"Perpendicular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surprise, and had then remained silent. Etta looked out of the window and said nothing. It was a most singular out-look—weird, uncouth, prehistoric, as some parts of the earth still are. The castle was built on the edge of a perpendicular cliff. On this side it was impregnable. Any object dropped from the breakfast-room window would fall a clear two hundred feet to the brawling Oster River. The rock was black, and shining like the topmost crags of an Alpine mountain where snow and ice have ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... gorgeously dressed and hung with diamonds. Without being exceptionally stout, everything is so tight and pushed-up that she seems to come straight out from her chin in a kind of platform, where the diamonds lose themselves in a narrow, perpendicular depression ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... formed into vaults, with pillars set at regular distances. The first vault opened contained old armour; the second was full of pikes, with long points emerging from tufts of feathers. The walls of the third chamber were hung with a kind of tapestry made of slender reeds, laid in perpendicular rows. Those of the fourth were covered with scimitars. In the middle of the fifth cell, rows of helmets were seen, the crests of which looked like a battalion of fiery serpents. The sixth cell contained nothing but empty quivers; the seventh, greaves for protecting the legs in battle; ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... is, it is not practicable, hence the above numerous injunctions as to preliminaries, and which have to do with counterbalancing the impossibility of direct and strong pressure. The only pressure that can be applied directly is that of a nearly perpendicular one, the cramp grasping the button from underneath, with a proper guard or padding of millboard, or cork, ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... church at Bampton is built in the manner most common to this country—that is, early Perpendicular, but the chancel is Decorated. In many of the churches there is some portion of Decorated work. The screen and roof of the church are worth seeing, and in the churchyard are several unusually large and fine old yew-trees, one or two girdled by stone benches. Leaving Bampton, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... meant for Penmaen-mawr, the northern termination of the Snowdon range. It is a mass of rock, 1545 feet high, a few miles from the mouth of the Conway, the valley of which it overlooks. Towards the sea it presents a rugged and almost perpendicular front. On its summit is Braich-y-Dinas, an ancient fortified post, regarded as the strongest hold of the Britons in the district of Snowdon. Here the reduced bands of the Welsh army were stationed during the negotiation ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... for a walk: my persecutor, I tell you, was with me at the time. I lagged behind the rest: the country near the Dee, you know, is beautiful. Our path happened to lie near a coal mine, and at the verge of the wood is a perpendicular shaft, they say, a hundred and fifty feet deep. My niece had remained behind with me—she knows, of course nothing of the nature of my sufferings. She knew, however, that I had been ill, and was low, and she remained to ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... worked or carved with rude stone implements. Over this entire area there are irregular elevations, somewhat circular in outline, from 50 to 200 feet in height, the faces of which have been worn away by the elements, and are in nearly all instances perpendicular. These consecutive elevations extend back from the Rio Grande from five to fifteen miles. Over this whole expanse of country, in the faces of these cliffs, we found an immense number of cavate dwellings, cut out by the hand of man. We made no attempt to count the number ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson
... of it then, so I piled in, "for," says I to myself, "never let on to any one that you don't know anything, but make them believe that you do know all about it." So says I to him, takin' up me shillalah this way (holding a very crooked stick perpendicular), "We'll take that for the straight line of the earth's equator"—how's that for gehography? (to the audience). Ah, that was straight till the other day I bent it in an argument. "Wery good," says he. ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... and I am not going to let you say so. If you don't promise not to, I will tell Mr. Ludlow myself that you were always perfectly true, and you couldn't help being true, any more than a—a broomstick, or anything else that is perpendicular. Now, will you promise?" ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... I saw at once the vast waters of the Gulf, all smooth and glassy as a mill-pond, the village of Bunder Gori, and the two buggaloes lying in its anchorage-ground, like little dots of nut-shells, immediately below the steep face of the mountain. So deep and perpendicular was it, that it had almost the effect of looking down a vast precipice. But how different was the view on turning to the south! Instead of this enormous grandeur—a deep rugged hill, green and fresh in verdure, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... The "croupier" revolves the wheel to the right. With a quick motion of his middle finger he flicks a marble, usually of ivory, to the left. At the Vesper Club, always up-to-date, the ball was of platinum, not of ivory. The disc with its sloping sides is provided with a number of brass rods, some perpendicular, some horizontal. As the ball and the wheel lose momentum the ball strikes against the rods and finally is deflected into one of the many little pockets or stalls facing the rim ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... the vast facade of the Hall of Egypt, and finally fixed his gaze on a perpendicular leaden column, adorned with strange symbols, through which (for it was a rainy night) raging torrents of water were distinctly heard flowing downwards to who knows what abysmal and ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... kind, that the interference of any further force, however minute, will destroy the arrangement previously existing, and bring about a different arrangement. Thus, a stick poised on its lower end is in unstable equilibrium: however exactly it may be placed in a perpendicular position, as soon as it is left to itself it begins, at first imperceptibly and then visibly, to lean on one side, and with increasing rapidity falls into another position. Conversely, a stick suspended from its ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... time I employed myself in writing out a paper on the geometrical interpretation of the algebraical expression sqrt(-1). I think that the original suggestion of perpendicular line came from some book (I do not remember clearly), and I worked it out in several instances pretty well, especially in De Moivre's Theorem. I had spoken of it in the preceding term to Mr Peacock and he encouraged me to work it out. The date at the end is 1820, January 21. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... upon his back as the elephant lay upon all-fours, and holding a long stick across his spine at right angles, I could just touch it with the points of my fingers by reaching to my utmost height. Thus, as he lay, his back was seven feet two inches, perpendicular height, from the ground. This would make his height when erect about twelve feet on the spine-an enormous height for an elephant, as twelve feet on the top of the back is about equal to eleven feet six inches at the shoulder. If I had ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... falling of the roof one of the piers was thrust out of the perpendicular, the upper half toppling over, and the lower would have again returned to its original position had a stone not fallen into the vertical joint, catching the pilaster as a wedge. The pier is still fixed out of the perpendicular by the stone ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis
... appeared before me, that promised, one way or another, to interrupt the chase; it was a ditch or gully, that intersected my path at right angles. It was several feet in depth, dry at the bottom, and with perpendicular sides. ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... stupidly admiring what is said to be admirable. It is like a crack in a great wall, at the bottom of which is a river, sometimes inundated, sometimes dry; the passage narrow, the sides craggy, bare, lofty and perpendicular; its whole length not above ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... yawning canyon below. Generally instant death is their portion, though I recall an instance, while on an expedition against the hostile Indians thirty years ago, where a number of mules of our pack-train, loaded with ammunition, tumbled nearly five hundred feet down an almost perpendicular chasm, and yet some of them got on their feet again, and soon rejoined their companions, without having suffered ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... moment by the extraordinary beauty of the picture which lay before them. The waterfall, the sound of which had reached them a few minutes earlier, was some sixty feet in height and about twelve feet wide, the river tumbling vertically down the perpendicular face of the cliff into a wide basin, the lofty sides of which were draped with the graceful fronds of giant ferns, the broad leaves of the wild plantain, crimson-leaved acacias, enormous bunches of maidenhair, and several varieties of plant and bush, ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... think Bristol lime, or shell lime, pressed in your manner, would have a good effect. When you are at leisure, I shall thank you for a few pieces, and if some of them are made pink or flesh colour, they will look well. I used the ball quite perpendicular, and it cut well, as most of the cutting is sideways. I tried a fine whirling point, but it made little progress; another with a chisel edge did almost as well as the balls, but did not work so pleasantly. I find a triangular scraping point the best, and I think ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... in the hope of getting Fuji's white crest reflected on its surface; but a veil of mist enshrouded all. And then twice I went to the edge of the watershed at the head of the valley: once struggling through the snow to the Otome Pass, on an immemorial and nearly perpendicular bridle path, and once by the modern road to the tunnel which, with characteristic address, the Japanese have bored through the rock, thus reducing ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... was ample scope for every imaginable polygon; trapezes and triangles could be combined in all sorts of ways. The inaccessible distances had ample elbow-room; and there was even an old ruin, once a pigeon-house, that lent its perpendicular to ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... shone more brilliantly. The huge chasms seemed bottomless and blacker than midnight. Gradually separate mountains appeared. What seemed like expanses of snow and immense glaciers streaming down their sides sparkled with great brilliancy in the perpendicular rays of the sun. Our motion had now assumed the aspect of falling. We seemed to be dropping from an immeasurable height, and with an inconceivable velocity, straight down upon ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... ran to the edge of the cliff. With cries of wonder and baffled vengeance they gesticulated toward the dark ravine into which horse and rider had plunged rather than wait to meet a more cruel death. The precipice at this point is over three hundred feet in height, and in places is almost perpendicular. We believed the Major to be lying crushed and mangled on the rocks. Imagine our frenzy of joy when we saw the daring soldier and his horse dash out of the bushes that skirt the base of the cliff, cross the creek, and come galloping to the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Finchley Road All Saints' Church stands up conspicuously. This is a fine church in the Perpendicular style, built in 1846. The chancel was added in 1866, and the tower and spire in 1889. It is really the church of the Eyre estate, and was largely built by the Eyre family. There is in it a beautiful marble font of uncommon pattern, and ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... artificial, though not seemingly ill adapted to give a great heat with but very little fuel. This they made by digging a round hole in the ground, about 20 inches wide and full 3 feet deep, cutting an opening in the front sloping down to the bottom, perpendicular at the sides, about 9 inches wide and about 15 inches long, reckoning from the edge of the circle: this is to serve to throw in the wood and to allow a passage for the air; at the other side a small opening about 4 inches by 3 inches is ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... and we, who had expected to dismiss at any moment, were full of anger, and were sullen to find that by some wretched order or other we had to take another hour of the road: first we had to go back four miles along the road we had already come, and then to branch off perpendicular to our general line of march, and (as it seemed to us) quite out ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... wonderful and unique instrument, horizontal and perpendicular Grand, five octaves, hammerless action, including keyboard, pedals, gong, peal of bells, ophicleide stop, and all the newest improvements, can be seen at Messrs. SPLITTE AND SON's Establishment, High Holborn, and purchased ON THE FIFTY YEARS' HIRE SYSTEM, by which, at a payment ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... laying down, in pairs, ab and cd perpendicular to the body. Put kl under ab and over cd. Put ij over ab and ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... broadside on—or, as it is nautically expressed, broaching to. Had she done so, the death of all on board would have been almost inevitable. Knowing this, the men on the pier gazed with breathless anxiety as each wave roared under the boat's stern, lifted it up until it appeared perpendicular; carried it forward a few yards with fearful velocity, and then let it slip back into the trough of ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... made a sharp turn to the left, the trees suddenly came to an end, and in their place were large piles of mossy, ragged boulders. The canyon ended in a perpendicular, moss-covered wall, hundreds of feet high, and from the top of this wrinkled old cliff leaped the stream into the canyon below. On an old tin sign, fastened to the stump of an immense tree, were the words, "St. Marys." Directly at the base of the falls, ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... summer morning, cool and dewy, fit for any Sunday—whence the eyes and mind of Cosmo turned to the remnants of night that banded the street, and from them he sank into metaphysics, chequered with the champing clank of the bits, the voices of the ostlers, passengers, and guard, and the perpendicular silence of the coachman, who sat like a statue in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... believe the intelligence. The squares were well guarded, the garrison ever alert. Spaniards were not birds of prey to fly up those perpendicular heights, and for beings without wings the thing was impossible. He followed Fleming through the darkness, and was soon convinced that the impossible was true. The precious squares were in the hands of the enemy. Nimble as monkeys, those yellow jerkined Italians, Walloons, and Spaniards—stormhats ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... maladroits," said the Duke, "that your shafts and bolts fall harmless on those ozier walls? Shoot in the air; let the arrow fall perpendicular on those within—fall as the vengeance of the saints falls—direct from heaven! Give me thy bow, Archer,—thus." He drew the bow as he sate on his steed, the arrow flashed up, and descended in the heart of the reserve, within a few feet ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... driven into the valley of the Wolgan by a path (which I descended), partly natural and partly made by the owner of the land, they cannot escape; for this valley is in every other part surrounded by perpendicular cliffs, and eight miles lower down it contracts from an average width of half a mile, to a mere chasm, impassable to man or beast. Sir T. Mitchell states that the great valley of the Cox river ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the Big Horn Basin, Hart Mountain rises abruptly from the Shoshone River. It is covered with grassy slopes and deep ravines; perpendicular rocks of every hue rise in various places and are fringed with evergreens. Beyond this mountain, in the distance, towers the hoary head of Table Mountain. Five miles to the southwest the mountains recede some distance ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... his absence, with my emergency kit, I caught ten six-inch trout to be divided between us for supper, as only two of our caribou ribs remained. Near dark George came back. After climbing half way to the summit of his mountain, he had encountered perpendicular walls of rock that blocked his ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... placed on another one is called a "dolmen," whether it be horizontal or perpendicular. A group of upright stones covered by succeeding flat stones, and forming a series of dolmens, is a "fairy grotto," a "fairy rock," a "devil's stable," or a "giant's palace"; for, like the people who serve ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... felt-hat, his coat, and his vest, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, to indicate his sanguine and ardent temperament, he would thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, and, standing near me in an attitude of perpendicular solidity, begin a monologue ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... chance at the first vacant one. Reluctantly he made up his mind to walk. He glanced up at the tower of the Metropolitan Building; then stared in astonishment. The hands of the great dial were still perpendicular—the hour indicated ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... crossing of the main highway over ten miles to the southwest. There, too, the river might be forded even if the Austrians had destroyed that bridge also; but here or elsewhere in the hills there could be no fording—the banks of the Ru were perpendicular cliffs. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... shining somewhere, with a wrong refraction in its rays. The world into which she had been carried was like that in a cubist picture which someone had shown her at the studio. It bore a relation to the world she knew, but a relation in which whatever she had supposed to be perpendicular was oblique, and whatever she had supposed to be oblique was horizontal, and nothing as she had been accustomed to find it. It made her head swim. It was literally true that she was afraid to move lest she should make a misstep through an error ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... with the horizon. If the radicles had been acted on solely by geotropism, they would have grown out of the bottom of the sieve perpendicularly downwards; but as they were attracted by the adjoining damp surface they bent towards it and were deflected 50o from the perpendicular. For the sake of ascertaining whether the tip or the whole growing part of the radicle was sensitive to the moist air, a length of from 1 to 2 mm. was coated in a certain number of cases with a mixture of olive-oil and lamp-black. This mixture was made in order to give consistence to ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... cannel-coal for the production of paraffin, it is necessary that the perpendicular tubes or retorts into which the coal is placed be heated only to a certain temperature, which is considerably lower than that applied when the object is the production of coal-gas. By this means nearly ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... who held down the balloon were preparing to let go the ropes; the band began to play, the men in the balloon took off their caps and waved farewell, people cheered—and the Kangaroo was off. She rose swiftly and buoyantly, remaining almost perpendicular until she was caught by a southwest current of air and sailed away towards the hills. As she rose the children could see Hugh at the edge of the ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... the most strenuous days I ever had in the islands, as the road—and what a road!—constantly led up and down the steepest slopes. It seemed to me we were climbing perpendicular mountains all day long, and I had many an opportunity of admiring the agility of my companions. I am a fair walker myself, but I had to crawl on my hands and knees in many spots where they jumped from a stone to a root, taking firm hold with their toes, never using their hands, never slipping, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... supposed to be the boy, standing on the top, as if waiting to see what he would do; so, after holding short counsel with himself, he, too, began to stagger upward, marvelling more and more at the feat of the pony as he went, for though the precipice was not perpendicular, it had this added difficulty, that all its particles shifted as they were touched. There was, however, some solid substance underneath, for, catching at the sand grasses, clambering rather than walking, he soon found himself ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... stories of various heights, rising to the top of the tower. Each of these stories or galleries has four windows, facing directly to the points of the compass, and rising of course regularly above each other. These four perpendicular ranges of windows admitted air, and, the fire being kindled, heat, or smoke at least, to each of the galleries. The access from gallery to gallery is equally primitive. A path, on the principle of an inclined plane, turns round and ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... get on a slope where Snowslides are frequent I prod deep into the snow to ascertain its actual depth, where the snow is thick it is most apt to slide. The cry is keep close to the rocks and you are safe. After many days of severe suffering and fighting cold we came to a perpendicular ridge of ice which we discovered was a long ridge, there seemed to be no way around so we prepared to let over each other. It was about one hundred feet down to the ice. I was the first to test the ropes, then one by one the dogs, sleighs, guns and all was over ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... proceeded across the grass flat, through the opening of the narrow canon, and so on back into the interior by way of the bed through which flowed the sulphur stream. The country was badly eroded. Most of the time we marched between perpendicular clay banks about forty feet high. These were occasionally broken by smaller tributary arroyos of the same sort. It would have been impossible to reach the level of the upper country. The bed of the main arroyo was flat, and grown with grasses and herbage of an extraordinary vividness, due, I supposed, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is sandy, like all those of Fezzan. It is bounded on the north by the perpendicular buttresses of the Hamadah, and on the south by sandy swells. The well is not copious, but affords a regular supply of slightly brackish water. The people descend to the bottom, thirty or forty feet, and fill their gerbahs. The blacks are very troublesome, and require a good deal of patience. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... is one rapid flood, 10 or 12 feet deep, charged with yellow sand, this river must present an imposing spectacle. I walked across the dry portion, observing the sand-waves, all ranged in one direction, perpendicular to that of the prevailing wind, accurately representing the undulations of the ocean, as seen from a mast-head or high cliff. As the sand was finer or coarser, so did the surface resemble a gentle ripple, or an ocean-swell. The progressive motion of the waves was curious, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... world renowned experiment with the kite. A June thunder cloud was rising in all its majesty. Franklin, accompanied by his son, repaired to a field secretly, being afraid of the ridicule of the people. Here he raised the kite, made of a large silk handkerchief. The top of the perpendicular stick was pointed with a sharp metallic rod. The string was hemp with the exception of the part held in the hand, which was silk; at the end of the hempen string a common key was suspended. With intense anxiety and no slight apprehension of danger, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... ancient examples of the first system. The tombs are built of large, black, unbaked bricks, made without any mixture of straw or grit. The lower part is a mastaba with a square or oblong rectangular base, the greatest length of the latter being sometimes forty or fifty feet. The walls are perpendicular, and are seldom high enough for a man to stand upright inside the tomb. On this kind of pedestal was erected a pointed pyramid of from 12 to 30 feet in height, covered externally with a smooth coat of clay painted white. The defective ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... silence. "Those mountains have most extraordinary shapes. All the lines are straight and perpendicular—no slopes or curves." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... pine, most beautiful in form and colour, which by hiding some of the lower buildings thus makes a picture of the whole. The effect of the building is grand and stately beyond description. The long line of flat distance and the flatness of the Down here come in contact with the perpendicular lines of the Tower and lower buildings, producing that strikingly peculiar combination which never fails to produce a grand effect. This is the real secret of Claude's seaports. His stately buildings, moles, and tall towers form a right angle with the straight ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... expectations; and besides, it was the coast of Asia, the mysterious continent which has been my dream from childhood—bare, lofty, rocky, basaltic; islands of naked rock separated by narrow channels, majestic, perpendicular cliffs, a desolate uninhabited region, lashed by a heavy sea, with visions of swirling mists, shrieking sea-birds, and Chinese high-sterned fishing-boats with treble-reefed, three-cornered brown sails, appearing on the tops of surges, at once to vanish. Soon we were among ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... fire; which he had no sooner done, than he cast some incense into it, and pronouncing certain words which I did not understand, there presently arose a thick cloud. He divided this cloud, when the rock, though of a prodigious perpendicular height, opened like two folding doors, and exposed to view a magnificent palace in the hollow of the mountain, which I supposed to be rather the workmanship of genii than of men; for man could hardly have attempted such a bold ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... lands, in the highest state of cultivation, presenting the most agreeable scenes, replete with the useful product of a rich soil and fine climate; the whole bounded by lofty mountains, clothed with rich and almost impervious forests of evergreens, occasionally intermixed with high and nearly perpendicular rocks, whose summits are, for a great part of the year, covered with snow;—the whole forming one of the most agreeable, picturesque, and romantic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... immediately to the east. The name occurs in the formerly separate villages of Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle Bulkeley and Cheadle Moseley. There are cotton printing and bleaching works in the locality. The parish church of St Giles, Cheadle, is Perpendicular, containing an altar-tomb of the 15th century for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the haze increased so much with snow and sleet, that we did not see an island of ice, which we were steering directly for, till we were less than a mile from it. I judged it to be about 50 feet high, and half a mile in circuit. It was flat at top, and its sides rose in a perpendicular direction, against which the sea broke exceedingly high. Captain Furneaux at first took this ice for land, and hauled off from it, until called back by signal. As the weather was foggy, it was necessary to proceed with caution. We therefore reefed our top-sails, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... sir, that an ordinary robin is perfectly aware that while squirrels and cats are able to ascend the perpendicular trunk of a tree, they cannot climb the painted pillar of a piazza; and consequently it is perfectly safe to build a nest at the ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... straight, and descending so suddenly from the forehead as to make an angle with the latter the reverse of the one most common in human faces. Seen in profile, the brows formed the most prominent point, and the line of the head ran back above, while the line of the nose fell inward from the perpendicular down to the small curved nostrils. The short black moustache was thick enough to hide the lips, though deep furrows surrounded the mouth and terminated in a very prominent but pointed chin. The whole face expressed unusual qualities and ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... stranded in mid-stream. The sight appeared to arouse whatever of youthful mischief remained in the feeble old heart. She seemed to gather herself for a tremendous effort, then snorted once, and kicked thrice—three feeble kicks of perhaps six inches in the perpendicular. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... speaking of the stone mason; she knew that Clark was daring the impossible to get at her child, to save her "Boy." She felt in every fiber of her body the strain of that feat—the clinging, creeping progress up the perpendicular wall over the canon. Those around groaned as they watched, expecting each moment to see the man's body fall backwards ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... or only way the true perpendicular distance of the Sun, Moon, or Stars, from this earth, can be obtained. By Wm. Wood.[565] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... letter, only permitting herself one scornful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets, brought to the trench a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... studying architecture, She says that "all Schoolmasters' Houses ought to be built in the Early Perpendicular Tutor style." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... continually supplied. The wild wind that night blew away a second sheet of iron that another young officer, with almost filial thoughtfulness, placed over me after I had gone to rest, but the original sheet maintained its perpendicular position, and by its welcome protection supplied me with a fresh illustration of the familiar saying, "He stayeth His rough wind in the ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... very much that he had never heard of or seen this castle before; but when he reflected on the subject, he saw that it was as much separated from the village by the perpendicular rock on which it stood as if it were ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... managing for Mr. J. G. Macdonald. At this station there was a water-hole 25 miles long, and in bathing one would see crocodiles basking on the rocks and bank, but they appeared to be harmless. At the lower end of this hole there was a perpendicular drop of over 40 feet, with a very deep hole at the foot, infested by sharks and alligators. The ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... day, and the next night after, till noon of the 3d, we made our way good, running 60 leagues. The morning of the 17th we had sight of the island of Madeira, which to those who approach from N.N.E. seems to rise very high, and almost perpendicular in the west. To the S.S.E. is a long low land, and a long point with a saddle through the midst of it, standing in 32 deg. N. [lat. 32 deg. 30' N. long. 16 deg. 12' W.] And in the west part are many springs of water running down from the mountain, with many white fields like fields of corn, and some ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... funnel. The whole thing was at least two hundred feet in height, the chimney part, starting about midway, was about fifty feet square; its top sloped off like the roof of a shanty. Beginning at the top, the chimney was split down about one quarter of its length. On the perpendicular part of this rock a good many names had been cut by men who had scaled the base, and, reaching as far on to the chimney as they could, cut their names into its surface. So clear was the atmosphere that when several miles distant we could ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... (Coniferae).—M. Chatin states* that the leaves, which are horizontal during the day, rise up at night, so as to assume a position almost perpendicular to the branch from which they arise; we presume that he here refers to a horizontal branch. He adds: "En mme temps, ce mouvement d'rection est accompang d'un mouvement de torsion imprim la partie basilaire de la feuille, et pouvant souvent parcourir un arc de 90 ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... or two lines of retreat perpendicular to and behind his position of battle, it will generally be best to attack the center, or that wing where the obstacles of the ground shall be the least favorable for the defense; for in such a case the first consideration is to gain the battle, without having in view the total destruction ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Quebec lies upon the top of a rock, about two hundred feet high, almost perpendicular in some parts of it, and everywhere extremely steep and inaccessible, excepting towards the Hauteurs d'Abraham, which is a continuation of the same hill, that begins at Quebec and ends at Cap Rouge, diminishing gradually ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... flesh, with a hardly perceptible stoop. He had a red, seamed face. Under the small, pale blue eyes, genial and yet frigid, there showed a thick, raw, red selvedge of skin, and below that the skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids, instead of being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular. His nose and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the lips, drawn tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a short white beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck was fantastically drawn and creased. His limbs were thin, the knees and ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the lands appertaining to the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and about three miles, a furlong, and few odd yards from that oft-recorded good town, a dry stone wall, some thirty inches in height, runs from the lofty and perpendicular sea-banks, over a portion of what may be termed the fag-end of Lammermoor, and now forming a separation between the laws of Scotland and the jurisdiction of the said good town; and on crossing to the northern side of this humble but important stone wall, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... you depart—chilled and depressed. No one steps with you to open the gate and exchange a second farewell, and express a cordial wish to see you again there. You feel that you must walk in measured step and place your hat precisely perpendicular, for the eyes of 'Society' are upon you. What a comfort when you turn a corner behind the hedge and can thrust your hands into ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... was Kellup, as smart a young feller as you'd find in a day's ride, livin' with his wife an' kids in what he called a flat. Be-lieve me! It was some perpendicular to git into, an' ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... are strange testimony of the habits and contrivances of England's lawless partisans in these remote valleys. The lower excavations evidently served for stables, as the mangers roughly cut in the rock testify. The horses or mules were led up and down a steep narrow ledge. A perpendicular boring, shaped like a well, connects the lowest chamber with those above, and there can be no doubt that the nethermost part served the purpose of a well or cistern. By means of a hanging rope a man could easily pull himself up to the higher stages and let himself down in the same manner. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... They had to fly. The escape was not very difficult, except the twenty feet of perpendicular fall outside ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... bridges spanning the Delaware, and under some of these I saw the cliff swallow at home, the nests being fastened to the under sides of the timbers,—as it were, suspended from the ceiling instead of being planted upon the shelving or perpendicular side, as is usual with them. To have laid the foundation, indeed, to have sprung the vault downward and finished it successfully, must have required special engineering skill. I had never before seen or heard of these nests being so placed. But birds are quick to adjust their needs to the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... swamps, and a shy hornbill (Scythrops) was seen and heard several times. The nests of the white ant were rarely seen; but the soldier ant, and the whole host of the others, were every where. The funnel ant digs a perpendicular hole in the ground, and surrounds the opening with an elevated wall, sloping outwards like a funnel; the presence of this insect generally indicates a rotten soil, into which horses and cattle sink beyond their ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... rises the height of about 350 feet, and is said to be three feet and a half out of the perpendicular. The adventurous traveller may ascend to the top by a laborious staircase of 500 steps. Those steps were trod by the late amiable and excellent Sir James Edward Smith, who has described the view presented at the summit. 'The day was unfavourable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... odorala and the Nelumbium luteum, of which the former waves its beautiful flower on the surface of the river, while the latter, the queen, in fact, of the waters, proudly raises her magnificent crown upon a perpendicular footstalk. On the opposite bank, the evening breeze lifts the triangular leaves and rosy-red flowers of the Marsh-Mallow, overhung by Gray Willows and the Silver-leaved Maple and the Red Maple, on which a flock of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... what we were afraid of, for you see we had only two hundred fathoms of line in each boat; and having both harpoons in him, we could not bend one to the other, in case he 'sounded' deep, for sometimes they will go down right perpendicular, and take four lines, or eight hundred fathoms, with them; so we expected that we should this time lose the whale as well as our lines, for when they were run out we must either cut or go down with him. Well, the lines ran out so swift that we poured water on them that they might not fire—and ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... south the American submarine had run at right angles into the line of the Hun retreat. The Dewey held a strategic position. She viewed the approaching squadron as though looking down the hypotenuse of the angle. The Germans were speeding along the base. The Dewey had but to slip down the perpendicular to intercept ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... which I am obliged to round. At two miles got clear of them, and proceeded over a great number of stony rises, very steep; they are composed of conglomerate quartz, underneath which is a course of slates, the direction of which is north-west, and lying very nearly perpendicular, and also some courses of ironstone, and a sharp rectangular hard grey flint stone. My horses being nearly all without shoes, it has lamed a great many of them, and, having struck the river again at fifteen miles, I camped. They have had a very hard day's journey. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... good-nature too, though of hot temper and so full of multifarious veracities; a substratum of inarticulate good sense withal, and much magnanimity run wild, or run to seed. A big-limbed, swashing, perpendicular kind of fellow; haughty of face, but jolly too; with a big, not ugly strut;—captivating to the French Nation, and fit God of War (fitter than 'Dalhousie,' I am sure!) for that susceptive People. Understood their ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... mining equipment, with candles stuck by lumps of clay to their felt hats, the travellers have painfully descended by perpendicular ladders and along dripping-wet rock passages, fathoms down into pitchy darkness; the miner who guides ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... was provided with a bamboo, which was found indispensable; and thus, like a party of pilgrims, we proceeded on our way; and before we had gone very far, we discovered that we were subjected to severe penance. The mountain was nearly perpendicular. In some places we had to ascend by a single piece of wood, with rough notches for the feet, resting against a rock twenty or thirty feet above our heads; and on either side was a precipice, so that a false step must have been certain death. In other places a single ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... round, and entered the precincts of "Gurt-na-Morra." As I proceeded along the avenue, I was struck by the slight traces of repairs here and there evident,—a gate or two that formerly had been parallel to the horizon had been raised to the perpendicular; some ineffectual efforts at paint were also perceptible upon the palings; and, in short, everything seemed to have undergone a kind of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... point of the island, sailed through the racing currents between the lower end of La Bellissima and "Our Lady of the Angels," more slowly past what looked to be a perpendicular forest. From water to crest the gulches and converging spurs of this hillside in the sea were a dense mass of oaks, bays, underbrush; here and there a tall slender tree with a bark like red kid and ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... was simple. First he took a metal stylus or a pencil and drew perpendicular lines in the side margins of his parchment, and horizontal lines at equal distances from top to bottom of the page. Then the task of copying was straightforward. If the book was to be embellished he left spaces for the illuminator ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... contention of a great historian of British architecture that Wadham College must have been built at different dates, because its architecture is of different styles—an improper combination of Jacobean and Perpendicular. Dr Griffiths was the kindliest of men, but the most accurate, and it gave him, for he was human, great pleasure to correct mistakes. He listened silently to the great man's argument: next morning, at a large breakfast party given in the College ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... boot-jack, and so caught the full force of the waves. One corner, as already mentioned, was called Flinty Point, the other Needle Point, and between these two points there was no gangway within the semicircle up the wall of cliff. Indeed, within the cove the cliff was perpendicular, or rather overhanging, as far as such crumbling earth would admit of its overhanging. To reach a gangway, a person inside the cove would have to leave the cliff wall for the open sands, and pass round either Needle ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... footprints of the two men were here very clearly impressed in the thin but soft soil, and they all took care not to trample on the tracks. They followed the prints closely, and found that they led straight to the edge of a cliff forming a sheer precipice, almost perpendicular, at the foot of which the sea, some two hundred feet below, was ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... hunting. While waiting for the truth to be revealed and my suspicions set aside, I will complete the little that I know of her by noting that the Black Tachytes passes the winter in the adult form and away from her cell. She hibernates, like the Hairy Ammophila. In warm, sheltered places, with low, perpendicular, bare banks, dear to the Wasps, I am certain of finding her at any time during the winter, however briefly I investigate the earthen surface, riddled with galleries. I find the Tachytes cowering singly ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... large portion of it, where water trickles and falls, is perfectly white. The walls present a specimen of how Nature packs the stone, crowding huge masses, as it were, into chinks and fissures, and here we see it in the perpendicular or horizontal layers, as ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as his own. God wills that he should do so, that man may live as of himself according to the laws of order, which are as many as there are precepts in the Word, and may dispose himself to receive the love of God. But still God perpetually holds with His finger the perpendicular above the scales, and regulates, but never violates by compulsion, man's free decision. Man's free will is from this: that he feels life in himself as his, and God leaves him so to feel, that reciprocal conjunction may take ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery, and somewhere half way up the enemy had a second trench strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that preparations had been made for hauling off the ship at high water, which, as the sea had remained perfectly calm, the captain hoped to do without her having suffered material damage. She was now rapidly regaining her perpendicular position, and in a few minutes would be on an even keel. The brig, after following the pirates for a short distance, had hove to Captain Haiselden had no fancy for running in among ...
— The Mate of the Lily - Notes from Harry Musgrave's Log Book • W. H. G. Kingston
... Then he ran home, and Pelle lay down at the edge of the fir-plantation, on his face with the soles of his feet in the air, and sang. All round him there were marks of his knife on the tree-stems. On the earliest ships you saw the keel, the deck was perpendicular to the body. Those had been carved the first summer. There was also a collection of tiny fields here on the edge of the stream, properly ploughed, harrowed, and sown, each field ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and, standing up in the boat, began to examine the surroundings with keen interest. They were close to the great crag "shaped like a giant's helmet," as Valdemar Svensen had said. It rose sheer out of the water, and its sides were almost perpendicular. Some beautiful star-shaped sea anemones clung to it in a vari-colored cluster on one projection, and the running ripple of the small waves broke on its jagged corners with a musical splash, and sparkle of white foam. Below them, in the emerald mirror of the Fjord, it was so clear that they ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... I could perceive by the dark parapet-like band along its crest that it was covered with a growth of timber. This was the more readily observed from contrast with the perpendicular sides, which were almost of a snowy whiteness, on account of the gypsum, chalk, or milky quartz of which the rock ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... the southern facade of the house, and is generously broad. It is paved with great lozenge-shaped slabs of marble, stained in delicate pinks and greys with lichens; and a marble balustrade borders it, overgrown, the columns half uprooted and twisted from the perpendicular, by an aged wistaria-vine, with a trunk as stout as a tree's. Seated there, one can look off over miles of richly-timbered country, dotted with white-walled villages, and traversed by the Nive and the Adour, to the wry masses of the Pyrenees, purple ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... where the canyon boxed in between perpendicular walls, there lay a great lagoon, a lake that rose minute by minute as if seeking to override its dam, yet held back by the torrent of sand and water that Hidden Water threw across its path. For an hour they fought each other, the Alamo striving vainly to claim its ancient ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... perplexity became almost distress; for she found herself shut in a little space by buildings of varying heights. Behind her lay the difficult route over which she had come, and on the east uprose a steep bank or bluff. Against this was placed a nearly perpendicular sort of ladder, and this steep stair was the only ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... He had crossed the higher of the two without much trouble except for a laborious scramble over large, rough stones, but the ascent of the other threatened to be difficult. It rose in front, a wall of splintered crag, seamed by deep gullies, for the strata was tilted up nearly perpendicular. All the gullies were climbed by expert mountaineers, but this needed a party and a rope, and the other way, round the shoulder of the great rock, was almost as hard. Festing knew the easiest plan ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... magnet perpendicular to the plane of the loop, it may be placed parallel to its plane. Fig. 14d shows the magnet and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... higher the farther we proceeded. In the very centre of the mountains, apparently, this canon ended in a small round valley. There appeared to be no possible exit, save by the way we had come, or over the almost perpendicular ridges a thousand feet or more above. Nevertheless, we discovered a narrow ravine that slanted up into the hills to the left. Following it we found ourselves very shortly in a great forest on the side of ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... nail it up for you myself. Won't it make a nice contrast to the humming-bird's? Over the bed, shall I? But then, if it should drop down on your nose, you know! I think the corner over the fireplace will be best. Yes, we'll have it right up perpendicular, in the angle. The branch twists a little, you see, and the nest will run out with its odds and ends like an old banner. Might I push up the ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... however, considerable ground for interesting speculation with respect to these first three numerals. The earliest Hindu forms were perpendicular. In the N[a]n[a] Gh[a]t inscriptions they are vertical. But long before either the A['s]oka or the N[a]n[a] Gh[a]t inscriptions the Chinese were using the horizontal forms for the first three numerals, but a vertical arrangement for four.[101] Now where did China get these forms? Surely ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... or two of climbing brought them out upon the semicircular platform which crowns the rock. Below them on the far side was a perpendicular black cliff, a hundred and fifty feet high, with the swirling, foam-streaked river roaring past its base. The swish of the water and the low roar as it surged over the mid-stream boulders boomed through the hot, stagnant air. Far ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... St. Charles, on the left. Far away the united streams are again divided into a northern and southern channel by the picturesque Isle of Orleans. To the right hand is seen Point Levi, and the almost perpendicular banks of the St. Lawrence; on the left the more gradually sloping shore presents a long line of intrenchments and redoubts, reaching to a distance of seven or eight miles, ending at the great chasm into which the Montmorency River hurls down its waters in a fall of two hundred and fifty feet. ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... there that the fiery appearance at night is not actually fire or flame, but caused by hot burning stones and masses of scoria, &c., constantly falling down the sides of the cone, which on the lee side are almost perpendicular. On the weather side are cocoa-nut trees, and one small house, but we could see no people. It was grand to see the great stones leaping and bounding down the sides of the cone, clearing 300 or 400 feet at a jump, and springing up many yards into the air, finally plunging ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seemed to her possible that some one might be aware of what had happened, and might give her father warning; but Anna had seen that for a good way above Malans the upward path looked all right, and it was so perpendicular that she fancied the destruction of its upper portion might not have been at once discovered, especially if it had occurred at night. No, she was obliged to see that it was extremely doubtful whether her father would receive ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... figures showing elevations, will give you a better idea of it than a long verbal description. It is an extraordinarily desolate scene. A few wild goats scramble over the rocks, or rush down the nearly perpendicular cliff; occasionally a solitary bird raises its harsh note; the wind howls fiercely; and as you lie under the lee of a mass of lava, taking in the scene and picking out the details as the rising sun brings them out one by one, presently the mist begins to pour into the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... 80) is the finest canvas stitch, and is therefore suitable for work involving much detail. Pictorial and heraldic subjects are frequently carried out in it. It is worked diagonally over a perpendicular and horizontal thread of the canvas. The diagram shows the method of working both back and front. It will be noticed that though the line goes alternately from left to right and from right to left, the stitch is always the same ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... already supported by the water, and all that is required of the propeller is to push her forward. If set so as to act in a direct line with the plane of motion, it will use all its force to push her forward; if set so as to use its force in a perpendicular direction, it will use all its force to raise her out of the water. If placed at an angle of 45 deg. with the plane of motion, half the force will be used in raising the ship out of the water, and only half will be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude of persons. To carry such a multitude conveniently round them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the softening of the angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in our own Perpendicular period it all but disappears. You may study that tendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for such in effect Notre-Dame has always been. That circumstance is illustrated by the great font, the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... new development of Gothic architecture in this period, the Decorated giving place to the Perpendicular. The latter derives its name from the perpendicular divisions of the lights in the arches of the windows. It marks the final period of the Gothic or Pointed style, and is noted for the exquisite carved work of its ceilings. ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... disturbance, thus plainly showing that at an interval of only 157,250 miles their attractive power was virtually inoperative. Signs of internal agitation, however, were not wanting. Each fragment threw out a short tail in a direction perpendicular to the line joining their centres, and each developed a bright nucleus, although the original comet had exhibited neither of these signs of cometary vitality. A singular interchange of brilliancy was, besides, observed to take place between ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... a very cheerless aspect; the beams were blackened and bulging forward, the chimney had fallen off, the corners of the house were stained with damp, and sunk out of the perpendicular, the small, dusty, bluish windows peeped out from under the shaggy overhanging roof with an indescribably morose expression: some old vagrants have eyes that look like that. I knocked; no one responded. I could hear, however, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... method of etheric telegraphy, due to Marconi himself, is the suspension of a perpendicular wire at each terminus, its length twenty feet for stations a mile apart, forty feet for four miles, and so on, the telegraphic distance increasing as the square of the length of suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, July, 1898, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... a little rivulet running down it. The ravine widened out as they went up it, till they reached a spot where it formed a circular area of some hundred and fifty feet in diameter, surrounded on all sides by perpendicular rocks, with a tiny cascade a hundred feet in height falling into it at the farther end. Some rough huts of boughs of trees were ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... expression as relates to floating bodies. By that light it was very easy to imagine Wilkes' picture of a ruined town of alabaster. There were arches of all sizes and orders; pinnacles without number; towers, and even statues and columns. To these were to be added long lines of perpendicular walls, that it was easy enough to liken to fortresses, dungeons and temples. In a word, even the Alps, with all their peculiar grandeur, and certainly on a scale so vastly more enlarged, possess no one aspect that is so remarkable for its resemblance to ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... army men on board were models of efficiency and quiet discipline, herding back the excited passengers and trying to keep them away from the rail, for the slant of the deck was now almost perpendicular. ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh |
