"Cavernous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the house, who lived in a dark cavernous hole on the first floor, was slowly dying of a consumption, the sufferings of which were imbittered by the chill dampness of his abode. His hollow voice and hacking cough, however, could not veil the grateful accent with which he uttered any allusion to Madame Ossoli. He was ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sharply to drop its unconscious burden upon the deck, and the watching man, petrified with horror, saw within the gaping maw great sucking discs and beyond them a brilliant glow. The whole cavernous pit was aflame with phosphorescent light. Dimly he knew that this light explained the ability of the beastly arms to grope ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... fallen from power, after a bad beating at the polls, there is no knowing but that he may rise again, and hold once more in those tired old hands, shiny with rheumatic gout, and now twitching feebly under the discomfort of a superimposed malady, the reins of democratic and imperial power. The dark, cavernous eyes still wear their look of accumulated wisdom, a touch also of visionary fire. The sparse locks, dyed to a raven black, set off with their uncanny sheen the clay-like pallor of the face. He sits in a high-backed chair, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... faint eerie murmur to yon distant forest shades is here terrific—the booming of drums, the cavernous bellowing of the native horns, drowning rather than supporting the shrill yelling chorus of the singers. For ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... The French assert that they have borrowed it from us, and from the school of MRS. RADCLIFF, &c. &c. They also assert, that the policy of the royalist-party was not unconnected with this propagation of cavernous, cadaverous adventures, ideas, and illusions, intended, they say, by the impression of a new moral terror to infatuate their countrymen again with the dull and soporific prestiges of popery. They ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... different structure from the ordinary compound eyes, on the sides of the head. This frontal eye is totally wanting in the other workers, and is not known in any other kind of ant. The apparition of these strange creatures from the cavernous depths of the mine reminded me, when I first observed them, of the Cyclopes of Homeric fable. They were not very pugnacious, as I feared they would be, and I had no difficulty in securing a few with my fingers. I never saw them under any other circumstances than ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... cavernous salle a manger was apart: he sat alone, a solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once or twice en route as it ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... made the same half gloom, with their ruddy glare into the darkness, and where there was the same sombre glittering upon the walls and ceiling. We pursued our track along a devious cutting, haunted by confused and giant shadows, suddenly passing black cavernous sideways that startled us as we came upon them, and I began to expect mummies, for I thought myself for one minute within an old Egyptian catacomb. After traversing a further distance of two thousand seven hundred feet we halted at the top of the third slide, the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... arms, and touched the wall on the right side and on the left. He was in a passage. Little by little a cavernous daylight exuding, no one knows whence, and which floats about dark places, and to which the dilatation of the pupil adjusts itself slowly, enabled him to distinguish a feature here and there, and the corridor was vaguely sketched out ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... covered with thick vegetation. The stone, which is of resplendent whiteness, appears only here and there between the foliage. It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque spot. It recalled forcibly to my remembrance the valleys of Derbyshire, and the cavernous mountains of Muggendorf, in Franconia. Instead of the beeches and maple trees of Europe we here find the statelier forms of the ceiba and the palm-tree, the praga and irasse. Numberless springs gush from the sides ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... above tier; the pictured foulnesses, the painted lusts, the divinities of abomination. And, yawning in the sloping precipice of sculpture, beneath a frenzied swarming of gods and Gopia,—a beetling pyramid of limbs and bodies interlocked,—the Gate, cavernous and shadowy as the mouth of Siva, ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... magic light and shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and wheelhouse silvered and mellowed. The twin wire cables stretching back to the tow became two glistening silver ropes. At their ends, cavernous gloomy and grimy despite the moonlight, wallowed the high bulky hull ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... of air, wild voice of the sky! Thy shout rends the heavens, and earth trembles with dread; In hoarse hollow murmurs the billows reply, And ocean is roused in his cavernous bed. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the chimney to the darkest recesses of the cellar in quest of my vanished treasure. I began with a queer old triangular cupboard that occupied one corner of the kitchen. And in the deepest and dustiest corner of the top shelf of that cavernous old cupboard, what should I find but the cricket ball that I had lost the previous summer? My excitement was so great that I almost fell off the table on which I was standing. As soon as the flicker of my candle ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... only feature of the situation intelligible to him, was, that Kenwick, too, discarded his pipe at this juncture, and the gondolier was, accordingly, obliged to stow away his own half-finished cigarette,—4th quality,—in the cavernous recesses of the stern. He had been counting upon smoking it out before arriving at the Palazzo Darino, though he had scented danger from the moment his eye fell upon Vittorio's gondola. A gondolier, however, is early schooled to study any whim rather than his own, and presently Pietro observed, rather ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst of all this welter? The Colonel ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... cutting a pathway in the blue water, and scooping it up in an impalpable mist, hurrying on to the low beach of the island, and tearing the sand and shells up in heaps—and then a lull. Now, as if all the demons of winds had let loose their cavernous lungs from the four quarters of the earth, and like the shocks of artillery, volley upon volley, came the hurricane. The sea became one boiling, seething, hissing surface of foam, pressed and flattened by the weight of the tempest, which ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous pallor of the listeners. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... upon us with admiration, little dreaming the dark secrets we had discovered concerning that impressive pile, whose peaked roofs and soaring gables sheltered monk and prior before yet our own country had a name, and in whose cavernous cellars only the bravest of the servants dared to go, lest gowned and hooded spectres should ask ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... William's desires. He wished only to die in some quiet spot and to have Miss Pratt told about it in words that would show her what she had thrown away. But he followed with the others, in the wake of the Swedish lady named Anna, and as they stood in the cavernous hollow of the great barn he found ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... and to judge of it. So that one goes rambling amongst the wild woods of natural things, where there are many objects under shadow and mantle, for it is in a thick, dense, and deserted solitude that Truth most often has its secret cavernous retreat, all entwined with thorns and covered with bosky, rough and umbrageous plants; it is hidden, for the most part, for the most excellent and worthy reasons, buried and veiled with utmost diligence, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... an ostrich!" declared Janice, after almost every cold scrap in the house had followed several slices of "bread-butter" down Pietro's cavernous maw. ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal. An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the patio overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen water jar, dim red; ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... whose finely-cut face and cavernous eye-bones suggested a carving in old ivory, bowed himself almost to the ground before the girl who had saved his admired Captain Sahib from the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... spacious quay of Saumur in the dusk of the evening, when the flickering tapers of the temperate town are going out one by one. Roars of merriment greet you as you approach the cavernous city of the suburb. There the entertainments of the inhabitants are only about to begin. You see moving lights in the distance twinkling along the grey surface of the rock, and flitting amongst the trees that lie between ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... failed very quickly, and he presently reached out and drew a reading-lamp towards him. The flame he kindled flickered upward, throwing weird shadows upon his lean, brown face, making the sunken hollows of his eyes look cavernous. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... tell us that the precipices here are 1500 feet high. When we reached their edge, we found that the clouds, which had been completely lifted up from the smoother parts of the mountain, still lingered as if they had difficulty in getting clear of the ragged edges of the cavernous opening, and moving about restlessly like evil spirits, hither and thither, afforded but partial glimpses of the deep vale below. Though Ben Nevis was at this time rather deficient in his snowy honours, considerable patches lay in the unsunned crevices ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... prayers. He rose and flung himself, worn-out, upon his hard pallet, and, seeming to slumber, dreamed again within his dream. Once more in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living choking its aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the cavernous depths of the great organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the singing boys. A day of great rejoicings,—for a prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of the mighty skeleton-minster were shaking with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... for that. I can see love in your eyes." She laid her hand on his knee. "Why are you trembling like this? From love?" she continued, while the cavernous thundering of the gombo went on without a pause. "But if you love her as much as that, you must give your Paquita a gold-mounted rosary of beads for the neck of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... de Biologie, May 3, 1890) proposed the name of bulbo-cavernous reflex for the smart contraction of the ischio-and bulbo-cavernosus muscles (erector penis and accelerator urinae) produced by mechanical excitation of the glans. This reflex is clinically elicited by placing the index-finger of the left hand on the region of the bulb while ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... exert. Even the roadway leading up and down the mountain is not always safe, it would seem, from these dangerous intruders. It is rocky and solitary, and is bordered every where with gloomy ravines and chasms, all filled with dense and entangled thickets, in which, and in the cavernous rocks of which the strata of the mountain are composed, wild beast and noxious animals of every kind find a secure retreat. The monks relate that not many years ago a servant of the convent, who had been sent down the mountain to Haifa, to accompany a traveler, ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... cavernous head, set upon the strongest shoulders, which has appeared upon the planet, since the soul of Socrates went back to God. Daniel Webster! strong mind in strong body, leader and king of men, deep-chested, lion-voiced, whose words of power moved men as the wind moves the sea, ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... pleasant beauty of face and figure, it needed no costly silks to grace or heighten. There she stood. Not a word from her merry lips, but a smile which stole over all the solitary grimness of the library, and made everything better, and brighter, and fairer, in a minute. It floated down into the cavernous humor of Dr. Renton, and the gloom began to lighten directly,—though he would not own it, nor relax a single feature. But the wan ghost in the corner lifted its head to look at her, and slowly brightened as to something worthy a spirit's love, and a dim phantom's smiles. Now then, Dr. Renton! ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... by an arch led into the coal cellar, beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor, and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three, leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black—evidently a similar vault belonging to ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... well-filled but not crowded room, stopping now and then to exchange a greeting or a farewell, and much hampered, as it seemed, in so doing, by a pronounced and disfiguring short-sight. He was a strongly built man of more than middle height. His iron-gray hair, deeply carved features, and cavernous black eyes gave him the air of power that his reputation demanded. On the other hand, his difficulty of eyesight, combined with the marked stoop of overwork, produced a qualifying impression—as of power teased and fettered, a Samson among ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... years ago. The same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... I wished that I had been less abrupt in my questioning. Peters did manage quite coolly and rationally to answer "Yes" to all my questions. But at the words "Pym," "Bernard," "Grampus," his eyes began, in appearance, to start from their sockets; those awful teeth gleamed from that cavernous mouth, as he uttered demoniac yell on yell, and raised himself to a sitting posture in the bed. I thought his eyeballs must certainly burst, as he looked off into nothingness wildly, as if a troop of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... improvised pillow, beheld the Major's face suddenly illuminated by the light with which he was kindling his pipe once more. He watched the face with a sort of artistic interest for a few seconds—the drooping shadows, the apparently cavernous eyes, the deep-shaded bar of the mustache across the face. In the wavering light cast from below it resembled the face of a vindictive beast. Then the Major whispered, between ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... a rigid scheme of classification has not been wholly successful, their structural peculiarities, the hypsometrical relation between their interior and the surrounding district, their size, and the character of their circumvallation, the dimensions of their cavernous opening as compared with that of the more or less truncated conical mass of matter surrounding it, all afford a basis for grouping them under distinctive titles, that are not only convenient to the selenographer, but which undoubtedly represent, as a rule, actual diversities ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... my steps. I walked for a quarter of an hour. I gazed into the darkness. I shouted. No reply: my voice was lost in the midst of the cavernous echoes which alone replied ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... way, the type of fireplace that our Colonial ancestors built—great cavernous openings and generous flues, with the result that the more wood was piled upon the blaze the more they blistered their toes and at the same time chilled their backs. For it is evident that when we secure such a strong, unobstructed current of hot air up the ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... a nose, but the mouth below could not be seen. It was hidden by the mustache and the enormous square beard. His face was colorless, almost as white as hair and beard; there seemed to be no shadow or tint anywhere except the cavernous recesses from which the man's eyes gleamed and sparkled. Altogether he was ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... himself in a long street, planted with shade-trees, and looking old-fashioned and fallen from a former dignity. He perceived that it could never have been fashionable, like Bolingbroke Street or Beacon; the houses were narrow, and their doors opened from little, cavernous arches let into the brick fronts, and they stood flush upon the pavement. The sidewalks were full of people, mostly girls walking up and down; at the corners young fellows lounged, and there were groups before the cigar stores and the ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... dismay at the cavernous, the terrene dark, was not inconsistent with his pleasure in being out on the wild waste hillside, when heaven and earth were absolutely black, not seldom the whole of the night, in utter loneliness to eye or ear, and his never then ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the hidden reefs! Contented brute, his daily wants how few! And these by Nature's mother-hand supplied. Man's wants unnumbered and unsatisfied, And multiplied at every onward step— Insatiate as the cavernous maw of time. His real wants how simple and how few! Behold the kine in yonder pasture-field Cropping the clover, or in rest reclined, Chewing meek-eyed the cud of sweet content. Ambition plagues them not, nor hope, nor fear; No demons fright them and no cruel creeds; No pangs of ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... banks of Egypt's Nile, and heard the lamentations of priests and wailing of women as a black ox, flower bedecked and wearing a collar encrusted with gems, was drowned in the turgid stream. Time and space ceased to exist for him. Through the murk of cavernous passages he paced, pausing before a pit in which reposed a sarcophagus of huge dimensions; and when the dim company and he had paid tribute to that which lay there, all ascended to a temple, lofty and awesome, its dizzy roof upheld by aisles of monstrous granite. To an accompaniment of sorrowful ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... water-ditches; occasionally one comes to a sloping cavern leading down to the water; on descending to the depth of from twenty to forty feet, a small, rapidly-coursing stream of delicious cold water is found, well rewarding the thirsty traveller for his trouble; sometimes these cavernous openings are simply sloping, bricked archways, provided with steps. The course of these subterranean water-ways can always be traced their entire length by uniform mounds of earth, piled up at short intervals on the surface; each mound represents the excavations from a perpendicular shaft, at ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... camped at the edge of the timber on some mountain meadow, with his ponies grazing in the starlit dusk, when the little, leaping flame of his night fire flung ruddy shadows that danced in giant mimicry in the cavernous arches of the pines; when the faint tinkle of the belled pack-horse rang a faery cadence in the distance; then there was no such thing as loneliness in his big, outdoor world. Rather, he was content in a solid way. An inner glow of satisfaction because of work well done, a sense of well-being, ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... little, but not much, more sociable, for, although Nigel's active mind would gladly have found vent in conversation, he experienced some difficulty in making headway against the discouragement of Van der Kemp's very quiet disposition, and the cavernous yawns with which Moses displayed at once his desire for slumber and his ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... long I lay unconscious. I but know I slept, and wakened, and that 'twas no dream. I heard a rustle in the hay beside me, And opening sleepy eyes, scarce marvelling, I saw her, standing naked in the lamplight, Beneath the huge tent's cavernous canopy, Against the throng of elephants and camels That champed unwondering in the golden dusk, Moon-white Diana, mettled Artemis— Her body, quick and tense as her own bowstring, Her spirit, an arrow barbed and strung for flight— White snowflakes melting on her night-black ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... man rose, and, his eyes glittering, his voice cavernous, he cried, fastening his ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... felt a hand on her shoulder, and Rosamond said, "I have brought our only hope," and Eleonora stood, looking at the ghastly face. The yellow skin, the inflamed purple lips, the cavernous look of cheeks and eyes, were a fearful sight, and only the feeble incessant groping of the skeleton fingers ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at the bottom wholly submerged, where the light of idealism is not supposed to penetrate. Grit had been a junkman; his business address—a vacant lot; his only asset—a junk-cart across the top of which he had strung a belt of jingling, jangling bells that had called through the cavernous streets more plainly than Grit himself: "Rags, old iron, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... sidewalk stretched a line of ageing wooden pickets and about midway in their extent hung the wooden gate with the screak. The house was frame, low and wide-stretching, with an inviting verandah about a cavernous front door that was dark and rarely open. People used the side door into the ell sitting room, and the brick walk leading in a curved sweep to this doorway was free from grass. A high wooden lattice separated the front lawn from the backyard and sheds ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... there hung the grave's green mould, About it hung the odor of the dead; Yet from its cavernous eyes such light was shed That all my life seemed gilded, as with gold; Unto the trembling new love '"Go," I said "I do not need thee, ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... appeared they exhibited the greatest delight to see the Union soldiers. All slaves had the belief that we had come to free them, and there was much difficulty in preventing them from marching with us. The country through which we passed was cavernous, and the surface had many bowl-like depressions, at the bottom of which was, generally, considerable water. Springs and streams were scarce. The Confederates on retiring drove their disabled, diseased and broken-down horses, mules, etc., into these ponds and shot them, leaving ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... sight was that. On from the crest of the precipitous slopes above, two miles and more away, it came, a living thing, rolling, sliding, gliding; piling itself in long, leaping waves, hollowing itself into cavernous valleys, like a tempest-driven sea, whilst above its surface hung a powdery cloud of ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... young lady visitor, even from the far off and to her mysterious bluegrass could have anything much finer than that bonnet with its silken facings! She tied the wide strings underneath her chin in a great, flaring bow, and peeped forth from the cavernous depths of the arched "poke" with quite unconscious coquetry, flirting, with the keenest relish and most completely childish pleasure with the charming creature whom she saw reflected on the little mirror's ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... sepulchre without stopping to look at the parked machines or even the marvelous statue that stood above it, for what did we care about machines or statues now? As we approached we were astonished to hear low and cavernous growlings. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... were allayed, however, when the irreverent attendant punched his Sublime Majesty in the head and chest, and elicited an impatient, cavernous, ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... began, delivering his words in a voice no longer nasal, but deep—more than deep—a voice made purposely hollow and cavernous—"what! has the miracle of Pentecost been renewed? Have the cloven tongues come down again? Where are they? The sound filled the whole house just now. I heard the seventeen languages in full action: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of brandy and a piece of white bread, at the same time taking my money. I drank and passed the glass to Zebede, who emptied it. We had as much difficulty in getting out of the crowd as in entering. Hard, famished faces and cavernous eyes were on all sides of us. No one moved willingly. Each thought only of himself, and cared not for his neighbor. They had escaped a thousand deaths to-day only to dare a thousand more to-morrow. Well might they mutter, "Every one for himself, ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read in that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his doorstep, waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to them a thing for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the doom that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... At my very feet, so near that I could have leaped at once into eternity, the earth was cleft to a depth of six thousand six hundred feet—not by a narrow gorge, like other canons, but by an awful gulf within whose cavernous immensity the forests of the Adirondacks would appear like jackstraws, the Hudson Palisades would be an insignificant stratum, Niagara would be indiscernible, and cities ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the rugged walls of a vast chamber or set of chambers. He could only dimly see this, for the light was but feeble, and the bearer hidden behind the rugged pillars which supported the roof; but it was evidently coming nearer, and as it approached he could see that he was in a vast cavernous, flat-ceiled place, which appeared to have been a quarry, from which masses of stone had been hewn, the floor here and there being littered with refuse of ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... remembered now that big white-birch tree stood right at the place where the brook tumbled over the edge and fell into it. Although she was dreadfully afraid of falling in herself, she went cautiously over to this tree, feeling her way with her foot to make sure she did not slip, and peered down into the cavernous gloom below. Yes, there was Molly's little face, just a white speck. The child was crying, sobbing, and holding up her ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... conventional rhetoric of all Roman art may have added these embellishing touches, and cite, in confirmation thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and water, even the Thames at London Bridge, always leaps downhill—more or less. Of more importance is old Chaupy's discovery of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... within a few yards of her without being seen. I then signed to Mr. Peggotty to remain where he was, and emerged from their shade to speak to her. I did not approach her solitary figure without trembling; for this gloomy end to her determined walk, and the way in which she stood, almost within the cavernous shadow of the iron bridge, looking at the lights crookedly reflected in the strong tide, inspired a dread ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... his feet, and a long staff lent his drooping figure support. His whole attitude told its own tale of exhaustion. But a closer inspection, one glance into the fierce-burning eyes, which glowered from the depths of two cavernous sockets, would have added a sequel of starvation. The eyes had a frenzied look in them, the look of a man without hope, but with still that instinct of life burning in his brain. Every now and again he raised one mitted hand ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... answer, sounding cavernous from behind hair and fingers. An explanation presently followed, that a summons had come for him in the morning from Mr. Thompson; and that Mr. Ripton had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... evidently been rolled from a point immediately over the mouth of a hollow. The squire instantly set himself to work to dislodge the ponderous stone, and, aided by two of his men, who lent their broad shoulders to the task, quickly accomplished his object, disclosing what appeared to be the mouth of a cavernous recess. From out of this, as soon as the stone was removed, popped the head of Master Potts, and Nicholas, bidding him be of good cheer, laid hold of him to draw him forth, as he seemed to have some difficulty in extricating himself, when ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... picture of heavy jaws—a flashing of yellow teeth when the mouth opened to emit guttural, unrecognizable words—nostrils that ran crosswise of the face in a nose broad and flat! The forehead above was low and sloping. From the straggling yellow hair it slanted down to brows that overhung deep-sunk and cavernous eyes.... And when Danny O'Rourke's own curious eyes met those of the stranger, they were held in a grip that ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... words, coughed painfully, a hollow cavernous cough that seemed to tear his chest. He expressed himself vehemently, moving his arms freely, with the gestures of a man used to speaking in public, burning with the zeal ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... tip, of those feet, amid which a cavernous growl now and then mingled; but he hesitated, for the tiger appeared to be too far off to ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... chimneys like ears in exactly the right places. Some pieces of paper were whirled up and down by the wind, they danced about the horse's feet. She noticed that the door-handles needed polishing. A cavernous hall, a young girl with untidy hair and a yelping dog ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... floor, 2 And thou, the Unconquered Beast, That hugely liest at rest By the dim shining adamantine door, —Still from thy cavernous lair Gnarling, so legends tell, A tameless guard of Hell,— Mayest thou this once thy vigilance forbear, And leave large room for him now entering there. Hear us, great Son of Darkness and the Deep; On thee we call, God of the ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Neuvic to be a cheerful, pleasant little town, with a venerable-looking old church, apparently of the twelfth century. It is entered by a cavernous portal under a very massive low tower, but the interior shows little of interest. What struck me, however, as something quite uncommon was a small altar in the centre of the nave just below the sanctuary. Upon it was an image of the Virgin, which a boy told me had been found in a ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... that base. In the Man, the surface of the skull is comparatively smooth, and the supraciliary ridges or brow prominences usually project but little—while, in the Gorilla, vast crests are developed upon the skull, and the brow ridges overhang, the cavernous ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters, and round these they were exterminated. Some are still seen, prone on the brim of an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their fleshless hands or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where shrivel the entrails of eyes. The ground is so full of dead that the earth-falls uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed skeletons, and with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the steep slope ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Soon he paused before a quiet house, one of the many which housed in cavernous depths uncounted clerks and other small fry of the city. "Good-night to you," said Peter Niburg. Then, rather tardily. "And my thanks. But for you I should now—" he ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Seldom had I seen so fine a figure. Within six months I saw that man reduced almost to a skeleton by solitary confinement, wearily trailing one limb after the other, and looking out despairingly from cavernous, moribund eyes. Well did Lord Fitzgerald (I think) in a recent speech in the House of Lords describe this torture as the worst ever devised by the brain of man. His lordship added that the Governor of a great prison told him that he never knew a man ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... linen closet was a joy to behold; a room of itself, light and airy, with the smoothest of cedar shelves and deep cavernous drawers for blankets ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... little swallows darted from the cavernous entrance on our approach, divided into flocks, soared, wheeled, flew right and left, and finally returned in a body as swiftly as they came, to the sides of the long dark tunnel, which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... although now shaved down and trimmed to intense respectability of cultivation. The heavens darkened and the air thickened as they came close to their journey's end, until they slow down as if gropingly finding their way into the cavernous gateway of the ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... describing nature are not yet invented. "Endeavour," he says, "to describe a mountain in such a manner that it may be recognised. When you have spoken of its base, its sides, its summit, you will have said all! But what variety there is to be found in those swelling, lengthened, flattened, or cavernous forms! It is only by periphrasis that all this can be expressed. The same difficulty exists for plains and valleys. But if you have a palace to describe, there is no longer any difficulty. Every moulding has ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... crystalline radiated and refracted and reflected marvellously. But we did not reach the primary source of the stream by miles; we were stopped by a precipitous rock, down the face of which one half of the stream fell, while the other crept out of its foot, from a little cavernous opening about four feet high. Charley was a few yards ahead of me, and ran stooping into the cavern. I followed. But when I had gone as far as I dared for the darkness and the down-sloping roof, and saw nothing of him, I grew dismayed, and called him. There was no answer. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Soon it was no longer an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these vestiges of some splendid place, countless minute men ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... assembly. He was a fine specimen of an Eskimo—a good-looking young savage; slim and wiry, with a nose not too flat, and only a little turned up; a mouth that was well shaped and pleasant to look at, though very large, and absolutely cavernous when in the act of yawning; and his eyes looked sharp and eager, as if always on the outlook for some passing bird, with ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... perpendicular, serrated walls; the Sierra has elsewhere, too, an overwhelming exhibit of titanic granite carvings. It is not its waterfalls, though these are the highest, by far, in the world, nor its broad, peaceful bottoms, nor its dramatic vistas, nor the cavernous depths of its tortuous tributary canyons. Its secret is selection and combination. Like all supremacy, Yosemite's lies in the inspired proportioning of carefully chosen elements. Herein is its real wonder, for the more carefully one analyzes the beauty of the Yosemite ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... right direction. This was, in fact, the parlour. The bed, by day, assumed the dignity of a broad but saggy lounge, exceedingly comfortable if one was careful to sit far enough forward to avoid slipping into its cavernous depths from which there was no escape without assistance. Besides being the parlour, it was also the library, the study-room, the dining-room and reception hall. By night, it was the bed-chamber of ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... central London district. You know what happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one seeks—pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the housekeeper's bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter, gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism, the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of incredible age. One asks ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... a hubbub in the nests, Such a bustle and squeak! Nestlings, guiltless of a feather, Learning just to speak, Ask—"And how about the fashions?" From a cavernous beak. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... parted and dripped foam, as the lion continued his cavernous growls, while his ears lying flat on his head in the manner peculiar to the feline species, the bristling spine and the lashing of the tail gave the beast the appearance of a bundle of concentrated fury, ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... by a huge gray mustache, and his cheeks were sunken, while his forehead projected, and was fringed with heavy eyebrows, from behind which his dark eyes glowed with a sort of gloomy lustre from cavernous depths. Over his whole face there was one pervading expression that was more than despondency, and near akin to despair. It was the expression of a man whose life had been a series of disheartening failures, or of one who had sinned deeply, or of one who had suffered unusual and protracted anguish ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... just emerged from a thicket into an open space, where the ground was comparatively dry. Overhead the stars were shining in great clusters of silver and gold against a dark, cavernous looking sky, here and there overrun with careering black clouds. Beverley shivered, not so much with cold as on account of the stress of excitement which amounted to nervous rigor. Long-Hair faced him and leaned toward him, until his breathing ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... giant Strength! how fearful to behold, Outstretched on yon o'erhanging crag, thy mad waves downward rolled: To look adown the cavernous abyss that yawns beneath— To see the feathery spray flash forth in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... quite terrific enough looking before, like the slimy black head of something huge coming out of the water. Now it looks as if it had opened a cavernous maw" (I'm sure he nabbed that from some book) "as black as ink, ready to swallow any unfortunate mariner which came near. Below the base of this fearsome hole roars the cruel surf, ready to engulf a boat which would never be seen more ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... circumstance of finding two persons at the corner of Salisbury Square as we left it—two persons who were speaking in French and who eyed us very suspiciously—revived my alarm. They even followed us along Fleet Street towards the Ludgate Circus, and though we dodged them through the cavernous Ludgate Hill Railway Station, across sundry courts and past the stores of Messrs. Spiers and Pond, we again found them waiting for us on our return towards the embankment, determined, so it seemed, to convoy us home. We hastened our steps and they hastened theirs. We loitered, they loitered also. ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... his steps to the building which they had been discussing, and turning the battered brass handle of the door, walked calmly in. On his right and left were counting houses framed with glass; in front, the cavernous and ugly depths of a gloomy warehouse. He knocked upon the window-pane on the right and passed forward a step or two, as though to enter the office. The boy, who had been engaged in the left-hand counting house, came gliding from his place, passed ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these creatures coiled! The thick, heavy body with the tail projecting upward from the center, the head drawn back, and the red, cavernous mouth open, with the curved, hollow teeth and the sacs at their roots filled nigh to bursting with this concentrated essence of the vilest of all poison—imagine this, we say—but don't do it either! If you have never seen a rattlesnake, don't go near one, unless you ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... summer of 1845, in the garden beneath the arbour. Pecuchet, his feet resting on a small chair, read aloud in his cavernous voice, without feeling tired, stopping to plunge his fingers into his snuff-box. Bouvard listened, his pipe in his mouth, his legs wide apart, and the upper part of his ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... any convenient box or barrel or bureau drawer, and of a final fevered morning when two or more criminals in the guise of moving-men bumped and scraped our choicest pieces down tortuous stairways and slammed them into their cavernous vans, leaving on the pavement certain unsightly, disreputable articles ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... during the meal. At a glance of even the mildest interest a dozen long brown arms thrust the spoils of the East upon our consideration. With us sat a large benign Swedish professor whose erudition was encyclopaedic, but whose kindly humanity was greater. Uttering deep, cavernous chuckles, the professor bargained. A red coral necklace for the moment was the matter of interest. The professor inspected it ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the lungs. A decided leathery, frictional sound is detected over a considerable portion of the thoracic surface. As the disease advances, and gangrene, with the production of cavities in the lungs, ensues, loud, cavernous rales are heard, which are more or less circumscribed, occasionally attended by a decided metallic noise. When one lobe of the lungs is alone affected, the morbid sounds are confined to one side, and on the healthy side the respiratory murmur ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... some brambles that had caught on her dress, and there close beside them, so near that she could thrust her hand into the opening, yawned the cavernous black ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... somewhere!" cried Walter excitedly; and, lifting the roughly constructed wooden latch, he pushed the door open, disclosing a cavernous darkness. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... cavernous obscurity of the jungle the night seemed suddenly to lighten and O'Reilly found himself looking out over a level waste of stumps and tree-trunks perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, extending right and left as far as he could see. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... road, and ran into a marshy and thickly-wooded glen, known by the name of Wiley's Swamp. A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... those animals which live farthest south spend the whole year abroad in mild seasons. The grisly rarely chooses that favorite den of his little black brother, a hollow tree or log, for his winter sleep, seeking or making some cavernous hole in the ground instead. The hole is sometimes in a slight hillock in a river bottom but more often on a hill-side, and may be either shallow or deep. In the mountains it is generally a natural cave in the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... fire. Jean whistled and I signalled back; but there was soon such a pounding of rains it drowned every sound. For all the help one could give the other we might have been a thousand miles apart. I looked back. M. Radisson's fire threw a dull glare into the cavernous upper darkness. That was guide enough. Jean could keep his ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... In a cavernous rock in the forest, hammering upon an anvil, was a complaining Mime. As he hammered, the sparks flew from the ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... him that they had been gathering sticks for their fire, and had chanced to see, on the opposite side of the river, among the rocks that reached down to the stream itself, an old man, a woman, and some girls, depositing in a cavernous rock what appeared to be bags of clothes; 12. that when they saw this, they thought it would be safe to cross, as the ground at that point was inaccessible to the enemy's horse; that having taken off their clothes, and taken their daggers in their hands, they went over undressed, ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... descended by a flight of stone steps to the water's edge, and, as we stepped upon the narrow strip of pebbly beach, walled in by cavernous rocks, Zarlah, with great earnestness, exclaimed: "You are right, dear Harold, we must be hopeful, and not waste the few precious moments we have together in regrets that are useless. We shall always love each other, and if we are brave—even unto death—Love ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of beauty in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... broken and split into most extraordinary shapes, forming huge caves and caverns, that once no doubt had been some of the cavernous depths of the ocean, were to be seen in every direction; little runnels, with a few gum-trees upon them, constituted the creeks. Callitris or cypress pines, ornamented the landscape, and a few blood-wood or red gum-trees also enlivened the scene. No ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. DANTE ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... She left herself in Henrietta's young hands and she, casting about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the terrible basement kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady and, gazing ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... color was caused by hordes of tiny, shrimplike creatures—distant cousins of those which you like so well in a salad. The whale preferred them in the form of soup, so she went sailing slowly through them with her cavernous mouth very wide open. Every now and then she would shut her jaws and give two or three great gulps, and her little eyes, away back at the base of her skull, would almost ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... recovery of his chest. It involved peculiar hazards, since it carried the diver below the familiar turret-chamber, through the inextricabilis error of entangling machinery in the engine-room, groping among floating and sunken objects, into a remote state-room, the Acheron of the cavernous hold. He was to find by touch a seaman's chest; handle it in that thickening gloom; carry it, push it, move it through that labyrinthine obscurity to a point from which it could be raised. To add immeasurably to the intricacy of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... on one hand, and his whole figure expressive of the most profound dejection. In front of him an ancient silver crucifix gleamed in the flicker of the small wood fire which had been kindled in the wide cavernous chimney—and a black-bound copy of the Gospels lay open as if but lately consulted. The faded splendour of certain gold embroidered hangings on the walls added to the solemn and melancholy aspect of the apartment, and the figure of the venerable ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... said, they offered human sacrifice to Hobomocko and his demons of the wood. In Berkshire's early days a hunter, John Chamberlain, of Dalton, who had killed a deer and was carrying it home on his shoulders, was overtaken on the hills by a storm and took shelter from it in a cavernous recess in Wizard's Glen. In spite of his fatigue he was unable to sleep, and while lying on the earth with open eyes he was amazed to see the wood bend apart before him, disclosing a long aisle that was mysteriously lighted and that contained hundreds of capering ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... cavernous room Penn seemed to have seen in his dreams. The same irregular, rocky roof started up from the wall by his bed, and stretched away into vague and obscure distance. All was familiar to him, but all was somehow mixed up with frightful fantasies which had vanished with the ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... homeless, sat perched in the midst of them, I chanced upon a room which commanded a glorious view of the lake. True, it was too expensive for my slim purse; true, the owner of it was sour of feature; true, the room itself was cavernous and unfriendly and cold-looking, but the view of the great, blue lake triumphed over all these, although a cautious inner voice warned me that that lake view would cover a multitude of sins. I remembered, later, how she of the sour visage had dilated upon the subject of the sunrise ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... boys uttered smothered exclamations and jumped, for the long, gaunt head that appeared in the doorway was entirely unexpected. It was the cavernous and melancholy head of an incredibly thin, old, whitish horse. This head waggled slowly from side to side; the nostrils vibrated; the mouth opened, and the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... voice again rang out clearly in the great cavernous basilica as he repeated the prayer in clear impassioned words—that same prayer which the ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... about it. The gleam of the candles seemed to me magical. A sentiment bound all three of us by some mysterious tie to that singular little man, who made me, strange to say, conceive, suddenly, the inexplicable influences of fanaticism. Nothing less than the hollow, cavernous voice of Beaumarchais's neighbor, the surgeon, could, I think, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... vocal tract. Raise it too high, and you bring it so close to the hard palate that the mouth becomes too small for free, resonant voice-emission. The tone becomes wheezy. Let the tongue lie too flat, and the mouth-cavity becomes too large and cavernous for tense, vibrant voice-emission. The tone becomes too open. Let the base of the tongue move back too far, and it will tend to close the pharynx and to check free egress from the pharynx into the mouth, making the tone muffled. Raise the back of the tongue until it touches the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilted Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... of sponge chopp'd small and fry'd in lard, &c. are very fit baits to destroy these nimble creatures, which else soon will ruin a semination of nuts, acorns and other kernels in a night or two, and rob the largest beds of a nursery, carrying them away by thousands to their cavernous magazines, to serve them all the Winter: I have been told, that hop-branches stuck about trees, preserve ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... in the midst of these cemeteries of things, a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its sanctified gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain celebrated oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... within three inches of his open jaw, "irresistibly attracted," said the narrator, "although he was drawing back with all his might." The latter part of the tale is fishy—for the gentleman was twenty feet off, and could not nave seen that—but he saw the mouse finally disappear in that cavernous gullet; and when he killed the snake-a large black one—the mouse lay in its stomach, without a wound. ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... down its cavernous jaws; faint yells are heard at intervals—then nothing but a dull champing sound; after which, dead silence. The Monster smiles, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; he imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children who go by his side, holding each of his hands. And ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp falling on a small portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the other side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears. I can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the knowledge ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... winged figure, in act of stealing the rigid form, and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch's weird image of Death. A white butterfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air—neither descending nor drifting, but waiting—poised on outspread pinions, hovered the Angel of the Resurrection holding out ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the widow Schmittheimer having vacated the premises, the work of rehabilitation began in earnest. Men with wheelbarrows and spades and picks made their appearance and started in to demolish walls and to excavate sand at a marvelous rate. Presently a cavernous space yawned where it was proposed to locate the cellar where the steam-heating apparatus was to stand. The sand taken from this spot was harrowed out and dumped in a pile over the horse-radish bed in ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... philanthropists, and newspaper writers have dwelt largely upon the horrors of a series of subterranean chambers, extending beneath the Adelphi Terrace in the West Strand, and locally and popularly known as the "Adelphi Arches." To this day they are a forbidding, cavernous black hole, suggestive of nothing if not the horrors of thievery, or even murder. They are, however, so well guarded by three policemen on "fixed point" duty that at night there is probably no more safe locality ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... as is the Martian habit, walked to the quarry mouth, up a winding and hard stone road. This dreary and desolate region seemed to have a charm. Its expanse of rigid waves of stone, pimpled with sharp excrescences, and as deeply pitted with cavernous grottoes, where no life seemed able to survive, save a stunted herbage, sparsely assembled in vagrant groups, or gathered in thirsty lines around the lip of the still pools, was full of scenic interest, but more deeply ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... single scenes is often not less than a third of universal space. When he has added figure to figure in the endeavour to picture the multitudinous disarray of the fallen Angels on the lake, one line suffices to reduce the whole spectacle to its due dimensions beneath that cavernous tent of darkness:— ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... imagination—that the ladies exchanged coughs and significant glances, and noticed the trembling hand with which Mrs. Krauss helped herself to cake, her sudden lapses into silence, her abrupt interruptions and cavernous yawns. For years Mrs. Krauss had been at home once a week to her German neighbours. They are a gregarious nation, and the "Kaffee-Gesellschaft"—an afternoon affair, beginning at four o'clock—is greatly beloved by German women. Here they enjoy strong coffee, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and neck so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their chains render it impossible ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... darkest hue of the orange leaf, and deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose. Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into quaint shapes and figures that were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dirty, white-washed apartment crowded with linotypes and other machines, in front of which sat men in white aprons, tapping, tapping—gazing at documents pinned at the level of their eyes—and tapping, tapping. A kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots in the ceiling! In this jungle there was scarcely room for us to walk. Buchanan explained the linotypes to me. I watched, as though romantically ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... frightened glimpse at the yellowed, bony face, the cavernous eye sockets, the bushy eyebrows, beneath which a cold intellectual gleam still feebly flickered. Andrew Fraser had bent his tall form over her, and peering down at her had whispered after their few ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... to the ears of M'Snape—apparently from the recesses of the earth just in front of him—a deep, hollow sound, the sound of men talking in some cavernous space. He stops dead, and signals to his companions to do likewise. Then he listens again. Yes, he can distinctly hear guttural voices, and an occasional clink, clink. The saphead has been reached, and digging operations ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... stairs to meet Slops in Fatty Harris' room and thence into the outlawed night. They stole over the crinkling snow, burying their noses in their sweaters, until, having climbed several fences, they arrived behind a shed of particularly cavernous appearance. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... spent its fury upon the precipitous southern bank, against which it dashed with a vehemence equal to a heavy surf breaking against cliffs. It had undermined this lava cliff, and for a space of perhaps one hundred and fifty feet the lava beat and surged into glaring, red-hot, cavernous depths, and was repelled with a dull, heavy roar, not exactly like the boom of breakers, because the lava is so much heavier than water, but with a voice of its own, less resonant, and, as we who listened thought, full of even ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... been heaved up, whilst the lava was in a softened state. (Sir G. Mackenzie "Travels in Iceland" pages 389 to 392, has described a plain of lava at the foot of Hecla, everywhere heaved up into great bubbles or blisters. Sir George states that this cavernous lava composes the uppermost stratum; and the same fact is affirmed by Von Buch "Descript. des Isles Canaries" page 159, with respect to the basaltic stream near Rialejo, in Teneriffe. It appears singular that it ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... falling tree would have touched it, stood a cabin, individual in its complete darkness except for a dull ruddy glow at one end, where a window extended as high as the eaves. An open fire within gnawed at the half-green logs, sending smoke and steam up the cavernous chimney, and casting about the room an uncertain, fitful ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... off, followed by Baptiste and a short, square, old negro, very black and grotesque, who had introduced himself to the mulatto, with many glittering and cavernous smiles, as "d'body-sarvant of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... urethra (meatus). The urethra is a canal running through the entire length of the penis, opening by its proximal extremity into the urinary bladder, and serving for the passage of the urine from the bladder to the exterior of the body. The main substance of the penis is composed of three cavernous bodies, the paired corpora cavernosa penis, and the single corpus spongiosum, or corpus cavernosum urethrae. These consist of what is known as erectile tissue, a spongy mass within whose lacunar spaces a large quantity of blood can, in certain conditions, be retained. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... up as if from some cavernous depth of divination—"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... more he came hounding the buffalo, they were considerably winded. Short-tufted tails, raised stiffly, gave warning. Snorts, like puffs of escaping steam, and deep grunts from cavernous chests evinced anger and impatience that might, at any moment, bring the herd to ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... same old cavernous wine vault of my youthful remembrance, such an one as has not its mate in all Carolina to this good day, as I firmly believe. My father's hobby was to build for all eternity; and this stone-arched cellarage ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... She was incredulous, but there it was, clearly enough. What was such a thing doing here?... Finishing school for the daughters of gentlemen.... She had never had such a thing in her hands before.... Fraulein could not know.... She glanced at her, but Fraulein's cavernous mouth was serenely open and the voices of the girls sang heartily, "Whenhy—cometh. Whenhy—cometh, to make up his jewels——" These girls, Germany, that piano.... What did the English girls think? Had anyone said anything? Were they chapel? Fearfully, she told them over. ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... reached it before sundown, and had begun to feed, stripping branches of their leaves, the enormous trunks reaching up like snakes and whirling the leaves Catherine-wheellike down enormous throats; the purring and grumbling of their cavernous bellies, the rubbing of rough shoulders against the bark, the stamping of feet crushing the undergrowth, resounded in echoes amongst the trees. The big bull giraffe that had cast its lot in with the herd was busy, too, tearing and snapping down twigs and leaves, feeding like the others, who were ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... enraged at the destruction of his friends, that he cared neither for the size of the dragon's jaws nor for his hundreds of sharp teeth. Drawing his sword, he rushed at the monster, and flung himself right into his cavernous mouth. This bold method of attacking him took the dragon by surprise; for, in fact, Cadmus had leaped so far down into his throat, that the rows of terrible teeth could not close upon him, nor do him the least harm in the world. Thus, though the struggle ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Rue du Musee, on a level with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus, half sunken by the raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped in the perpetual shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre, darkened on that side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy chill, and the cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these houses a kind of crypt, tombs of the living. As we drive in a hackney cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue du Doyenne, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... moment. Miss Letitia's maid was tall and gaunt and awkward. The first impression produced by her face was an impression of bones. They rose high on her forehead; they projected on her cheeks; and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous eyes of this unfortunate person rigid obstinacy and rigid goodness looked out together, with equal severity, on all her fellow-creatures alike. Her mistress (whom she had served for a quarter of ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Hikihoho, and relatives of the owner, moved about dispensing whiskey and absinthe. And through the curious company moved Parlay himself, cackling and sneering, the withered wreck of what had once been a tall and powerful man. His eyes were deep sunken and feverish, his cheeks fallen in and cavernous. The hair of his head seemed to have come out in patches, and his mustache and imperial had shed in the same ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... resting his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his hands, and stared at the smoke curling heavily up into the cavernous chimney, where the soot hung long and black. It was very lonely. Willie Denner, of course, had long ago gone to bed, and unless the lawyer chose to go into the kitchen for company, where Mary was ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... devouring monster, broke over their frail skiff, sweeping the sail off like a strip of ribbon, snapping the mast and rolling over and over them with a thousand heads of foam that, spouting upwards, again fell into dark cavernous deeps, covering and dragging down everything on the surface with a tumult and roar! It passed on thundering,—but left a blank behind it. Skiff and men had vanished,—and not a trace of the wreck floated on ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... find an acquaintance. It chanced, however, that he saw nothing but strangers. Then his eyes fell upon a man who was seated with folded arms a short distance away, a man of respectable but somewhat gloomy appearance, dressed in dark clothes, with pale cheeks and cavernous eyes. Selingman ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make no great headway. Sometimes I give up toiling through sheer and desperate aching of body and limbs, and let myself lie drifting into helplessness and a growing sleep. And then—in my dream—I start to find myself going down into strange cavernous depths of shining green, and I wake—in my dream—to begin fighting and toiling again against my compelling desire ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... all are the catfish. These are monstrous creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot—scaleless, slick things, with corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist and strong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough to eat anything, living or dead ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... at the task from old experience, and gripping the box tightly between his knees he made the hollow, cavernous place echo again as he struck the steel in his left hand with a piece of sharp-edged flint held ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... necessary in these and similar experiments to examine the interior of the bulbs of alloy at the ends of the conducting wires; for occasionally, and especially with those which have been positive, they are cavernous, and contain portions of the chloride or iodide used, which must be removed before the final weight is ascertained. This is more usually the case ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... throwing the bridle to a rider, he saw a face that suddenly froze the thrilling delight of the moment. A tall, gaunt man with cavernous black eyes and huge, drooping black mustache fronted him and seemed waiting. Cordts! Bostil had forgotten. Instinctively Bostil stood on guard. For years he had prepared himself for the moment when he would come face to ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey |
