  The bosonic content of string theory in curved background of multidimensional
structure with p-branes has a systematic geometrical description as an
effective sigma-model of gravity in lower dimension (say 3+1) with additional
interacting dilatonic and p-brane fields. If the target-space is locally
symmetric, solutions with intersecting p-branes can be found. Some static
solutions are p-brane generalizations of black holes (including the standard
Reissner-Nordstr"om class), which allow the prediction of detectable features
of the higher-dimensional p-brane geometry via scaling properties of black hole
thermal properties. E.g. the Hawking temperature T_H depends critically on the
p-brane intersection topology.
