in the west. ”

“ It is when the surface has been uplifted to a considerable height, and especially when, as is usually the case, this uplifting action has been associated with mountain-building, that valleys take on their accented and picturesque form. The reason for this is easily perceived: it lies in the fact that the rocks over which the stream flows are guided in the cutting which they effect by the diversities of hardness in the strata that they encounter. The work which it does is performed by the hard substances that are impelled by the current, principally by the sand and pebbles. ”

“ The formation of shales will now demand our attention. When a river is carrying down with it a quantity of mud or clay, it is transported as a fine, dusty silt, and when present in quantities, gives the muddy tint to the water which is so noticeable. We can very well see how that silt will be carried down in greater quantities than sand, since nearly all rivers in some part of their course will travel through a clayey district, and finely-divided clay, being of a very light nature, will be carried forward whenever a river passes over such a district. ”

“ Thayer to his curt dismissal an hour and a half later, the interest and attention of his auditors never wavered.
His first lesson emphasized the historical phase of geology; and as he talked and pointed here and there in illustration, it seemed to the boys that every stone and boulder and pebble and overhanging cliff responded with the story of its life. This crevice, that oblique angle, this smooth indentation, that rough mass,—-each marking had its significant meaning to the enthusiastic leader. ”

“ A normal river—in fact, all the greater streams of the earth—originates in high country, generally in a region of mountains. Here, because of the elevation of the region, the streams have cut deep gorges or extensive valleys, all of which have slopes leading steeply downward to torrent beds. Down these inclined surfaces the particles worn off from the hard rock by frost and by chemical decay gradually work their way until they attain the bed of the stream. The agents which assist gravitation in bearing this detritus downward are many, but they all work together for the same end. ”

“ Two long, smooth slopes of rock one below another form the chief part of the water-slide, and the thin stream slipping over them makes one wish to see how the fall would look when the water comes down, a roaring torrent, swollen by heavy rains and melting snow. ”

“ The chain of downs, upon whose highest point they had just been standing, stretched towards the north in a vast confused mass, which in the twilight seemed endless, here overgrown with coarse grass and broom, yonder in dreary baldness, rounded, lengthened, flattened, with sharp overhanging edges, like a sea which, while lashed by a tempest, had suddenly been converted into sand. ”

“ Whereupon, with anxious mind and weary body soothed by the loud splash of the waterfall, with the pain in his ankle considerably relieved, and with a soft, grassy nook beside a rock offering repose, it was not very strange that, after closing his eyes drowsily, Ralph sank into a troubled slumber. ”

“ In this section nearly all the down-wearing has been brought about in the direct path of the stream, which has worn the elevated plain into a deep gorge during the slow uprising of the table-land to its present height. In this way a defile nearly a mile in depth has been created in a prevailingly rather flat country. This gorge has embranchments where the few great tributaries have done like work, but, on the whole, this river flows in an almost unbroken channel, the excavation of which has been due to its swift, pebble-bearing waters. ”

“ The greater part of the water which enters the soil does not penetrate to any great depth in the underlying rocks, but finds its way to the surface after no long journey in the form of small springs. Generally those superficial springs do not emerge through distinct channels, but move, though slowly, in a massive way down the slopes until they enter a water course. Along the banks of any river, however small, or along the shores of the sea, a pit a few inches deep just above the level of the water will be quickly filled by a flow from this sheet which underlies the earth. ”