Lay of the land

Usage examples of terrain.

Grumbler stopped again, momentarily confused, angrily tempted to lob a magnapult canister across the broken terrain toward the impact, but the emissary ear reported no physical movement from the area.

He travelled by jeep through an invariable terrain of architectonic vegetation where no wind lifted the fronds of palms as ponderous as if they had been sculpted out of viridian gravity at the beginning of time and then abandoned, whose trunks were so heavy they did not seem to rise into the air but, instead, drew the oppressive sky down upon the forest like a coverlid of burnished metal.

Back at the walled garden near the house, Ana turned to survey the gently sloping terrain down to the jungle, and was hit by its unlikely but striking similarity to another would-be paradise, the remnants of which she had once visited, a hortus conclusus whose inhabitants had tried to keep the outside world at bay while an ideal society was being constructed within the boundaries.

Closely following the contours of the rugged terrain, Manesh concentrated on altitude and speed, trying to avoid radar detection by the American fighters and the ever-present AWACS.

The alternatives were retracting their steps, or making a northward detour towards the sea, back into a terrain of sandy soil and marram grass.

He glides silently over the slippery mountains of its body, a metonymical terrain without end.

The boat was skimming the side of a canyon wasteland, an endless terrain of monochromatic rubble that looked less inviting than the surface of the moon.

But the first go-round had shown me that Faye and Jay were as lost in this new obstetrical terrain as my own parents.

To the skittish dismay of the buffalo, the parafoils billowed open and jolted their load over the uneven terrain.

German successes both in the Balkans and Libya, two widely different types of terrain, prove once again the paramountcy of armoured forces supported by a powerful air force.

The sharply-slanted fifty-foot segment of pitted steel offered no level terrain on which to land, and the shifting wind from the ocean struck the paravane like a heavy fist, tipping the craft at dangerous angles.

A mock-up of the terrain, accurate to the last foot, was built in a remote location in Alabama, where Pardee trained Pilgrim, practicing the insertion repeatedly under a variety of weather and light conditions.

She quickly recounted the tale of the hallucinatory terrain Parell Hyath had used to try delaying the company from Corwell, while Tristan frowned in displeasure mingled with confusion.

Where once the herds of Riathan Paravians ran in pearlescent, ethereal splendor, the terrain spoke to the listening ear and thinned the veil that bound time and dimension.

So that herd of twelve horses might spend a whole day thundering up and down the increasingly sloppy and treacherous field, with the players bellowing and cursing and the spectators roaring encouragement, and the sticks waving and crashing and often splintering, and the churned-up terrain plastering the players and horses and watchers and musicians, and the riders falling from their saddles and trying to scurry to safety and being cheerfully ridden down by their fellows, and, toward the end of the day, when the field was a mere swamp of mud and slime, the horses also slipping and slewing and falling down.