Chalk down

“ It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at least listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps—I can only say perhaps—that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny before it. ”

“ Chalk is not rich and fertile, like manure, it is altogether poor, barren stuff: you know that, or ought to know it. Recollect the chalk cuttings and banks on the railway between Basingstoke and Winchester—how utterly barren they are. Though they have been open these thirty years, not a blade of grass, hardly a bit of moss, has grown on them, or will grow, perhaps, for centuries. ”

“ If you will look at the surface of the chalk, where the sands and clays lie on it, you will find that it is not smooth; that the beds do not rest conformably on each other, as if they had been laid down quietly by successive tides, while the chalk below was still soft mud. ”

“ Holmes remarks,2440 ‘it must be obvious that the course which would commend itself to all seekers after superior chalk would be to begin operations where chalk is at the surface, 517 make a shaft 10 to 20 feet deep, and procure chalk lying at that depth’; and, while he freely admits that ‘a farmer might naturally prefer to get chalk at a depth of 60 to 80 feet on his own land rather than ... from some one else’s pit a mile or two away’, he emphasizes the absurdity of supposing that ‘any people ... ”

“ And, for reasons which you will hardly understand, men are beginning now to believe that the chalk has never ceased to be made, somewhere or other, for many thousand years, ever since the Winchester Downs were at the bottom of the sea: and that “the Globigerina-mud is not merely a chalk formation, but a continuation of the chalk formation, so that we may be said to be still living in the age of Chalk.” ”

“ As I reached the shore I searched about till I had found a couple of chalk boulders to my taste, and carried these to the top of the rock off which I regularly made my plunge, and laid them there.
"An Englishman ought to be as clever as a nigger," I said as I undressed, and I stooped and picked up one of the stones and gazed down into the deep water. ”

“ If we follow the lines of fault, we may see, says M. Puggaard, along the planes of contact of the shifted beds, the marks of polishing and rubbing, which the chalk flints have undergone, as have many stones in the gravel of the drift, and some of these have also been forced into the soft chalk. ”

“ Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do ”

“ I ain't no great shakes, ye know, but I'll walk the chalk all right this time. Golly! Ain't it squashy, though!" he exclaimed, as with a run and a skip he landed straight in the middle of the puffy bed. ”

“ Ashes and chalk would be employed to hide his identity by the one being freely thrown over his head, and his face painted with the latter, whilst individuals would often rush out of their houses to lay their hands upon him that they might thus transfer to him their sin, guilt, trouble, and death. ”

“ They will part, treacherous and careless, and let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me.
... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles. ”

“ Chalk′y.—Chalk for cheese, a small price for a good article.—Chalking the door, in Scotland, a form of warning tenants to remove from burghal tenements.—Chalk out, to trace out, as with chalk, to plan.—By a long chalk, by a considerable distance, referring to the habit of scoring with chalk. [A.S. cealc, like Fr. chaux, is from L. calx, limestone.]
Challenge, chal′enj, v.t. to call on one to settle a matter by fighting or by any kind of contest: to claim as one's own: to accuse ”

“ Joe laughed.
'No; it comes out of the ground.'
'This is like the slate story,' said Dora.
Harry nodded.
9. 'But, Joe, I want to know how the chalk makes the ground good.'
'I don't know how, but it does. If it lies here for a year or more, the earth will turn brown, and we can grow wheat in it. Besides, chalk holds water, and so it will keep the ground moist up here.'
10. 'How?'
'Well, when it rains, the water will not run away through the earth, but will stay in the lumps of chalk. Are you going? Good-bye, then.' [Pg 34]
'Fizz and bubble, bubble and fizz.' CHALK.
PART 2. ”

“ And just beneath there was a small mark with the powder of the chalk lying on it—as if some one had commenced a stroke and had broken the chalk in his hand. I saw the bit of chalk lying on the ground. But what do you make of it?'
'It's a horrible old sign,' said Phillipps—'one of the most horrible signs connected with the theory of the evil eye. It is used still in Italy, but there can be no doubt that it has been known for ages. It is one of the survivals; you must look for the origin of it in the black swamp whence man first came.'
Dyson took up his hat to go. ”

“ We kept close to the bank of sand thrown up by the sea, behind which lay the dismantled and perishing vessels I have already mentioned. The water was much discoloured; and, like that of the Seboo, bore traces of chalk. I observed something white on the bank: pulling to the spot, I found it really to be chalk, an outlyer standing on its edge. It was harder than the common chalk of England. The flints were large masses, and there was a coating on them of crystals of carbonate of lime. ”

“ The chalk gradually bends downwards underground and is covered by sand, gravel, and clay, so that in many places we find the upper part of the hills sandy or clayey whilst the valleys beneath them are chalk. ”

“ It is true, chalk is not in so general use, as an article of diet, as cheese, except in boarding-schools; but the difference is plainly one of degree rather than of kind. We have heard of "prepared chalk." It has been whispered that gentle spinsters use it for a beautifyer. We rather incline to the belief that it is prepared for the inside rather than the outside of humanity. ”

“ The chalk of England, although it appears upon the surface only in detached hills and patches, is actually continuous through considerable tracts of country, where it exists at great depths, as is now ascertained by numerous wells and other sinkings. In the order of position, which the strata of the chalk itself, and those which lie above and below it, bear severally to one another, there has been observed in distant places a remarkable agreement. ”

“ Dennis replied. “I thought perhaps the white chalk which was deposited in the blade-pocket, and was even noticeable on the handle, might be due to billiard chalk. But, of course, I didn’t mention billiards, because it would have given my line of reasoning away. I thought it was better to spring it on them with a bump.” ”

“ On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. ”

“ Three miles south of us the great chalk escarpment quite cuts us off from the low country of Kent, and between us and the escarpment there is not a village or gentleman's house, but only great woods and arable fields (the latter in sadly preponderant numbers) so that we are absolutely at the extreme verge of the world. The whole country is intersected by foot-paths; but the surface over the chalk is clayey and sticky, which is the worst feature in our purchase. ”

“ Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs. ”

“ The middle and upper strata consist of chalk of extreme whiteness and purity, and are chiefly distinguished from each other by the upper one containing layers of flint nodules which do not occur in the lower. The chalk without flints is most frequently somewhat harder than that with flints, and hence they are sometimes distinguished as the hard and soft chalk ”

“ Go for your daily paper and watch the dark dream die. It will say “Clear and warm to-day,” and your window says it. Spring there, sitting on your window-sill, [209] says what your paper will say. So Spring is real. What else will it say?
I draw my legs from the covers. Pain. Then that is true? My hand in a search that makes its moving to my ankle a deep rent of some sleep in my mind, touches the swollen flesh of a larval truth.
—That ankle and its pain: the limekiln and the man with the white head: my parents: Philip: Mildred! The low house on the mountain? ”

“ But the slightest rise and fall in the road,—a mossy bank at the side of a crag of chalk, with brambles at its brow, overhanging it,—a ripple over three or four stones in the stream by the bridge,—above all, a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if, possibly, one might see a hill if one got to the other side of the trees, will instantly give me intense delight, because the shadow, or the hope, of the hills is in them. ”

“ The street is not different from the dawn [80] that drenched my room. Stone is solitary, damp: houses are stifled by the night that they hold, that is passing. I buy a Times and a World at the corner stand where the dark hunched man with thick glasses and a bristling beard gazes at me with exaggerated eyes. I do not look at the paper, waiting for the car. As I sit in the car, I read quietly what I expected to find. Here is the substance ”

“ In tracing this vast collection of water-worn materials, we find that it forms a considerable hill behind the town, and that it joins to the side of the range of hills called the South Downs.
In Alum bay in the Isle of Wight, however, the stratum immediately next to the flinty chalk, and consequently deposited upon it, consists of a white chalk marl without flints. Its nature is sufficiently shewn by its pulverizing with the frost; and the rains wash it down, so that its situation is marked by a deep hollow. ”

“ The lower stratum is more or less argillaceous, and constitutes what is called the chalk marl. Together with the other strata it frequently forms cliffs of considerable height, and though differing little from them in colour is easily distinguished by its constantly shivering with the frost, which always pulverizes a mass of it when exposed to the air for a few months; whereas the others resist the weather in a much greater degree, and are often even employed as a material for building. ”

“ To begin with, our impression of displeasure will but increase with the hillock itself, which will the more strike the sight, and which will be the more repulsive. But continue; raise it up twice as high as a tower, and insensibly the displeasure will efface itself to make way for quite another feeling. The hill has at last become a mountain, so high a mountain that it is quite impossible for our eyes to take it in at one look. ”

“ She heard the crunching of heavy feet all around her, whispering made hoarse by breath exhausted, movement across rock and scrub, retreating steps.
For an interminable time she sat there alone in the hot sun, drenched to the skin in sweat, listening, thinking, striving to find a reason for this lawless outrage. ”

“ Then there were treacherous squalls that went boldly astern and sneaked back upon us from a mile to leeward. Again, two squalls would tear along, one on each side of us, and we would get a fillip from each of them. Now a gale certainly grows tiresome after a few hours, but squalls never. The thousandth squall in one's experience is as interesting as the first one, and perhaps a bit more so. It is the tyro who has no apprehension of them. The man of a thousand squalls respects a squall. He knows what they are.
It was in the doldrums that our most exciting event occurred. ”

“ Oh, the footfalls! the footfalls! Each tread marks a good or a wicked thought. A fiend or an angel starts beneath every heel. They write an eternal [255] record as they go. Their voices float forever to witness against or for us. We people space as we cleave it. The ground that is dumb as we spurn it has a memory and a revenge. I am more sensitive than my kind; and my penance to these monitors of my sin is but a realization of the terror which all must feel at the accusation of their footfalls. ”

“ But, if we care to consider the matter thoroughly, if we compare the requisite array of facts, then the cliff of the unknown rises abruptly, not to be climbed by the path which we insist on following. ”

“ Speciosity in all departments usurps the place of reality, thrusts reality away; instead of performance, there is appearance of performance. The quack is a Falsehood Incarnate; and speaks, and makes and does mere falsehoods, which Nature with her veracity has to disown. ”

“ The streets however are nasty.
But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells—crack, crack—crack, crack—what a fuss thou makest!—as if it concerned the good people to be informed, that a man with pale face and clad in black, had the honour to be driven into Paris at nine o'clock at night, by a postillion in a tawny yellow jerkin, turned up with red calamanco—crack, crack—crack, crack—crack, crack,—I wish thy whip—
—But 'tis the spirit of thy nation; so crack—crack on. ”