He left the court, crossed the Yangtze River by balancing on a floating reed and plunked himself down facing a bare cliff wall to meditate on what to do next.
From the fell where we stood, knee-deep in purple heather, the old limestone quarry in the valley seemed just another scar on the landscape, a great bite of mineral wealth torn from the hillside leaving a bare cliff face, rushy pools and broken rock.
The Klis Fortress rises on a bare cliff divided into two parts.
The cobblestone trail rose through a valley flanked by steep, forested slopes, capped by bare cliffs.
The rising mist continued to unveil the nearby trees, the bare cliffs behind them, and portions of a silver sea, while the smooth evening air poured in around the table, and they continued their pretense of eating, trapped in the moment by their private anxieties.
This community, a refuge for scuba divers and backpackers, pressed up against the sea by the soaring bare cliffs of the Sinai, is so close-knit that it took almost half the day on Tuesday for the shock to subside enough for anyone to wash the blood from the pedestrian walk, to board up shattered store fronts or even to remove the plates of food left on restaurant tables.
If Opportunity's first look across Endurance at its bare cliffs is any indication, the time before the Eagle crater sea was a varied chapter of Mars history.
For a start the mine is smack in the middle of a National Forest and what was once a landscape of dense vegetation is a now a moonscape of bare cliffs and billowing dust.
Waterfalls tumble down its precipitous cliff faces, sometimes huge silver-white torrents foaming through verdant forests, sometimes more modest but no less enchanting like the Quadruple Waterfall - which has just morphed into sextuplets - its translucent bridal veils billowing down the sheer bare cliffs.
It's 500 square miles of loneliness, of bare dunes and forbidding cliffs, where grey rocks tower 2,000ft above red desert and you feel as small as a grain of sand.
The ongoing ecohydrological transitions in the more xeric aspects are in the process of transforming those hillslopes from smooth, curvilinear, soil-mantled, sediment transport-limited slopes to detachment-limited slopes characterized by an expanding area of bare bedrock steps and cliffs, and this transition is probably irreversible.
