"Waterspout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steam-engine. A pressure upon a button, and a few seconds sufficed to exchange a speed of four for one of twenty miles an hour; while, instead of sinking the vessel below the surface, the master directed the engine to pump out all the liquid ballast she contained. The waterspout thus sent forth half-drowned the enemy which had already come within a few yards of our starboard quarter, and effectually-scared the others. It was just as well that Enva, who heartily hated the bitter cold, was snugly ensconced in the warm cushions of the cabin, and had not, therefore, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... men want to get into English imprisonment. As I was thinking about all this, the masts again appear on the horizon, the Emden steaming easterly, but very much slower. All at once the enemy, at high speed, shoots by, apparently, quite close to the Emden. A high, white waterspout showed among the black smoke of the enemy. That was a torpedo. I see how the two opponents withdrew, the distance growing greater between them; how they separate, till they disappear in the darkness. The fight ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... people have been drowned.... On Sunday morning I saw the Danube bearing swiftly away the terrible wreckage of the storm. There were large articles of furniture, the bodies of men, women, and children, together with horses and cows, all floating on the whirling waters.... It rained a waterspout for nearly five hours, and in consequence the small valleys leading down from the mountain were in some places thirty feet deep, for a time, in rushing water.... The tramways in some places are destroyed; the mountain ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... know not how) there lurked quicksands full of dread, Rocks and reefs and whirlpools in the water-bed, Whence a waterspout Instantaneously leaped out, Roaring ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... as its coevals, and was ages older than the human race. The pool appeared—but not as she had known it, for it boiled and heaved, bubbled and rose. From its lowest depths it was moved to meet and receive her! Coil upon coil it lifted itself into the air, towering like a waterspout, then stretched out a long, writhing, shivering neck to take her from the invisible arms that bore her to her doom. The neck shot out a head, and the head shot out the tongue of a water-snake. She shrieked and woke, bathed ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... branches of trees. The railway station at Randalstown was much injured; great numbers of slates, and two and a half hundredweight of lead were torn from the roof. When passing over a portion of the lake, it presented the appearance of a waterspout. On land everything that it lapped up was whirled round and round, and carried upwards in the centre, whilst dense clouds surrounded the outside and came down ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... live on, I would cling on, though swinging fearfully from that up-rushing throne; for my mind was unsubdued, and my reason would not die, but rebelled against his mandate. And so the pinions flapped away, the dreadful cavalcade of clouds followed, we broke the waterspout, raced the whirlwind, hunted the thunder to his caverns, rushed through the light and wind-tost mountains of the snow, pierced with a crash the thick sea of ice, that like a globe of hollow glass separates earth and its atmosphere from ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... then came a rattling shower of hail, with stones as big as pigeons' eggs, succeeded by rain, not in showers, but literally in cataracts. The only thing to which a tempest of rain in Italy can be compared is the bursting of a waterspout. Venetia could scarcely believe that this could be the same day of which the golden morning had found her among the sunny hills of Arqua. This unexpected vicissitude induced Lady Annabel to alter her plans, and she resolved to rest at Rovigo, where she was glad to find that they ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... time," he answered, very firmly, gazing through the door as if he saw the vain endeavor. "That little game can easily be stopped, for about fifty dollars, by opening down the bank toward the old track of the river. The biggest waterspout that ever came down from the mountains could never come anigh the mill, but go right down the valley. It hath been in my mind to do it often, and now that I see the need, I will. Firm and I will ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... you there! 'T is a waterspout!" cried Fuller, pointing excitedly at the cloud, which, driven on with furious force by an upper current of wind unfelt below, was now bellying in a marked and abnormal fashion, while from the lowest point of the convexity appeared ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... of rain, which fell upon the frigate's deck like a waterspout, cut short all further speech by its deafening tumult, and although it lasted but a few minutes, it killed the fury of the squall to such an extent that the ship, unsteadied by her canvas, rolled so violently that no one could keep his feet. ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the storm was at its height; the black thunder-cloud had broken into many, which assumed the wildest shapes and the strangest colours, some of them unspeakably glorious; the rain poured in a deluge, and more than one waterspout was seen at no great distance: an immense rabble is hurrying in one direction; a multitude of men of all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... these souvenirs feel the same desire as I experienced to visit the cascades of Tierra-Alta, let them go to a place called Yang-Yang; it was near this spot where my Indian protector resided. At this part the river, obstructed in its course by the narrowness of its channel, falls from only one waterspout, about thirty or forty feet high, into an immense basin, out of which the water calmly flows onwards, to form, lower down, three other waterfalls, not so lofty, but extending over the breadth of the river, thereby making three sheets of water, clear and transparent as crystal. What beautiful ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... Creek and river very high. A great freshet. A very wonderful washout occurred in the side of the North mountain, above Turleytown, back of Elijah Baker's. It is supposed to have been caused by a waterspout or cloud-burst, as it is sometimes called. A great flood of water seemed to fall on the side of the mountain on a small patch of ground, uprooting trees, overturning rocks, and carrying all in one huge mass ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... mean to ask in Parliament (as poor gamblers in that Cockpit are wont), 'And why did not you make the offer sooner, then? Friendship with his Prussian Majesty, last year, would have saved the whole of that large Waterspout about the Meadows of Clamei! Nay need we, a few months ago, have spent such loads of gold subsidizing those Hessians and Danes against him? The treasures of this Country go a strange road, Mr. Speaker! What is the use of our industries and riches?' Heavens, yes, what! But we continue ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... flew with the wind. The surface was lashed into foam as white as the driven snow. The lightning and artillery of the heavens were incessant, blinding, and deafening; involuntarily we bowed our heads, utterly helpless. Soon the heavens were opened, and the floods came down like a waterspout. I knew then that the worst of it had passed, and though one fierce squall succeeded another, each one was tamer. The deluge, too, helped to beat down the sea. To give an order was impossible, for I could not be heard; I could ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... by the lieutenant, Eric pressed the button. There was a tremendous roar as a waterspout shot up from the surface of the sea. As though some vast leviathan had passed underneath the old bark and shouldered her out of the water, the long black hull heaved herself up slowly. She seemed to hang poised for a fraction of a second on the surface of the water as if, in her death agony, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... billow after billow being carried against the coral reefs with a violence known only to the earthquake and the angry ocean. Vast volumes of water surged high on either side, projecting still higher their sparkling shafts of spray, like the pillars of a waterspout. ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... based upon the thinnest foundation of scientific facts. In order, however, to describe a journey among the stars, it was necessary to invent some mode of locomotion in these distant regions. In former times Lucian had been content with a ship which ascended to the rising moon upon a waterspout; but it was now necessary to improve upon this very primitive mode, as people began to know something more of the forces of nature. One of the first of these travellers in imagination to the moon in modern ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... appropriate expression, "it went out," like a huge glowworm. Had it fled from us? We were duty bound to fear so rather than hope so. But at 12:53 in the morning, a deafening hiss became audible, resembling the sound made by a waterspout expelled ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the sea. The sails, filled by the wind, swelled out and carried them along in wild career. It was wet and rough above and below, and might still be worse. Hold! what is that? What has struck the boat? Was it a waterspout, or a heavy sea rolling ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... imprisonment. As I was thinking about all this, the masts again appear on the horizon, the Emden steaming easterly, but very much slower. All at once the enemy, at high speed, shoots by, apparently quite close to the Emden. A high, white waterspout showed among the black smoke of the enemy. That was a torpedo. I see how the two opponents withdrew, the distance growing greater between them; how they separate, till they disappear in the darkness. The fight had ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a waterspout, Miss Trevor? No? Then the chances are that you will see several before you are many hours older. Have you noticed those long, black, quivering tongues that dart out and in from the bodies of the darkest clouds? Well, those are the forerunners ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, and other ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... further and remains behind. He has not been heard from since. In the park, we take refuge on the bank of the river. A very violent whirlwind now begins to uproot large trees, and lifts them high into the air. As it reaches the water, a waterspout forms which is approximately 100 meters high. The violence of the storm luckily passes us by. Some distance away, however, where numerous refugees have taken shelter, many are blown into the river. Almost all who ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... himself thought it was strange that he could keep still and wait until the next morning to see the ships. He certainly had not slept five minutes before he slipped out from under the wing and slid down the lightning-rod and the waterspout all the way ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Moonlight illuminated the warriors' faces and showed the face of Demetrios as sly and leering. It was less the countenance of a proud lord than a carved head on some old waterspout. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... and partly wrong. The Frenchman did attempt a fire with his main-deck gun; but, at the first plunge of the ship, a sea slapped up against her weather-bow, and sent a column of water through the port, that drove half its crew into the lee-scuppers. In the midst of this waterspout, the gun exploded, the loggerhead having been applied an instant before, giving a sort of chaotic wildness to the scene in-board. This satisfied the party below; though that on the forecastle fared better. The last fired their gun several ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mentioned in the Vidar myths, some mythologists suppose that he had but one leg, and was the personification of a waterspout, which would rise suddenly on the last day to quench the wild fire personified by the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Columbiad was accompanied by a veritable earthquake. Florida was shaken to its very depths. The gases of the powder, expanded by heat, forced back the atmospheric strata with tremendous violence, passing like a waterspout through the air. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... overtaken by the most dreadful storm I ever saw—flashes of lightning, crashes of thunder, and the rain descending like a waterspout—I rode to Windsor, to settle with the Queen what sort of crown she would have to be crowned in. I was ushered into the King's presence, who was sitting at a red table in the sitting-room of George IV., looking over the flower garden. A picture of Adolphus Fitzclarence was behind him (a full-length), ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... hail and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... infinitely grander sea than the measureless ocean of worlds, the Father was carrying navies of human souls, every soul a world whose affairs none but the Father could understand, through many a storm, and waterspout, and battle with the powers of evil, safe to the haven of the children, the Father's house! And Clare began to understand that ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... such overwhelming torrents, that it was as if a waterspout had burst, and Ferdinand gasped for breath beneath its oppressive power; while the blaze of the variegated lightning, the crash of the thunder, and the roar of the wind, all simultaneously in movement, indicated the fulness of the storm. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... (egress) 295; defluxion^; flowing &c v.; current, tide, race, coulee. spring, artesian well, fount, fountain; rill, rivulet, gill, gullet, rillet^; streamlet, brooklet; branch [U.S.]; runnel, sike^, burn, beck, creek, brook, bayou, stream, river; reach, tributary. geyser, spout, waterspout. body of water, torrent, rapids, flush, flood, swash; spring tide, high tide, full tide; bore, tidal bore, eagre^, hygre^; fresh, freshet; indraught^, reflux, undercurrent, eddy, vortex, gurge^, whirlpool, Maelstrom, regurgitation, overflow; confluence, corrivation^. wave, billow, surge, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... had the nerve to imitate insanity the way we did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, outgrowing my belts every year, and sitting eight hours at a desk without exploding. Am I the chap who climbed up sixty feet of waterspout a few short years ago and persuaded the clapper of the college bell to come down with me? Here you are all worn smooth on top and proprietor of an overflow meeting in a nursery. In about ten minutes you'll be tearing your coat-tails out of my hands because ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... started along the terrace in the opposite direction at a sharp run, carrying no balls, for they intended to make them on the scene of operation. When the other two divisions were off, Speug addressed his faithful band. "MacFarlane, take six birkies, climb up the waterspout, and clean the richt-hand shed, couping the Pennies into the street. Mackenzie, ye're no bad at the fightin'; tak' anither sax and empty the roof o' the left-hand shed, and 'gin ye can clout that Penny that's ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... and he found himself in profound darkness. The waves murmured and broke at the entrance of the cave; the waterspout precipitated itself with a crash into the ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... souls. Their only action is now on the childish brains of bigots and pretenders; and this is no doubt providential; it is better so, for if the priest became the master, if he succeeded in raising and vivifying the wearisome tribe he manages, it would be like a waterspout of clerical stupidity beating down on a country, would be the end of all literature ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... your eye upon the miner. When it's wet and growing wetter 'Twill be worse before it's better. When the tide is at its ebb Fix your gaze on SIDNEY WEBB. When the tide is at high level Modernists discuss the Devil. Floods upon the Thames or Kennet Stimulate the brain of BENNETT; While a waterspout foretells Fresh activities in WELLS. When it's calm in the Atlantic Gooseberries become gigantic. When it's rough in the Pacific Laying hens are less prolific. When the clouds are moving largo There is no restraining MARGOT. When their movement is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... crash of thunder passed away, than down came the rain, pattering on the roof and floor of the verandah. It seemed as if a waterspout had broken over us. ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the swift current bore me circling away, and finally whirled me with frightful velocity. My feet were shaken asunder, my integument softened, my brain reeled. I was passed from eddy to eddy; I became drunken with emotion; I suffered all the tortures of the lost. A waterspout lifted me from the clutch of the sea, and deposited me upon the dry land, close to the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... This proportion was kept up in the early months of 1840; and, as I write these lines, the crisis is not yet ended. It is said, further, that the number of houses which have wound up their business is greater than the number of declared failures. By this flood, we may judge of the waterspout's ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... heavier Burden to take me to Constantinople. The Mediterranean Sea here very beautiful, and delightful to see the Dolphins, Tunnies, and other Fish, that frequently leapt out of the Water, and followed our Ship in great Numbers. Also a Waterspout, which is a Phenomenon very well known to Seamen in the Levant Trade, and reckoned very dangerous. It looked mighty Fierce and Terrific; and our Sailors, to conjure it away, had recourse to the Superstitious Devices of cutting the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... like some strange lambent flame; the breeze sings hoarsely among the cordage; the whole surface flood plunges on as if some immense cataract must soon appear after the rapids are passed. Every sea that the vessel shatters sends up a flying waterspout; and the frost acts with amazing suddenness, so that the spars, the rigging, and the deck gather layer after layer of ice. Supposing the vessel is employed in fishing, then the men in the forecastle crouch round ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... deep lowered the welkin; the clouds, ruddy a while ago, had now, through all their blackness, turned deadly pale, as if in terror. Notwithstanding my late boast about not fearing a shower, I hardly liked to go out under this waterspout. Then the gleams of lightning were very fierce, the thunder crashed very near; this storm had gathered immediately above Villette; it seemed to have burst at the zenith; it rushed down prone; the forked, slant bolts ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... traders were in the habit of bringing him presents of araki every season. He declared this to be excellent, and demanded another bottle. At that moment a violent storm of thunder and rain burst upon us with a fury well known in the tropics; the rain fell like a waterspout, and the throng immediately fled for shelter. So violent was the storm, that not a man was to be seen: some were sheltering themselves under the neighbouring rocks; while others ran to their villages ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... that, guiding Israel through the land of Yemen, shone, Like a spirit of the desert, like a phantom, pale and wan, O'er the desert's sandy ocean, like a waterspout at sea, Whirls a yellow, cloudy column, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... sped on day and night, and behind it followed the old man like a shadow. Once it went into an inn, and killed several travellers; another time it slid into the King's house and killed him. Then it crept up the waterspout to the Queen's palace, and killed the King's youngest daughter. So it passed on, and wherever it went the sound of weeping and wailing arose, and the old man followed ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people now. It seemed to him that they were the wraiths of those persons who had loved each other at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and the leaden devils who grinned from every waterspout and all those dark and narrow windows were only part of some magic picture, such as a sorceress may momentarily summon out of smoke-wreaths, as he had seen Zoraida do ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... himself across the chasm. He had already clutched the rock, and thrust himself forward, when the tremendous volume of water struck him. McNab and the soldier felt the sudden pluck of the rope and saw the light swing across the abyss. Then the fury of the waterspout burst with a triumphant scream, the tension ceased, the light was blotted out, and when the column sank, there dangled at the end of the lariat nothing but the drenched and blackened skeleton of the she-oak bough. Amid a terrific peal of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... road parted company with the shore, and we turned inland over the plain. The night came on with drifting showers, which descended in torrents, lashing the naked plain, and battering our vehicle with the force and noise of a waterspout. And though at length the moon rose, and looked out at times from the cloud, she had nothing to show us but houseless, treeless desolation; and, as if scared at what she saw, she instantly hid her face in another mass of vapour. The stages were short, and the halts long; for ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... The usual waterspout began to pour. The newspapers asserted that Mr. Gladstone meant to cut down naval estimates, and this moved the country clergy to angry apprehension that he was for peace at any price. The candidate was obliged to spend thankless hours on letters to reassure ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that," said Tommy, "without the buff'loes have got 'em." So they camped for the day under a huge banyan-fig tree and awaited developments. About evening, away on the horizon, there arose an answering cloud of smoke, connecting earth and sky, like a waterspout. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... floor of Palazzo Lepri, Via dei Condotti, where we passed many happy days. When we first lived in Via Condotti, the waste-pipes to carry off the rain-water from the roofs projected far into the street, and when there was a violent thunderstorm, one might have thought a waterspout had broken over Rome, the water poured in such cascades from the houses on each side of the street. On one occasion the rain continued in torrents for thirty-six hours, and the Tiber came down in heavy flood, inundating the Ghetto and all the low parts of the city; the water was ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... resonant clang of the horse's hoofs on the pavement, a single cry broke forth, "Georges! Georges! it is Georges!" Anxious faces appeared at the windows, and from every door people came out, who began to run without knowing it, drawn along as by a waterspout. Did Georges see in this a last hope of safety? Did he believe he could escape in the crowd? However that may be, at the top of the Rue Voltaire he jumped out into the street. Caniolle, at the same moment, left the back of the cab—which Petit, and another ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in the good West Coast waterspout pour for ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... fat, pompous man.] Well may they fear, for the Assyrians are not three days distant. They are blazing along like a waterspout to chop Damascus down like ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... and the royal authority were there reduced in the face of the national representatives! from seeing the King on his return choked with anguish at the mortifications to which I was doomed to behold the majesty of a French Sovereign humbled! These events bespeak clouds, which, like the horrid waterspout at sea, nothing can dispel but cannon! The dignity of the Crown, the sovereignty itself, is threatened; and this I shall write this very night to the Emperor. I see no hope of internal tranquillity without the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... waters was neither more nor less than a waterspout, which again is neither more nor less than a whirlwind at sea, which gradually whisks the water round and round, and up and up, as you see straws so raised, until it reaches a certain height, when it invariably breaks. Before this I had thought ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... between two broken black banks of moss earth, sometimes crossed narrow but deep ravines filled with a consistence between mud and water, and sometimes along heaps of gravel and stones, which had been swept together when some torrent or waterspout from the neighbouring hills overflowed the marshy ground below. He began to ponder how a horseman could make his way through such broken ground; the traces of hoofs, however, were still visible; he even thought he heard their sound at ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... piston-rods came throbbing up with a singular distinctness. The arc of cloud had risen halfway to the meridian. There were streaks in it—streaks of yellow on black. Far away to the north, at the point of contact with the horizon, a single waterspout rose like a black pillar from sea to cloud. Dwellers in the cool and temperate zones would have thought that the end of the world was about to come. Men, standing quite still, felt the drops of perspiration trickling beneath their ears. The air taken into the lungs seemed powerless to expand ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... without any warning, a most terrific eruption occurred. A loud explosion was heard; the earth shook, and immense columns of hot water, boiling mud mixed with burning brimstone, ashes and stones, were hurled upwards from the mountain top like a waterspout, and with such wonderful force that large quantities fell at a distance of forty miles. Every valley near the mountain became filled with burning torrents; the rivers, swollen with hot water and mud, overflowed their banks, and swept away the escaping ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... evenings for a month, he reckoned one night that he'd drop down street and look in on the boys. Honeybunch reckoned not, and he didn't press the matter, but after they'd gone to bed and she'd dropped off to sleep, he slipped into his clothes and down the waterspout to the ground. He sat up till two o'clock at the Dutchman's, and naturally, the next morning he had a breath like a gasoline runabout, and looked as if he'd been attending a successful coon-hunt in the ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... terrific, appalling outburst that he hastily clambered back upon the bank, to watch the strange sight. For fully two minutes the waterspout quivered and vibrated in the air, when it collapsed as abruptly ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... in, he gave it as his opinion that the frog had been carried up by a waterspout, from a lake about twenty miles distant, kept up and borne along by currents of air. At all events, he was a hero and an adventurer, and I resolved to keep him as a curiosity. So I put him in a large rain-water trough, at the back of the house, ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... its head was in shelter, but the rain streamed down upon its back and hind quarters, while a perfect deluge, like that from a waterspout, ran down a long gully in the overhanging rock right on to the spine just between the shoulders, and there divided to trickle on either side down the fore legs, and then run down through the pine needles, which formed too ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... of the weather I knew not. Certainly, of all the caprices of this huge cold sea, its calms are the shortest lived, but this knowledge helped me to no other. The clouds did not stir. In the north-east a beam of sunshine stood like a golden waterspout, its foot in a little flood of glory. It stayed all the while I was on deck, showing that the clouds had scarce any motion, and made the picture of the sea that way beyond nature to my sight, by the contrast ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... fell in great drops whose sheer weight and size carried them, at the moment of impact, through the ragged shirts to the warm flesh beneath. In a second, it seemed, a waterspout was upon them and was pouring its ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... out of the window, and sliding down the waterspout, reached the roof and went in pursuit of the ball. One of the windows opening from the third story onto this open space was that in the electric room, and it was under this window that the ball came to a standstill. As Dick ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses, or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse, or a waterspout with a grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humor of the Moyen-age above the bent ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... old-fashioned wooden stoop with two steps, guarded by a wooden railing (many a day since these were painted); and over these railings and up the supports which carry the roof of the portico straggles a honeysuckle that does its best to hide the shabbiness of the shingles and the old waterspout and sagging gutter, and fails miserably when it gets to the farther cornice, which has rotted away, showing under its dismal paint the black and ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the truth. A great waterspout lifted me out of the river. Then a fierce wind caught me and blew me about as if I were a feather. Finally, I was dropped here within ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... heard; a genuine waterspout fell upon deck, heaved up by an enormous wave. A cry of terror rang out from the crew whilst Garry, at the helm, held the Forward in a straight line in spite of the frightful incumbrance. When their frightened looks were drawn towards the mountain of ice it had disappeared; ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... 'Father, let me also show you something;' and, as it was beginning to rain, he drew his sword and swung it in cross cuts above his head, so that not a drop fell on him, and the rain fell heavier and heavier, till at last it was coming down like a waterspout, but he swung his sword faster and faster, and kept as dry as ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... mouth. The Dyaks saw it coming, and in their puny efforts to escape, looked like ants before an elephant. The five streams, flowing through the delta of the Cotabato River, seemed to draw the vicious waterspout toward them, and on it went, directly in the wake of the doomed Dyaks. Tensely the Sabah's passengers followed the course of the spout. The whirling Nemesis descended upon the pirates; their cries of anguish came ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... in wild career. It was rough and wet around and above, and it might come worse still. Hold! what was that? what struck there? what burst yonder? what seized the boat? It heeled, and lay on its beam ends! Was it a waterspout? Was it a heavy sea coming suddenly down? The boy at the helm cried out aloud, "Heaven help us!" The boat had struck on a great rock standing up from the depths of the sea, and it sank like an old shoe in a puddle; ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... ten-fold. As for the notary, he had temporarily lost his head in presence of political events which came upon him like a waterspout out of cloudless skies. Theodose, certain now of his supremacy, holding Thuillier fast by his past services and by the literary work in which they were both engaged, admired by Brigitte for his modesty and discretion,—for never had he made the slightest allusion to his own poverty ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... imprisonment. As I was thinking about all this, the masts again appeared on the horizon, the Emden steaming easterly, but very much slower. All at once the enemy, at high speed, shot by, apparently quite close to the Emden. A high white waterspout showed amidst the black smoke of the enemy. That was a torpedo. I saw how the two opponents withdrew, the distance growing greater and greater between them; how they separated, till they disappeared in the darkness. The fight had ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... in my heart before the wind rose to a hurricane, scattering the flames on all sides into a tempest of burning billows. I buried my head in my apron, for I thought that all was lost, when a most terrific crash of thunder burst over our heads, and, like the breaking of a waterspout, down came the rushing torrent of rain which had been pent ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... had ordered it, and had let the bill go to his father; whenever he had wanted money, he had sent to his father for it, and had got it. Dawson's question made the reality of his position—moneyless, resourceless, friendless—burst over him like a waterspout. Dawson saw and understood; but it was not his cue to lessen that sense ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... In that waterspout we sat and waited while Dr. S. hunted up his friends; but apparently they had all left, with their flocks. A few Albanians appeared, and by the dint of much persuasion Dr. S. induced them to show us an empty hut. As soon as they had done this they left us, looking at us in an ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... A waterspout had burst up among the moorlands, and the river, in its power, was at hand. There it came, tumbling along into that long reach of cliffs, and, in a moment, filled it with one mass of waves. Huge, agitated clouds of foam rode on the surface ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... explosion so terrific that Ken distinctly felt the deck of the trawler lift under his feet. A cloud of thick black smoke shot high into the air, and as it rose a very waterspout ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... ample, was formed by buildings, generally of a very mean character: the long back premises of a carpenter, the straggling yard of a hackney-man: sometimes a small, narrow isolated private residence, like a waterspout in which a rat might reside: sometimes a group of houses of more pretension. In the extreme corner of this area, which was dignified by the name of Smith's Square, instead of taking a more appropriate title from the church of St John which it encircled, was a large old house, that ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... said to Billy, "and see that lightning reaching out? This is going to bust the world open, somewhere. That's no cloudburst that's shaping up, it's a regular old waterspout; I know ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... were down hunting and an awful storm came up—a kind of waterspout—and when they got back to their rock they found their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north came along and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust one side, or forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... managed much like a racing automobile. As she started from the dock, the purring drone of her eight cylinders sent her feathering over the waves like a skipping stone. She sank back into the water, her bow leaping upward, a cloud of spray in her wake, like a waterspout. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the year, when M.P.'s were about, And speeches burst forth like a waterspout, HODGE took up his bundle, and caught up his staff, And went for a walk—if you please, don't laugh!— Singing dumbledumdeary, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... figures lay piled on each other in grotesque attitudes and heaps. Even the stone tank at the north-west side of the Ka'aba, under the famous Myzab, or Golden Waterspout on the Ka'aba roof, was heaped full of them; and all round the sacred Zem Zem well they lay in silent windrows, reaped down by ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... choose such part Of soul-consuming care! Sense failed in the mortal strife: Like the watch-tower of a town Which an earthquake shatters down, Like a lightning-stricken mast, Like a wind-uprooted tree Spun about, Like a foam-topped waterspout Cast down headlong in the sea, 520 She fell at last; Pleasure past and anguish past, Is it death or is ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... dashing of the waves two seas crossing each other, one the from north and the other from north-north-east. Waterspouts were formed at the distance of a mile and were carried rapidly from north-north-east to north-north-west. Whenever the waterspout drew near us we felt the wind grow sensibly cooler. Towards evening, owing to the carelessness of our American cook, our deck took fire; but fortunately it was soon extinguished. On the morning of the 1st of December the sea slowly calmed and the breeze became steady ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the Calle del Lobo. It was there and then that Patricio de Escosura firmed his intimacy with the future poet. He describes graphically his first meeting with the youth who was to be his lifelong friend. He first saw Jos sliding down from a third-story balcony on a tin waterspout. In the light of later years Escosura felt that in this boyish prank the child was father of the man. The boy who preferred waterspouts to stairways, later in life always scorned the beaten path, and "the illogical road, no matter how venturesome and hazardous it was, attracted him ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... according to the fancy of the builder; sunshine and storm had stained it grayish brown, and no tint could better harmonize with the background and surroundings. In one corner of the stoop a tin wash-basin stood under a waterspout in the sink; there swung the family towels; the public comb, hanging by its teeth to a nail, had seen much service; a piece of brown soap lay in an abalone shell tacked to the wall; a small mirror reflected kaleidoscopical sections of the face, and made up for its want of compass ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... obliged once more to run back towards the port they had left; but before they could reach it, they were driven out to sea by a terrific gale. Here for days they were tossed about, while the rain poured down in a perfect deluge, and to add to the terror of the seamen a waterspout was seen approaching, from which they narrowly escaped. For a short time the tempest ceased, but again raged with greater fury than before. No serious damage, however, having occurred, the vessels at length, ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... effect), when the time comes round:—but we have not yet got to November of this Year 1729; there are still six or eight important months between us and that. Important months; and a Prussian-English "Waterspout," as we have named it, to be seen, with due wonder, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of neat water. Mr. John Sanders was met at the end of Maiden Lane, with his legs thrust into the sleeves of his coat, and the rest of his body encased in the upper part of a property dragon; whilst little round Wilkinson was vainly endeavouring to squeeze himself into a wooden waterspout. Had he succeeded he might have applied for the reward offered by the Royal Society for a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... some food to eat, for it appears our giant friends are something of inventors in their way. The current of water bore him to the surface of the earth, and he was cast up on the ocean, in what was probably taken for a waterspout ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... strange and intermittent roaring, the which I could make nothing of, until, at last, forcing my way through the underbrush I saw before me a column of water that spouted up into the air from a fissure at the base of the hill, and this waterspout was about the bigness of a fair-sized tree and gushed up some twenty feet or so, now sinking to half this height, only to rise again. Scarce pausing to behold this wonder I would have hasted on (and roaring louder than the water) when I beheld her seated close by upon a rock ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... waterspout, a phenomenon which carried so much terrific majesty in it, and connected, as it were, the sea with the clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... wiped the street clear of every trace of it. I had just put back the ladder when Mrs. Sparrow returned with a piece of pink cotton-wool in her mouth. That was her idea of a colour scheme: apple-blossom pink and Reckitt's blue side by side. She dropped her wool and sat on the waterspout, and tried ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... descended almost to the earth, rushing about, holding out their hands as though to clasp the blessed moisture and talking excitedly one to the other. Soon they were driven into their huts, for the rain turned into a kind of waterspout. Never had such ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... herds with the big bird whose wings, among the Dacotahs of America and the Zulus of Africa, make thunder; or he may associate with the dragons, serpents, cows and other aerial cattle which supply the rain, and show themselves in the waterspout. Chinese, Greenland, Hindoo, Finnish, Lithunian and Moorish examples of the myth about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched for by Grimm.(2) A Mongolian legend has it that the gods wished to punish the maleficent ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... her house at last. One half of the thatch lay over the other half; the rafters were bare like the ribs of the wreck; the oat-cake peck was rattling on the lath; the meal-barrel in the corner was stripped of its lid, and the meal was whirling into the air like a waterspout; the dresser was stripped, the broken crockery lay on the uncovered floor, and the iron slowrie hanging over the place of the fire was swinging and striking against the wall, and ringing like a knell. And in the midst of this scene of desolation the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... A waterspout had shot down the back of his neck. "We mus' go out of zis! We soon shall be wetter; we can run to ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various |
