"Cataract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hope; but—well, I think I shall see an oculist. One doesn't care to face a prospect of failing sight, perhaps of cataract, or something of that kind; still, it's better to know the facts, I ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of loose articles fell with them from the upturned side of the car to the other; they were part of a cataract of falling bodies, involved as in a crushing avalanche. Wynne found himself in this falling shower crumpled up between two chairs, one of his feet evidently thrust through a broken window and the other still held by that convulsive clasp. Miss Morison was half ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... prosperity and aggrandizement of a State is to be seen in its increase of inhabitants, and consequent progress in industry and wealth. Of the vast tide of emigration, which now rushes like a cataract to the West, not even a trickling rill wends its feeble course to the Ancient Dominion.—Of the multitude of foreigners who daily seek an asylum and a home, in the empire of Liberty, how many turn their steps toward the regions of the slave? None. No not one. There is a malaria in the atmosphere ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... the beautiful lady. She waved her hand, and the chief treasurer took a bag from the chest, untied it, and emptied a cataract of gold into the fur cap. The fisherman had never seen so much wealth in all his life before, and he stood like ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... of Langewachte Spruit was commanded by strong entrenchments, I reconnoitred for another passage of the Tugela. One was found for me below the cataract by Colonel ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... convulsions of a dying cachalot, actually involved in them. The turns were off my body, but I was able to twist a couple of turns round my arms, which, in case of his sounding, I could readily let go. Then all was lost in roar and rush, as of the heart of some mighty cataract, during which I was sometimes above, sometimes beneath, the water, but always clinging, with every ounce of energy still left, to the line. Now, one thought was uppermost—"What if he should breach?" I had seen them ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... I ventured to Falling Waters, a reservoir which is precipitated from a cliff, called Campbell's Ridge, into a gorge of the Shawnee Mountains. The deafening roar of the cataract would be almost deathly to me; but, strengthened by the promise of Heraine, I determined to add this achievement to the long list of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... drainage of the Rughamat Makna, the huge "horse" or buttress of gypsum bearing north-east from the harbour. The principal veins number three. The uppermost and sweetest is the Ayn el-Tabbakhah; in the middle height is El-Tuyuri (Umm el-Tuyur), with the dwarf cataract and its tinkling song; whilst the brackish 'Ayn el-Fara'i occupies the valley sole. Besides these a streak of palms, perpendicular to the run of the Wady, shows a rain-basin, dry during the droughts, and, higher up, the outlying dates springing from the arid sands, are fed ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... barely entered the dining-room when this cataract of speech was turned on them by their mother, with every appearance of excitement and gratification. All her usual melancholy apathy was thrown aside; her face was alight with pleasure, her eyes bright ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... room until all the guests have seated themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... displaying any high mountains. I saw numerous grottoes, some of them with magnificent entrances, which looked as though they had been cut in the rocks by art. In one of these grottoes water fell from above, forming a very pretty cataract. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... lest he dam the eruption, he dashes down his thoughts on scraps of paper—walking, standing, lying down, on the street, at the table, in the night—as if under unceasing command. So furiously did the cataract of his thoughts rush through him, that he thought he was going out of his mind. He was not working out the idea. The idea was working him out. It would have been an hallucination had it not been so informed by reason from ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... Acadian French; for he is well enough acquainted with prairies to be aware that one needs to know the road even to a place in full view across the plain. Bonaventure, with riot in his heart, and feeling himself drifting over the cataract of the sinfullest thing that ever in his young life he has had the chance to do, softly lays down his wood, and comes to ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... easy, his humane and charitable disposition was constantly exerting itself. Mrs. Anna Williams, daughter of a very ingenious Welsh physician, and a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature, having come to London in hopes of being cured of a cataract in both her eyes, which afterwards ended in total blindness, was kindly received as a constant visitor at his house while Mrs. Johnson lived; and after her death, having come under his roof in order to have an operation upon her eyes performed with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... quarters of the horizon towards the island. The noise was incessant and most tiresome. On walking rapidly into the centre of the island, countless myriads of birds rose shrieking on every side, so that the clangour was absolutely deafening, "like the roar of some great cataract." The voyagers could see no traces of natives, nor of any other visitors ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... came within hearing of a rushing noise that sounded like subterranean thunder. The river, lashed into fury, tumbled along over rapids with frightful velocity, and conducted them to the brink of a magnificent cataract, which, to their wondering fancies, rushed down in one vast volume of foam to the depth of twelve hundred feet! *7 The appalling sounds which they had heard for the distance of six leagues were rendered yet more oppressive to the spirits by the gloomy ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... now, and all this golden cataract of hair has rushed out over the piled pillows. It oppresses and terrifies me. If I could speak, it seems to me that I would ask Louise to come and bind it up. Won't she turn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... where he built a castle, and made peace with the neighboring tribes, called by some Nubae and by others Nabatae, to whom he gave up the strip of territory which the Romans had conquered, of seven days' march above the first cataract, on condition that they should prevent the Blemmyes and Ethiopians from attacking Egypt. Maximianus in the meantime was engaged in putting down the revolt in Mauritania, which he effected ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... carefully before planting his feet. It was the time of barley harvest, and a scorching afternoon. On the burnt plain below, the road to Megiddo shone and quivered in the heat. But he could not see it. Cataract veiled his eyes and blurred the whole landscape ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... on the broad bosom of the waters, the two pygmy vessels held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, and the gleaming cataract of Montmorenci; the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter and its crowded archipelago, till now the mountain reared before them its rounded shoulder above the forest-plain of Montreal. All was solitude. Hochelaga had vanished; and of the savage population that Cartier had found ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... day on which this story opens. And then, greatly to Mr. Anstruther's annoyance, an event had occurred which upset all his carefully laid plans. Miss Bidwell, whose sight had never been very strong, was threatened with cataract in both eyes, and acting on the advice of a clever little doctor who had lately come to the neighbourhood, she had decided to go to her mother's relatives in France and to take a complete rest until her eyes should be ready for operation. The news that Miss Bidwell's sight had been failing ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... provision-train wound its way along the bank of the Niagara. On the right were high cliffs, thickly wooded; on the left a precipice, whose base was fretted by the furious river. In the ears of the soldiers and drivers sounded the thunderous roar of the mighty cataract. As men and horses threaded their way past the Devil's Hole savage yells burst from the thick wood on their right, and simultaneously a fusillade from a hundred muskets. The terrified horses sprang over the cliffs, ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... dust increased, enveloping the lower part of the procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a maelstrom. The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... subjects so softened, soothed, or bent, as aforesaid, for he opens his window and prepares to discharge the contents of his jug on the heads of the devoted minstrels. If the ancient ophicleide player, with the brandy bottle protruding from his great coat pocket, might but know of the impending cataract which more immediately threatens himself, he would convey himself from the dangerous neighbourhood with all the alacrity of which his spindle shanks are capable. A younger neighbour on the opposite side of the street awaits the catastrophe with amused interest, whilst a drunken "unfortunate" ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... glittering with similar hues, very beautiful for a small object, but wanting in dignity and repose for an entire landscape. We remember with great pleasure Gignoux's 'Autumn in Virginia,' and his painting of 'Niagara by Moonlight' gave us a far more majestic impression of the great cataract than the famous day representation by Church. As we gazed, we called to mind a certain night when the moon stood full in the heavens, vivid lunar bows played about our feet, and, mounting the tower, we looked down into the apparently bottomless abyss, dark with clouds of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... valleys, skirted the edges of rocky precipices, and toiled over the savage monotony of the dreary table-land. At length, on the brow of a mountain, I observed the fragments of a gloomy forest—cedar, and pine, and cypress. The wind moaning through its ancient avenues and the hoarse roar of a cataract were the only ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... are the great gold bearing streams that caused the mining excitement of 1849. They all head near the Tahoe region, and include the Yuba, Feather, American, Mokelumne, Calaveras, Cataract, and Tuolumne. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... by the night breeze, sway to and fro, like ghosts moving in a minuet; when still, appearing as the water of a cataract suddenly frozen in its fall, its spray converted into hoar frost, the ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Had heard these sayings of The Shah, he said, "Oh Shah, who would not be the Slave of Lust Must still endure the Sorrow of no Son. —Lust that makes blind the Reason; Lust that makes A Devil's self seem Angel to our Eyes; A Cataract that, carrying havoc with it, Confounds the prosperous House; a Road of Mire Where whoso falls he rises not again; A Wine of which whoever tastes shall see Redemption's face no more—one little Sip Of that delicious ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... directly the signal is given, and the boats start, everybody will run impetuously at full speed along the banks to keep up with the boats, and cheer on their own men, and it will be necessary for our trio to make the best possible use of their legs, before the living cataract pours down upon them. Indeed, they would not have been on the towing-path at all, but among the rather questionable occupants of the grass plot before the inn on the other side of the river, were it not for their desire to run along with the boats, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... self-opinion, and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara; and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... me for all the wrong I have done you!" And as he clambered his way toward the green light, a great tear rolled from under the heavy lid and flowed past him like a cataract. ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... spent in reading your wonderful Potted Meat Supplement from cover to cover. As there is more printed matter in it than in Mr. DE MORGAN'S latest novel you might expect to hear that I am suffering to-day from eye-strain. On the contrary the symptoms of incipient cataract, which declared themselves a few months ago, have entirely disappeared, and I was able to see the French coast distinctly this morning from my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water, their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away." "Satque superque satis"—we cannot go on. There is nothing like calling things by their contraries—it is truly startling. Whenever you speak of water, treat it as fire—of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Moero scenery. Pent in on all sides by high mountains, clothed to the edges with the rich vegetation of the tropics, the Moero discharges its superfluous waters through a deep rent in the bosom of the mountains. The impetuous and grand river roars through the chasm with the thunder of a cataract, but soon after leaving its confined and deep bed it expands into the calm and broad Lualaba, stretching over miles of ground. After making great bends west and south-west, and then curving northward, it enters Kamolondo. By the natives it is ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... forms of mental derangements are hereditary—one of the parents or near relation being afflicted. Physical or bodily weakness is often hereditary, such as scrofula, gout, rheumatism, rickets, consumption, apoplexy, hernia, urinary calculi, hemorrhoids or piles, cataract, etc. In fact, all physical weakness, if ingrafted in either parent, is transmitted from parents to offspring, and is often more strongly marked in the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... them, which when ground makes good bread. They were sad looking creatures, far worse than the Spanish gypsies we afterwards saw in Andalusia. The Merced River, which winds through the valley, rises some twenty miles away towards the north, fed by the Yosemite Fall, a cataract unsurpassed in height by any other upon the globe. The vertical height of the fall is set down at 2,550 feet, though it is not composed of one perpendicular sheet of water. The reader will remember that the ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... sun through an ordinary solar microscope, you discover that it has a curdled or mottled appearance, as though suffering from biliousness. It is also marked here and there by long streaks of light, called faculae, which look like foam flecks below a cataract. The spots on the sun vary from minute pores the size of an ordinary school district to spots 100,000 miles in diameter, visible to the nude eye. The center of these spots is as black as a brunette cat, and is called the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... his lungs—he could swim more strongly now. He managed to gasp an answer: "Here, Winslow, over here!" There was a splashing in response to his voice. He heard it over the noise of the waters he had been swept away from the cataract. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Wolfe in the siege of Quebec: that brigadier-general Prideaux, with a third body, reinforced with a considerable number of friendly Indians, assembled by the influence and under the command of sir William Johnston, should invest the French fort erected at the fall or cataract of Niagara, which was certainly the most important post of all French America, as it in a manner commanded all the interior parts of that vast continent. It overawed the whole country of the Six Nations, who were cajoled into a tame ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... great cataract which had effectually dammed our progress up the valley, the leaders swerved toward the left, passing so closely beside the leaping, foaming flood as to be enveloped in the spray as if in a cloud of mist. Almost beneath the fall, the water crashing on the rocks within reach of an outstretched hand, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... October nights were frosty and still; and as we had been told many strange stories regarding it—stories about bold fishers who had threaded their dangerous way between the overhanging rock and the water, and who, striking outwards, had speared salmon through the foam of the cataract as they leaped—stories, too, of skilful sportsmen, who, taking their stand in the thick wood beyond, had shot the rising animals, as one shoots a bird flying,—both my Cromarty cousin and myself were extremely desirous to visit the scene of such feats and marvels; and Cousin William obligingly ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the falls for days, to revel in the beauties of the mighty cataract and the great gorge through which the waters afterwards ran. Then unwillingly the oxen were in-spanned, and their course was directed up the river, beyond the beautiful islands, and on mile after mile, till the bright transparent river flowed smoothly downward, and from its reedy banks plenty of ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... Director visited the Supai Indians of Cataract Canyon, and was informed by them that their present home had been taken up not many generations ago, and that their ancestors occupied the ruins which have been described; and they gave such a circumstantial ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... escapes. Mr. Wolverton remarked that every one knew of those who had navigated the entire series of canyons, but that few people knew of those who had been unsuccessful. He knew of seven parties that had failed to get through Cataract Canyon's forty-one miles of rapids, with their boats, most of them never being ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... who formed the garrison of the town, holding blazing torches of pine and pitch, and the glare from the fires of the upset engines, was one which would have delighted Rembrandt. When a rush of water, a cataract from the roof of the lately blown-up tunnel, suddenly occurred, adding to the horror of the night, the place was pandemonium. Almost the only men unhurt in the front carriages, which were smashed to pieces, were the Mayors of the villages ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... there where it appeared so terribly grand to me as it did when I stood at the foot of the Falls. There we went out on the rocks as far as we could, and not get too wet with the spray, and viewed the water as it poured over the cataract and plunged into the abyss below, beat itself into foam and spray, which settled together again and formed the angry waves that went rolling and tumbling away to the sea. There I heard the sound of many waters thundering in their fall and I thought, while looking at that ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... tourist walks twenty-five miles over them in a short day. The engineering feats on these roads are in many cases notable. On the Simplon route a wide mountain stream rushes down over a post-road tunnel, and from within the traveler may see through the gallery-like windows the cataract pouring close beside him down into the valley. On the route that passes the great Rhone glacier, the road ascends a high mountain in a zigzag that, as viewed in front from the valley below, looks like a colossal corkscrew. This road ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... in quiet tete-a-tete he unveiled some of his special experiences. I should like to mention one. He once had great hope of the conversion to God of a Mongol, who had given him his entire confidence, and who was suffering from cataract in both eyes. Gilmour felt that this was a case in which surgical help might restore the sufferer to at least partial sight, and he made arrangements that in the escort of a Mongol the patient should find his way to the medical institution at Peking. He started on the pilgrimage ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... physical powers still unimpaired. His half-brother, who filled the post of minister of foreign affairs at the commencement of the present reign, died blind some little time back, after twice paying ten thousand dollars to a Dutch oculist from Batavia to operate on his eyes for cataract. His successor, the present minister, is one of the finest specimens of a Siamese gentleman in the country. He was first a provincial governor; then went on a special embassy to England; last year attended the supreme king on his visit to Singapore and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... in four months' time would come thundering through the gorge in a garment of foam, with the shout of a wild thing loosed from bondage. The triumph of desolation was reached in the savage peaks that almost fronted the camp and descended to the valley in a cataract of crags. Here even the persevering thorn-bush could take no hold upon a surface of bare rock, split up into clefts, and chiselled to such fantastic shapes that the whole might have inspired Dante's conception of the ravine by which he descended to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... trees by the furious missiles, seemed as if a tornado was in the height of its fury: every few minutes, a thunder heard above all other sounds, denoted the explosion of a caisson, sweeping into destruction, with a cataract of fire and iron, men and animals for hundreds of feet around it. The effect of such a fire of artillery is, however, much less deadly than any except those who have been subject to it can believe. The prevalent impression concerning the relative destructiveness ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Niagara Falls petrified; and I think the simile very striking. It is like a cataract falling in huge waves, in some places leaping out from a projecting rock, in others descending in ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... praises of God; and down he sped, over cliffs and slippery ledges, to the large village of Lezan, on the banks of the noisy Zab. Scarcely had he entered it, when a young man, the only one he had ever seen from this remote region, from whose eyes he had removed a cataract a year before, came with a present of honey, and introduced him at once to the confidence of the people. He became so thronged with the sick from all the region, that he had to forbid more than three or four ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... the rain did not fall in distinct drops, but in streams of various thickness. Sometimes it was a compact mass forming a sheet of water, like a cataract, a Niagara. Imagine an aerial basin, containing a whole sea, being upset. Under such showers the ground was hollowed out, the plains were changed to lakes, the streams to torrents, the rivers, overflowing, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... was a marvellous fascination in his voice—an Italian witch, or red Indian, or a gypsy would have at once recognised in him a sorcerer. Yet his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud, a running stream without babbling stones or rapids; but when it came to a climax cataract he cleared it with grandeur, leaving a stupendous impression. In the ordinary monotony of that deep voice there was soon felt an indescribable charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have heard in more or less different phrase ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... dull old hole compared to Mrs. Ess Kay's splendid room. Mine, at home, has all the furniture covered with faded chintz, and the curtains are made of plain white dimity. But I love the deep window seats where I can curl up among cushions, with a cataract of roses veiling the picture of the terrace with its ivy-covered stone balustrade, the sun-dial, the two white peacocks, and far away, the park with a blue mist among the trees. And I haven't learned yet to love my beautiful room at Mrs. Ess Kay's, though I admire it immensely—admire ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... was shattered with a frightening thud. Red pieces of glass and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho's eyes as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked. A cataclysm could not have been more horrible. An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed the brutish mind as with ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... rivulets, undirected in their course by human industry, preserved in them a constant moisture. It was rare to meet with flowers, wild fruits, or birds beneath their shades. The fall of a tree overthrown by age, the rushing torrent of a cataract, the lowing of the buffalo, and the howling of the wind were the only sounds which broke the silence ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... point of the Rovuma, above a cataract where a reach of comparatively still water, from 150 to 200 yards wide, allows a school of hippopotami to live: when the river becomes fordable in many places, as it is said to do in August and September, they must ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... knowledge comes to him, as it comes, and on which he can trace the affinity of every part with every other part, he is assuredly frittering away a large percentage of his efforts. There are certain philosophical works which, once they are mastered, seem to have performed an operation for cataract, so that he who was blind, having read them, henceforward sees cause and effect working in and out everywhere. To use another figure, they leave stamped on the brain a chart of ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... far from the Rue de Louvain, and we stood on the doorsteps of the house we sought ere the clouds, severing with loud peal and shattered cataract of lightning, emptied their livid folds in a torrent, heavy, prone, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... into Africa. The tenants above made common cause with Mistress Judy Pettit, and the gentle lady of Mr. Wheelwright was in turn discomfitted, and compelled to descend headlong down stairs, in rather too quick time for her comfort, with a cataract of Irish women tumbling after her. Wheelwright ran to the rescue of his help-meet, and pulling her through the door, endeavored to shut it on the instant, to keep out the foe; in doing which the proboscis of Mistress ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... of icy arrows into the town, and it vanished. The swarthy girls and lads that sauntered homeward behind their mothers' cows across the wide suburban stretches of marshy commons heard again the deep, unbroken, cataract ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and with trembling, shaking hands handed the bag to Tom, who, in an ecstasy of wonder and dizzy with delight, poured out with swimming sight upon the coat spread on the ground a cataract of shining silver money that rang and twinkled and jingled as it fell in a shining ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... Raja at the sign upon his glittering chariot leaps, Instant Ganga the divine follows his majestic steps. From the high heaven burst she forth first on Siva's lofty crown, Headlong then, and prone to earth thundering rushed the cataract down, Swarms of bright-hued fish came dashing; turtles, dolphins in their mirth, Fallen or falling, glancing, flashing, to the many-gleaming earth. And all the host of heaven came down, spirits and genii, in amaze, And each forsook his heavenly throne, upon that ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... dreamed that he heard a voice crying without, and awoke, Leaping blindly afoot like one from a dream that he fears. A hellish glow and clouds were about him;—it roared in his ears Like the sound of the cataract fall that plunges sudden and steep; And Rahero swayed as he stood, and his reason was still asleep. Now the flame struck hard on the house, wind-wielded, a fracturing blow, And the end of the roof was burst and fell on the sleepers below; And the lofty hall, ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the river had all the strength of a cataract, and he who slipped would infallibly be carried down by the strong current and dashed against ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... before the Count heard the increasing din of the approaching multitude, the first ranks of which rushed on with the rapidity of a cataract. ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... was the farthest point he reached upon the Orinoco. This island lies at the mouth of the Caroni, the great southern artery of the watershed, and Raleigh's final expedition was made up this stream. He reached the foot of the great cataract, now named Salto Caroni, and his description of this noble natural wonder may be quoted as a favourable instance of his style, and as the crown ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... monotonous, so nearly akin to silence and yet so distinct—as if it uttered the name of God. How the great river dances over the granite shores, how it scourges the rocky walls, bounds against the island altars, dives rattling into the whirlpool, pervades the cataract with harmony! ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately intended from his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in my poor Cynocephalyte?" he said; and his eyes were filmed like the eyes of one afflicted with cataract. "He was a devoted servant, Dr. Petrie, but the lower influences in his genealogy sometimes conquered. Then he got out of hand; and at last he was so ungrateful toward those who had educated him, that, in one of those paroxysms of his, he attacked and killed a most faithful Burman, one of ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... were never printed. They were hunting-cries, ringing trumpet-notes, rousing, animating, terrifying, urgent; not to capture, not to give again. They were lightning flashes and rolling thunder. They shook hearts with terrible alarms. But they were transient, never could they be caught. The cataract can be measured to its last drop, the dizzy play of foam can be painted, but not the elusive, delirious, swift, growing, mighty stream of ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... killed while leading a charge. Dick has done awfully well in the medical, passed all necessary exams, and taken every possible degree. He is now looking out for a practice, and meanwhile a big man in London has sent him out to investigate one of these queer water friction cures—professes to cure cataract and cancer and every known disease, by simply sitting you in a tub, and rubbing you down with a dish-cloth. Dick Cameron says—Hullo! Why are we talking of Dick Cameron? I thought I was telling you about ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... spot on the cliff, where a stream fell in a cataract on to the sand, and there was a rustic seat with a lovely view of the bay. Beth dropped on to the seat out of breath and looked curiously about her. The tide was high. The water, smooth, sullen, swollen and weary, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... caste, or mode of Indian life is known to him; all our delightful provinces of the sun that lie off the railway are to him an undiscovered country; Ghebers, Moslems, Hindoos blend together in one indistinguishable dark mass before his eye, [in which the cataract of English indifference has not been couched; most delightful of all—he knows not the traditions of Anglo-India, and he does not belong to the ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... she kept up with the others very well on their march into the water towards the fall. All, except the pirates, shivered as the cold water came again around their knees, and they looked with fear upon the tumbling cataract which they were required to go under. There was no help for it, however; the seven pirates surrounded them and persuaded them to go on. They stood in a forlorn group in the quiet water near the foot of ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... ought to arise. If we do not feel at times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be, their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... cataract. It was not incurable; if he were operated upon he might recover his sight. The operation had not yet been attempted because his health would not allow it.... He was suffering from bronchial trouble, and if the operation was ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... the crash of falling timbers, and the thunder of the seas, as they broke across the deck. In a moment more, the cabin skylight was dashed in pieces by the breakers, and the spray, pouring down like a cataract, put out the lights, while the cabin door was wrenched from its fastenings, and the waves swept in and out. One scream, one only, was heard from Margaret's state-room; and Sumner and Mrs. Hasty, meeting in the cabin, clasped hands, with these few but touching ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... moment there came a deafening crash, a shock that threw them all off their feet, and the vessel, with her bows stove in, was sawing and grinding upon the sharp rocks that had pierced her through and through, with the water rushing into her like a cataract. ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... no happiness on earth . . ." Janina whispered to herself, and it seemed to her that hitherto she had had a cataract blinding her eyes which fate had now brutally torn off. She now saw, but there were moments in which she yearned for her former blindness and ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... terracing down from some four thousand feet above us and six miles beyond us, with progressive leaps of jagged blue serac between the two peaks of the mountain, and, almost at our feet, fell away with cataract curve to its precipitation four thousand feet below us. Across the glacier were the sheer, dark cliffs of the North Peak, soaring to an almost immediate summit twenty thousand feet above the sea; on the left, in the distance, was just visible ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... circumstance, he remained at home one day; and when the dog, as usual, departed with his piece of cake, he resolved to follow him, and find out the cause of this strange procedure. The dog led the way to a cataract at some distance from the spot where the shepherd had left his child. Down a rugged and almost perpendicular descent the dog began, without hesitation, to make his way, and at last disappeared by entering ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... least during the absence of Adolf and Placidia. There are those also who consider that in his absence the Numidian lion might be prevailed on to become the yoke-fellow of the Egyptian crocodile; and a farm which, ploughed by such a pair, should extend from the upper cataract to the Pillars of Hercules, might have charms even for a philosopher. But while the ploughman is without a nymph, Arcadia is imperfect. What were Dionusos without his Ariadne, Ares without Aphrodite, Zeus without Hera? Even Artemis has her Endymion; Athens ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract, the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... guessed at the size of the earth. Some said it was forty thousand miles round, but Eratosthenes was not content with guessing. He studied the length of the shadow thrown by the sun at Alexandria and compared it with that thrown by the sun at Syene, near the first cataract of the Nile, some five hundred miles distant, and, as he thought, in the same longitude. The differences in the length of these two shadows he calculated would represent one-fiftieth of the circumference of the earth which would accordingly be twenty-five thousand miles. There ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... jagged streams of light came so close to one another that he seemed deafened as well as blinded. He wondered if he should ever be able to hear human voices again when it was over. That he was drenched to the skin and that the water poured from his clothes as if he were himself a cataract was so small a detail that he was scarcely aware of it. He stood still, bracing his body, and waited. If he had been a Samavian soldier in the trenches and such a storm had broken upon him and his ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... write trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some centuries, been highly esteemed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ronald Adair was the second son of the Earl of Maynooth, at that time Governor of one of the Australian Colonies. Adair's mother had returned from Australia to undergo the operation for cataract, and she, her son Ronald, and her daughter Hilda were living together at 427, Park Lane. The youth moved in the best society, had, so far as was known, no enemies, and no particular vices. He had been engaged to Miss Edith Woodley, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the second Cataract as fast as possible, and return back at leisure. Hekekian Bey came to take leave yesterday, and lent me several books; pray tell Senior what a kindness his introduction was. It would have been rather dismal in Cairo—if one could be ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... He is, as he knows, little better than a pensioner in Count Orso's household. He holds his lands on sufferance. His faculties are paralyzed. He is on the first smooth shoulder-slope of the cataract. He knows that not only was his jealousy of his wife groundless, but it was forced by a spleenful pride. What is there to do? Nothing, save resignedly to prepare for his divorce from the conspiratrix Camilla and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which sprang from one of the lower and snowless elevations, was now nearly in shadow; all but the uppermost jets of spray, which rose like slow smoke above the undulating line of the cataract, and floated away in feeble wreaths ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... see the famous cataract of Niagara, and I had taken my way through the Indian tribes who inhabit the deserts to the west of the American plantations. My guides were—the sun, a pocket-compass, and the Dutchman of whom I have spoken: the latter understood perfectly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... and surged over the man, and the girl, and up to old Willis's throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then followed the returning out-draught, and every limb quivered with the strain: but when the cataract had disappeared, the chain was ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... like the spray of a cataract, had extinguished the torches one after another; there was but one left. Ave Maria took it out of the place where it had been stuck, and holding it in his hand, came and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... way which was visible in front had the appearance of a muddy cataract, through which ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... were accordingly put under the command of Ismael Pasha, the youngest son of the Viceroy, with orders to conquer all the provinces on the Nile, from the Second Cataract ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... In cataract the crystalline lens becomes opaque and loses its transparency, the power of refraction is lost—the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the interpreters exclaimed "Yellala falla"—"the cataract is speaking," and we could distinctly hear the cheering roar. The stream now assumed the aspect of Niagara below the Falls, and the circular eddies boiling up from below, and showing distinct convexity, suggested the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... game at floating down a stream which rushed over a cataract, of which strangers were ignorant until they were on the edge of the fall and tumbling over. The visitors were to float first, and Fulufuluitolo, or "Sugar-cane-down," took the lead. He planted his feet firmly on a rock near the fall, and as his party came floating down ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... injuries from lightning on record. In these cases the lesions have consisted of detachment of the retina, optic atrophy, cataract, hemorrhages into the retina, and rupture of the choroid, paralysis of the oculomotor muscles, and paralysis of the optic nerve. According to Buller of Montreal, such injuries may arise from the mechanic violence sustained by the patient rather than ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... distance of about twenty miles. There is a rise of thirty-five hundred feet on this stage, but so gradual is the ascent that one realizes it only in watching the stream, which is almost continuous rapid and cataract. For miles there was scarcely a square yard of smooth water. The only means of crossing from one bank to the other is by the rope bridges, of which I saw three. Several times I had a chance to watch some one making the trip. From a bamboo rope securely anchored on either bank with heavy rocks, ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... all assembled at Coca, Gonzalo marched along the course of the river, till at last he arrived at a place where it fell over a cataract of above 200 fathoms making a noise that could be easily heard at six leagues distance. A few days march below that place, the whole waters of the river became confined in a rocky channel not exceeding twenty feet wide, while the rocks were at least 200 fathoms in height above the water, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... sunlight. "How much?" she called down. But Great Taylor seemed not to hear. A child ran out with a bundle in her arms. "Rags," called the child, then stepped back out of the way, wondering. Great Taylor was passing on. An elevated train sent down a cataract of noise, but her song rose above it: "Rags ... old iron...." And when she reached the avenue a policeman with a yellow emblematic wheel embroidered on his sleeve held up his hand and stopped the traffic of the Devil's Own city to let Great ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... two ago upon Eleanor herself! Now she looked up. The light was flushing upon the mountain tops every moment stronger. The dewy scents of the May morning were filling the air with their nameless and numberless tokens of rich nature's bounty. The voice of a cataract, close at hand, made merry down the rocks along with the song of the blackbird, woodpecker and titmouse. And still, as Eleanor stood there and looked and listened, the rush and the stir of sweet life grew more and more; the spring breeze wakened up and floated ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... miniature cataract adds its tiny roar to the many "breathings of the night;" at Molly's feet lie great bunches ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... George into Dorothy's room. Madge was dressed for the day, and Dorothy, who had been helping her, was making her own toilet. Her hair hung loose and fell like a cataract of sunshine over her bare shoulders. But no words that I can write would give you a conception of her wondrous beauty, and I shall not waste them in the attempt. When we entered the room she was standing at the mirror. She turned, comb in hand, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... resolved to go up, at any rate, as far as Asouan and the first cataract. I had thought of acceding to the wishes of a party who are going across the Great Desert by Mount Sinai to Jerusalem; but the kindness of yourself and Mrs. Damer is so great, and the prospect of joining in your boat is so pleasurable, that I have made up my mind to accept your very ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... away aching desolation overwhelmed her. Brian's face with its passion and pain rose before her dry, burning eyes. Then darkness came, blotting out the sunshine; the little stream trickling into its stony basin seemed to grow into a roaring cataract, the waters to rush into her ears with a horrid gurgling; while the stones of the amphitheatre seemed to change into blocks of ice and to freeze her as ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round, with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... thought of. For a moment she stood panting before it, while with trembling hand she put a key in the lock; the next she pushed open the creaking door and entered. As she turned to take out the key, she saw Malcolm yards away in the middle of the road and in a cataract of rain, which seemed to have with difficulty suspended itself only until the lady should be under cover. He stood with his bonnet in his hand, watching for a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... comes a sea!' Struck full, straight on her beam, by wind and sea together, the Victoria lays over as if she would never stop. Over she heels to it—over, over, over! A second is a long suspense at such a time as this. The sea breaks in thunder along her whole length, and pours in a sweeping cataract across her deck, smashing the boats and dragging all loose gear to leeward. Over she heels—over, over, over! The yards are nearly up and down. The men cling desperately, as if to an inverted mast. And well they may, especially on the leeward ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... the air like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought again of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet. A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end. The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast, as by a strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between them and all objects about them. But as the large man fell back in a sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat, Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of the raft down the cataract had been several times over discussed during their halts, and the possibility of their enemies having escaped. The Cornishman and his companions, including the man they had succoured, declared as one that the ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... were relieved at intervals by the standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we could turn from this scene to the Lake, and see every branch, and leaf, and cataract of flame upon its bank perfectly reflected as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us,) rendered the scene very impressive. Occasionally, one of us would remove ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and were glad enough to have it eight bells, and the wheel relieved. We turned-in and slept as well as we could, though the sea made a constant roar under her bows, and washed over the forecastle like a small cataract. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... that upon their side of the river there was an upland plateau or bench. To their right the river, the gorge, and the strip of meadow extended for a mile or more, then curved away and were lost to sight. To their left, almost too close for comfort, was the stupendous cataract, towering above them to a terror-inspiring height. Nadia studied it with awe, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... mattresses of balsam brush upon which to sleep. While the sunset glow still filled the western sky, we heard a man's voice shouting above the roar of the rapids, and on going to the brink, saw a "York boat" in the act of shooting the cataract. It was one of the boats of "The Goods Brigade" transporting supplies for the northern posts of the Hudson's Bay Company. As the craft measured forty feet in length and was manned by eight men, it was capable of carrying about seventy packs, each weighing about a hundred pounds. But of these ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... recollection of the one great name of America, and inwardly beating with the sanguine expectation of emulating, in some degree, its renown. In no one were these virtuous hopes more vivid than in the bosom of a young officer who stood on the table rock, contemplating the great cataract, on the evening of the 25th of July of that bloody year. The person of this youth was tall and finely molded, indicating a just proportion between strength and activity; his deep black eyes were of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... a far finer figure coming home than he had been in going out. He wore a coat of azure velvet, and his vest was a perfect cataract of fine point de Venise. His shoes were of white leather with red heels, and his stockings of the finest white silk. He had felt ashamed of his plain claret cloth, which had seemed so fine at first, when taken to the houses of the fine hooped and powdered ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... he stood opposite to that wild and magnificent gloom of Nature which frowned on him from the canvas, the very leaves on those gnome-like, distorted trees seemed to rustle sibylline secrets in his ear. Those rugged and sombre Apennines, the cataract that dashed between, suited, more than the actual scenes would have done, the mood and temper of his mind. The stern, uncouth forms at rest on the crags below, and dwarfed by the giant size of the Matter that reigned ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... yellow-lined mouths. It was an aerial feat that made our heads dizzy. This pair of birds did not fly up the face of the falls in ascending to the top, as did those at Rainbow Falls, but clambered up the wall of the cliff close to the side of the roaring cataract, aiding themselves with both claws and wings. When gathering food below the falls, they would usually, in going or returning, fly in a graceful curve over the heads ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... powers! shear that mane that had been growing for years!—that cataract of hair that has been, so to speak, my oriflamme; the only physical belonging of which I ever was proud, the only thing, so far as I know, that I have ever been envied! For the moment the suggestion ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... the hot air, and through the dripping interstices of the khuskhus tattie a chilly fragrance creeps into the room, causing the mercury in the thermometer to retreat from its proud place. Nay, the seraph finds his way to your very bath-room, and discharging a cataract into the great tub, leaves it heaving like the ocean after a storm. When you follow him there, you will thank that nameless poet who gave our humble Aquarius the title he bears. Surely in the world ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA |
