Think of an ocean, of all the boats across its vast expanse rising and descending on their local swells.
Today the hill, a vast green expanse rising 197m with sweeping vistas of the surrounding countryside, remains a palpably sacred site with a wealth of remains including a Stone Age passage tomb (a narrow passage made of large stones containing multiple burial chambers) and prehistoric burial mounds up to 5,000 years old.
Between here and St . Louis for example, a miles-long stretch of Interstate 70 and surrounding fields have been submerged under a spectacular expanse of rising water, and in many similar areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois and Montana the rains have turned wheat, corn and soybean fields into lakes.
By early Tuesday, only one road to the town of Rockhampton was still open, as a rising expanse of water submerged most of the roads in and out of town, the police said.
In December 1975 I found myself in Big Bend National Park in an expanse of desert rising up against the desolate mountains of Texas.
BRIAN GREENE "The Elegant Universe" John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" conjured romantic visions of snow-covered Russian expanses, of people rising up and taking power.
Where once there were irregular little lawns divided by paved walkways, there is now a single oval of 90,000 square feet: Two acres of Kentucky bluegrass and tall fescue, an expanse interrupted only by the rising trunks of 38 trees, including that of a regal sophora.
By 4 p.m., the harbor was barely visible in the distance, a sprawl of warehouses and cranes rising from where the flat expanse of desert met the sea.
The first skyscrapers, including the Eko Pearl tower, are gradually rising from the vast sandy expanse along with roads, bridges, functioning street lights and palm trees amid the cranes, diggers, giant pipes and reels of cable.
In the far east of Kazakhstan, right on the Chinese border, in a place that is ringed by mountains and flanked by deserts, a massive new epicenter of trade is rising up from an empty expanse of parched dunes.
But looking out of our small wooden hut across an expanse of bubbling mud and volcanic craters, steam rising from the ground, it was hard to feel hopeful about the meal we were about to embark on.
