"Rarefied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Such rarefied confessions were common, and this was one of many occasions when I disgraced William by snickering in the solemn pause ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with them not only their own romance, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... be nearer the truth to rank Racine among the idealists. The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... comfort to the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must, like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... that they saw lakes of water in the distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if covered with live coal, and their minds began to wander. The poor horses moved ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... ballast, the inverse gravity of my inertron ship would hurl me continuously upward until I shot forth from the last air layer into space. I thought of jumping, and floating down on my inertron belt, but I was already too high for this. The air was too rarefied to permit breathing outside, though my little air compressors were automatically maintaining the proper density within the shell. If I could compress a sufficiently large quantity of air inside the craft, I would add to its weight. ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... rule holds good. The ridges and the hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold as regards mountain tops?—as regards high mountain tops? Probably it would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river surface that most of our travelling is done. The night we returned to Coldfoot we put our ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... shaly composition; wherever a living stream of water is found, there also is a village, with clusters of trees. From points where a comprehensive view is obtainable the effect of these dark-green spots, scattered here and there among the whitish hills, seen through the clear, rarefied atmosphere, is most beautiful. It seems a peculiar feature of everything in the East - not only the cities themselves, but even of the landscape - to look beautiful and enchanting at a distance; but upon a closer approach all ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... existence of an imponderable substance—an ether—was recognised, so mediumistic phenomena seemed mysterious until the now fully established fact was recognised, that between the particles of ether there exists another still more rarefied imponderable substance not subject to the law ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... where large bodies of the waters have overflowed, rarefied and distended by electrical attractions and repulsions. The overflowing of the waters often makes the star visible when it ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... what he wanted was not the applause of the public, but the faith of a coterie, to be a martyr, misunderstood by the many, worshipped by the few. A Bloomsbury hero, a Chelsea King! "We confess that as a writer Mr. Delancey Woburn is altogether too rarefied for our taste. His work is far too impregnated by the stamp of a tiny clique of rather self-conscious superintellectuals. Reading his books, we feel as if we had suddenly entered a room full of people who know one another very well. In other words, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... the room grew rarefied. Then, in the shadowy dimness of a corner, near the floor, a white ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... air castle," said Tom; "but for the life of me I can't see how it will work. Of course, in theory, if you could revolve a big-bladed propeller in very dense, or in liquid, air, there would be more resistance than in the rarefied atmosphere of the upper regions. And, if this could be done, I grant you that you could use slower motors and smaller propeller blades—more like those of a motor boat. But how are you going ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... climbing or dropping, one always reaches a plain or upland which would delude one into believing that he is almost at sea-level, were it not for the towering mountains that all around keep one hemmed in in a silent stillness, and the rarefied air. Yi-che-shin, for instance, standing at this altitude of considerably over 6,000 feet, is in the center of a tableland, on which are numerous villages, around which the fragrance of the broad bean in flower and the splendid fertility ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... in that country that they think nothing of a walk of many miles, but the intensely rarefied air of the mountains made my own ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... of blood have thus passed, one into each of the cavities, these drops which cannot but be very large, because the orifices through which they pass are wide, and the vessels from which they come full of blood, are immediately rarefied, and dilated by the heat they meet with. In this way they cause the whole heart to expand, and at the same time press home and shut the five small valves that are at the entrances of the two vessels from which they flow, and thus prevent any more blood from coming down into the heart, and becoming ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... colour, of rest and peace in the grateful shadow of the little church on the cliff, but, above all, in the release from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought, she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied, the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the song-significant into which she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... name I would like to have applied to me sometimes," I said. "You see I'm tremendously fond of this world exactly as it is now. Mr. Vedder, it's a wonderful and beautiful place! I've never seen a better one. I confess I could not possibly live in the rarefied atmosphere of a final solution. I want to live right here and now for all I'm worth. The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life. 'Why,' I answered without a thought, 'Now.' It has always ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... intolerable weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, almost unconscious. My brave Conseil, though exhibiting the same symptoms and suffering in the same manner, never left me. He took my hand and encouraged me, and I heard him murmur, "Oh! if I could only not breathe, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... rectangular triangle, all the lines from the circumference of which meeting in a center, by holding it in the light of the sun they can collect and concentrate all its rays at this one point of convergence; where the air will now become rarefied, and any light, dry, combustible matter will kindle as soon as applied, under the effect of the rays, which here acquire the substance and active force of fire. Some are of opinion that these vestals had no other business than the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... They quickly communicated to the wood-work in the interior of the buildings, and broad sheets of flame mingled with smoke rose up towards the heavens, throwing a fearful glare over every object. The rarefied atmosphere heightened the previous impetuosity of the wind, which, fanning the rising flames, they rapidly spread from dwelling to dwelling, till the whole fiery mass, swayed to and fro by the tempest, surged and roared with the fury of a volcano. The ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes—say Pure Mathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon keep the tally. ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... this ascent, but I suffered from nothing but the excruciating cold, which benumbed my limbs and penetrated to my bones; and though I dismounted several times and tried to walk, uphill exercise was impossible in the rarefied air. The atmosphere was but one degree below the freezing-point, but at that height, a brisk breeze on soaked clothes ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... strikingly, gowned, somewhat conspicuously; a large pattern in the figure of the cloth. She carried a little dog. There was about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant and hard in effect, like a polished stone. And we felt the rarefied atmosphere of a wealthy, highly cultivated, rather haughty society. "Charge to Edward Wharton," she said, very nicely, bending over us as we wrote "Lenox, Mass." She pronounced it not Massachusetts, but Mass, as is not infrequent in the East. "Thank you," ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... itself into a kind of rarefied picnic, and, as Sara crossed the cool green lawns in the wake of a smart parlourmaid, she found that quite a considerable number of Audrey's friends—and enemies—were gathered together under the shade of the trees, partaking of tea and strawberries ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Post; we formed a spacious camp, to the east of the block-house, with breastworks of uncommon strength. This plan probably saved us from some contagious disease; indeed, the bad smell of the dried fish, and the rarefied air in the building, had already begun to affect many of our ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... places of the world flies the vulture of madness, pausing to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert, slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of a dreamer, brain-sick with reality. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... proved that the temperate climate and rarefied air of this spot are singularly favourable to the cultivation of the coffee-tree, which is well known to flourish on heights. The prefect of the capuchins, an active and enlightened man, has introduced into the province this new ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of this ink does proceed from the fuliginosity or sooty part of the coal of the cork which is exceeding porous and light, and that this fuliginosity is nothing but an oil very much rarefied. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... height of heroism or of sin. When Love stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... enkindled at the sight of the new and strange scenes dimly presented to their view. In imagination they climbed to the summit of this lofty peak. They let themselves down to the abyss of that yawning crater. Here they imagined they saw vast seas hardly kept in their basins by a rarefied atmosphere; there they thought they could trace mighty rivers bearing to vast oceans the tribute of the snowy mountains. In the first promptings of their eager curiosity, they peered greedily into her cavernous depths, and almost expected, amidst ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... as a consequence of that royal infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered with bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... sentinel peaks, while in our front stretched the valley tributary to the Yellowstone, in extent, itself, an inland empire. The month was August, and, with the exception of cool nights, no complaint could be made, for that rarefied atmosphere was a tonic to man and beast, and there was pleasure in the primitive freshness of the country which rolled away on every hand. On leaving the Rosebud, two days' travel brought us to the east fork of Sweet Grass, an insignificant ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... the purpose to write a rhetoric. The many fine distinctions and divisions, the rarefied examples of very beautiful forms of language which a young pupil cannot possibly reproduce, or even appreciate, have been omitted. To teach the methods of simple, direct, and accurate expression has been the purpose; and this is all that can be expected ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... descending columns, or from the actual dropping of the fluid contained in them, they would sometimes, says he, appear at a distance to be sucked up from the sea. The theory of waterspouts in the present day does in fact admit the supposition here referred to; that the air, being rarefied by particular causes, has its equilibrium restored by the elevation of the water, on the same principle that mercury rises in the barometer, or the contents of a well in a common pump. The opinions of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... joyous cast, which was noticeable because he was habitually of grave demeanor, and his associates, observing the change, taxed him with the fact and demanded an explanation, Hobart in particular wishing to know. Harley lightly ascribed it to the rarefied air, as they were ascending a plateau, and the others, though calling it the baldest and poorest of replies, were ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a memorable party, something that they would remember always. They lingered over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word "mortifying" to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room was whirring and shifting now; a curious lightness permeated and rarefied the heavy air. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... all, not to labor only,— But to breathe in the essence of vivified sheen, The fragrance of rarefied thoughts as they surge to and fro, Heaving the unknown depths up to mountains of night. Crystalline, luminous, rare, opalescently ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the crooning of ring-doves among the pines. Butterflies, like detached flowers, fluttered in and out. A faint breeze stirred the roses, so that an occasional creamy ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism of The Skylark, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the shadow, the double of a god, was in no way essentially different from the soul, shadow, or double of a man; his body, indeed, was moulded out of a more rarefied substance, and generally invisible, but endowed with the same qualities, and subject to the same imperfections as ours. The gods, therefore, on the whole, were more ethereal, stronger, more powerful, better fitted ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... so thin and rarefied that breathing is hard work. That's nothing. Now for a good rest and refresh. We must not stay up here ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... now, he knew the projectile was racing higher into the rarefied atmosphere, heading steadily out to where the air of earth would ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... of a being from another sphere; and a writer in The Fortnightly had swam into his ken, trailing visible clouds of glory. But by and by he finds himself breathing with perfect composure in that rarefied air, and in course of time the grey conviction settles upon him that these fabled people are in no wise different from the booksellers and business men he had found so sordid and dull—no more individual or delightful as a race; and he speedily comes to the old conclusion ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... blue sky. She looked in vain for birds. Then her gaze went wonderingly to the lofty fringed rim of the great amphitheater, and as she studied it she began to grasp its remoteness, how far away it was in the rarefied atmosphere. A black eagle, sweeping along, looked of tiny size, and yet he was far under the heights above. How pleasant she fancied it to be up there! And drowsy fancy lulled her ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... with this disorder. Persons in good health and of a spare habit speedily recover from it, but on plethoric and stout individuals its effects are frequently very severe. After an abode of some time in the mountainous regions, the constitution becomes inured to the rarefied atmosphere. I suffered only two attacks of the veta; but they were very severe. The first was on one of the level heights; and the second on the mountain of Antaichahua. The first time I ascended the Cordillera I did not experience ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... before the donkey's nose to lead him on. Day after day we floundered through swamps and marshes, over rocky, barren hills, and through thick growths of willows and alders, and at the end of the day's journey it would apparently be as far off as ever. The explanation was that in the rarefied atmosphere of interior Labrador distances are very deceptive; when George reported that the "big water" was three miles ahead it ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... English society, as the promise of speedy political distinction. It will supply to its happy possessor the want of family and fortune—it rapidly melts away all distinctions. The obscure but eloquent commoner finds himself suddenly standing in the rarefied atmosphere of privilege and exclusiveness—the familiar equal, often the conscious superior, of the haughtiest peer of the realm. A single successful speech in the House of Commons, opens before its utterer the shining doors of fashion and greatness as if by magic. It is as it were ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... partner, but the partner never replied in suitable terms, and Diva became honey-mouthed again. It was, indeed, if Mr. Wyse had appeared at two or three parties, rather a relief not to find him at the next, and breathe freely in less rarefied air. But whether he came or not he always returned the invitation by one to a Thursday luncheon-party, and thus the high circles of Tilling met every week at ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and a solitary sign-post with "Paris-Perpignans" suggested unbelievable distances. The Aigle glided up gradients like the side of a somewhat toppling house, and scarcely needed to change speed, so well did she like the rarefied mountain air. I liked it too, though I had to be thankful for the plaid; and above all I liked the wild loneliness of the Causse, which was unlike anything I ever saw or imagined. The savage monotony of the heights was broken just often enough by oases of pine wood; and ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... theory in its most defensible form— that is to say, a conception which makes the differences in various substances consist in differences in condensation or rarefaction of the particles of the primary substance. The simple normal condition of this substance he deemed to be air. In its rarefied condition, it becomes fire, and in its condensed condition it progresses by stages from liquid to solid. And just as the modern chemist is beginning to have good ground for believing that all substances, or so-called elements, may be the result of a series of differentiations and compositions of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... in advance of ours, they may be conceived to have grappled with the stupendous problem of keeping their world in a habitable condition as long as possible. Supposing them to have become accustomed to live in their rarefied atmosphere (a thing not inconceivable, since men can live for a time at least in air hardly less rare), the most pressing problem for them is that of a water-supply, without which plant life cannot exist, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... free speaking, there can not be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions degrees ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... 'the only power in the world which could crush Poland's crushing fate,' As the late Professor Morfill well said of him, Krasinski 'always stood by the open grave of his country,' and the somewhat cloudy mysticism in which he found his chief consolation is too rarefied for robuster minds. Yet his hope never wholly failed: the saying that he quoted to encourage his friend Soltan—'speravit contra spem: that is a great and holy word of the sacred Scriptures'—might stand for his motto; and a saying from one of his ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of character might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all, when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist, and the vers librist, one swims into the splendours of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a series of Moorish arabesques. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Brahmanas do not indeed often assert on their own authority that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world, and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in which fact and fancy are completely confused with one another and consistency ceases to have any meaning, none of them would have difficulty in accepting the Rigvedic statement that he ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known as the 'elements'—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... taken up by the atmosphere from the Indian Ocean is deposited on the eastern hilly slope; and when the moving mass of air reaches its greatest elevation, it is then on the verge of the great valley, or, as in the case of the Kalahari, the great heated inland plains; there, meeting with the rarefied air of that hot, dry surface, the ascending heat gives it greater capacity for retaining all its remaining humidity, and few showers can be given to the middle and western lands in consequence ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... professed Christians who are so rarefied and etherealized that they do not want a religion of blood. What do you want? You seem to want a religion of brains. The Bible says: "In the blood is the life." No atonement without blood. Ought not the apostle to know? What did he say? "Ye ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... behind them, and only the soft green of the Jersey hills, and the deep purple-black of the sky above were visible. The sun blazed high in the nigh-black heavens, and in the rarefied air, there was so little diffusion that the corona was readily visible with the aid of a smoked glass. Around the sun, long banners in space, the Zodiacal light gleamed dimly. Here and there some of the brighter stars winked in the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... fire. And no baby's face is sweeter than Diana's was now, all blossoming as it were with love and humility. If her husband had loved her before, the feeling of longing and despair that came over him when he looked at this rarefied beauty would be hard to tell. He had ruined her life, he reproached himself; and she was lost to him for ever. Yet, as I said, though Diana's face was grave, it was a gravity wholly without clouds; the gravity of the summer dawn, when the ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... risen, no breeze was straying, everything was of one hue and silent ... but one could scent the approach of the awakening, and in the rarefied air the scent of the dew's harsh dampness ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may partly be that Mr. Yeats is not ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... evening, just when you smell the first indication of winter in a rarefied atmosphere, and see it in the clear curling of the smoke, as its woolly flakes rise from the cottage chimney and gradually are lost in the clear blue sky. Although not a cold evening, a log fire was extremely welcome. My father, Heaven rest him! had a slight touch in the toe of what finished him ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... for something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the baffle drains get the water away no air can get in, so the engine has a good suck at the air in the boat, the result of all this being a slight vacuum in the boat. It is a very unpleasant sensation, and made me very sick. This is really a form of sickness due to the rarefied air. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... the day was altogether devoid of interest or event. Overhead, the sun blazing wastefully and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay, thirsting for spring rain, and bare except for inedible roley-poleys, coarse tussocks, and the woody stubble of close-eaten salt-bush; between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely lapt ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Peak. It was a long and toilsome climb, winding about the snowbeds of the mountain side. Sometimes we scaled straight up the acclivity on "all fours," throwing ourselves down on the rocks at frequent intervals to rest our aching limbs and fill our lungs with the rarefied air; up and up and up, until at last, with a long pull and a strong pull, we stood on the sky-haunting ridge above all the surrounding elevations, looking down upon the rest of the world, which seemed to be crouching ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual. The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... of comment—so great was the demand upon his lungs—was not too tired to admire the power and resolution of the girl, who seemed not to suffer any special inconvenience from the rarefied air. The dryness of his open mouth, the throbbing of his troubled pulse, the roaring of his breath, brought to him with increasing dismay the fact that he had overlooked another phase of the ranger's job. "I couldn't chop a ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... should be kept in motion. Thirdly, by rockets, which, going off successively, would drive up the balloon by the force of projection. Fourthly, by an octahedron of glass, heated by the sun, and of which the lower part should be allowed to penetrate the dense cold air, which, pressing up against the rarefied hot air, would raise the balloon. Fifthly, by a car of iron and a ball of magnetised iron, which the aeronaut would keep throwing up in the air, and which would attract and draw up the balloon. The wiseacre who invented these modes of flying in the air seems, some would say, ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... should sacrifice you? One enjoys for a season the wide expanse visible from that lofty emotional pinnacle; but the atmosphere is too rarefied, and we gladly descend to the warm, denser air of the plains of common sense selfishness. If it be lowering your standard to become the wife of a bishop (the youngest ever ordained in his State), clothed with the double distilled odors ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of becoming amassed, condensed and rarefied. In the tornado that happened at Natchez, in 1840, the houses exploded whenever the doors and windows were shut, the roofs shooting up into the air, and the walls even of the strongest buildings ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... deaths, soft exhalations Of soul; dear and divine annihilations; A thousand unknown rites Of joys, and rarefied delights." ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... about—to sleep—to awaken surrounded by rarefied light and air in which no object or act or even word or thought wore its past familiar meaning, or to go about the common streets, feeling as though somehow one were apart and unseen, was a singular thing. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the chimney perpendicularly over the fire; but to ascertain its most advantageous distance, or how far above the burning fuel it ought to be placed, is not so easy, and requires several advantages and disadvantages to be balanced. As the smoke and vapour rise in consequence of their being rarefied by heat, and made lighter than the air of the surrounding atmosphere, and as the degree of their rarefraction is in proportion to the intensity of their heat, and as this heat is greater near the fire than at a ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... all he enjoyed the quiet, starlit nights before the moon was up; for the moon dazzled the eyes in the rarefied air where they flew, whereas the stars gave just enough light to steer by without making ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... discoverers of iodine and bromine, two substances hitherto undecompounded, were both amongst the class of manufacturers, one being a maker of saltpetre at Paris, the other a manufacturing chemist at Marseilles; and the inventor of balloons filled with rarefied air, was a paper manufacturer near Lyons. The descendants of Mongolfier, the first aerial traveller, still carry onthe establishment of their progenitor, and combine great scientific knowledge with skill in various departments of the arts, to which the different ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... faculties move in an atmosphere above as well as on the earth, as I know that above the atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen which envelops the earth there is an ethereal, a rarefied atmosphere, which stretches to worlds of which all we know is that they exist. If your spirit can soar above this earthly atmosphere, well and good. I, for one, shall do nothing to limit or hinder it: I shall only welcome and applaud and reward whatever effort you make to bring our inner ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... have no doubt that if, as many believe, the aurora borealis is produced by sudden cosmic disturbances, such as eruptions at the sun's surface, which set the electrostatic charge of the earth in an extremely rapid vibration, the red glow observed is not confined to the upper rarefied strata of the air, but the discharge traverses, by reason of its very high frequency, also the dense atmosphere in the form of a glow, such as we ordinarily produce in a slightly exhausted tube. If the frequency were very low, or even more so, if the charge were not ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... the explanation of this I would say: that the fire there is that which heats the globe, inside of it is the water, and it happens that this humid element, being rarefied and attenuated by virtue of the heat, and thus resolved into vapour, it requires much greater space to contain it, therefore if it does not find easy exit, it goes on with extreme force, noise, and destruction to break ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... his feet slowly and walked up and down the room for a moment, glancing out occasionally towards the clump of palms which marked the disappearance of the Nile into the desert beyond his vision. At intervals a cannon-shot crashed upon the rarefied air, as scores of thousands had done for months past, torturing to ear and sense and nerve. The confused and dulled roar of voices came from the distance also; and, looking out to the landward side, David saw a series of movements of the besieging forces, under the Arab leader, Ali Wad Hei. Here ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... been reported," observes Lord Bacon, "and is still received, that extreme applauses and shouting of people assembled in multitudes, have so rarefied and broken the air, that birds flying over have fallen down, the air not being able to support them; and it is believed by some that great ringing of bells in populous cities hath chased away thunder, and also dissipated pestilent air. All which may be also from the concussion of the ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... this hypothesis provisionally—that comets are large meteors, or a compact swarm of meteors, which, coming near the sun, find a highly rarefied sort of atmosphere, in which they get heated and partly vaporized, just as ordinary meteorites do when they dip into the atmosphere of the earth. And let us see whether any facts bear out the analogy ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... brooks to their snowy source in the peak of St. Gothard. We cut off the bends of the road by footpaths up the rocks, which we ascended in single file, one of the Americans going ahead and little Pietro with his staff and bundle bringing up the rear. The rarefied air we breathed, seven thousand feet above the sea, was like exhilarating gas. We felt no fatigue, but ran and shouted and threw snowballs, in the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... to the north-east, but clearly visible in the rarefied mountain air, towered the mighty gates through which the Olifant River roared down to meet the Letaba. On their left the great ranges rolled away to the infinite north-west. What direction first to explore in? That was a difficult question ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... out of heavy snowstorms. At the highest point is a pyramid, commemorating a certain Mr. Oakes Ames, which looked 20 feet high and very near the line; it is however, 75 feet high and half-a-mile off. The air is so rarefied that ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... to be done," he shouted to Malvoise, "if we keep on going higher the air will soon be so rarefied that we ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... only in the Caucasus. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but it was still light. The evening glow had spread over a third of the sky, and against its brilliancy the dull white immensity of the mountains was sharply defined. The air was rarefied, motionless, and full of sound. The shadow of the mountains reached for several miles over the steppe. The steppe, the opposite side of the river, and the roads, were all deserted. If very occasionally mounted men appeared, the Cossacks in ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... made an ample provision, as well as of a plant called LLARETTA, the root of which burns tolerably well. This precious combustible was carried back to the CASUCHA and heaped up on the hearth. It was a difficult matter to kindle it, though, and still more to keep it alight. The air was so rarefied that there was scarcely oxygen enough in it to support combustion. At least, this was the reason assigned ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... ship as she rushes through the atmosphere. And if perchance you were fortunate enough to escape being blown overboard, you would be made seriously ill by the sudden change, from the dense air which you are now breathing, to the highly rarefied air outside. For this same reason it is also necessary that, while the ship is in flight, all ports and doors communicating with the exterior atmosphere should be kept tightly closed. But come, the sun is rising," he said, as a flash of ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... air" or "liquid fire," neither of which, we contend, were empty terms. With Bacon's knowledge of experimental chemistry it is a question, and a most interesting one, whether he had not in his mind those two actual principles respectively of gas and air rarefied by heat on which we launch our balloons into ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But this is true—that the most personal expression of all for any man is in verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of composition—we will not say "more difficult"—some kind of effort or struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest shape. Such emotions as a man has to express ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... air-supply would have to be cut down or throttled to an abnormal extent, we will realise at once that such a small quantity of both air and gas would have been drawn in, and consequently the mixture would be so rarefied that on the compression stroke the pressure would possibly be extremely low and totally inadequate to produce efficient working. Moreover, working at such a high vacuum as this would not only prevent ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... bearing of the Scotch Novels has been a considerable recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts, it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons and misfortunes. The candour of Sir Walter's historic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... am not quite sure of his claret. I admit his superior ecclesiastical birth; I recollect his connection with St. Peter; and I am conscious of the more potent spells and effluences of his shovel-hat and apron; but I find the atmosphere of his heights cold, and the rarefied air he breathes does not feed my lungs. Up yonder, above the clouds of human weakness, my vertebrae become unhinged, my bones inarticulate, and I collapse. I meet missionaries, and I hear the music of the spheres; and I long to descend ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... from the nature of all those volcanoes, which in almost every corner of the earth are continually vomiting up either flames or smoke. "These," said he, "are the great vents appointed by nature for the discharge of that rarefied air and combustible matter, which, if confined, would burst the globe asunder; but, besides the larger outlets, there are some small chimneys through which part of the heat transpires; a vapour of that sort, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... friend's allusions, though they were much too subtle for his ready comprehension, for the intellect of the Swiss was a little frosted by constant residence among snows and in full view of glaciers, and it wanted the volatile play of the Genoese's fancy, which was apt to expand like air rarefied by the warmth of the sun. This difference of temperament, however, so far from lessening their mutual kindness, was, most probably, the real cause of its existence, since it is well known that friendship, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont Blanc,—it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla that he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... become furious rivers, which often sweep away the improvements of man, and change the face of the country in a single night. During the dry season the inhabitants depend upon the sea-breeze which blows in over the heated land to replace the rarefied air. It blows from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, in the eastern part of the island; in other parts, from nine to three. But frequently a furious northeast wind interrupts this refreshing arrangement: the air becomes hard and cold; thick, wintry-looking clouds sweep over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... that, Sally felt constrained to admit, Trego had been in a measure right in his contention, though it had needed his folly to persuade her of his wisdom. She was out of her element here. And now she began to despair of ever learning to breathe with ease the rarefied atmosphere of the socially elect. The stifling midsummer air that stagnated in Huckster's Bargain Basement was preferable, heavy though it was with the smell of those to whom soap is a luxury and frequently a luxury uncoveted; there, at least, sincerity and charity ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... reason for this precaution. The higher the altitude the more rarefied (thinner) becomes the air, and the less sustaining power it has. Consequently the more difficult it becomes to keep in suspension a given weight. When sailing within 30 feet of the ground sustentation is comparatively ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... is constantly going on between the animal and vegetable worlds. This interchange of kindly offices is constantly going on all over the earth, even in the highest latitudes, and in the very depths of winter; for air which has been respired is rarefied, and, when thrown from the lungs, ascends, and is thus not only out of our reach, whereby we are protected from respiring it a second time, but this (to us) deadly poison falls into the great aerial current which is constantly flowing from the polar ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... observing this new world. They imagined themselves walking through its unknown countries, climbing its highest peaks, descending into its lowest depths. Here and there they fancied they saw vast seas, scarcely kept together under so rarefied an atmosphere, and water-courses emptying the mountain tributaries. Leaning over the abyss, they hoped to catch some sounds from that orb forever mute in the solitude of space. That last ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... a rarefied atmosphere on a mountain height and view the struggles of ordinary mortals below may be poetic, ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... the highly rarefied air, the traveller at first experiences great difficulty in breathing, accompanied by a sharp, piercing pain at each inspiration. This increases until he becomes what the natives call "emparamento,"—when ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... burner holes at a velocity destructive of good results. Herr Frederick Siemens perceived this in his early experiments, and not only increased the orifices of his burners, but provided for the closer contact of the more rarefied gas and air by the use of notched deflectors, which are now an essential part of his apparatus. Mr. Grimston also uses separate tubes of large area for his hot gas, but dispenses with deflectors, save ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... visibly losing flesh. The dame prospered. Piloted by the love-sick bibliographer she gradually waddled her way—it was uphill work, for both of them—into the uppermost strata of local society where, owing to the rarefied atmosphere, her appetite, to say nothing of her person, soon gained notoriety. She was known, in briefest space of time, as "the cormorant," as "prime streaky," as "Jumbo," as "the phenomenon" and, by those who understood the French language, as the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this account the currents of the atmosphere in stormy seasons are never regular, but blow and cease to blow by intervals; as a part of the moving stream is condensed by the projectile force; and the succeeding part, being consequently rarefied, requires some time to recover its density, and to follow the former part: this elasticity of the air is likewise the cause of innumerable eddies in it; which are much more frequent than in streams of water; as when it is impelled against any oblique plane, it results with its elastic force added ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... the shining morning, we ourselves seem to grow rarefied as the air. Our senses seem to grow finer, purged to a keener sensitiveness. Our eyes and ears seem to become spiritual rather than physical organs, and an exquisite elation, as though we were walking on shining ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... respect-carrying. As for Rangar, he was content. He drew the salary that would have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... thousand eight hundred and forty-seven cubic feet of gas of which we speak, all introduced into the balloon, it would be entirely filled; but that would not do, because, as the balloon continued to mount into the more rarefied layers of the atmosphere, the gas within would dilate, and soon burst the cover containing it. Balloons, then, are usually ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... for the escape of rarefied impure air, we should also provide means by which pure air may be constantly admitted into the room, as the crevices of the doors and windows are not always sufficient; and, if they should be adequate, air can be introduced ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... London and in New York, knew how to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saens, had had gowns made by Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago. The airs of the avenue de l'Opera in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her childhood in the groves and on the beaches ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of the viscera, and enters the cavities of the bones; it even penetrates into some spaces between the muscles of the neck—and thus not only is the most perfect oxygenation of the blood secured, but, the temperature of the blood being very high, the air in every part is rarefied, and the great lightness and vigour provided for, that the habits of birds require. Several birds were found by Dr. Kirk to have marrow in the tibiae, though these bones are generally ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... peculiar frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions, sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of lecture-rooms, of seances, her familiarity with the vocabulary of emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What was a part of her essence was ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, Watson. But if I am spared by lesser ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The pure rarefied air fanned the heated faces of the climbers, and with every moment seemed to instil fresh life and vigour. It was easy to believe that, once started, one would wander on and on over this wonderful moorland, feeling no fatigue, possessed with the ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... distal fragment, cast a comparatively faint shadow, and there may even be a clear space between the fragments. When the parts are exposed by operation, the bone is found to be soft and spongy and the ends of the fragments are rarefied and atrophied; sometimes they are pointed, and occasionally absorption has taken place to such an extent that a gap exists between the fragments. The bone is easily penetrated by a bradawl, and if an attempt is made to apply plates, the screws fail to bite. These ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... mere thought of rising to such a height shows how thoroughly we were carried away with the excitement. But we were better prepared for a lofty flight than might be supposed. For among the recent wonders of science had been the invention of an air- condensing machine, by which the rarefied atmosphere of the upper regions could be converted into good food for the lungs. These machines had been successfully tested more than once by voyagers of the air, but the present occasion promised to give them a much more severe trial than they ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... broke the seven green withs at Gaza: 'as a thread of tow is broken when it toucheth the fire.' Perhaps nobody would guess off-hand that the Profecia del Tajo was the handiwork of a sixteenth-century monk, a dweller in the rarefied atmosphere of mysticism. It only remained for a friar in the opposition camp to discover nearly three hundred years later a tendency in Luis de Leon to treat sensual themes in a sensual fashion.[272] To deal seriously with a belated judgement ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... read a paper before the Royal Society in March 1882, on "A New Theory of the Sun". His views in many respects coincided with mine.* [footnote... Interstellar space, according to Dr. Siemens, is filled with attenuated matter, consisting of highly rarefied gaseous bodies— including hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and aqueous vapour; that these gaseous compounds are capable of being dissociated by radiant solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... under the very shadow of the Rockies. At least you would have wondered a decade ago in the Centennial year. You note the transparency of the atmosphere. Science has told you that at such an altitude the air is rarefied. There is no light haze to soften outlines and to lend enchantment to a distant view. Roof, spire, chimney, all stand out clear and hard, and the coal-smoke from the railway blots the landscape where it rises, yet is quickly scattered ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... conquered individually higher mountains was not understood, but people were quick once more to take hope and remember the plant's normal distaste for cold or think there was perhaps something in the rarefied atmosphere to paralyze the seeds or inhibit the stolons, so preventing further progress. Even through the comparatively low passes it came at such a slow pace methods tried fruitlessly in Los Angeles were successful in keeping it back. Everyone was quite ready to wipe off the Far West if the grass ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... it was felt that the influx was into the brain, and that this was acted upon in like manner. Lastly, they spoke in such a manner that the speech fell only into the interior understanding; its fluency was like that of rarefied air. I was sensible of the influx itself, but not distinctly of the particulars. These several kinds of speech were circumstanced like different fluids—the first kind was like flowing water; the second like water of less density; the third like the atmosphere respectively; and the fourth like rarefied ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... fell upon her as she crossed the threshold, and Jessy recognized unwillingly that she looked surprisingly handsome. Handsome, however, was not the word Vane would have used. He thought Evelyn looked exotic: highly cultivated, strangely refined, as though she had grown up in a rarefied atmosphere in which nothing rank could thrive. Exactly what suggested this it was difficult to define; but the man felt that she had brought along with her the clean, chill air of the heights where the cloud-berries bloom. She was a flower of the dim and misty North, which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... neared the hospice I began to feel the effects of the rarefied air very sensibly. It made me dizzy and sick, bringing on a most acute headache—a sharp, knife-like pain. S. was ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the heavy tropical rains and the melted snow from the mountains, poured vast quantities of water into it. Had the valley been at the level of the sea, it would simply have become a great lake, surrounded by hills; but at three thousand feet higher, the atmosphere is rarefied, and evaporation goes on with such rapidity as to keep the accumulation of water in check. So the affair had adjusted itself in this wise, that the land and the five lakes should divide the valley about equally between them. It became ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... dilatation it can be rendered more rare. Properly agitated, a tuning-fork now sounds in a manner audible to you all, and most of you know that the air through which the sound is passing is parcelled out into spaces in which the air is condensed, followed by other spaces in which the air is rarefied. These condensations and rarefactions constitute what we call waves of sound. You can imagine the air of a room traversed by a series of such waves, and you can imagine a second series sent through the same air, and so related to the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... passed into one another by a process of condensation and rarefaction. Fire first became solidified into air, then air into water and lastly water into earth. The process of dissolution took place in the reverse order, earth being rarefied into water, water into air, and air into fire. It is allowable to see in this old world doctrine an anticipation of the modern idea of different states of matter—the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous, with a fourth beyond the gaseous which ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... expected, and occasioned me some alarm. At this juncture, very imprudently, and without consideration, I threw out from the car three five-pound pieces of ballast. The accelerated rate of ascent thus obtained, carried me too rapidly, and without sufficient gradation, into a highly rarefied stratum of the atmosphere, and the result had nearly proved fatal to my expedition and to myself. I was suddenly seized with a spasm which lasted for more than five minutes, and even when this, in a measure, ceased, I could catch my breath only at long intervals, and in a gasping ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... or four months, or settling here permanently. People can safely sleep out of doors for six months of the year. The plains are from 4,000 to 6,000 feet high, and some of the settled "parks," or mountain valleys, are from 8,000 to 10,000. The air, besides being much rarefied, is very dry. The rainfall is far below the average, dews are rare, and fogs nearly unknown. The sunshine is bright and almost constant, and three-fourths of the days are cloudless. The milk, beef, and bread are good. The climate is neither so hot in summer nor so cold in winter ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... lock up Veda—eternal truth! The gods have spoken. It is time. Kali rises in the East, with her necklet of skulls—Giants of evil she has slain. It is she who speaks through the voice of the patriot: 'Do not wall up your vision, like frogs in a well.... Rise above the Penal Code to the rarefied atmosphere of the Gita and consider the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... from the nearest snow to supply the rarefied air in the valley heated by the sun, even now tolerably powerful; it blows for some days so long as a vacuum is formed, and discontinues when clouds again appear; hardly so, as it before only blew for three or four days, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... future? The plea that the question of changing customs arises is not valid, for customs ratified by Aristophanes, by Rabelais, by Shakespeare, have no right to change. If they have changed, let us try immediately to return from our disgraceful refinements to the nobler and more rarefied heights of lyric laughter, tragic intensity, and wit, for we cannot have the first two without the last. And anyhow, how can a social custom claim precedence over the undying material of the senses and the emotions of man, over the very ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... drawing sharp, quick breaths in the rarefied upper atmosphere, he told himself it was ambition that was leading him on, but in his heart he knew it was not so. In his heart, he knew he was going to the rescue of his gallant companion, though the way ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... the atmosphere are correctly classified as waves, they bear little resemblance to the waves on water. Instead of being made of crests and troughs, as are the water waves, the sound waves consist of alternating successions of slightly condensed and rarefied layers of air. Then, while the general movement of the water waves is that of ever widening circles over a surface, the sound waves spread as enlarging spherical shells through the air. In sound waves, as in all other waves, however, it is only the form ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... Professor Coello was perfectly willing to do his share and more; but neither he nor we were anxious to climb with heavy packs on our backs, in the rarefied air of elevations several thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc. The argument with the Indians was long and verbose and the offerings of money and goods were made more and more generous. All was in vain. We finally came to realize that whatever supplies and provisions were ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... of information at the rate of five minutes a day for an hour on a holiday. Let's go up-stairs," he added, turning to the Imbiber, "where we may discuss our last night's entertainment apart from this atmosphere of rarefied learning. It makes ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... The air was so rarefied, the drive so exciting, that I shouted with all my might, "Go on, reindeer, go on. This is fine, I never had such a drive ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu |
