"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them O'er the deep, and madly down; Now it beating, whirling lifts them, Upward where the heavens frown. All the powers of evil coming, Riding on the billows' top, From the bottomless, the foaming, From the ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... he won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back with his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he sank into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in Eldorado County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the Napa Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him five thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton boom was more than ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... falsely reported as consumed; on which he sold them to the King a second time. Not without reason does a writer of the time exclaim: "This is the land of abuses, ignorance, prejudice, and all that is monstrous in government. Peculation, monopoly, and plunder have become a bottomless abyss."[555] ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... his wife, lest her instinct might guess his thoughts. Yet he must not leave her any longer or his absence would make her anxious. Not that his love for Asako had been damaged; but he felt that they were traveling along a narrow path over a bottomless gulf ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... waiting here for the courage to go to you since you have made it so very hard for me—my pagan." With which she came close to him, looking upward into his face, smiling a little, shrinking a little, yielding yet withholding, while the moonlight made of her eyes two bottomless, boundless pools, dark with love, and brimming with the promise of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... split with thousands of canyons that writhed over the white expanse like snakes in tortuous convulsions. From these bottomless abysses arose a luminous amethystine vapor. In the depths jutting icicles took fire and glowed through the lustrous mists like burning eyes. Where the chasms joined with others or widened, ominous shapes, swathed in wind-blown blackish-purple robes, with extended ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... to an end, but there is nothing to indicate the presence of the canon until we get glimpses through the trees of an apparently bottomless gulf. The gulf widens upon a closer view, we reach the edge, and all its wonderful proportions burst upon us. Does the Grand Canon look as you thought it would? Probably not, for it is unlike any other in the world. The canon is very deep. The river has worn its way for more than a mile down ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... Captain and a Pit-man to descend with us. So we changed our clothes and descended by the ladders in the pumpshaft. Pretty work to descend with the huge pump-rods (garnished with large iron bolts) working violently, making strokes of 12 feet, close to our elbows; and with a nearly bottomless pit at the foot of every ladder, where we had to turn round the foot of the ladder walking on only a narrow board. However we got down to the bottom of the mine with great safety and credit, seeing all the mighty machinery on the way, to a greater depth ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... happened was that in the shuffling herd that passed before her by far the greater part only passed—a proportion but just appreciable stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away, lost themselves in the bottomless common, and by so doing really kept the page clear. On the clearness therefore what she did retain stood sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... autumn, in Northern China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies to rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless abyss, where all past things ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths, excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... There is a 'bottomless darkness' occasionally referred to as a place where evil spirits are to be sent by the gods; and a 'deep place' is mentioned as the portion of 'evil, false, untruthful men'; while Soma casts into 'a hole' (abyss) ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... saintliness. Their interpretation of the Christian spirit may be the best and truest. Yet the ideal must become flesh. Let them not be proud of their not having pride, and exclusive because God chose them to understand the bottomless deepness of the esoteric Christianity. By pride towards the proud and by exclusiveness they may spoil and darken their ideals and remain in ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... the writers upon the Bathos, that the true profound is surely known by one quality—its being wholly bottomless; insomuch, that when you think you have attained its utmost depth in the work of some of its great masters, another, or peradventure the same, astonishes you, immediately after, by a plunge so much more vigorous, as to outdo all his former ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... incomprehensible a race as any in the world. They are as superstitious, as credulous of marvels, fairies, magicians, and omens, as the men whom St. Patrick preached to, and at the same time they are shrewd, skeptical, sensible, and bottomless liars. Upon the whole, I met with no nation on my travels whose company I enjoyed so much, or who inspired me with so much kindliness, ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... Lord, my strength redouble, Heaven open, heed my trouble! God, if my cause Thine shall be, Grant a day of victory! Fell all Thy foes now! Fell all Thy foes now! Roll forth Thy thunders, Thy lightning affright them, Into the pit, the bottomless, smite them, Their seed uproot, Tread under foot! Send then Thy snowy white dove peace-bringing, Unto Thy faithful Thy token winging, Olive-branch fair of Thy summer's fruition After ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... barrancas, which impede the traveller in the highlands and necessitate a course toward the east, there are innumerable smaller ones, especially in the western part of the range, where large portions of the country are broken up into a mass of stupendous, rock-walled ridges and all but bottomless chasms. A river generally flows in the barrancas between narrow banks, which occasionally disappear alltogether, leaving the water to rush between abruptly ascending ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... even as I now look down on the dizzy slums where I am and yet am not! It cannot be that I came up out of the depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, I might perhaps tell the truth. But only a High Silence meets me, and I do not understand. In letting myself down to the bottomless, I discovered I could not stand it long enough. I am dumbly dissatisfied. I feel like a diver who has nigh strangled himself to bring up a handful of seaweed, and so feels he must down again—and again—until he attains somewhere the holy ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... a magnolia shrub about ten paces away from us, casting a shadow so deep that the ground it covered looked like a bottomless abyss. But nevertheless, something bright moved in it—perhaps the sheen of that lone light in an upper window reflected on a knife-hilt or a button—something that moved in time to ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the coincidence appeared to my mind almost supernatural. It really seemed as if some kind old fairy had conjured up the whole place for our benefit. And—bless the good godmother!—to crown all, there were two old tea-chests and a bottomless barrel in the yard. ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... other objects. They illumined now a vivid yellow shrub; they danced upon a roof-top; they flooded, with a sudden circlet of brilliance, the awful depths below of the swirling waters and of rocks that were black as a bottomless pit. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... less, he sank into the state of timidity and apprehension known only to those harassed almost beyond human endurance and to the dying. Fear oppressed him till his whole being shrank into something less than the smallest grain; he was hurled by fearful sounds and overawing obsessions into a bottomless abyss. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Harris, growing suddenly furious, "no! a thousand times! I'd sooner see her in the burning depths of the bottomless pit than have you get within a hundred miles of her with your contaminating presence. She is safely hidden away, and that forever, from the companionship of our sex. So let her be till ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... bottomless pit in the cabin now, and fishes and squirming things brushed against his legs and rubbed against the line which ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... have yet evoked," he answered, with a sudden fierce note in his tone. "Don't think that I speak to you as a cynic, one who loiters on the edge of the cauldron and peers in to gratify cravings for sensation. I have been there, down in the thick of it, there where the mud is as black as hell—bottomless as eternity. I was young—as you—mad with enthusiasm. I had faith, strength, belief. I meant to cleanse the world. I worked till the skin hung on my bones. I gave all that I had—youth—gifts—money. And, do you know what I was doing? I was ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... slowly assumed the appearance of a vast mountainous desert. As we drew nearer its colors became more pronounced; the great flat regions appeared darker; the mountain peaks shone more brilliantly. The huge chasms seemed bottomless and blacker than midnight. Gradually separate mountains appeared. What seemed like expanses of snow and immense glaciers streaming down their sides sparkled with great brilliancy in the perpendicular rays of the sun. Our ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... torch Lightest thou him Through the fords when 'tis night, Over bottomless places On desert-like plains; With the thousand colours of morning Gladd'nest his bosom; With the fierce-biting storm Bearest him proudly on high; Winter torrents rush from the cliffs,— Blend with his psalms; An altar of grateful ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... have our being, there is some hope of our climbing to stand with others who have ascended its successive rungs and reached the starry heights. Yes, let us believe that, for some days at least, John's mind was overcast, his faith lost its foothold, and he seemed to be falling into bottomless depths. He sent them to Jesus, saying, Art Thou He that should come? We can easily trace this lapse ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... mountain's very womb. There were times when the stench was so horrible we nearly fainted. We stumbled on men's bones. We collided with sharp projections in the gloom—fell down holes that might have been bottomless for aught we knew in advance—and scrambled over ledges that in places were smooth with the wear of feet for ages. Everlastingly to right, or left of us, or up above, or down below we could hear the inhabitants scampering away. Now and then an arrow would flitter between us; but their ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... curse. Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream! Ye horns shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And frisk caper skip prance dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art, Love has given you no heart: So hurrah till you plunge into bottomless death. ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... me, I planted myself there at his back in an attitude of expectancy and determination to await his leisure. He was cramming the money into his trousers pocket as he turned round and beheld me. He was embarrassed. He, the universal debtor, the bottomless pit of loans and obligations, to be ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... sins of your past life were marshaled in single file, they would reach from here to hell. If you have escaped all other sins, the fact that you have rejected the mission of the Son of God is enough to condemn you forever, pushing you off into bottomless darkness, struck by ten thousand ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... down The black and bottomless abyss, And quaking are the gilded crown And palsied feet of prejudice. The guns have killed, but it is true They bring to life things good and new. God grant they have ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman; so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me. I have always hated a great height, but never before did I realise the full horrors of which such a position is capable. Oh, the sickening sensation of that yielding board resting on the two moving supports. I grew dizzy, and thought that I must fall; my ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Bjaaland's sled fell into one of the numerous crevasses. At the critical moment we were fortunately able to come to Bjaaland's aid; had we been a moment later the sled with its thirteen dogs would have disappeared in the seemingly bottomless pit. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... a time I have stood on the broken end, where the discouraged labourers had left their very shovels and picks and trucks and had apparently fled in dismay, as if convicted of the impiousness of trying to fill the Bottomless Pit. To my childish imagination the upturned wheelbarrows and wasted trucks and rails always suggested the banks of the Red Sea after the awful disaster had swept over Pharoah and his host. How the returning tide used to sweep through that ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... lady, to whom the reader shall be introduced in time, whom Sir Felix was instigated to pursue with unremitting diligence. Her wealth was not defined, as had been the L40,000 of her predecessor, but was known to be very much greater than that. It was, indeed, generally supposed to be fathomless, bottomless, endless. It was said that in regard to money for ordinary expenditure, money for houses, servants, horses, jewels, and the like, one sum was the same as another to the father of this young lady. He had great concerns;—concerns so great that the payment of ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... ignorant People no longer saw God between them and annihilation, they plunged into the boundless and bottomless abyss of Atheism, they lost their divine sense, they became brutal as the animal, who sees in the earth only a pasture ground, instead ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... fixedly into the chasm. To Helen's fancy it was bottomless, though in reality it was not more than forty feet deep, and the two walls fell away from each other at a practicable angle. In normal summer weather, a small crevasse always formed there owing to the glacier ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... meantime the boat sank deeper; forty-five meters were passed—the pointer indicated forty-eight meters. I began to think the depth of the Chesapeake Bay must have some limit; we surely could not be heading for the bottomless pit? Then—the boat halted at a depth of fifty meters ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... thousand miles in a minute, and no body feel the motion; and with Deacon Homespun, in the dialogue, "why, if this world turned upside down, the water did not spill from the mill ponds, and all the people fall headlong to the bottomless pit?" ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... knight, and noble jostled in a motley throng. But the sight of all that crowd was the 'prentices, who swarmed out into the road, and raised our shouts above the clanging of Saint Clement's bells and the trumpets of the Royal servants. 'Twas no pageant we had come out to see. Giants, and whales, and bottomless pits, and salvage men, and the like we could see to our hearts' content on Lord Mayor's Day; and the gilded barges and smoking cannon on the river's side. But it was not every day her Majesty ambled through the city on her hunting horse, and passed our way with her gallants for a day's ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring the author down to the age of fourteen and a half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... is once induced to sacrifice her virtue she is treated as a slave and outcast by the very man who brought her ruin upon her. Her self-respect is gone. Her life becomes valueless to her, and she is swept downward, ever downward, into the bottomless pit of prostitution, and becomes ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by overflows ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... John that his brain did not give way in that lonely hour of bottomless despair. But he lived through it, as we do live through such things, and was sane and sound after it, though it left ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... says: "I entered a narrow garret, furnished with a bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat in ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... has left upon my hearth. Even if I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human being, loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound to say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy's photographs, or in Mr. Wells's rich, bottomless murk of humanity to make a revolution for. And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his bottles of disinfectants and shelves of sterilized truths, his hard well-being and his glittering comforts, has presented the vision of a world ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... forgiveness and with God there is perfect righteousness. The Cross as the basis of pardon is the central mystery of revelation; and it is not to be expected that our theories shall be able to sound the depths of that great act of the divine love. Perhaps our plummets do not go to the bottom of the bottomless after all; but is it needful that we should have gone to the rim of the heavens, and round about it on the outside, before we rejoice in the sunshine? Is it needful that we should have traversed the abysses of the heavens, and passed from star ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... which reveled there in frolicsome adventure. The very Lives of the Saints helped us to understand what was so carefully left unsaid! But the day when I was reft of your sweet company, I became a true Carmelite, such as they appeared to us, a modern Danaid, who, instead of trying to fill a bottomless barrel, draws every day, from Heaven knows what deep, an empty pitcher, thinking to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... seemed to look alike. Yes, and breathed alike, and felt alike when you were squeezed up against them, and you were always being squeezed up against them, wherever you went. And you could smell them, and hear them wheeze and cough, and you went falling down with them into a bottomless pit where your head began to throb and throb and it was hard to move away from all that heat and pressure. It was hard enough just to ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... bias. prier, to pray. prire, f., prayer. priv de, deprived of, without. prix, m., price, prize, reward, penalty. prochain, adjoining. prodiguer, to lavish. profanation, f., profanation, desecration. profane, profane, unworthy; m., intruder. profiter, to take advantage. profond, deep, bottomless. proie, f., prey; en — , a prey to. projet, m., project, plan, scheme. promettre, to promise. prompt, quick, prompt, ready; — , eager to. promptement, promptly. prononcer, to decide. prophte, m., prophet. proposer, to propose, offer. propre, own. proscrit, proscribed, condemned. prosprer, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... great men have been healthy—otherwise they would have fallen short of the mark. Prisons are filled with nervous, diseased creatures. There is no doubt but that most of these who, through ignorance, sifted through to the bottomless pits could have saved themselves had they realized the truth and "taken stock" of themselves, in time—of course, allowing for those, who are victims of ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... that a million a-year would not be sufficient to carry on the exorbitant expenses, so often and so justly complained of in the house of commons: that over and above the yearly allowance of seven hundred thousand pounds, many occasional taxes, many excessive sums were raised, and all sunk in the bottomless gulf of secret service. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds were raised in defiance of the ancient parliamentary methods, to secure the kingdom from a Swedish invasion; then the two insurance offices were erected, and paid near three hundred ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... certainly do produce a very contrary effect from the Philippics of Demosthenes! The sixth—good fellow without a rag on his back—does not care a straw where the march goes. He can't be worse off than he is; and it is quite immaterial to him whether he goes to the dog-star above, or the bottomless pit below. I say nothing, however, against the march, while we take it altogether. Whatever happens, one is in good company; and though I am somewhat indolent by nature, and would rather stay at home with Locke and Burke (dull dogs though they were) than have my thoughts set off helter-skelter ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Jewish masses in the fear of Russian bureaucracy and inculcate in them polite manners aroused the attention both of the Russian and the foreign press. It was universally felt that these farcical performances of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless hatred, of a morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from moralizing to more tangible forms of ill-treatment. This danger intensified ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... breaks off, as a rule, in a high wall of ice, do we realize how huge a volume and weight it must have, far above toward its sources, or why so many of the crevasses on the upper ice fields seem almost bottomless. ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... account of Wastin of Wastiniog we are told that he was forbidden to strike his wife with the bridle. Let us compare this prohibition with that of the fairy of "the bottomless pool of Corwrion," in Upper Arllechwedd, Carnarvonshire, who wedded the heir of the owner of Corwrion. The marriage took place on two conditions—first, that the husband was not to know his wife's name, though he might give her any name he chose; ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Instead she swallowed silently, looking out on the rain. The picture of herself and David, alone in a log cabin somewhere on the other side of the world, caused a sudden return of yesterday's dejection. It rushed back upon her in a flood under which her heart declined into bottomless depths. She felt as if actually sinking into some dark abyss of loneliness and that she must clutch at her father and Daddy John ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Maine, is a lake of salt water, which, like dozens of shallow ones in this country, is locally reputed to be bottomless. Yet Kidd was believed to have sunk some of his valuables there, and to have guarded against the entrance of boats by means of a chain hung from rock to rock at the narrow entrance, bolts on either side showing the points of attachment, while ring bolts were thought to have been driven ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... great, noble, right, blessed life is lived without rigid self-control, self-denial, and self-crucifixion. Do not fancy that that means the absence of joy and spontaneity. 'I will walk at liberty for I keep Thy precepts.' Hedges are blessings when, on the other side, there are bottomless swamps of poisonous miasma, into which if a man ventures he will either drown or be plague-stricken. The narrow way that leads to life is the way of peace, just because it is a way of restrictions. Better to walk on the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... bear my weight," he said, looking doubtfully at the frail bridge, and at the blue gulf, which appeared to be a bottomless pit. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Christianity.' That is easier said than done! The plausibility of the solution in Macaulay's mouth is due to the fundamental assumption that everything except morality is hopeless ground of inquiry. Once get beyond the Ten Commandments and you will sink in a bottomless morass of argument, counterargument, quibble, logomachy, superstition, and confusion ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Power Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless Perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire, Who durst defy ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch." ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... see hereafter that Lot and his daughters "dwelt in a cave"; and we shall find Job bidden away in the "narrow-mouthed bottomless" pit or cave. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... those existing with us. I think that under the same circumstances our troops would have done as well as the Germans, marched as admirably, made combinations as quickly and accurately, and fought with as much success. I can but leave to conjecture how. the Germans would have got along on bottomless roads—often none at all—through the swamps and quicksands of northern Virginia, from, the Wilderness to Petersburg, and from Chattanooga ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... failed. This goddess was named Lu-o. She had been idly watching the growth of the planet, when, to her horror, she saw the newly made ball slipping slowly from its place. In another second it would have shot down into the bottomless pit. Quick as a flash Lu-o stopped it with her magic wand and held it firmly until the chief god came dashing ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a week-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed a sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at the head of England's ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... that, in the same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental image—he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't say than for what ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... 'Is there any way in which I can be of use to you? If you think not, I shall be off tomorrow to Greystone for a few days. I feel as if we were all being swept into a ghastly whirlpool which roars over the bottomless pit. Of course, I will stay if I can do anything, no matter what. Otherwise, address for a week ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep, and a world of mist in which flowed a fountain. Twelve rivers issued from this fountain, and when they had flowed far from their source, they froze into ice, and one layer accumulating over another, the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... sin, in order to come to Christ, or effectually to correct vice, before he believes on him, must needs meet with a miserable disappointment, for without faith it is impossible to please God, Heb. xi. 6. and in the end sink himself into an immense and bottomless chaos of uncertainties, like one lopping the branches off a tree to kill the root; no man cometh to the Father but by me, and without me ye can do nothing, says Christ himself, John xiv. 6. xv. 5. The love of God being the prima ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the night of the abortive raid upon The Cedars he had showed a marked aversion from the society of newspaper men. Regarding the facts of his donation to the fund he had vouchsafed no word to Zoe. Closely had the story of his doings at Richmond been hushed up; as closely as a bottomless purse can achieve such silencing, but, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... diabolical wisdom. Satan, having had more than three thousand years since he failed on Israel in Egypt, was now better up to his work. The king proposed to indulge the ministers. The royal indulgence was surely a product of the bottomless pit. The snare was laid six times and caught ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... the bluff, with Rex Krane and Aunty Boone, we watched and waited. The wooded Neosho valley full of inky blackness seemed to us like a bottomless gorge of terror which no moonlight could penetrate. We strained our ears to catch the rattle of the wagons, but the noise from the saloon, coming faintly now and then, was all the sound we could hear save the voices of the night rising up from the river, and the whisperings ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... aspect of nature become, if a mere abstraction called law is to be the sole ruler of the universe; if— to quote the famous words of the German sage—'If, instead of the Divine Eye, there must glare on us an empty, black, bottomless eye- socket;' and the stars and galaxies of heaven, in spite of all their present seeming regularity, are but an 'everlasting storm ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Republic, the coast turns northwest, to the Pedernales River, which forms part of the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Several small bays indent this portion of the shore, the one most favorable for shipping being Las Aguilas Bay, also known as Bahia sin Fondo, or Bottomless Bay. This part of the country, the Baboruco peninsula, is very sparsely inhabited. In the beginning of the nineteenth century it was the abode of maroons, half-savage fugitive ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... souls naturally unfeeling, gallantry turns into wickedness. Through ennui and the demand for excitement, through vanity, and as a proof of dexterity, delight is found in tormenting, in exciting tears, in dishonoring and in killing women by slow torture. At last, as vanity is a bottomless pit, there is no species of blackness of which these polished executioners are not capable; the personages of Laclos are derived from these originals.[2306]—Monsters of this kind are, undoubtedly, rare; but there is no need of reverting to them to ascertain how much ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... same ministers were to be again employed, a million a year would not be sufficient to carry on the exorbitant expenses so often and so justly complained of in this House." He deplored the vast sum "sunk in the bottomless gulf of secret service." "I heartily wish," he exclaimed, "that time, the great discoverer of hidden truths and concealed iniquities, may produce a list of all such—if any such there were—who have been perverted from their public duty by private pensions, who have been the hired ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make—a twig crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew ...
— Options • O. Henry
... that afflicts our lives? Must it not be, that the innumerable sum of God's mercies has not to have subtracted from it, but has to have added to it, the sum which also at intervals appears to us innumerable, of our sorrows and our burdens? Perhaps the explanation does not go to the bottom of the bottomless, but it goes a long way down towards it. 'Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth' makes a bridge across the gulf which seems to part the opposing cliffs, these two sets effect, and turn the darker into a form in which the brighter reveals itself. 'All things ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and it is not in all the vain power of dogma and philosophy to dispossess the divine Mind of healing power, or to cast out error with error, even in the name and for the sake of Christ, and so heal the sick. While Science is engulfing error in bottomless oblivion, the material senses would enthrone error as omnipotent and omnipresent, with power to determine the fact and fate to being. It is said that the devil is the ape of God. The lie of evil holds its own by declaring itself both true and good. The path of Christian Science ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... Mexicans had known vaguely of a woman haunting this castle by the sea. Sometimes they had seen a gray, creeping figure at the end of the hall or heard a piercing cry ring out at midnight, and now this creature was about to spring upon them and curse them to the bottomless pit. There was a cry of fright, and in leaping back, the man near the top of the ladder knocked over the one below, and he in turn the next, so that it was like when a ball hits the King Pin and the others ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering pit of Tophet," "bottomless universal hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all he left no practical scheme. His works are fundamentally not about politics or history or literature, but about himself. They are the exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two deeply held convictions; their ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... if cement barrels are to be used in measuring the sand and stone, he should specify what a "barrel" is to be. When the concrete is to be mixed by hand the better practice is to measure the sand and stone in bottomless boxes of the general type shown by Fig. 10 and of known volume, and then specify that a bag of cement shall be called 1 cu. ft., 0.6 cu. ft., or such other fraction of a cubic foot as the engineer may choose. The contractor then has a definite basis on which to estimate ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... ascend the long chain from effect to cause, until he reaches the first cause, the womb wherein was first generated the subsequent distant effect. So, likewise, they cannot realize that at the start the imperceptible deviation from the aim by and by widens to a bottomless gap until the aim is missed. Then the greatest and the most devoted sacrifices are useless. The legal conductors of the nation, since March 6th, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... said Suleiman to the Caliph, "I will take no further coin from you, for the rapacity of the Governor is like a bottomless pit that would swallow all ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... passionately, rising from his chair—"friends from the bottomless pit could not have more foully and fatally deceived that poor, thoughtless, trustful child. But all their trickery and treachery could never have succeeded had they not found a paltry tool in a senseless creature like you—you, Sir—who could stand there and ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... Lord only knows! They say that it is a bottomless abyss, with no outlet but one crooked one, miles long, that reaches to the Demon's Punch Bowl. But if there is a bottom to that abyss, that bottom is ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... imagined it to have the shape of an inverted round boat or bowl, the thickness of which would represent the mixture of land and water (ki-a) which we call the crust of the earth, while the hollow beneath this inhabitable crust was fancied as a bottomless pit or abyss (ge), in which dwelt many powers. Above the convex surface of the earth (ki-a) spread the sky (ana), itself divided into two regions:—the highest heaven or firmament, which, with the fixed stars immovably attached to it, revolved, as round an axis or pivot, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... hordes of Northern barbarians, who, under Genseric overran the Western Roman empire early in the fifth century, are symbolized by a volcanic mountain cast into the sea and spreading its streams of molten lava in every direction. The fearful pest of Mohammedanism is a dense smoke issuing from the bottomless pit and darkening the heavens. The Saracens of Mahomet are swarms of locusts appearing upon the earth, with scorpion stings, tormenting men five months, or, prophetically, one hundred and fifty years. On the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... hated their cousins, and the father gave each bride a dagger, with which she stabbed her bridegroom. Only one had pity, and though the other forty-nine were not punished here, yet, when they died and went to Tartarus, they did not escape, but were obliged to be for ever trying to carry water in bottomless vessels. The people of Argos called themselves Danai, and no doubt some of them came ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inadequate machinery, to conquer the world has been sufficiently dilated upon. The Spanish and Italian and Walloon soldiers were starving in Brabant and Flanders in order that Spanish gold might be poured into the bottomless pit of the Holy ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... varied and extensive genius; the confidence of courage, the sedateness of wisdom, the stateliness of integrity; on the other, coarse manners, rude language, violent passions continually exploding, a bottomless void on the side of truth, and a rueful waste on that of common honesty.... So many pernicious faults were not committed by Xerxes or Darius, whom ancient historians call feeble princes, as were committed by Napoleon, whom the modern do not call feeble, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... two great drifts into a pit which seemed bottomless. He crawled to the top of the second, using his pulseless hands like sticks in the snow, and at the top something rose from the other side of ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... bottom. The sight of this horrible den acted as a "pretty considerable" sedative to our enthusiasm. Each exclaimed to himself, (at least I did for one) "Can I venture?"—as he contemplated the dismal, and, to all appearance, bottomless gulf, where nothing was visible but the strange figures of our guides at a prodigious distance beneath us, clinging to the wall with one hand, while they brandished their torches with the other. However, there was little space for reflection; and though, by this ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that 'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... perpetually receding background of objective mystery, is a thing that cannot be destroyed. Those among us who reluct at every human explanation of this panorama of shadows, are only too easily able to "flee away and be at rest" in the bottomless gulf they crave. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... say, "Don't be frightened"; but when a wagon with four wheels travels for a considerable distance upon only two, while those on the upper side are spinning round in the air, and the whole affair inclines at a right angle toward a bottomless gulf of mud, it is rather difficult for a nervous person to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... no answer, but staggered to her feet, and went away blindly through the door, which opened just wide enough to let her through. There were clouds on the sky. The patio, in its blackness, was like the rectangular mouth of a bottomless pit. I picked up the candlesticks, and lighted myself to my room, walking upon air, upon tempestuous air, in a feeling of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... planks hanging from the beams, piled with dirty old quilts and bolsters. Servants' belongings, an excessively grimy mat, hubble-bubble pipes, tobacco, tinder, and two wooden chests littered the floor, besides sundry packing-cases full of useless odds and ends, such as a rusty kettle lid, a bottomless iron stove, a discoloured old nickel teapot, a soup-plate full of treacle blackened with dust. In a corner was a tub for washing dishes, and from nails in the wall hung moist dish-clouts and the cook's livery and skull-cap. The only piece of furniture ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... very long time to make out all this, for every now and then my brain seemed to lose its power for a while, and every thing whirled about me. Especially there was that awful sensation of sinking down, down through the pebbles into some chasm that was bottomless. I had never either felt pain or fainted before, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton |
