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
pertaining to or like land
terrestrial
pertaining to or like the ocean
oceanic, marine, pelagic, thalassic
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
The canyon is a rudimentary steep V, the walls clay and silt. The river within looks slender and white from the air, but the damaged area is like an artillery range, pitted with boulders, heaped with khaki-colored debris.
EDWARD HOAGLAND, “River-Gray, River-Green”
We circled the lake, slipping into each estuary and up Soper Brook, then up Snare Brook.... The brooks were silty but the wetland grasses were a tender light-green.
EDWARD HOAGLAND, “Fred King on the Allagash”
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 arretes 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 sheer flanks of the canon 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”
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
Climate
This was the manner of its coming. Before it, there was clear sky, and the sun shining upon new-fallen snow, a soft breeze from the west, moist and not cold. Then to the north was a line of high-banked, slate-gray cloud, and the mutter of thunder. Next, suddenly, the clouds darkened sun and sky, the north wind struck frigidly, and the air was thick with furious snow.
GEORGE R. STEWART,
Storm
Hour by hour the cloud-deck grew lower and thicker and darker; swift-blown scud sped beneath the low stratus, seeming to skim the wave-crests.
GEORGE R. STEWART,
Storm
Blowing across the sky away from us is a cloud resembling a black wing, torn from the shoulder, pulling along behind it an immense dark pubic fleece.
EDMUND WHITE,
Forgetting Elena
Above the whole valley, indeed, the sky was heavy with tumbling vapors, interspersed with which were tracts of blue, vividly brightened by the sun; but, in the east, where the tempest was yet trailing its ragged skirts, lay a dusky region of cloud and sullen mist, in which some of the hills appeared of a dark-purple hue.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
The Marble Faun
characterized by good weather
fair, clear, pleasant, lovely, balmy, halcyon, temperate
characterized by bad weather
nasty, dirty, foul, inclement
sunny
bright, cloudless, glorious, sunshiny
intensely bright
glary, glaring, dazzling, blinding
cloudy
cloud-covered, nebulous
overcovered or blanketed with clouds
overcast, lowering, gray, gloomy, clouded up
foggy
misty, thick, murky, vaporous, brumous
windy
gusty, blowing, blowy, howling, roaring, turbulent,
blustering
breezy
airy, zephyrous
stormy
tempestuous, raging, angry
threatening
lowering, darkening, looming, black
To-day is a grey day, and the sun as I write is hidden in thick clouds, high over Kettleness. Everything is grey—except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a “brool” over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom.
BRAM STOKER,
Dracula
Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus—huge towers of modelled vapour, looking as white as Monday’s washing and as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away.
T . H . WHITE,
The Once and Future King
damp
humid, muggy, dank, steamy, moist
rainy or wet
precipitating, drizzly, drippy, torrential, showering, pouring
dewy
roric, roriferous
wet and cold
raw, bleak
dry
arid, parched, desiccated, bone-dry, desert, waterless
very warm
hot, torrid, burning, blazing, scorching, blistering, broiling,
baking, searing, roasting, tropical, pitiless
hot and humid
sultry, sweltering
cold
chilly, nippy, sharp, algid
very cold
biting, piercing, bone-chilling, freezing
cool
chill, chilly
refreshingly cool or chill
crisp, bracing, brisk
snowing
snowy, niveous, nival
frosty
rimy, hoary
icy or frozen
frigid, freezing, gelid
Clouds
... the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for the moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded, lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightning, yet you can hear no thunder....
MALCOLM LOWRY,
Under the Volcano
When the sky was furrowed with whispy [sic] bands of altostratus cloud the colour ranged from the most delicate pearl-pinks to the deepest fiery red. Sometimes it was so breathtakingly beautiful that Donald and I rushed for our cameras to capture its ephemeral glory.
JOHN LISTER-KAYE,
The White Island
It was a cloudy evening and as we arrived the sun disappeared into a glowing velvet bank of high cumulus cloud which obliterated Raasay from our view.
JOHN LISTER-KAYE,
The White Island
It was quieter than the quietest night. And the clouds drifted across the sky with the same terrible, icy, inhuman slowness.
Also there were changes of colour. The scene became tinted with mauve. She watched cumulus gather on the horizon; saw it break into three, and with continuous changes of shape and colour the clouds started their journey across the sky.
D.M. THOMAS,
The White Hotel
Note: For remembering these Latinate cloud classifications (introduced in 1803 by English chemist Luke Howard), it is helpful to know the meanings of the key affixes: cumulo-, heap or pile; strato-, cover or layer; cirro-, curl or hair; alto-, high; and nimbo-, rain cloud
.
(LOW-ELEVATION CLOUDS)
stratus
cloud mass like a formless gray horizontal sheet, from which may come drizzle; the sky looks heavy and leaden; bases and tops of clouds are uniform.
cumulus
separate, distinctively shaped puffs or fleecy domed or towered piles of cloud, brightly white in sunlight with darker base; upper parts often like cauliflower.
stratocumulus
grayish, rounded, roll-like masses forming an extensive layer; often look like altocumulus but are lower.
cumulonimbus
mountainously high and often dark storm cloud (or thunderheads) with swellings or “towers” and frequently a flattened, anvil-like top plume; often with ragged cloudlets underneath.
Ragged edges of black clouds peeped over the hills, and invisible thunderstorms circled outside, growing like wild beasts.... Before sunset the growling clouds carried with a rush the ridge of hills, and came tumbling down the inner slopes. Everything disappeared; black whirling vapours filled the bay, and in the midst of them the schooner swung here and there in the shifting gusts of wind.
JOSEPH CONRAD. “Karain: A Memory”
At the base of this cliff of atmosphere cumulus clouds, moments ago as innocuous as flowers afloat in a pond, had begun to boil, their edges brilliant as marble against the blackening air.
JOHN UPDIKE.
The Witches of Eastwick
Down river, from Andy’s Landing, a burned-off cedar snag held the sun spitted like an apple, hissing and dripping juices against a grill of Indian Summer clouds. All the hillside, all the drying Himalaya vine that lined the big river, and the sugar-maple trees farther up, burned a dark brick and over-lit red. KEN KESEY,
Sometimes a Great Notion
(MIDDLE-ELEVATION CLOUDS)