"Cavernous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a motley throng of uncle, aunties, visiting lady, neighbors, and children went climbing the cavernous, echoing stairway of the dark school building behind the toiling figure of the skeptical Uncle ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... the first evidence of beauty in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one seeks—pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the housekeeper's bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter, gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism, the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of incredible age. One asks for So-and-so—he's out; for Williams—he's ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the pillars of a colonnade. The forester blew up his air bed. In front of the supper-fire, the shadowy figures of the cooks moved back and forward. From a near-by glacier came an occasional crack, followed by a roar which told of ice dropping into cavernous depths below. The Little Boy cleaned his gun ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito. Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes. When he could spare his cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and with a wrinkled smile ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... After the cavernous obscurity of the jungle the night seemed suddenly to lighten and O'Reilly found himself looking out over a level waste of stumps and tree-trunks perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, extending right and left as far as he could see. Against the luminous western horizon opposite the inky ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... in the chill autumnal night through the desert of Bloomsbury, the dead leaves rustling round the horse's hoofs as we gallop through the Squares. Ah, I shall be across the Border before these doorsteps are cleaned, before the coming of the milk-carts. Anon, I descry the cavernous open jaws of Euston. The monster swallows me, and soon I am being digested into Scotland. I sit ensconced in a corner of a compartment. The collar of my ulster is above my ears, my cap is pulled over my eyes, my feet are on a hot-water tin, and my rug snugly envelops most of me. Sleeping-cars are ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... nearer it came, and now even the breathing of the beast was audible. Evidently attracted by the noise of his descent into its cavernous retreat it was approaching to investigate. He could not see it but he knew that it was not far distant, and then, deafeningly there reverberated through those gloomy corridors the mad bellow ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... so enraged at the destruction of his friends, that he cared neither for the size of the dragon's jaws nor for his hundreds of sharp teeth. Drawing his sword, he rushed at the monster, and flung himself right into his cavernous mouth. This bold method of attacking him took the dragon by surprise; for, in fact, Cadmus had leaped so far down into his throat, that the rows of terrible teeth could not close upon him, nor do him the least ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Land's End, where, as elsewhere, I did signalise myself by not scribbling my autograph on a rock, or carving M.F.T. on the sod: the rocky coast is of the same grand character; granite bits, as big as houses, floundering over each other like whales at play; the cliffs, cavernous, castellated, mossgrown, and weatherbeaten; it looks like a Land's end, a regular break up of the world's then useless ribs: an outlier of rocks in the sea, surmounted by a lighthouse: looks like the end of the struggle between conquering ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and cavernous spot, in spite of the Sahara-like heat of the great pile. In the very heart of it two gigantic masses of rock had put their shoulders together, like Gog and Magog, so that under their ten thousand tons of weight was a crypt-like tunnel as ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... dominated by a reflective system of economics. Mr. Carson—the late Solicitor-General for Ireland, and Mr. Balfour's chief champion in the Coercion Courts—with a long hatchet face, a sallow complexion, high cheek-bones, cavernous cheeks and eyes—is the living type of the sleuth-hound whose pursuit of the enemy of a Foreign Government makes the dock the antechamber to the prison or the gallows. Sir Edward Grey, with his thin face, prominent Roman nose, extraordinarily calm expression, and pleasant, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Scotland a "batty bird" skimmed past my face, attracted, I suppose, by the bright light. I suppose that bats that have not been disturbed before for generations have been aroused by the blast of war through all that region and have come out of dark cavernous hiding-places, as those that night must have done, to see what it is all about, the tumult ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... growl. To me the growl was far more awe-inspiring than the roar; it carried a suggestion of stealth combined with latent ferocity and unimaginable force in reserve. The adjective "thunderous" does not fit the roar at all; the latter suggests, more than anything else, the tones of a mighty, cavernous brass trumpet. Most terrifying, however, is the suspicion that a lion is silently padding round your camp just before daybreak, debating with himself as to whether he will ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... of the forest heard the warning and understood its meaning. From the snug security of the cavernous greenheart, the little, woolly douroucoulis or night monkeys roused themselves from their daylight slumbers, peered out into the fading light with round, blinking eyes, and then curled up ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... belt around his naked waist. His fuzzy wool was dyed a bright brick red colour and twisted into countless little curls which, hanging over his beetling and excessively dirty black forehead, almost concealed his savage eyes, and harmonised with his thick, betel-stained lips and cavernous, grip-sack mouth. Around his arms were two white circlets of shell, and depending from his bull-like neck a little basket containing betel-nut and lime. He certainly was a most truculent-looking scoundrel. Nevertheless, I ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... rolled up before the Persian custom-house in the valley below. There was no evidence of the proximity of a Russian frontier, except the extraordinary size of the tea-glasses, from which we slaked our intolerable thirst. During the day we had had a surfeit of cavernous gorges and commanding pinnacles, but very little water. The only copious spring we were able to find was filled at the time with the unwashed linen of a Persian traveler, who sat by, smiling in derision, as we upbraided him for his disregard of the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... voice came back to him, cavernous and hollow. He shouted again, and then he heard Michel ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... passion of tears and broken prayers. He rose and flung himself, worn-out, upon his hard pallet, and, seeming to slumber, dreamed again within his dream. Once more in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living choking its aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the cavernous depths of the great organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the singing boys. A day of great rejoicings,—for a prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of the mighty skeleton-minster were shaking with anthems, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... model portress did not preside over the house inhabited by Austin Lovel. There Clarissa found only a little deaf old man, who grinned and shook his head helplessly when she questioned him, and shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the staircase—a cavernous stone staircase, with an odour as of newly opened graves. She went up to the first-floor, past the entresol, where the earthy odour was subjugated by a powerful smell of cooking, in which garlic was the prevailing feature. One tall door on the first-floor was painted ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... little distance between them as he walked, and when she looked at him he looked away. She had a vision of herself as an ogre—whiskers sprouted all over her face, her ears bulged and swaggled, her voice became a cavernous rumble, her conversation sounded like fee-faw-fum—and yet, her brothers were not afraid of her in the least; they pinched ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... wonderful piece of mechanism, no more grandly conceived and wonderfully perfected bit of God's handicraft is to be found than the Male and Female Sexual Organs. It is a wonder to those who have made these parts (with their elastic vessels, cavernous sinuses, network of nervous ganglia and fibrillae, chain of lymphatics, periodical ovulation, timed pubescence, and perfected, co-ordinate functions) a study, that they stand abuse and excess so well; that the fierce blasts of lust and passion that sear and scorch them and ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... a straightbacked rocking-chair, in which the august woman rocks her straighter self, and a great tin cage, from between the bars of which an intelligent parrot chatters—"my lady, my lady, my lady!" There is a cavernous air about the place, which gives out a sickly odor, exciting the suggestion that it might at some time have served as a receptacle for those second-hand coffins the State buries ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... coverlet savagely. Milo, with horror in his shining face, gently removed her hand, then stood before her with bowed head, his cavernous chest heaving wildly. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... never been smuggled into America. Ostensibly in the laundry business, and really a master workman in that line, the astute Chink had long since relinquished the labor over the tubs and ironing-board to Hop Wah, his silent partner. Ah Moy's chief interest in the establishment lay in its cavernous sub-cellar, where he conducted gaming tables and a smoking-'parlor' with flattering success. The gods evidently smiled upon him, for his den seemed to be unknown to the police, though they had ferreted out all other resorts of the kind in the city. As there is no 'graft' in Washington, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... and the baggage wheeled off in big trucks. The newsboys and telegraph agents had all gone. A great fear fell suddenly upon her that her uncle was never coming, and that she would soon be left entirely alone in this barnlike, cavernous custom-house, with its bare walls and dusty floors; and night was coming on, and she ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... my steps. I walked for a quarter of an hour. I gazed into the darkness. I shouted. No reply: my voice was lost in the midst of the cavernous echoes which alone replied ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the judge's name was Stone. The name fitted him. He was not young, and looked a man suited to the prosecution of these secret Mormons. He had a ponderous brow, a deep, cavernous eye that emitted gleams but betrayed no color or expression. His mouth was the saving human feature ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... interval between shots had passed. Still no signal. They waited and watched, with fast-mounting apprehension. Could the brave ones down in those fearsome depths have failed almost in sight of the goal? or could misfortune have overtaken them in that narrow, cavernous reach of the chasm so ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... There was no flutter of life in their crowded branches. Everything was so still that Miki heard the excited throbbing of life in his own body. He looked at Neewa, and in the gloom the cub's eyes were glistening with a strange fire. Neither of them was afraid, yet in that cavernous silence their comradeship was born anew, and in it there was something now that crept down into their wild little souls and filled the emptiness that was left by the death of Neewa's mother and the loss of Miki's master. The pup whined gently, ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... and then his immense trunk swung upward, the point twined itself tightly about an unusually leafy twig, there came a slight snapping and swishing sound as the twig was torn from its parent branch, and the next instant both stem and leaves vanished down a cavernous throat. Then, as the ponderous trunk swung downward again, and the beast uttered a grunt of enjoyment, I pressed the trigger of my elephant gun, the barrel of which I had levelled over the bole of the fallen tree a minute or two earlier: there ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... in the cavernous salle a manger was apart: he sat alone, a solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... and mounted the curving drive to the terrace and the cavernous porte-cochere, where hung a bell-pull so huge that Myra had to clasp it in both hands and drag upon it with all her weight. Far in the bowels of the house a bell clanged, deep and hollow-voiced ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Nismes; the crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the caves of that state and published in 1856, in Volume I., Kentucky Geological Survey Reports. Dr. Norwood says: "Referring to the 'Subcarboniferous Limestone' (now known as the St. Louis group of the Mississippian series), Dr. Owen says: 'The southern belt of this formation is wonderfully cavernous, especially in its upper beds, which being more argillaceous, and impregnated with earths and alkalies, are disposed to produce salts, which oozing through the pores of the stone effloresce on its surface, and thus tend to disintegrate and scale off, independent ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... light Away from Heaven in a bridal kiss,— Fire of bodily sense in spiritual glee Held, as fire of water in sunlit air. Ah God, beautiful God, my soul is wild With love of thee. Hitherward turn thy feet, Turn their golden journeying towards this night,— This night of cavernous earth; and now let shine These walls of stone, against thy nearing love, Like pure glass smitten by the power of the sun; And let them be, in thy descending love, Like glass in a furnace, falling molten down, Back from thy burning feet streaming and flowing, Leaving me naked to thy bright ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels, horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily reflecting the ruins, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... was open, and the boy's hand thrust in, they ran up his fingers, and then along his arm to his shoulder, wonderfully active and enterprising with their sharp little noses, one even venturing right up the boy's head after a pause by one ear, as if it looked like the cavernous entrance ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the edge of the timber on some mountain meadow, with his ponies grazing in the starlit dusk, when the little, leaping flame of his night fire flung ruddy shadows that danced in giant mimicry in the cavernous arches of the pines; when the faint tinkle of the belled pack-horse rang a faery cadence in the distance; then there was no such thing as loneliness in his big, outdoor world. Rather, he was content in a solid way. An inner glow of satisfaction because of work well ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... usual authorities tell us that the precipices here are 1500 feet high. When we reached their edge, we found that the clouds, which had been completely lifted up from the smoother parts of the mountain, still lingered as if they had difficulty in getting clear of the ragged edges of the cavernous opening, and moving about restlessly like evil spirits, hither and thither, afforded but partial glimpses of the deep vale below. Though Ben Nevis was at this time rather deficient in his snowy honours, considerable patches lay in the unsunned crevices of the precipice. It was a fine thing to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... that was drawing near. In the low doorway, sat an old hag-like woman, who stared at us with a look of rage, as we passed by her into the room where the sick man was. Sultry as was the day, there was a hot blaze in the cavernous fireplace. Over it hung an iron kettle, from which most sickening odors emanated. The sick man was in a heavy stupor. We tried in vain to arouse him, even for a moment. His wife looked unusually cheerful, as she assured us that he "was a great deal better; that he ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... other heard the speech, and no one but Myles heard the answer that came back, hollow, cavernous, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... quickly, and he presently reached out and drew a reading-lamp towards him. The flame he kindled flickered upward, throwing weird shadows upon his lean, brown face, making the sunken hollows of his eyes look cavernous. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... way, the shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of bright weather there, its singular darknesses which linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells—a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble—all this acted on his childish fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects and incidents never failed ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... her husband meditatively, "you see we had the snow mountains there, and the effect was pretty lively. Then there were the echoes—those cavernous echoes were grand! What was that passage in Job, Effie, that I used to ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... must have had a singularly varied expression of countenance, or else his portrait-painters must have been mere block-heads, for no two of their productions were alike. I saw smiling Davids, frowning Davids, mild Davids, and ferocious Davids,—Davids with oblique eyes, red noses, and cavernous mouths,—and Davids as blind as bats, or with great goggle-orbs, aquiline nasal organs, blue at the tips, and lips made for a lisp. One David had a brown Welsh wig on his head, and was anachronistically attired ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... crossed the grass from window and door of the Turrentine house; Judith's play-party was in full swing. They were dancing or playing in the big front room which was lit only by the rich broken shimmer and shine from a fire of pine sticks in the cavernous black chimney. Though it was early July the evening, in those altitudes, had its own chill, and the heat from this was not unpleasant, while its illumination became necessary, for all the lamps and candles available were in use out ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... became a little, but not much, more sociable, for, although Nigel's active mind would gladly have found vent in conversation, he experienced some difficulty in making headway against the discouragement of Van der Kemp's very quiet disposition, and the cavernous yawns with which Moses displayed at once his desire for slumber and his magnificent ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... casting about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the terrible basement kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the sleeve just above the wrist-band, or place of undue constriction. If the abnormally constricted condition of the anal orifice has been growing from bad to worse for years, the locality immediately above the anal canal will become dilated or cavernous (caused by retained feces or gases), which cavity is called ballooning of the rectum. When a speculum is introduced into the rectum (as shown on page 14 of pamphlet How to Become Strong), and through it ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... a magnificent thing to see. Riding down the cavernous vastness of the building through the rich lights streaming in long rays from the pictured windows—oh, there was never ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... a yell of terror that echoed through the cavernous woods, Pedro sprang to his feet, while his hand reached for the stiletto that he always carried. But quick as he was, he was not as quick as the bear, for, with a motion like lightning and a grip like steel, Black Bruin pinioned his arms to his sides and held ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... of the skull is comparatively smooth, and the supraciliary ridges or brow prominences usually project but little—while, in the Gorilla, vast crests are developed upon the skull, and the brow ridges overhang, the cavernous ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... a great head, with little piggish eyes set wide apart, with immense muzzle and lips, and broad cheeks armed with stiff projecting bristles—the sluggish toxodon. The creature opens its cavernous mouth to seize a floating gourd; and now it tears up the great fleshy arum roots from the clay bank, and grinding them to pulp, sinks below to masticate its meal. Numberless other curious creatures are roaming through the forest, or ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... little nook in the wall, in which he might place the candle, and soon finding one that answered the purpose well, he there left it, having all the appearance of a little shrine, while he proceeded again to the mouth of that singular and cavernous-looking place. He had, evidently, quite made up his mind what to do, for, without a moment's hesitation, he lifted the body again, and carried it within the entrance, walking boldly and firmly, now that he knew there was no danger between him ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... when the irreverent attendant punched his Sublime Majesty in the head and chest, and elicited an impatient, cavernous, responsive "ugh!" ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... not better educated. They are seldom troubled with mauvaise honte; I do not say it in irony, but begging that the words may be taken at their proper meaning. They can always talk, and very often can talk well. But when assembled together in these vast, cavernous, would-be luxurious, but in truth horribly comfortless hotel drawing-rooms, they are unapproachable. I have seen lovers, whom I have known to be lovers, unable to remain five minutes in the same ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... or with voluminous bursts of fractured English from Perdosa. Pulz had nothing to offer, but watched from his pale green eyes. The light shifted and wavered from one to the other as the ship swayed: garments swung; the empty berths yawned cavernous. I could imagine the forecastle filled with the desperate men who had beaten off the Oyama. The story is told that they had swept the gunboat's decks with ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... they got up into the highlands beyond Scutari they began to realize the deceitfulness of Podgoritza and the real truth about khans. Their next one they reached after a rainy evening, and it was a cavernous room with a floor of indurated mud and full of eye-stinging wood-smoke and wind and the smell of beasts, unpartitioned, with a weakly hostile custodian from whom no food could be got but a little goat's flesh and bread. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... or of the vast barrels in the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built in situ and meant to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a face of determination, as though ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... A.D., Strabo, an eminent historian of the time, wrote: "About these places rises Vesuvius, well cultivated and inhabited all round, except at its top, which is for the most part level, and entirely barren, ashy to the view, displaying cavernous hollows in cineritious rocks, which look as if they had been eaten by fire; so that we may suppose this spot to have been a volcano formerly, with burning craters, now ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... of it. So that one goes rambling amongst the wild woods of natural things, where there are many objects under shadow and mantle, for it is in a thick, dense, and deserted solitude that Truth most often has its secret cavernous retreat, all entwined with thorns and covered with bosky, rough and umbrageous plants; it is hidden, for the most part, for the most excellent and worthy reasons, buried and veiled with utmost diligence, just as we hide with the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... a hand as though he feared another blow. The gesture was so human and yet so humble that Mary looked into his face. Time, which turns the sweet-eyed girl into a withered spectre, must have touched him with its thumb. His eyes were ringed and cavernous, his cheeks empty. ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... the flap, and scrambled into a cavernous space between the ceiling and the roof, from which, to Coote's relief, there seemed no exit, except by the door ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... feet. Huge waves roared by, of such vastness that Madden could hear their crests crashing and thundering high above the level of the bridge. These moving mountains shook tons of black water into dim, ghostlike spray, and sent it hissing down into cavernous troughs. The weight of the wind-swept spume flashing out of darkness through the binnacle light almost took the boy off his feet. It pounded his oilskin, stung his face. The enormous iron dock groaned and clanged under the mad bastinado. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... serene abyss, 250 In every heaving shall partake, that grows From heart to heart among the sons of men,— As the ominous hum before the earthquake runs Far through the AEgean from roused isle to isle,— Foreboding wreck to palaces and shrines, 255 And mighty rents in many a cavernous error That darkens the free light to man:—This heart, Unscarred by thy grim vulture, as the truth Grows but more lovely 'neath the beaks and claws Of Harpies blind that fain would soil it, shall 260 In all the throbbing exultations share That wait on freedom's triumphs, and in all The glorious ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... of the corridor, and gazed down into the depths of a cavernous abyss. Instantly the space seemed filled with sprites in every conceivable attire. Some were dressed in the party-colored habits of court pages, some in royal robes of ermine, others as shepherds with crooks, and again others as cherubs ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... occurred to me that it actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and the houses with flights ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel between myself and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me. I argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned and joyous living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me. But why us? they seemed to insist. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... submerged, where the light of idealism is not supposed to penetrate. Grit had been a junkman; his business address—a vacant lot; his only asset—a junk-cart across the top of which he had strung a belt of jingling, jangling bells that had called through the cavernous streets more plainly than Grit himself: "Rags, old iron, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... us with admiration, little dreaming the dark secrets we had discovered concerning that impressive pile, whose peaked roofs and soaring gables sheltered monk and prior before yet our own country had a name, and in whose cavernous cellars only the bravest of the servants dared to go, lest gowned and hooded spectres should ask what ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... present a gently inclined and smooth, or sometimes furrowed, surface to windward, while they are steeply inclined or precipitous to leeward, so that they resemble on a miniature scale glacier-ground hillocks of rock. They are often cavernous on the leeward side, from the upper part having curled over the lower part. During one unusually heavy south-west gale with torrents of rain, many castings were wholly blown to leeward, so that the mouths of the burrows were left naked and exposed on the windward side. Recent castings ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... century or baron of the tenth century. A giant with the face of a "Tartar," pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling "bull-dog,"[3157] with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy. His strength in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a hand on her shoulder, and Rosamond said, "I have brought our only hope," and Eleonora stood, looking at the ghastly face. The yellow skin, the inflamed purple lips, the cavernous look of cheeks and eyes, were a fearful sight, and only the feeble incessant groping of the skeleton fingers showed life ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... slowly down again, we saw that we were shut into a vast courtyard, surrounded by a colonnade, whence cavernous passages led circuitously to the various compartments of the palace. Within the courtyard were drawn up in expectant readiness four companies of archers and three of slingers, in all, perhaps, seven hundred men, who gaped and stared ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the attention is a terrible figure, all vermilion red, towering above many smaller images—a goblin shape with immense cavernous eyes. His mouth is widely opened as if speaking in wrath, and his brows frown terribly. A long red beard descends upon his red breast. And on his head is a strangely shaped crown, a crown of black and gold, having three singular lobes: the left lobe bearing an image ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... was an immense, cavernous room divided into front and back by a partition about seven feet high with an opening in the middle. There was no regular window, but we were only a few feet from the sea which reflected the sunshine through the open door and ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... the answer, sounding cavernous from behind hair and fingers. An explanation presently followed, that a summons had come for him in the morning from Mr. Thompson; and that Mr. Ripton ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... most unpleasant, and the least interesting. There are no women there, no water, and no vegetation. It is surrounded, and indeed often filled, by a world of sand. A scorching sun is always overhead; and one is domiciled in a huge cavernous hotel, which seems to have been made purposely destitute of all the comforts of civilised life. Nevertheless, in looking back upon the week of my life which I spent there I always enjoy a certain sort of triumph;—or rather, upon one day of that week, ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... was beating down very strongly upon us, but it was also, curiously enough, the result of some dimness that obscured the direct path of one's vision. On every side of our rough forest road there were black cavernous spaces set here and there like caves between sheets of burning sunlight. Into these caves one's gaze simply could not penetrate, and the light and darkness shifted about one with exactly the effect of stirring, swaying water. Although the ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... swallows darted from the cavernous entrance on our approach, divided into flocks, soared, wheeled, flew right and left, and finally returned in a body as swiftly as they came, to the sides of the long dark tunnel, which were ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Swamp. A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This has ever since been considered a haunted ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of the shoulder and sent him spinning round and round, he saved himself by clutching at the desk. Fortunately, it was his left arm that hung helpless by his side. His fingers groped feverishly in the cavernous folds of his overcoat pocket. Power, who had dashed against the wall, smashing the glass of one of the pictures, had already recovered his balance and turned around. The little revolver, with whose use Philip was barely acquainted, flashed ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beyond question, but it wasn't a bear. Its eyes, shining with a phosphorescent glow, and the cavernous growling that issued from the red jaws, made it seem the most frightful kind of a monster. Hoping that it was not particularly hungry, Ned tried the scare game again, flinging up his arms and shouting, and making ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... afternoon. The sun swung low in a majestic sky, whose clouds of gold and purple seemed to the gaze of Montaiglon a continuation of the actual hills of wood and heather whereof they were, the culmination. He saw, it seemed to him, the myriad peaks, the vast cavernous mountain clefts of a magic land, the abode of seraphim ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... blood-vessels, which are empty when the penis is flaccid. By a complex nervous mechanism based on vascular paralysis due to nervous phenomena called inhibition and dynamogeny, the nervous irritations cause an accumulation of blood in the spaces of the cavernous bodies which become so gorged with blood as to form stiff and hard rods. The size of the penis is thereby increased considerably and its stiffness allows it to penetrate the vagina of the female. At the same time and by the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... ruddy glare into the darkness, and where there was the same sombre glittering upon the walls and ceiling. We pursued our track along a devious cutting, haunted by confused and giant shadows, suddenly passing black cavernous sideways that startled us as we came upon them, and I began to expect mummies, for I thought myself for one minute within an old Egyptian catacomb. After traversing a further distance of two thousand seven hundred feet we halted at the top of the third slide, the Konigsrolle. ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... to his home. Her life there was the one bright oasis in her desert past. Then she left it a woman, and began the long struggle with poverty and trials over again. In addition, skepticism threw its icy shadow over her. She had toiled in the cavernous mines of metaphysics hopelessly; and finally, returning to the holy religion of Jesus Christ, her weary spirit found rest. Ah, that rest which only the exhausted wanderer through the burning wastes of ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... wide, and a man deathly pale, erect, faultlessly dressed in a full suit of black, the coat buttoned close to his chin, his cavernous eyes burning like coals of fire, entered on St. George's arm and advanced ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the heavens. The pines, of magnificent height and girth, were so closely set that far overhead, where the branches began, was a heavy roof of foliage, impervious to the sunshine, brooding, dark and sullen as a thundercloud, over the cavernous world beneath. There was no undergrowth, no clinging vines, no bloom, no color; only the dark, innumerable tree trunks and the purplish-brown, scented, and slippery earth. The air was heavy, cold, and still, like cave ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... soon as the policeman was out of sight he retraced his steps to the building which they had been discussing, and turning the battered brass handle of the door, walked calmly in. On his right and left were counting houses framed with glass; in front, the cavernous and ugly depths of a gloomy warehouse. He knocked upon the window-pane on the right and passed forward a step or two, as though to enter the office. The boy, who had been engaged in the left-hand counting house, came gliding from his place, passed silently behind the visitor and turned the ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... queen enters. It was the Signorina. She bounded forward amid thunders of applause, and lighting on one foot remained poised in air. Heavens! was this the great enchantress that had drawn monarchs at her chariot-wheels? Those heavy muscular limbs, those thick ankles, those cavernous eyes, that stereotyped smile, those crudely painted checks! Where were the vermeil blooms, the liquid expressive eyes, the harmonious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... dark cavernous portal in the face of the Golden Cliffs, through which the river poured. On into the Stygian darkness ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... open the door before me and stepped out. Though I could see nothing, I remembered the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, and, stretching out my arms, I felt for the boarding on either hand, guilding myself by it, and began to descend, when something rising, as it were, out of the cavernous darkness before me made me halt and draw back in mingled dread ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy was held always before their child's eyes ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... longer an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these vestiges of some splendid place, countless minute men ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... on the bed, and I would have to find the mouth myself or risk drowning it. I held the water on the bed-rail with my right hand, groped with the other, and found a clammy, death-cold forehead, a nose and cavernous cheeks, an open and fever roughened mouth. I poured water on my handkerchief and bathed the face. That would have been my first desire in extreme moments. The poor wretch gave a reviving moan, so ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... disport on the rocks Like a mythical mermaiden belle, And comb out my watery locks, Then dive to my cavernous cell. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... tall Sikh, whose finely-cut face and cavernous eye-bones suggested a carving in old ivory, bowed himself almost to the ground before the girl who had saved his admired Captain Sahib from the possibility of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... cavernous rock by the seashore, that jutted into the water like a small craggy promontory. Captain Cadurcis climbed to its top, and then descending, reclined himself upon an inferior portion of it, which formed a natural couch with the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... exactly like the filling in a chocolate cream, and how his eyes rolled and his teeth twinkled! But it was the inside of his mouth that fascinated Sara most. It was of the lovely, violent red of certain jelly-beans she had known, and she caught the most tantalizing, cavernous ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker |
