"Cleft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and I came down from the ridge, we met Captain Magnus ascending. I had in my hand a small metal-backed mirror, which I had found, surprisingly, lying in a mossy cleft between the rocks. It was a thing such as a man might carry in his pocket, though on the island it seemed unlikely that any one would do' so. I at once attributed the mirror to Captain Magnus, for I knew that no one else had been to the ridge for days. ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... them, and will in their turn do pioneer work in other schools. The thin end of the wedge is even now being driven into the close-grained mass of tradition and routine; and each successive blow that is struck by a teacher of intelligence and initiative will widen the incipient cleft. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... may be compared to the course of a steamer across an unquiet ocean. The waves raised by a fresh gale on the starboard bow were cleft by the stem, only to reunite behind the churn of the propeller. They were powerless to abridge the day's run by many miles, but they could still swing forwards to the shore. On one occasion the ship was slowed down to ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... an unusual attachment for the little Mara, and this affection was beginning to spread a warming element though her whole being. It was as if a rough granite rock had suddenly awakened to a passionate consciousness of the beauty of some fluttering white anemone that nestled in its cleft, and felt warm thrills running through all its veins at every tender motion and shadow. A word spoken against the little one seemed to rouse her combativeness. Nor did Dame Kittridge bear the child the slightest ill-will, but she was one of those naturally care-taking people whom Providence ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Baron was tuned up to the pitch, and was all the more cheerful for having unwonted anxieties to conceal; but the hapless man was not yet aware that in the course of that evening he would find himself in a cleft stick, between his happiness and the danger pointed out by his friend—compelled, in short, to choose between Madame Marneffe and ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... confining it to his waist with a girdle of soft cotton, but he would not wear any kind of shoes. The method he adopted to prevent any one from approaching him when they brought him food, was to fix an earthen pot into the cleft of a stick prepared for that purpose, and in this vessel he would receive such fruits as the season presented. He would not eat flesh or fish; nor would he drink anything but the water of the river, which he ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Jason, and Dryas twin-begot with war, A blossom of bright battle, sword and man Shining; and Idas, and the keenest eye Of Lynceus, and Admetus twice-espoused, And Hippasus and Hyleus, great in heart. These having halted bade blow horns, and rode Through woods and waste lands cleft by stormy streams, Past yew-trees and the heavy hair of pines, And where the dew is thickest under oaks, This way and that; but questing up and down They saw no trail nor scented; and one said, Plexippus, Help, or help not, Artemis, And we will flay thy boarskin with male hands; ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... upon phrase, clause upon clause, till a modern is forced to exclaim: "What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Now I have dealt with these complexes in different ways; and sometimes I have cleft and hacked and wrenched them out of all semblance of their original shape, and sometimes I have hauled them almost entire, like a cable, tangled with particles, out of the sea-bed of ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... on the pavement, for the old man ran to observe the course which was taken by his master, who turned to the left down a small and broken path, which gained the sea-shore through a cleft in the rock, and led to a sort of cove where, in former times, the boats of the castle were wont to be moored. Observing him take this course, Caleb hastened to the eastern battlement, which commanded the prospect of the whole ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... nature scattered free and wild, Each plant, or flower, the mountain's child; Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cleft a narrow bower; Foxglove and night-shade, side by side Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain; With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray-birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft the ash and warrior oak Cast ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... direction of the open mouth of the great serpent-eater. And as birds in great affliction ascend by thousand into the skies when the trees in a forest are shaken by the winds, so those Nishadas blinded by the dust raised by the storm entered the wide-extending cleft of Garuda's mouth open to receive them. And then the hungry lord of all rangers of the skies, that oppressor of enemies, endued with great strength, and moving with greatest celerity to achieve his end, closed his mouth, killing innumerable Nishadas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... corner. The hour was eight o'clock. Homefarers and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the buildings to his left he looked down a cleft that proclaimed itself another thoroughfare. The alley was dark except for one patch of light. Where there was light there were sure to be human beings. Where there were human beings after nightfall in San Antonio there might be ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... alternately, from hold to hold, with frightful precipices beneath them. As soon as Ormond had warmed to the business, he was delighted with the dangerous pursuit; but suddenly, just as he had laid his hand on the egg, and that King Corny shouted in triumph, Harry, leaping back across the cleft in the rock, missed his footing and fell, and must have been dashed to pieces, but for a sort of projecting landing-place, on which he was caught, where he lay for some minutes stunned. The terror of poor Corny was such that he could neither move nor look up, till ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... mountains shook at his voice. Then he commanded his companions, and they charged upon us all together: we also charged upon them: the fires rose and the smoke ascended, the hearts of the combatants were almost cleft asunder, and the battle raged. The birds fought in the air; and the wild beasts in the dust; and I contended with Ed-Dimiryat until he wearied me and I wearied him; after which my companions and troops were enervated, and my tribes were routed. I flew from before ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... had made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was visible but, more often, there was nothing to be seen but the broad back of a wave, on which, for a time, the boat tossed before sinking down once more. The roll was scarcely noticeable, for the boat kept at the same angle all the time and cleft her way through the waves. The motion was comfortable and soothing to the mind; quite unlike the violent lunging ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... dark-haired daughters. Greece, too, had her representatives, to remind the spectators that there had been an Orpheus. There were flutes of the Doric and of the Phrygian mode, and—let us forget not—the Tyrrhenian trumpet, with its brazen-cleft pavilion. But by far the greater part of his musical relics he had acquired during his stay in Italy. He could show the litui with their carved clarions—the twisted cornua—the tuba, a trumpet so long and taper,—the concha wound ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... whose adolescence had been languid and who had never known a woman with a fling, a perfume, or a moue (there had been only a common-sense-heeled co-ed of his law-school days and the rather plump little sister-in-law of Leo's), the dawn of Josie cleft open something in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions that stung his eyeballs. He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of her apartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light—flight-woodcock coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... with a steamy shiver: Each dip of the road is now a crystal lake, And every rut a little dancing river. Through great soft clouds that sunder overhead The deep sky breaks as pearly blue as summer: Out of a cleft beside the river's bed Flaps the black crow, the first demure newcomer. The last seared drifts are eating fast away With glassy tinkle into glittering laces: Dogs lie asleep, and little children play With tops and marbles in the sunbare places; And I that stroll with ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... his figure making no silhouette against the dark disc of the cave's mouth. And afterwards, as he moves along the cliff, keeping close in, its shadow effectually conceals him from their view. But still safer is he from being observed by them, after having ensconced himself in a cleft of rock; which he does while their backs are turned ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after age Knows and names ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... calves head being cleft and cleansed, and also the brains, boil the head very white and fine, then boil the brains with some sage and other sweet herbs, as tyme and sweet marjoram, chop and boil them in a bag, being boil'd put them out and ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... escape of the smoke. The roof, however, was a more effectual covering, than Mr. Birkbeck had generally experienced, as it protected him and his party very tolerably from a drenching night. Two bedsteads, formed of unhewn logs, and cleft boards laid across; two chairs, (one of them without a bottom,) and a low stool, were all the furniture possessed by this numerous family. A string of buffalo-hide, stretched across the hovel, was a wardrobe for ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... twain by the energy of the Sudarsana it fell like the city of Tripura shaken by the shafts of Maheswara. And after the town of Saubha had fallen, the discus came back into my hands. And taking it up I once more hurled it with force saying, "Go thou unto Salwa." The discus then cleft Salwa in twain who in that fierce conflict was at the point of hurling a heavy mace. And with its energy it set the foe ablaze. And after that brave warrior was slain, the disheartened Danava women fled in all ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... leap brought him to close quarters. The heavy ax whistled through the air in a single mighty stroke that cleft the Centaurian's frail body nearly ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... of a cleft, sat he—majestical Pan! Ivy drooped wanton, kissed his head, moss cushioned his hoof; All the great God was good in the eyes grave-kindly—the curl Carved on the bearded cheek, amused at a mortal's awe As, under the ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... found the rhinoceros, an animal less than the elephant but larger than the buffalo. It has a horn upon its nose, about a cubit in length; this horn is solid, and cleft through the middle. The rhinoceros fights with the elephant, runs his horn into his belly,[53] and carries him off upon his head; but the blood and the fat of the elephant running into his eyes and making him blind, he falls to the ground; and then, strange to relate, the roc comes and carries ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... the more usual phase figured by authors, where the plasmodiocarp is simply compressed but not extravagantly thin. Both types occur in the western mountains, forms with and without calcium, fissured by wider or narrower cleft, from the same plasmodium; forms bilabiate and forms opening at first to display an inner peridium; forms globose with narrow base, but apex cleft, and forms ellipsoidal, yet compressed, opening like the gaping of some tiniest bivalve; ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... lines on a face grey beneath the great brown hood of his duffle—a face so youthful, yet with the knowledge of the command of men writ plain thereon. The propellers have swirled faithfully and unceasingly; the good ship in consequence has cleft the passive waves. But who knows what hideous lurking peril of mine or torpedo we have not survived, what baleful eye has not glowered at us, itself unseen, and retired again to its foul underworld, baulked of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... pick a sallet another while, which is not amiss to cool a man's stomach this hot weather. And I think this word 'sallet' was born to do me good; for many a time, but for a sallet, my brain-pain had been cleft with a brown bill; and many a time, when I have been dry and bravely marching, it hath served me instead of a quart pot to drink in; and now the word 'sallet' must ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... Doraine swung around and pointed straight for the cleft in the shore. The ship, two miles out, had responded to the insidious pressure of the current and was being drawn toward the rocks,—at first so slowly that there was scarcely a ripple off her bows; then, as she lumbered onward, she began to turn over ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... him, he took from them a Davidian suit of manifold rings and close-meshed, which he donned, and he baldrick'd himself with a scymitar of Hindi steel, hadst thou smitten therewith a cliff it had cleft it in twain or hadst thou stricken a hill it had been laid level as a plain; and he hent in hand a Rudaynian lance[FN391] of Khatt Hajar, whose length was thirty ells and upon whose head sat a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... tramped, peering delightedly under bushes for the green suits and red caps of the Clan Shee, and every cleft of rock became the portal to a fairy dwelling. At sunset he discovered a fairy battle in the clouds and when the moon rose, silhouettes, fairy-like and frail, scudded mystically across the face of it. Old Gaffer Moon, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood. Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the sea, it swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay window in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Afghan; who, however, continued to struggle gallantly. At length the Brigadier for a moment got the uppermost. Still retaining in his left hand the weapon of his enemy, he dealt him with his right a cut from his own sabre, which cleft his skull from his crown to the eyebrows. The Mohammedan once shouted "Ne Ullah!" (O God!) and never moved or ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the best blood of Milan, the gay and brave young men, after marching in the pride of their strength to hold the Alpine passes and bar Austria from Italy while the fight went on below, were struck by a sudden paralysis. They hung aloft there like an arm cleft from the body. Weapons, clothes, provisions, money, the implements of war, were withheld from them. The Piedmontese officers despatched to watch their proceedings laughed at them like exasperating senior ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... phase of her personality was uppermost as she sought in the trunk for something to wear, and a smile curved the corners of her straight lips and brought out a faint cleft in her square chin, as she ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... once," said Dave in a very low tone, "but, behind you, through the fork in the cleft rock, the Man with the Haunting Face is staring this way. Be ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... a gully at the foot of a certain spur of the mountains, called the Red Cleft. Now, at that time I knew very little of geology. I know more now. Also, I had had but little experience in mining; and, moreover, whenever I mentioned Red Ridge I was simply laughed at by my mates. I was laughed out of giving the ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... great a need as to be commercially profitable at once. That will be well, and we shall all be glad. But who will build the Mills House for lonely girls and women who cannot pay seven or eight dollars a week, and would not go to the Woman's Hotel if they could? The social cleft between Madison Avenue and Bleecker Street is too wide to be bridged by the best intentions of a hotel company. I doubt if they would know where to go in that strange up-town country. When as an immigrant I paid two dollars a day for board that was not worth fifty cents, in a ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... less terrible than Juliet's vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she reaches her father's dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the core, and Rose Mary lies in her last ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the chart, the doleful chart; See where these mountains meet— The clouds are thick around their head, The mists around their feet: Cast anchor here; 'tis deep and safe Within the rocky cleft; The little anchor on the right, The ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... conciliate an order by the bribery of a few hundreds of its members, whose very names were as yet unknown. To keep the people faithful to the coalition was a much more difficult task. It was soon patent to all that the agitators had not been wrong in supposing that a serious cleft had opened between the late allies, and in the war of words with which the Forum was soon filled, Memmius seems to have been no match for his opponent. Crassus surpassed himself, and the keen but humorous invective with which he held Memmius up to the ridicule of his ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... cast-iron filagree wall of her den, she turned quickly round ready to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes, and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... chamber almost as large as the one which we occupy; while beyond that again there are other passages and chambers—seven of the latter in all—communicating with each other, and ending in a long, tortuous cleft forming a passage which leads out there, behind those bushes. But it is the last chamber of all, the one nearest in this direction, that is the marvel. Unlike the others—all rock chambers—the one about which I am ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... of thunder cleft the air around her, 'Lina could not have started up sooner than she did. The convict took his eyes away from her, pitying her so much, while Densie's bony hand was raised as if to thrust her off, and Densie's voice exclaimed: "Not this, not ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... for a long while talking, as schoolboys will talk, in a sheltered cleft of the headland, which, I believe, had once been a cavern, and was known by the name of the Kierfiold Helyer. Here the force of many an Atlantic storm had so worn away the face of the rocks that the cliff was driven back to the innermost parts of the original cave. Great pieces ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... And yet a deep cleft separates the American declarations from the English enactments that have been mentioned. The historian of the American Revolution says of the Virginia declaration that it protested against all tyranny in the name of the eternal laws of man's being: "The English petition of right in 1688 was historic ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... what was worse, only half warm, not to mention that sometimes his bed had not been arranged for two days together. Waverley's mind involuntarily turned to the Patmos of the Baron of Bradwardine, who was well pleased with Janet's fare and a few bunches of straw stowed in a cleft in the front of a sand-cliff; but he made no remarks upon a contrast which could ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... branches Rustled in the breeze of morning, Saying, with a sigh of patience, 25 "Take my cloak, O Hiawatha!" With his knife the tree he girdled; Just beneath its lowest branches, Just above the roots, he cut it, Till the sap came oozing outward; 30 Down the trunk, from top to bottom, Sheer he cleft the bark asunder, With a wooden wedge he raised it, Stripped it from the trunk unbroken. "Give me of your boughs, O Cedar! 35 Of your strong and pliant branches, My canoe to make more steady, Make more strong and firm beneath me!" Through the summit of the Cedar Went a sound, a cry of horror, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... sure to find, two or three little round openings pierced in it, and through these emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower[31] whose small dark, purple-fringed bell hangs down and shudders over the icy cleft that it has cloven, as if partly wondering at its own recent grave, and partly dying of very fatigue after its hard won victory; we shall be, or we ought to be, moved by a totally different impression of loveliness from that which we receive among the dead ice and the idle clouds. There is ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... affairs of love, so I answered her reprovingly. "Kisses have no causes," said I; "I will kiss Guelph-wise; I will kiss Ghibelline-wise; I will kiss Red; I will kiss Yellow; it's all one to me, so long as the mouth be like yours, as pink as a cleft pomegranate, and the teeth as white ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... was provided with a stick cleft at one end and pointed at the other. In the cleft was stuck a square of white card-board on which was printed the contestant's name, Colonel Bogey's record for the course, the contestant's handicap, and the sum ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... gives to his mother 'to throw away the worser part of her cleft heart,' Pietro ridicules ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... the gayest and most costly attire, was fattened on the choicest food, and carefully kept in ignorance of his doom. When he was fat enough, they bound him to a cross in the presence of the multitude, danced a solemn dance, then cleft his head with a tomahawk and shot him with arrows. According to one trader, the squaws then cut pieces of flesh from the victim's body, with which they greased their hoes; but this was denied by another trader who had been present at the ceremony. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the two horses, bending their strength sturdily to the task, had pressed up the massive slope from the deep cleft of the gorge. As the road curved about the outer verge of the mountain, the valley far beneath came into view, with intersecting valleys and transverse ranges, dense with the growths of primeval wildernesses, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... other kinds of plants, but apple, peach and general propagation methods failed to give success in the budding and grafting of pecans. I concluded the method must be all right but that I should be more exact about my mechanical manipulations. I started out with the ordinary cleft graft commonly used for top-working most sorts of trees. I experimented in several different orchards and put in hundreds of cleft grafts. I took great pains to make my work as mechanically perfect as possible. All conditions of stock, scions, weather, etc., seemed to promise the highest ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... had stood looking around at the huge broken slabs of granite and speculating upon the oddness of the formation, while their conversation had taken on an academic flavor as they discussed the nebular and glacial theories. They had discovered at the bottom of a great cleft in the rock, a spring of sparkling water, so cold that it was impossible to drink it without frequent pauses. They had named the place "The Saucer," had eaten their lunch there. He remembered how beautiful she had looked as she talked in carefree animation and he had taken ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... your Grace, from out your store, Give an alms to one that's poor, That your mickle may have more. Black I'm grown for want of meat Give me then an ant to eat, Or the cleft ear of a mouse Over-sour'd in drink of souce; Or, sweet lady, reach to me The abdomen of a bee; Or commend a cricket's hip, Or his huckson, to my scrip. Give for bread a little bit Of a pea that 'gins to chit, And my full thanks take for it. Flour of fuzz-balls, that's too ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... bless boatman and senator. In the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the divine halo around her. But if from this picture in ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... a thick, concave, horny plate that forms the sole. At the heels and between the bars is a wedge-shaped mass of rather soft horny tissue that projects forward into the sole. This is the foot pad or horny frog. It is divided into two lateral portions by a medium cleft. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... high up the hills, The white snow sifts their columns deep, While through the canyon's riven cleft From there, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... our rock, and Amroth led the way, through a long cleft, with rocks, very rough and black, on either side, and fallen fragments under foot. It was steep at first; but soon the rocks grew lower; and we came out presently on to a great desolate plain, with ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that cover the plain; and the view is bounded by the Adriatic, which, like a thin line of blue, runs along the horizon. On the south and west is the hill country of the Apennines, among whose serrated peaks and cleft sides is many a lovely dell, rich in waters, and vines, and olive trees. The distant country towards the Mediterranean lay engulphed in a white mist. A violent electrical action was going on in it, which, like a strong wind moving upon its surface, raised it into billows, which appeared to ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... back across the Jordan to the company of their friends, amidst the thanksgivings of the people. But, alas! for the prophet himself, this would have been his loss, even had it proved to be their gain. The opening Jordan, cleft in twain by his rapt spirit, pressing its way to the skies, had returned to its course; and now the fords of the river, with its rocky bed, would have required his laboring feet to grope their way back ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... out and, falling on one another, we stuck to the cleft, in the wooden walls of the hallway, leading to the yard. We did not have to wait long. . . . . . . . Soon Tanya passed with a quick pace, skipping over the plashes of melted snow and mud. Her face looked troubled. She disappeared behind the cellar door. Then the soldier went there slowly and whistling. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... and beautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi- articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her own personality, for the time being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from god was swept away; and the Divine rushed ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... tension, he made a step in advance, and threw himself forward into the dark and fearful void. Who can tell the whirlwind of thought that rushed through his brain in the brief moment that he hung above that yawning gulf? Should he have miscalculated his distance, or chosen a place where the cleft was widest—should his footing fail, or his strength be unequal to carry him over, what a death were his! Dashed down that horrible abyss—crashing from rock to rock, until he lay at the bottom a mutilated corpse. The agony of years was ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... Methought I was inspired by the grand master-spirit; my pirogue bounded along the troubled waters of the ocean as if it possessed wings. One would have said that I had twenty rowers at my disposal, and I cleft the waves with the same rapidity as the halcyon's flight, when wafted away by the hurricane. After a short time's laborious and painful rowing I at last came in view of the corsairs who were carrying away my treasure. At the sight my strength was renewed ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... flooding that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of sound. Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods. As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and over me; but ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft, Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft." Inferno: Canto XXVIII. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... I studied that spring with new and awakened eyes. It was round and very deep, and the water bulged up in great greenish swirls. The outlet was a narrow little cleft through which the water flowed slowly, as though it did not want to take its freedom. The rush and roar came from the ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... thing most wondrous to tell. In far-away France an awful darkness came down upon the land; a great whirlwind swept the face of the country; the rain fell, the earth rocked, and the thunder rolled along the sky. For a long time the darkness was unbroken, save when the lightning cleft the storm-clouds and gave to the scene a yet wilder fear. On all there came a mighty dread, and they deemed the end of the world at hand. They knew not that it was an augury of the fateful tragedy at the ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... most beautiful view of the Stony Clove. The high and narrow cleft opens to the south, and I thought of loved ones ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... thought was that if he had received a shock it could not be comparable to that which she now felt. It could not be that the letter had fallen on his heart like a sword, severing it. Althea's heart seemed cleft in twain. Gerald—Franklin—it seemed to pulse, horribly divided and horribly bleeding. Looking still at Gerald's face, pallid, absorbed, far from any thought of her, anger surged up in her, and not ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... skeletons wonderfully complete,' all radiating from a centre, faces upwards, feet inwards; a 'radiation' not of Light, but of the Nether Darkness rather; and evidently the fruit of battle; for 'many of the heads were cleft, or had arrow-holes in them,' The Battle of Fornham, therefore, is a fact, though a forgotten one; no less obscure than undeniable,—like ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... a view of its farther side; and seated in a lofty cleft, beheld a lonely fisherman; solitary as a seal on an iceberg; his ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the anticipated pleasure of meeting and entertaining him, a man of common appearance approached along the road, and when he came to where the farmer was, stood still and looked at him until he had finished cutting the log, and was preparing to lift the cleft pieces ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... little man inserted his heel in the cleft, but, on attempting to pull his foot from the boot, he nearly went heels over head backward. Murphy caught him and put him on his legs again. "Heads up, soldiers," exclaimed Murtough; "I thought you ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... a loud growl. The panther had seized him; and then we saw it go bounding back up the rocks, grappling and gathering up the dog in its mouth, at every leap. Climbing still higher, it gained a projecting ledge, along which it ran to a great cleft, or fissure, seventy or eighty feet above the path. There ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... refusal of George to grant Catholic Emancipation, and the consequent resignation of Pitt in the spring of 1801, we may trace three sinister results. The Union with Ireland was bereft of its natural sequel, Catholic Emancipation; the Ministerial ranks were cleft in twain; and the crisis brought to the front Addington, a man utterly incapable of confronting Napoleon. Had Pitt remained in power, the Peace of Amiens would have been less one-sided, its maintenance more ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... man answered, his voice being a bit muffled because his head was hanging over the cliff. "My foot is caught in a cleft in the rocks, and I'm afraid to move for fear it will pull loose. If it does I'll lose my balance and topple, for I'm hanging more than half-way over this cliff now. And it doesn't look like a good place ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... is responsible for the strange story of Minerva—how Jupiter commanded Vulcan to split open his skull with a sharp axe, and how the warlike virgin leaped in full maturity from the cleft in the brain, thoroughly armed and ready for deeds of martial daring, brandishing her glittering weapons with fiery energy, and breaking at once into the wild Pyrrhic dance. We refer to this myth, bearing, as it doubtless does, an important moral in its bosom, as suggestive of the sudden and gigantic ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all round them—the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the mountains, in that section where head the Roaring Fork, One Horse Creek, and the Del Oro, is a vast tract of wild, untraveled country known vaguely as the Bad Lands. Somewhere among the thousand and one canyons which cleft the huddled hills lay hidden Dead Man's Cache. Here Black MacQueen retreated on those rare occasions when the pursuit grew hot on his tracks. So the current ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... reached the desired spot. It proved to be the body of a man who had died by violence. His dress and person denoted that of a passenger rather than that of a seaman, and he had evidently been dead but a very few hours, probably not twelve. The cut of a sabre had cleft his skull. Agreeing not to acquaint the ladies with this horrible discovery, the body was hastily covered with the sand, the pockets of the dead man having been first examined; for, contrary to usage, his person had not been stripped. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... my nostrils and sounding in my ears; but, being in water, I was safe if it were but deep enough. Presently I struck out, and, with a stroke or two, came to the surface. But no sooner did my head show above, and I draw a deep breath or twain, looking for my enemy, than an arbalest bolt cleft the water with a clipping sound, missing me but narrowly. I had but time to see that there was a tumult on the bridge, and swords out (the Scots, as I afterwards heard, knocking up the arbalests that the French soldiers levelled at me). Then I dived again, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... (uncertain) 475; delicate, ticklish, critical; beset with difficulties, full of difficulties, surrounded by difficulties, entangled by difficulties, encompassed with difficulties. under a difficulty; in a box; in difficulty, in hot water, in the suds, in a cleft stick, in a fix, in the wrong box, in a scrape &c n., in deep water, in a fine pickle; in extremis; between two stools, between Scylla and Charybdis; surrounded by shoals, surrounded by breakers, surrounded ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Julie had said, the spring that fed the boggy spot was not far back in the grove. The water gurgled down from a cleft in a huge rock, and on either side of the small pool wood violets dipped their fragrant petals into ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... a golden blur, And the small stars followed after her, But when the fireflies cleft the air I saw those three forms standing there, Until the night cooled, and the trees Shook in the strong hands of the breeze, And then I heard their footsteps press The muffled grass beyond the door, And so went forth for ever more, My three Fates ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... cloudless, the sun unusually warm. So warm, indeed, that long clefts, caused by the unequal expansion of the ice, appeared here and there. The man from the plane had not gone more than fifty yards when he halted sharply. With a crack like thunder, a cleft had opened at his very feet—a rift ten feet deep in places, apparently bottomless in others, and very long. Not wanting to go around it, he slid down one side and, with an ice pick, started to hack a foothold in the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... it sounded as if sixty piles of wood were all being sawn at the same time; then a cleft opened in the water which went down to the bottom of the sea, and there, wedged between three stones, stood a black box, which sang and played and tinkled and jingled, close to the eel-mother and her son, who hastily disappeared in the lowest depths ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... and break off small pieces about the size of a walnut and roll them round. Either put them on a tin close together, to be broken apart, or an inch or two from each other, in which case work in a little more flour, and cut a cleft on the top, and once more set to rise; half an hour will be long enough generally, but in this case you must judge for yourself, they sometimes take an hour; if they look swelled very much and smooth they will be ready. Have a nice hot oven, and bake ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen
... reminded of the object he had picked up and still carried. He looked at it now, and found that it was a heavy stick which must have been thrust firmly into the center of the path in the woods; one end of it was split, and into the cleft had been thrust a bit of folded paper—brown paper, he noted, of cheap quality, but what really took his eye as he drew it free was his own name in typewritten letters on ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... forest by a Kaskaskia Indian, probably bribed by a British trader. And as Pontiac lurched among the black shadows of the trees, his pursuer crept up behind him, and with a swift stroke of the tomahawk cleft his skull. Thus by a treacherous blow ended the career of a warrior whose ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... numbers and a variety of kinds of walnut-trees in this country. There is a very large kind, the wood of which is almost as black as ebony, but very porous. The fruit, with the outer shell, is of the size of a large hen's egg: the shell has no cleft, is very rough and so hard as to require a hammer to break it. Though the fruit be very relishing, yet it is covered with such a thick film, that few can bestow the pains of separating the one from ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... her, "is everything, the aim, the loyalty, the great surrender. Beside this failure is nothing at all. Do you say that the sapling fails that springs out of a cleft rock and towers—seeking, as we all seek, the sun, the light in heaven? A gale gathers it up and tears it out: over it goes, and lies shattered. Is that failure? How can it be ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... running into the petal. Wherefore it bears so formidable a name has not yet transpired. The flower consists of three petals, the calix three; it belongs to the class and order Hexandria monogynia; style, three-cleft; seed-vessel of three valves; soil, dry woods and cleared lands; leaves growing in three, springing from the joints, large round, but a little ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... breastplate, of fine temper made, Nor Corban's helmet, forged by magic art, Could save their owners, for Lord Dudon's blade Cleft Corban's head, and pierced Algazar's heart, And their proud souls down to the infernal shade, From Amurath and Mahomet depart; Not strong Argantes thought his life was sure, He could not safely fly, nor ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... man rose like a tower on board, Stood at the helm and cleft the flood profound: But the calm hero, leaning on his sword, Gazed back, and would not offer one ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... strength to meet the horrors of the underworld, Hercules traveled on to Peloponnesus, and to the Laconian city of Taenarus, which contained the opening to the lower world. Here, accompanied by Mercury, he descended through a cleft in the earth, and came to the entrance of the city of King Pluto. The shades which sadly wandered back and forth before the gates of the city took flight as soon as they caught sight of flesh and blood in the form of a living man. Only the Gorgon Medusa and the spirit of Meleager remained. The ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... thanks to Santa Lucia (type of God's grace), he has in sleep been conveyed to the very entrance of Purgatory. Gazing at the high cliffs which encircle the mountain, Dante now perceives a deep cleft, through which he and Virgil arrive at a vast portal (the gate of penitence), to which three huge steps of varying color and size afford access. At the top of these steps, on a diamond threshold, sits the Angel of Absolution with his flashing sword. Challenged by this ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Arnauld de l'Ariege to that of Rue de Petit-Repisoir, Viguier to that of the Rue Pagevin, Versigny to that of the Rue Joigneaux; Dupont de Bussac to that of the Carre Saint Martin; Carlos Forel and Boysset to that of the Rue Rambuteau. Doutre received a sword-cut on his head, which cleft his hat; Bourzat had four balls in his overcoat; Baudin was killed; Gaston Dussoubs was ill and could not come; his brother, Denis Dussoubs, replaced him. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... impressive about this towering natural wall, which seemed to shut off whatever lay beyond the gaze of man, as though it veiled an ancient mystery. Indeed, the aspect of it thrilled me, I knew not why. I observed, however, that at one point in the mighty cliff there seemed to be a narrow cleft down which, no doubt, lava had flowed in a remote age, and it occurred to me that up this cleft ran a roadway, probably a continuation of that by which we had threaded the swamp. The fact that through my glasses I could see herds of cattle grazing on the slopes of the mountain went to confirm ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... in a small room at the back of the house. Through the wide-flung French windows was a vista of terraced walks, the two sunken tennis lawns, a walled garden leading into an orchard, and beyond, the great wood-hung cleft in the hills, on either side of which the pastoral fields, like little squares, stretched away upwards. From here there was no trace of the more barren, unkinder side of the moorland. The succession of rich colours merged ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... yonder cleft i' the rock should serve for to-night. Howbeit I'll go look." So I limped across the beach to where showed a great fissure in the cliff hard beside a lofty tree; being come within this cleft I found it narrow suddenly, and at the end a small cave very ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... been reading in the book, the setting sun was shining through a cleft in the clouds piled up in the west; and a shadow as of a large distorted hand, with thick knobs and humps on the fingers, so that it was much wider across the fingers than across the undivided part of the hand, passed slowly ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... taking off his glasses and readjusting them on his well-shaped nose; "see those magnificent rocks—sepia and cobalt; and that cleft in the hills running down to the shore—ultra marine; and what a flood of crimson glory ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... my father was wont to pile up his gold pieces." "Plunge," said they, "thy hand right to the bottom that none escape thee." Cloderic bent forward, and one of the envoys lifted his battle-axe and cleft his skull. Clovis went to Cologne and convoked the Franks of the canton. "Learn," said he, "that which hath happened. As I was sailing on the river Scheldt, Cloderic, son of my relative, did vex his father, saying I was minded to slay him; and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... small. Quantities of heavy black hair rippled away from a forehead which would have been square if the hair had not grown down in a point like a Marie Stuart cap. Her chin was pointed, with a deep cleft in the middle, and the dimples Nevill had praised flashed suddenly into being, as if a ray of sunshine had touched her ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... from a cleft in the sand hills, half a mile from the house; the light being so arranged that it could not be seen from Brownsea Island, though visible to those on the south side, from Studland right away over the hills to Corfe Castle, even to Wareham. It was ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... inhospitable region, whose wild and desolate aspect seemed to attract their imaginations. Huge mountains of ice here rose against the northern sky, from which the smoke of volcanoes rolled balefully up; and the large tracts of lava, which had descended from them to the sea, were cleft into fearful abysses, where no bottom could be found. Here were strange, desolate valleys, with beds of pure sulphur, torn and overhanging precipices, gigantic caverns, and fountains of boiling water, which, mingled with flashing fires, soared up into the air, amid the undergroans ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the slide. They penetrated by their thickest extremities no less than from eighteen to twenty-four feet into the earth; and one of the trees having by accident struck against another, it instantly cleft it through its whole length, as if it had ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... draw aside a little, and set herself to watch this severe struggle, in the course of which the Biscayan smote Don Quixote a mighty stroke on the shoulder over the top of his buckler, which, given to one without armour, would have cleft him to the waist. Don Quixote, feeling the weight of this prodigious blow, cried aloud, saying, "O lady of my soul, Dulcinea, flower of beauty, come to the aid of this your knight, who, in fulfilling his obligations to your beauty, finds himself in this extreme ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... cast, and time and again was he baffled by the elusive peg. Nor could Gus do better. Taking advantage of inequalities in the surface, they scrambled twenty feet up the Dome and found they could rest in a shallow crevice. The cleft side of the Dome was so near that they could look over its edge from the crevice and gaze down the smooth, vertical wall for nearly two thousand feet. It was yet too dark down below for them to ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... hours' time the sea had fallen so, that a fishing-lugger came round a headland from a mile farther west, to where the "Flash" lay fast wedged in a cleft, and amidst the cheers of the great crowd, now gathered, Captain Trevor was taken from his dangerous position, while the news was brought, that the three boats had reached the great bay to the east, without the ...
— The Little Skipper - A Son of a Sailor • George Manville Fenn
... a man who knows exactly where he is and whither he is going, the man-at-arms began to clamber up a narrow fern-lined cleft among the rocks. It was no easy ascent in the darkness, but Simon climbed on like an old dog hot upon a scent, and the panting Aylward struggled after as best he might. At last they were at the summit and the archer threw himself down upon ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ages, cleft for me," and proceed to cleave the rock of each other's character. They cast one eye heavenward in prayer, while with the other they watch the other side to see that ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... those before the 3 lamellated joints short, transverse. Maxillary palpi with the terminal joint dilated, rather blunt at the tip, depressed above, and hollowed out at its base. Legs rather thick, the outer of the two tarsal claws of the third pair of legs, cleft at the end, anterior tibiae externally sub-tridentate. Thorax with the sides somewhat angulated and narrowly margined, rounded behind, but the sides of the posterior margin are straight, the surface is minutely punctured and covered with brown hairs, the sternum of the mesothorax is ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... men reached the mountain range which is a continuation of the great Quathlamba or Drakensberg chain, and saw great frowning precipices rise over steep slopes covered with dense forest. One long winding valley, overhung by precipitous cliffs, cleft the range, and through this the guides led them. At the head of the valley the range was slightly depressed, and a saddle was thus formed between two high peaks. Elevated tablelands, gently sloping to the north-west, and intersected by narrow, shallow valleys, stretched away from ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... dense foliage was cleft; there opened a broad alley between drooping boughs, and in the deep hollow, bordered with sand and stones, a flood rolled eastward. This river is now called Sinno; it was the ancient Sins, whereon stood the city of the same name. In the seventh century ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... to be on the sides of Kinchinjunga and on the top of Junnoo, as seen from the Choonjerma pass (Chapter XI, plate); but it is sometimes very conspicuous, and nowhere more than in the descent of the Grimsel towards Meyringen, where the granite on the east flank of that magnificent gorge seems cleft into parallel nearly vertical strata.] sloping to the west; the colour of all which above 20,000 feet, and the rounded knobbed form of the summit, suggest a granitic formation. Lofty snowed ridges project from Kubra into the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was afterwards soon dug out of the ground; which had been particularly noted to be plain and level, and ploughed just before; but where it was now found to have made a great fissure, or cleft, an ell wide, whilst it singed the earth ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King
... had been removed, and the sheep easily ran down its now sloping and grassy sides. In close proximity was a deep well, over the top of which had been placed a huge, flat stone. Overshadowing both cellar and well were three ancient elms, storm-beaten and lightning-cleft, but still standing as if to guard the very solitude which was unbroken save by the tinkling bell, which told whither the farmer's flock was straying. From Mr. Thompson I learned the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... the Green Mountains and the shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal a kiss from the mountain-maid at parting. It was one of those primitive taverns where ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... infirmities, our failures; and if he succeeds in this, gloom will fill us, doubts and fears will spring up within us, and we shall soon fail and fall. We must be wise as the conies, and build our nest in the cleft of the Rock ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... else, I guess. Well, see here. This is how it stands. To a certain extant, I don't mind admitting, seeing that we're being frank with one another, you two gentlemen have got us—that's to say, my employer—in a cleft stick. Frankly, those articles are beginning to attract attention, and if they go on there's going to be a lot of inconvenience for my employer. That's clear, I reckon. Well, now, here's a square proposition. How much do you want ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Kalevide reached the rocky portal, a voice was heard from heaven, "Strike the rock with thy fist!" He did so, and clove open the rock, and his right hand was caught in the cleft. Here he sits now on his horse at the gates of Porgu, watching the bonds of others while bound himself. The demons attempt unceasingly to soften their chains by heaping up charcoal faggots around them, but when ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... sunlight, which lit to the westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... He knew that he had a wide-ranging adversary to deal with. But he himself was a wide ranger, and acquainted with every cleft and crevice of Lost Mountain. He would find the great wolf's lair, and set his traps accordingly, one in the runway, to be avoided if the wolf was as clever as he ought to be, and a couple of others a little ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... not return by the way by which he came, he must needs go through the second, and this is yet more narrow and difficult than the first. Into this plain, therefore, the Romans marched with their whole army through a cleft in the rocks—that is to say, through the first pass; but when they came to the second, they found it shut with the trunks of trees and great stones. And now the stratagem of the enemy became manifest, and at the same time also there was seen on ...
— Stories From Livy • Alfred Church
... widely different aspect. At last she came to a stream which flowed over a bed of lava, and between banks of lava, with great rapidity and a rushing, roaring sound. At one point the river-bed was cleft through its centre, to the depth of eighteen or twenty feet, by a chasm from fifteen to eighteen feet wide, into which the waters pour with considerable violence. A bridge in the middle of the river spans this rift, and the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... Crag. I found no opening in the face of the rock, except one—apparently a rabbit hole—near a rent in the boulder. Climbing around the rock, however, I noticed that a large, flat stone lay in a rather unexpected position on a narrow cleft. I removed it, and saw that it covered the entrance to a dark hollow. At the same moment I heard a slight rustle behind me, as some animal darted from the hole I had previously examined. I scrambled down into the chamber, and there, when my eyes had become accustomed ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... at Strumitza station, where he defeated the Bulgarians and so assured himself of possession of Demir Kapu defile, a cleft in the mountains ten miles in length and from which, had they held it, the Bulgarians could easily, with a comparatively small force, have prevented any further advance. Having secured this pass, Sarrail ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... fimbriate with hairs; palea of the third glume short and deeply cleft, fourth ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... which seemed to show how beautiful a tree may be if left to itself. The main stem was certainly split from the root to the crown, and the storm had bowed the noble tree a little; but it stood firm for all that, and from every cleft into which wind and weather had carried a portion of earth, grasses and flowers sprang forth: especially near the top, where the great branches parted, a sort of hanging garden had been formed of wild raspberry bush, and even a small ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and onward the chariot flies, The small flashes large to my dizzy eyes. What is cleft in twain, seems to blur and mate; What is crooked in nature, seems to be straight. Things at my side in an instant appear Distant, and things in ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... he was only halfway to the center, and he was nearly exhausted. At a dozen different spots he thought he had found a promising cleft in the rock, a place where something might have been concealed ... but exploration of the clefts ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... and the gold myrobalan, With copper-leaved vibhitikas. All these Crowded the wood; and many a crag it held, With precious ore of metals interveined; And many a creeper-covered cave wherein The spoken word rolled round; and many a cleft Where the thick stems were like a wall to see; And many a winding stream and reedy jheel, And glassy lakelet, where the woodland beasts In free peace gathered. Wandering onward thus, The Princess ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... to be the man to incur your wrath. By the powers above! what a fierce reception you gave those rascals yonder. It was lucky for them that poor Matamore's sword had no edge. If it had been sharp and pointed, you would have cleft them from head to heels, clean in two, as the ancient knight-errants did the ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... considering what peculiar advantages are offered for the display of grand and stately architecture by the passage of a river through the midst of a great city. It seems, indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft open for the mere purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... town, and the clatter of the mules slipping and stumbling on the cobble stones brought but few to the doors of the low-built houses. To enter Ronda from the south the traveller must traverse the Moorish town, which is divided from the Spanish quarter by a cleft in the great rock that renders the town impregnable to all attack. Having crossed the bridge spanning the great gorge into which the sun never penetrates even at midday, the party emerged into the broader streets of the more modern town, and, turning to the right through a high ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman |
