spiny-backed

Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebra of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyrrhenian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts; and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay.

Europe Revised 1910