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More "Impenetrable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... right rose the mountain wall, dark with pine and spruce, though here and there a flaming service-berry or a hawthorn broke through the evergreens like sudden fire. The tangle of trees and shrubs seemed impenetrable, and yet Virginia had told of a trail which led from the creek not three rods from the ford—led up, up, up for five miles until it reached the ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... world is wild and passionate. Man's weary laughter and his sick despair Entreat at their impenetrable gate, They heed no voices in their ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the Sudan grasslands presents an unobstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south, between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pass commercial caravans, hybrid merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples, herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or looters ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... I understand that we must hope to see you at another time and elsewhere. That travellers in our country need an escort you would not wonder if you could see how the roads run, among lofty mountains shrouded in impenetrable forests. These give cover to hordes of brigands, who prey upon travellers and merchants, robbing and killing indifferently. Almost every month there are punitive raids made from the towns, and brigands are captured and put to death. But the pest ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... leading, and for quite half an hour they threaded their way in and out amongst the huge pillar-like trunks, which seemed to have grown closer together and looked as though if they were left undisturbed for a few years longer they would all join together and form an impenetrable wall. Then with the darkness seeming thicker than ever, they stopped short and stood hand ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... has his headquarters at Versailles, all as in a seat of war: clerks writing; significant staff-officers, inclined to taciturnity; plumed aides-de-camp, scouts, orderlies flying or hovering. He himself looks forth, important, impenetrable; listens to Besenval Commandant of Paris, and his warning and earnest counsels (for he has come out repeatedly on purpose), with a silent smile. (Besenval, iii. 398.) The Parisians resist? scornfully cry Messeigneurs. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... back as if she herself could have been seen, though she was quite invisible to them, for the screen, which was transparent to her eyes, was impenetrable to theirs. She remembered this, at length, and ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... were she would not greatly care. She was determined to assert her independence, and if she stooped to fib about the Hepburn picnic it was chiefly from the secretive instinct that made her dread the profanation of her happiness. Whenever she was with Lucius Harney she would have liked some impenetrable mountain mist to ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... and she skilfully avoided tete-a-tete talks with anyone other than Roger. Moreover, there was that in her manner which utterly forbade even the delicate probing of a friend. The Nan who was wont to be so frank and ingenuous—surprisingly so at times—seemed all at once to have retired behind an impenetrable ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... intimate acquaintance with the Pentateuch everywhere manifests itself; compare in proof of this the Dissertations on the Genuineness of the Pentateuch, i. p. 136 ff. There are too many instances, down to most recent times, of living piety breaking, in this respect, through almost impenetrable barriers, to allow us to consider this as a strange thing, and to make it necessary for us to excogitate the various ways and means by which Amos may have received this education. It is only on the lower ground of the mere forms of language, that the rank of Amos ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... that night the boat was moored to a tree on the eastern side of the stream, far-away from the haunts of civilised man, while Rob lay sleepless, listening to the strange and weird sounds which rose from the apparently impenetrable forest on the far-away ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... explore the dense wood which extended to the very edge of the shore, in search of the lovely country so enthusiastically described in the account written by Lord Anson's chaplain. How far were these enchanting descriptions from the truth! Impenetrable forests met him on every side, overgrown plants, briars, and tangled shrubs, at every step caught and tore his clothes. At the same time the explorers were attacked and stung by clouds of mosquitoes. Game was scarce and wild, the water detestable, the roadstead was never ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... down, down; each mountainous mass of water, as it reached the dreadful brink, recoiling, as in horror, from the abyss; and after rearing backward in helpless terror, as it were, hurling itself down to be shattered in the inevitable doom over which eternal clouds of foam and spray spread an impenetrable curtain. The mysterious chasm, with its uproar of voices, seemed like the watery mouth of hell. I looked and listened till the wild excitement of the scene took such possession of me that, but for the strong arm that held ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... in reality the effect of one or other of the passions, sometimes even those of the worst kind, and which a sound judgment would most condemn, and endeavour to extirpate.—Man is a stranger to nothing, more than to himself;—the recesses of his own heart, are no less impenetrable to him, than the worlds beyond the moon;—he is blinded by vanity, and agitated by desires he knows not he is ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... military glory; it did not dignify home, or the virtues of the family circle; it did not declare the folly of riches, or show that the love of money is a root of all evil. It made sensual pleasure and outward prosperity the great aims of successful ambition, and hid with an impenetrable screen from the eyes of men the fatal results of a worldly life, so that suicide itself came to be viewed as a justifiable way to avoid evils that are hard to be borne; in short, it was a religion which, though joyous, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... high for as much as half a mile at a stretch. At one moment the road would pass a dense banana plantation with the strange tall poles of the pawpaw trees standing sentinel, the next it would pass the dark recesses of a mangrove bay, where the sea ebbs and flows amid an impenetrable thicket of interlacing roots. And at frequent intervals a slight rise of ground would show the emerald sea beyond, gleaming as though lit with ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... ridges of the mountains. The first way is very difficult, and scarcely practicable, for in some parts the streams flow through narrow ravines, bordered on each side by perpendicular rocks, and occasionally their course is hidden amidst impenetrable forests. The other way, across the mountains, leads again into the Puna region, and from thence over the steep ridges of the Andes to their barren summits. Descending from these summits, we arrive on the sharp ridges of one of the many side branches of the Puna Cordillera, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... expecting to find in the packet some key to the interesting mystery which had sent Professor Farrago into the Everglades—I thrust the missive into my pocket and resumed a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... no mistaking the lady with the thick, impenetrable veil, nor her companion, whose heavy dark face was distinctly visible through the thin Indian gauze. Behind them walked the hideous negro, swinging his light cane jauntily, but beginning to cast angry glances at the two Russians, whom ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... secret affection drew me to the mysterious regions of the East and South,—towards Arabia, the wild Ishmael bequeathing sworded Korans and subtile Aristotles as legacies to the sons of the freed-woman,—to solemn Egypt, riddle of nations, the vast, silent, impenetrable mystery of the world. By continual pondering over the footsteps of the Seekers, the Sought-for seemed to grow to vast proportions, and the Found to shrink to inappreciable littleness. For me, over the dreary ice-plains of the Poles, over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... behind that impenetrable curtain, to learn why she hated her island. Never had he been so intrigued. Why, there was drama in the very dress she wore! There was drama in the unusual beauty of her, hidden away all these years ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... his eyes, therefore, when he saw the flame flicker and expire. His sight had surely deceived him. And now, since the light did not reappear, there must be some smoke wreath or impenetrable mist brooding about the tower's gray old head, and obscuring it from the lower world. But no! For right over the dim battlements, as the wind chased away a mass of clouds, he beheld a star, and moreover, by an earnest concentration of his sight, was soon able to discern even the darkened shrine ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was impenetrable, and at the end of his reading he turned back to read and re-read many pages, holding the book to the light, and seeming to examine ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... danger they were glad to breathe in the fresh air. If only the fog was thicker it might be of help to them; if they had only looked landward their hearts would have been lighter, for there in huge rolls of gray the fog was moving, thick, impenetrable, over the ground, and in a short time, probably not over a minute, the castle and the whole coast ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... already known to each other. Some needed introduction. Such introduction consumed a few minutes, even after the last had come and been checked off on the Master's list, in cipher code. The brightly lighted room, behind its impenetrable curtains, blued with tobacco-smoke; but no drop of wine ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Honeycombed everywhere with caves and passages leading into darkness impenetrable. There were pits into which we might so easily have fallen; ravines to span, sometimes with a leap, sometimes by a long ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... without disaster to their corps d'armee, although they had been constantly beaten. The rigor of the season had prevented those grand concentrations of forces and those brilliant strokes in which Napoleon ordinarily delighted; the troops advanced with difficulty through impenetrable forests, soaked by the rain: the men fell in great numbers without a battle. In the month of January, 1807, the emperor at last took up his winter-quarters, carefully fortifying his positions, and laying siege to the towns which still resisted him in Silesia. Breslau, Glogau, Brieg ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... form which had so recently appeared standing by her bedside. The same haggard countenance, the same awful appearance of murderous death. A faintness came upon her; she turned to flee to her chamber—the candle dropped from her trembling hand, and she was shrouded in impenetrable darkness. She groped to find the stairs: as she came near their foot, a black object, apparently in human shape, stood before her, with eyes which seemed to burn like coals of fire, and red flames issuing from its mouth. As she stood fixed a moment in inexpressible trepidation, a large ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... were rent by incessant flashes, or rather streams, of lightning. At one time they were piled up high in the sky, at another they descended to the earth, filling the air with a baleful darkness, more impenetrable than the obscurity of midnight. Wherever the hurricane passed, whole tracts of forest were shivered and stripped of their leaves and branches; and trees of gigantic size, which resisted the blast, were torn up by the roots and hurled to a great distance. Groves were torn from the mountain-precipices, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... shock to his sense of property in his child, that these people—the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them—should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... length of days. Thus the best ends of our mortal being are lost sight of; the solemn circumstances, the suggestive mysteries of life, are misconstrued. The heavens, which give a myriad hints of worlds beyond the grave, are, to many, impenetrable walls, shutting them in to mere pursuits of sense,—the upholstery of a workshop or bazaar; and this earth, which is but a step,—a filmy platform of our immortal course,—is to them the solid abiding place of all interest, and of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... felt himself the superior, intellectually and by nature, of most of the men he saw. He penetrated and comprehended them, but to them he was impenetrable; a certain air of authority rested upon him; he had abandoned the service of God; but the training whereby he had fitted himself for it stood him in good stead; it had developed his insight, his subtlety, and, strange to say, his powers of ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... preservation of their species, is a puzzle. Moreover, hundreds of these anomalous nests are excavated some distance beyond high-water, in country where the growth of grass is so strong and dense as to form an almost impenetrable barrier to those infantile turtle which have the fortune to get out of the death-traps, and in obedience to instinct, endeavour to reach the sea. Is it that Nature, "so careful of the type" imposes Malthusian practices to avoid the danger of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... place. But unfortunately, although the king was dethroned and deported, and the capital and the whole of the river in the hands of the British, the bands of armed soldiery, unaccustomed to conditions other than those of anarchy, rapine and murder, took advantage of the impenetrable cover of their jungles to continue a desultory armed resistance. Reinforcements had to be poured into the country, and it was in this phase of the campaign, lasting several years, that the most difficult and most arduous work fell to the lot ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to amend the Constitution which led to the Bill of Rights: "If they are incorporated into the Constitution, independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the Legislature or Executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the Constitution by the declaration of rights." Ibid. 385. Nine years later as author of the Virginia Resolutions ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... summer night ran its course, while the gusts of wind tugged and tore at the thin sides of our tent; no snowfall accompanied the south-easterly wind, but the loose snow of the surface was whirled up into a drift that stood like an impenetrable wall round the tent. After midnight it moderated a little, and by four o'clock there was comparatively fair weather. We were on our feet at once, put together camera, glasses, aneroids, axe, Alpine rope, with some lumps ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... late that night when I sealed the fated letter for M——; but I retired and slept easy, there was a burden removed which had well-nigh crushed me. What I have experienced since, words may never tell; the young have deemed me impenetrable to the natural susceptibilities of our natures, while the old have called me trifling. But, Ella, depend upon it, a heart once truly given, can never be bestowed again. I have erred in trying to conceal my history in the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... in this bedroom, there would be light enough out there. There was no moon; but the summer night, as he knew, would never deepen to real obscurity. It would keep all of a piece till dawn, like a sort of gray dusk, heavy and impenetrable beneath the trees, but quite transparent on the heath and in the glades; and then it would become all silvery and trembling; the wet bracken would glisten faintly, high branches of beech trees would glow startlingly, each needle on top of the lofty firs would change to a tiny sword ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... walk together, axe in hand, through my park, which is as dense and impenetrable as the virgin forests of America, or the jungles of India. It has not been touched for sixty years, and I have sworn to break the head of the first gardener who dares to approach it with ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... moved half-heartedly upon Lee. The two armies, the Union out-numbering the Confederate more than two to one, met in the dreary and almost impenetrable forest, southwest of Fredericksburg, known as the Wilderness, though the battle which followed bears the name of Chancellorsville. For five days the bloody work went on, with the result that Hooker retired beaten and humiliated before his enemy. Lee and the South had ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas would not move them from their accustomed orbit. But not a robin in the hedge was disturbed, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. Nature never put off her impenetrable mask. Or did she really not care? And was a human soul less to her than a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself if such privileges had been an indispensable preparation to the career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and his chill, and the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... marked by injustice and crime proves nothing against the position that they may have been appointed by a higher Power to work out a revolution in the East. "The dark mystery of the moral world," in this as in a thousand other instances, remains impenetrable. Heaven selects its own agents, and all that it becomes us to say concerning such relations is, that they do not appear in all cases to be made from among men specially entitled to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... tropical aspects. Our route lay through rocky valleys, over a bed of fine granite sand. The rocks were all blackened, forming a gloomy landscape, especially as all the morning the heavens were one impenetrable mass of clouds. The atmosphere felt, at first, damp and suffocating; but at length the wind got up, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... promised immunity. They followed it silently, pausing for a while to listen for sounds of pursuit, and at last, with minds relieved, if not quite certain, plodded on into the obscurity. They had entered, it seemed, an aisle of a forest which stretched, darkly impenetrable, on either side. Before them, blackness, darkness within dark, like a cave, a smell of dampness like a dungeon. The sky lightened for a moment and they saw the shape of leaves and tree fronds far above them like a pattern on a carpet—a pattern which changed with elflike witchery, ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... now brilliantly,—till finally flashing with a pale glare on the dark dead face, with the proud closed lips and black level brows, it flickered out; and one of the many countless mysteries of the Great Pyramid was again hidden in impenetrable darkness. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the wondrous, impenetrable picture-land: The crimson seas, Flashing in uncreated light, Crowded with galleons On a mission to ports where dwell the old gods And the mighty intellects of the Immortals. The ceaseless occupations, The language and the lore; The arts, and thoughts, the music, and the instruments; The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hurt, and in spite of Durrance's impenetrable face, she felt that she had succeeded. It was a small sort of compensation for the weeks of mortification which she had endured. There is something which might be said for Mrs. Adair; extenuations might be pleaded, even if no defence was made. For she like Ethne was overtaxed that night. That ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... insane," continued the impenetrable Warner. "The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type. Even a baby does not expect to find a ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... he thought; and he found the fire blazing and reddening the ceiling and curtains, the room all aglow with rich shadows, and his wife awaiting him, in full toilet, just as superb as you will see her tonight, just as sweet and cold and impassible and impenetrable. At least," continued Mrs. McLean, taking breath, "I have manufactured this little romance out of odds and ends that McLean has now and then reported from his conversation. I dare say there isn't a bit of it true, for Mr. Laudersdale isn't a man to publish his affairs; but I believe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river - though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his ENDYMION and Nelson parted from his Emma - still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been impracticable for any save the sure-footed iron-plated horses of the East. After traversing the valley for some miles, the rugged line of Piwa closed in upon us on the left, and a black impenetrable mountain seemed to bar our farther progress. After three quarters of an hour's ascent we were glad to halt. Clambering to a grassy knoll, we made a frugal meal of the hardest of biscuit soaked in muddy water, the only food, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh. Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the most impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... second time I attempted to leave the cell. For the second time this impenetrable woman called ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... of this little scene, were differently affected by it. The glance, moist with joy, which his wife cast upon her eldest child was a fatal revelation to the husband of the secrets of a heart hitherto impenetrable. That eldest child was all Juana; Juana comprehended him; she was sure of his heart, his future; she adored him, but her ardent love was a secret between herself, her child, and God. Juan instinctively enjoyed the ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... Street. There are no shops open; the sky over their heads is mud, the earth is mud under their feet, the muddy houses stretch in long rows, black, gaunt, uniform. The little party reach Hyde Park, also wrapped in impenetrable mud-grey. The man's face brightens for a moment as he says, "It is time to go back," and so they return, without the interchange of a word, unless perhaps they happen to see an omnibus horse fall down on the greasy stones. What is ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... after all, as great a surprise to Rachel as to any of the Gylingden gossips. Dorcas, knowing how Rachel thought upon it, had grown reserved and impenetrable upon the subject; indeed, at one time, I think, she had half made up her mind to fight the old battle over again and resolutely exercise this fatal passion. She had certainly mystified ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... shows nothing but a series of invariable sequences and co-existences. The difference is, in other words, that the theologian puts a legislator behind the laws, whilst the man of science sees nothing behind them but impenetrable mystery. The difference, so far as any practical conclusions are concerned, is obviously nothing. The laws of Nature, you tell us, are the work of infinite goodness and wisdom. But we are utterly unable to say what infinite ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... last head Dr. Grey was impenetrable, he parried, Or gave vague general replies to all Miss Gascoigne's questions. She gained nothing except the firm, decided answer, "I will not have Sir Edwin Uniacke ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... crest—and after that, perhaps two seconds later, came the explosion. There was a rumbling and a jarring, as if the earth were convulsed under foot; volumes of dense black smoke shot upward, shutting the mountain in an impenetrable pall of gloom; and in an instant these rolling, twisting volumes of black became lurid, and an explosion like that of a thousand great guns rent the air. As fast as the eye could follow, sheets of flame ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... an arduous task, for the way was through one of the jungle-paths, with walls of dense vegetation right and left, of the most impenetrable nature. Every here and there, too, the enemy had cut down a tree, so that it fell with the branches towards the pursuers, who were compelled to force a way through the dense mass that choked ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... during that day was horrible; the snow, caught up in dense whirls, covered the brig with an impenetrable veil; at times, under the influence of the hurricane, the fog would rise, and their terror-stricken eyes beheld the Devil's Thumb rising on the shore like ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... he entered the room I recognized him as one of the most unscrupulous agents of the notorious Third Section, one of the gang who drugged and kidnapped poor Alexander of Bulgaria. My own disguise, it is hardly necessary to say, was impenetrable. ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... was, so far as appeared to me, swallowed up in the sea,—crushed and broken into fragments by the falling ice, and every one of my companions was swallowed up with it. And there I was on an ice-raft, in the middle of the Arctic Sea, without food or shelter, wrapped in a great black, impenetrable fog, with the prospect of a lingering death staring ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... spindles and looms of the factory town, or illuminate the thoroughfares of cities. Beyond and above all such services as these, electricity is the corner-stone of physical generalization, a revealer of truths impenetrable by ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the fog became of an impenetrable thickness, and beyond the shop it seemed that there was pandemonium. Some fire, blazing at some street corner, flared as though it were the beating heart of all that darkness, and the cries of men and the slow, clumsy passing of the traffic ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... his watch. Ten minutes to one! No use waiting any longer. He scribbled a hasty note, left it on the writing-table, and walked into the garden past the impenetrable Caterina, who barely deigned to glance up from her knitting. He would look for a carriage, and give himself the luxury of a drive down. It was too hot to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... within the power of man to foretell the future and to solve unerringly its mighty problems. Almighty God has His plans and methods for human progress, and not infrequently they are shrouded for the time being in impenetrable mystery. Looking backward we can see how the hand of destiny builded for us and assigned us tasks whose full meaning was not apprehended even by the wisest statesmen of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... penetrating the vast blue dome above, like monarchs in royal vestments robed. Still others are seen, white and shadowy, stretching away down into Colorado, peak beyond peak, ridge beyond ridge, until lost in the impenetrable distance. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... chaos of jagged spikes and tangled branches. The tough cones, opened by the fire, had germinated and seedlings had sprung up amidst the riot of logs, growing as thick as grass. They were now about the height of a tall man's head, forming, with the tangled abatis of spiky trunks, a seemingly impenetrable jungle. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Eros. Verily Truth is as Eve, which was ashamed being naked; Wherefore doth Propriety dress her with the fair foliage of artifice: And when she is drest, behold! she knoweth not herself again. - I walked in the Forest; and above me stood the Yew, Stood like a slumbering giant, shrouded in impenetrable shade; Then I pass'd into the citizen's garden, and marked a tree clipt into shape, (The giant's locks had been shorn by the Dalilahshears of Decorum;) And I said, "Surely nature is goodly; but how much goodlier is ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... Rue du Petit Carreau to the Rue du Temple, there was fighting. The Pagevin, Neuve Saint Eustache, Montorgueil, Rambuteau, Beaubourg, and Transnonain barricades were gallantly defended. There, there was an impenetrable network of streets and crossways barricaded by the People, surrounded ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... wading as rapidly as he could, and Paul kept by his side. He comprehended Henry's plan, their last and desperate chance. In a few moments more they were at the great raft, and in the bank, amid a dense, almost impenetrable mass of foliage, they hid their rifles and ammunition. Henry uttered a deep sigh as ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... many misfort'nates as can per-jooce such sang-widges as them, though, to be sure, they eats uncommon quick 'old 'ard there, Jeremy—" But, indeed, the sandwiches were already only a memory, wherefore his brow grew black, and he glared at the still munching Jeremy, who met his looks with his usual impenetrable gloom. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... complexion. We may discriminate the janizaries, who have been gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national cavalry (the spahis of modern times); twenty thousand cuirassiers of Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia, whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timur: and a colony of Tartars, whom he had driven from Kiptchak, and to whom Bajazet had assigned a settlement in the plains of Adrianople. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... farming. Or put the question to a still higher legal functionary, who, on the same occasion, when he should have been a reed, inclining here and there, as adverse gales of evidence disposed him, was seen to be a manufactured image on the seat of Justice, cast by Power, in most impenetrable brass. ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... and prickly shrub. I came to the sacred wood in which the Ahkbasians used to pray when they were pagans, but in which, since their conversion, they have chiefly committed murder. I passed through three strange woods, the first of juniper and wild pear; the second, all dead, bleached and impenetrable, of what had once been hawthorn, but now one jagged, fixed mass of awkward arms and cruel thorns; the third, a beautiful, spacious pine-wood, climbing over cliffs to the far verge of the cape where the lighthouse flashes. These were like woods in a fairy tale, and may well have had each their ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... conversation on this point becoming extremely pointed and jocose, Miss Cummins finally turned and fled, escaping to the railway station as fast as her trembling legs could carry her. So the trip was a fruitless one, and the mystery that enshrouded Timothy and Lady Gay was as impenetrable as ever. ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... me, who had never seen any but single specimens of the plant, and not many of these. I think our green house at the north boasts but two; but here they were growing close together, and in such a manner as to form a compact and impenetrable hedge, their spiky leaves striking out on all sides like chevaux de frise, and the tall slender stems that bear those delicate ivory-coloured bells of blossoms, springing up against the sky in a regular ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the older members in the party, and soon the yacht was ready to fly back to her dock, up the River, near 72nd street. But the thick haze that had made the moon look so romantic, developed into an impenetrable fog. And anyone who has ever experienced such a fog hanging over New York Harbor, knows what it is to try to go ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... glorious religion under which we have prospered is a curse, and that the immortal gods are accursed demons. In their teachings they aim to overthrow all morality. In their private practices they perform the darkest and foulest crimes. They always keep by themselves in impenetrable secresy, but sometimes we overhear their evil discourses ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... dimensions struck me at once, as they rose in lonely majesty on the bare plain, with nothing to detract from their grandeur, or to afford, by its littleness, a point of comparison. We were never tired of gazing upon these noble monuments of an age shrouded in impenetrable mystery. They were afterwards seen at less advantage, in consequence of the intervention of some rising ground; but from all points they created the strongest degree ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... laws of the mind itself) is all we know of the object: and that the real nature of the Thing is, and by the constitution of our faculties ever must remain, at least in the present state of existence, an impenetrable mystery to us. "Of things absolutely or in themselves," says Sir William Hamilton,(19) "be they external, be they internal, we know nothing, or know them only as incognizable; and become aware of their incomprehensible existence, only as this is indirectly and accidentally revealed to us, through ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... heart. It was a dreadful prognostic for all my future life. But, as I have just observed, my conductors entered, and another subject called imperiously upon my attention. I could have been content, mortified as I was at this instant, to have been shut up in some impenetrable solitude, and to have wrapped myself in inconsolable misery. But the grief I endured had not such power over me as that I could be content to risk the being led to the gallows. The love of life, and still more a hatred against oppression, steeled my heart against that species ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... coming to visit me. I fear you must be very solitary at Hornsea. How hard to some people of the world it would seem to live your life! how utterly impossible to live it with a serene spirit and an unsoured disposition! It seems wonderful to me, because you are not, like Mrs. ——, phlegmatic and impenetrable, but received from nature feelings of the very finest edge. Such feelings, when they are locked up, sometimes damage the mind and temper. They don't with you. It must be partly principle, partly self-discipline, which keeps ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... these cunning rogues would be apt to explore most thoroughly. The partridge is undoubtedly acquainted with the same process of reasoning; for, like the vesper-bird, she, too, nests in open, unprotected places, avoiding all show of concealment,—coming from the tangled and almost impenetrable parts of the forest to the clean, open woods, where she can command all the approaches and fly with equal ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... in single file, bent nearly double, and seeing nothing before them but the shining backs and shoulders of the negroes who hacked out the way for them to go. And again they would come suddenly upon a precipice, and drink in the soft cool breath of the ocean, and look down thousands of feet upon the impenetrable green under which they had been crawling, out to where it met the sparkling surface of the Caribbean Sea. It was three days of unceasing activity while the sun shone, and of anxious questionings around the camp-fire when the darkness fell, and when there ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... caught it with his left hand, at the same time darting his head (which some modern heroes of the lower class use, like the battering-ram of the ancients, for a weapon of offence; another reason to admire the cunningness of Nature, in composing it of those impenetrable materials); dashing his head, I say, into the stomach of Adams, he tumbled him on his back; and, not having any regard to the laws of heroism, which would have restrained him from any farther attack on his enemy till he was again on his legs, he threw himself upon ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... in the least furthering the performance of our duties. In practical life no one regards miracles as possible; and their limitation to the past and to rare instances does not make them more credible. (3) In so far as the Christian mysteries actually represent impenetrable secrets they have no bearing on moral conduct; so far as they are morally valuable they admit of rational interpretation and thus cease to be mysteries. The Trinity signifies the three moral qualities or powers ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... scaling-ladders to get up among it," laughed Kit. "Talk of impenetrable jungles! here is a ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... sheer shining walls, whose reflection made the clear water almost black. The huge arch of the cave's entrance faced them. Behind was the dark channel, and beyond it the sunlight on the sea, before them the impenetrable gloom of the cave. The noise of the water dropping from its roof into the sea beneath struck their ears sharply. The hollow roar of the sea far off in the utmost recesses of the cave came to them. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... not know who I am!" she continued, endeavouring to assume her usual tone of command, and talking now to an absolute and impenetrable darkness. "You may learn when it is too late that you have chosen the wrong person for this pleasantry. I am the Marquise de Montespan, and I am not one who forgets a slight. If you know anything of the court, you must know that my word has some weight with the king. You may carry ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not break upon Billy with her startling news. Billy was so easily driven into an impenetrable silence! She must draw him out by old familiar methods and not frighten him into caution. By the time the Comrade was fastened to the Station wharf, the girl had got herself well in hand. The men of the crew who were ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... impenetrable wall of mystery along which he was groping, he returned to the living-room, raised one of the windows and unbolted the front door to make sure of an exit in case these strange, foolish Talbots should unexpectedly return. ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... out from crinkled heavy lids and a bulldog jaw shot out from under a fat beak of a nose. And over the broad expanse of countenance was spread a smile so sweet, so deep, so high that it gave the impression of obscuring the form of features entirely. In point of fact it was a thick and impenetrable veil that the Senator had for long hung before his face from behind which to view the world at large. And through his mouth, as through a rent in the smile, he was wont to pour out a volume of voice as musical in its drawl and intensified southern burr as the ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... at great cost to bear as unconcerned a part as before in simple festivities and gatherings, while the clouds gathered and the thunder muttered in his soul. And all the time the answer never came. Wrestle as he might, there seemed to him an impenetrable barrier between him and the golden light of God. He learnt in what dark and cold isolation it is possible for the soul to wander. Slowly, very slowly, the outlook brightened; a whole range of new emotions opened before him. The expressions of suffering and sorrow, that had seemed to him before ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 'The preparations of the heart in man, &c., is from the Lord.' And again, 'God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me' (Job 23:16). The heart, as it is by nature hard, stupid, and impenetrable, so it remains, and so will remain, until God, as was said, bruiseth it with his hammer, and melts it with his fire. The stony nature of it is therefore said to be taken away of God. 'I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... perceptible. The whole spirit of the mistress of these rooms pervaded the drawing-room where Augustine awaited her. She tried to divine her rival's character from the aspect of the scattered objects; but there was here something as impenetrable in the disorder as in the symmetry, and to the simple-minded young wife all was a sealed letter. All that she could discern was that, as a woman, the Duchess was a superior person. Then a painful thought came ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... ticket them and lock them up carefully in a kind of mysterious underground room shut in by iron gratings called a godoun. On rare occasions, only to honor some visitor of distinction, do they open this impenetrable depositary. The true Japanese manner of understanding luxury consists in a scrupulous and indeed almost excessive cleanliness, white mats and white woodwork; an appearance of extreme simplicity, and an incredible nicety ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... difficulty, time, and expense, which the attempt to bring it to light would occasion, excavations in this city, are now almost, if not entirely, abandoned; for it is to be remembered, that Herculaneum was destroyed by a flood of liquid lava, which as it cools, hardens into solid and impenetrable rock; whereas the hot ashes of Vesuvius overwhelmed Pompeii, and consequently it is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... and howled, and we rode and scampered, and finally we started him. He ran and bounded like a buck, and kept us well in the rear for some time; but at last he got caught in an impenetrable thicket of cane; then he turned to bay, and I tell you he fought the dogs right gallantly. He dashed them to right and left, and actually killed three of them with only his naked fists, when a shot from a gun brought him down, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of Robinson Crusoe in my nature, for I loved the isolation of this spot immensely. It wasn't an island, but it was all but an island. Towards the land, two jutting promontories of rock denied access to anything not a goat; the sea in front; an impenetrable pine wood to the rear: and there I lived so happily, so snugly, that even now, when I want a pleasant theme to doze over beside my wood-fire of an evening, I just call up Pertusola, and ramble once again ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... are able to say of the immediate catastrophe which decided the fate of England, and through England, of the world. The deep impenetrable falsehood of the Roman ecclesiastics prevents us from discovering with what intentions the game of the last few weeks or months had been played; it is sufficient for Englishmen to remember that, whatever may have been the explanation of his ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... swimming strongly—and after a time a lurid flash of lightning showed him a black mass of trees close ahead. They vanished, the succeeding darkness was impenetrable, and the crash of thunder was deadened by the roar of water. For a moment or two his head was driven under, but when he got it clear, another dazzling flash revealed a high bank only a few yards away, and when ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... of the vegetable world, from the supposed resemblance of their broad leaves to the human hand. The Date, the fruit of the Date Palm, derives its name from the Greek dactylus, a finger, from its mode of growing in clusters spreading out like the fingers of the hand. The Palm sometimes forms impenetrable forests; but more frequently is found in small groups of two or three, or even singly, beside springs and fountains of water, affording a kindly shade to ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... deer-brush and gathered a bunch of flowers that Linda bound together with some wiry desert grass and fastened to her belt. It was not long before Donald spied an amole, and having found one, discovered many others growing near. Then Linda led the way past thorns and brush, past impenetrable beds of cholla, until they reached a huge barrel cactus that she had located with the glasses. Beside this bristling monstrous growth Linda paused, and reached for the axe, which Donald handed to her. She drew it lightly across ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... preparations for the next war, which are not to be confined, as heretofore, to the so-called military states, but are to extend over all Anglo-Saxondom.[323] "Open covenants openly arrived at" signify secret conclaves and conspirative deliberations carried on in impenetrable secrecy which cannot be dispensed with even after the whole business has passed into history.[324] The self-determination of peoples finds its limit in the rights of every Great Power to hold its subject ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the sublimity of a storm at sea. The world about the ship is in wild commotion. The sky seems to have dropped into the sea, and now joins the roaring waves as they rush along. The blackness of the night is impenetrable, save as the lights from the ship gleam for an instant into the moving mass of water. Now and then a wave, rearing its crested head higher than the rest, breaks in spray upon the deck. The wind seems eager to hurl every movable object from the vessel, but as everything is fast, it must ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... not the will kept free? Beheld I not The road of duty close beside me—but One little step, and once more I was in it! 20 Where am I? Whither have I been transported? No road, no track behind me, but a wall, Impenetrable, insurmountable, Rises obedient to the spells I muttered And meant not—my own doings tower behind me. 25 A punishable man I seem, the guilt, Try what I will, I cannot roll off from me; The equivocal demeanour of my life Bears witness on my prosecutor's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... secured for myself a haven, a yet more impenetrable shade than this, against the time when, having seen four generations of men, two behind and two beyond, I may consider in silence what is likely to be the end of it all. It is true that I am getting old, but I am not yet prepared for a lodge in the wilderness. My present house ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... of the palm trees in company with some native boats. That was the first intimation we received that Krakatoa was in eruption, and from that time, eight o'clock, onwards through the day the rumbling thunders never ceased, while the darkness increased to a thick impenetrable covering of smoky vapour. Shortly after this we got under way, and proceeded until the darkness made it impossible to go on further. It was while we were thus enveloped in darkness that the stones and cinders discharged by the mountain began to fall upon the ship. In a ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... Urania's unfathomable eyes to Enriquez's impenetrable countenance. I might have been equal to either of them alone, but together they were invincible. I looked hopelessly at the baby. With its sharp little eyes and composed face, it certainly was a marvelous miniature of Enriquez. ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... preternaturally sly in the absolute darkness, but even through that impenetrable veil I knew it for a sham. I had laid hold of the hand-rail. It shook violently in my hand; he also was holding it where he stood. And these suppressed tremors, or rather their detection in this way, struck a strange chill to my heart, just as I was ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... anyone to fire, because in a few seconds the smoke came back, a huge, impenetrable curtain, and hid the man and the hillock. But Dick had not the slightest doubt that it was the great Southern leader, and he was right. It was Stonewall Jackson on the hillock, rallying his men, and Dick's own cousin, Harry Kenton, rode by ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... tundras—marshy plains—which in summer encircle the Polar Sea with a belt of verdure and wild flowers, but which in winter-time are merged with the frozen ocean in one boundless, bewildering wilderness of white. In hazy weather land and sky formed one impenetrable veil, with no horizon as dividing line, when, even at a short distance away, men and dog-sleds resembled flies crawling up a white curtain. But on clear days, unfortunately rare, the blue sky was Mediterranean, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... heart with all its claims had to remain in the background. The smiling boy Cupid, with his gracious raillery and his smarting griefs, seemed to make no impression on that pale, grave, and taciturn artillery lieutenant, and not to dare shoot an arrow toward that bosom which had mailed itself in an impenetrable cuirass of misanthropy, stoicism, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... replied Hans; "thou hast had thy share of life." He strode over the prostrate body, and darted on. And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the East, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven, and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade. The sun was setting; it plunged towards the horizon like ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... if all our efforts to forward the calling of the next conference in the interest of permanent peace brought up dead against an invisible barrier, an impassable wall like the secret line drawn in the air by magic, thinner than a cobweb, more impenetrable than steel. What was it? Indifference? General scepticism? Preoccupation with other designs which made the discussion of peace plans premature and futile? I did not know. But certainly there was something in the way, and the undiscovered nature of that ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... already beginning, of the dangerous Roman summer, he constantly deferred his return to Paris until the morrow. What had she guessed in consequence of the encounter, the details of which she had asked of him with an emotion scarcely hidden in her eyes of a blue as clear, as transparent, as impenetrable at the same time, as the water of certain Alpine lakes at the foot of the glaciers. He thought he was doing right in corroborating the story of Boleslas Gorka's madness, which he knew better than any one else to be false. But was it not the surest means of exempting Madame ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... found the subject quite hopeless as to discussion, he changed it, and said "I have lately seen some friends of yours, and I assure you I gave you an excellent character to them: I told them you were firm, fixed, and impenetrable to all ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... confounded by the blaze, they removed the mysterious veil, and displayed to them the Deity in the radiant glory of his unity. From the vulgar eye, however, these doctrines were kept inviolably sacred, and wrapped in the veil of impenetrable mystery." ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... judicious. "I really do," she said. "It does appear quite impenetrable, Sir Kenneth. I can't understand how you're doing it. Or why, ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... that, with his daughter thrown on the defensive, with Maggie's cause and Maggie's word, in fine, against her own, it wasn't Maggie's that would most certainly carry the day. Such a glimpse of her conceivable idea, which would be founded on reasons all her own, reasons of experience and assurance, impenetrable to others, but intimately familiar to herself—such a glimpse opened out wide as soon as it had come into view; for if so much as this was still firm ground between the elder pair, if the beauty of appearances had been so consistently ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... and that she might see it all no more she bent her head and glanced down on the gaping abyss in which Paris seemed to be engulfed. In its depths not a light could yet be seen; night had rolled over it and plunged it into impenetrable darkness. Its mighty, continuous rumble seemed to have ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... even more so than the occasion seemed to warrant, but they studied each other's faces furtively, as if each sought in the other some clue to the mystery which was to himself impenetrable. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... my sentence. I turned about and made a leap over the fungus tops towards the upper end of the cavity. I saw that the space turned upward and became a draughty cleft again, ascending to impenetrable darkness. I was about to clamber up into this, and then with ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Bedford—so much seemed clear. Though at first from my window I could make out nothing. I was feeling more than a trifle dazed,—there was a singing in my ears,—the sudden darkness was impenetrable. Then I became conscious that the guard was opening the door of his compartment. He stood on the step for a moment, seeming to hesitate. Then, with a lamp in his hand, he descended ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... are ours. Our reason for doubting Stewart's familiarity with the "Theodicee," and with Leibnitz in general, is derived in part from these phrases. We do not believe that any sincere student of Leibnitz has found him dark and impenetrable. Be it a merit or a fault, this predicate is inapplicable. Never was metaphysician more explicit and more intelligible. Had he been disposed to mysticize and to shroud himself in "impenetrable darkness," he would have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... steamer, Foma stood leaning against the tarpaulin, and attentively listened to each and every sound about him. And everything was blended into one picture, which was familiar to him. Through fog and uncertainty, surrounded on all sides by gloom impenetrable to the eye, life of man is moving somewhere slowly and heavily. And men are grieved over their sins, they sigh heavily, and then fight for a warm place, and asking each other for the sake of possessing ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... treating of, will agree with me, that the presence of a lake is indispensable to exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the imagination, by their aid, is carried into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is, that the heavens are not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a purer element. The happiest time is when the equinoxial ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the dusk, without farewell or salutation steadily as their own steers. And there are a few millions of them—unhandy men to cross in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and as impenetrable as that other Eastern fanner who is the bedrock of another land. They do not appear in the city papers, they are not much heard in the streets, and they tell very little in the outsider's ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Yellowknife seemed to be no longer a river, but a narrow lake, and the third day the rowers came into the Nine Lake country at noon, and until another dusk the bateau threaded its way through twisting channels and impenetrable forests, and beached at last at the edge of a great open where the timber had been cut. There was more excitement here, but it was too dark for David to understand the meaning of it. There were many voices; dogs barked. Then voices ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... prodigal is he Of royal blood, as ancient as the sea, Which down to him, so many ages told, Has through the veins of mighty monarchs roll'd! The great Achilles march'd not to the field Till Vulcan that impenetrable shield, And arms, had wrought; yet there no bullets flew, But shafts and darts which the weak Phrygians threw, 130 Our bolder hero on the deck does stand Exposed, the bulwark of his native land; Defensive arms laid by as useless here, Where massy balls the neighb'ring rocks do tear. Some ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... once shouted orders to his men to cease firing, and to take their place on the lower story; the walls of which, being strongly built of stone, were impenetrable by bullets; while these passed freely through the lightly-built story above. The enemy continued to fire rapidly for some time; and then, finding that no reply was made, gradually stopped. There was ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... "that huge lizard, which, resembling in shape the harmless inhabitant of the moors of other countries, is in Egypt a monster thirty feet in length, clothed in impenetrable scales, and moaning over his prey when he catches it, with the hope and purpose of drawing others within his danger, by mimicking the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and in the composition of a pudding, it was her judgment that mixed the ingredients. Then the poor woman would sometimes tell the Squire that she thought him and Olivia extremely of a size, and would bid both stand up to see which was tallest. These instances of cunning, which she thought impenetrable, yet which everybody saw through, were very pleasing to our benefactor, who gave every day some new proofs of his passion, which, though they had not risen to proposals of marriage, yet we thought fell but little short of it; and his slowness was attributed ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... had been set in concrete, the appearance of the ship submitted was something incredibly fantastic and admirable. Whether the hatches were on or not I could not tell, so thickly coated were the decks; but whether or not, the deposits and marine growths rendered the surface as impenetrable as iron, and I believe it would have kept a small army of labourers plying their pickaxes for a whole week to have made openings into the hold through ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... Montepulciano is buried in impenetrable mists of fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of these high-hill cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to the volcanic system of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed a portion of the crater which threw that mighty mass aloft. But ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and any moment he might miss the road that led off to the left. So he was compelled to give all his attention to peering into the thick shadows ahead. As good luck would have it, he came to higher ground where there was less mesquite, and therefore not such impenetrable darkness; and at this point he came ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;—yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for he is the father of German ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... as the seraphin of Klopstock, terrible as the fiends of Milton.... The distractions of a busy and contentious life break up our passions. A woman, on the contrary, broods over her passions; they are a fixed point on which her idleness or the frivolity of her duties holds her attention fast.... Impenetrable in dissimulation, cruel in vengeance, tenacious in their designs, without scruples about the means of success, animated by a deep and secret hatred against the despotism of man—it seems as if there were among them a sort of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... front the trees rose in a shadowy wall against the clear blue sky; there was no wind, and it was oppressively still. He could see about a quarter of a mile across the open, but the darkness of the wood was impenetrable and its silence daunting. The row of tracks was the only sign of life he had ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... averse to thought, and, moreover, the darkness forced him to give instant attention to his path. While the waters of the bay out to his right showed a ghostly gray, objects beneath the bluff where he walked were cloaked in impenetrable shadow. The air was damp with the breath of coming rain, and at rare intervals he caught a glimpse of the torn edges of clouds hurrying ahead of a ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... a roadway, hardened simply by the passing to and fro. It is the hardening effect of habit. Sometimes, the passage says, your life gets so worn by the coming and going of your daily routine, that you become impenetrable to the subtle suggestions of God, as if your life were paved. Some people are thus hardened even to good. They lose capacity for impressions. {117} Some people are even gospel-hardened. They have heard so much talk about religion that it runs off the pavement of their lives into the gutter. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... Gregoriev came together near the door of the specially prepared antechamber where his Majesty was to have his furs removed. Sophia's cheeks were flushed, her eyes burning again; but the face of Michael Petrovitch had become once more impenetrable. There were three minutes of the strained attention. Then, from the door of the antechamber, appeared a stately man, clad in a magnificent uniform, his breast covered with medals and crosses. When they were still many feet apart, a look passed between him and Prince Michael; and, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... betrayed his consciousness of such a conflict. Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe's serenity came from an understanding with her. But he doubted that. Tommy had not won—yet. That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising about Sophie was ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... water, a still surface which hid depths. At the prow of the boat shone a small lantern, which cast before the boat an arrow of light. And as the boat moved this arrow perpetually attacked the darkness in front. It was like the curiosity of man attacking the impenetrable mysteries of God. It seemed to penetrate, but always new darkness disclosed itself beyond, new darkness flowed ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... explained to him that this place is prepared for the righteous, while the terrible place prepared for the sinners is in the northern regions of the third heaven. He saw there all sorts of tortures, and impenetrable gloom, and there is no light there, but a gloomy fire is always burning. And all that place has fire on all sides, and on all sides cold and ice, thus it burns and freezes. And the angels, terrible and without pity, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... years; and a mighty phantom, under the mysterious name of Arch, in whose cloudy equipage were descried, gleaming at intervals, the crowns and sceptres of great potentates, sustained, whilst it agitated their hearts. London was one of the secret watchwords in their impenetrable cipher; Moscow was a countersign; Bavaria and Austria bore mysterious parts in the drama; and, though no sound was heard, nor voice given to the powers that were working, yet, as if by mere force of secret sympathy, all mankind who were worthy to participate in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... stood on the edge of Cape Nordkyn, 71 deg. 6' 50"—the most northern end of the continent of Europe, and rising majestically over seven hundred feet above the level of the sea. Before me was the Arctic Ocean, and beyond, a long way off and unseen by me, was the impenetrable wall of ice which the Long Night had built ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... and when I am not busy at anything else, I will have thee back again.' He did have Paul back again many a time, and communed with him, but we never read that he trembled any more. The impression is not always reproduced, although the circumstances that produced it at first may be. The most impenetrable armour in which to clothe oneself against the sword of the Spirit is hammered out of former convictions that were never acted on. A soul cased in these is very ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... giant arachnid dropped his prey, and then there came from him—clear, piercing, quivering through our nerves—that arrowy whistle that had caused us to shudder as we unwillingly listened to it darting out of the gloom of the impenetrable thickets. ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... the country in the actual Mafulu district of the Fuyuge area is strikingly different from that of the immediately adjoining Kuni country, the sharp steep ridges and narrow deep-cut valleys of the latter, with their thick unbroken covering of almost impenetrable forest, changing to higher mountain ranges with lateral ridges among them, and with frequent gentle undulating slopes and wider and more open valleys; while, interspersed with the forests, are small patches and great stretches of grass land, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... named, however, and the preparations went on—nem. con.—the person most interested (after herself) accepting every congratulation and allusion, touching the event, with the most impenetrable suavity. The marbles and pictures, upholstery and services, were delivered over to the order of Miss Bellairs, and Philip, disposed, apparently, to be very much a recluse in his rooms, or, at other times, engrossed by troops of welcoming friends, saw much less of ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... a manner on both sides of the road as to fall across and lengthwise, which, with their branches interwoven, presented an insurmountable barrier; in a word, this wilderness, of itself by no means easy of passage, was thus rendered almost absolutely impenetrable. Nor did Schuyler rest satisfied with these precautions; he directed the cattle to be removed to the most distant places and the stores and baggage from Fort George to Fort Edward, that articles of such necessity ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... was for drawing back into the thicket. They might have lost it then, for its retreat was impenetrable. But before it got clear away Atalanta put an arrow to the string, drew the bow to her shoulder, and let the arrow fly. It struck the boar, and a patch of blood was seen upon its bristles. Prince Meleagrus shouted out, "O first to strike the ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... Fort King, while others joined the hostile party. Charley Amathla was regarded as a brave, resolute, and upright man. He had saved the life of Assiola, and his murder was an act of horrible ingratitude. The Indians now abandoned their homes and took refuge in the impenetrable swamps. ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... statements. It is like trying to march through a tangled wilderness," he continued, as he picked up the book again and slowly slipped the leaves through his fingers; "but I'll read the thing through, now that I have begun it, though I have a suspicion that I shall only get deeper into an impenetrable thicket." ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... wildness of the tiny park sloping gently down to the cool, narrow, shaded river, over which the bending trees met and arched, and he begged me not to interfere with the trailing blackberry branches which crept about the roots and stems of the superb wild-rose trees, making sweet but impenetrable thickets interwoven with honeysuckle, even in the midst ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... sea,—the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mothers and maidens; from foot to brow, all noble, walked her knights; the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under their blood-red mantle-folds. Fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, implacable,—every word a fate—sate her senate. In hope and honour, lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of sacred sand, each with his name written and the cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... nothing by those little expedients, hints, and even entreaties, which are sometimes found so effectual in like cases. The old fermier-general was just as smiling and as promising as the Chateau des Anges itself, but, alas! as absolutely impenetrable. An iron will encountered and repressed all her shifts and struggles. She chafed and coaxed alike in vain. Whether the bird sang or fluttered, the bars ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... part in the author's delineations both with the pencil and the pen. The actual fact, however, is that icebergs occur in far greater numbers in the seas which are yearly accessible than in those in which the advance of the Polar travellers' vessel is hindered by impenetrable masses of ice. If we may borrow a term from the geography of plants to indicate the distribution of icebergs, they may be said to be more boreal than polar forms of ice. All the fishers on the coast of Newfoundland, and most of the captains on the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... like a wolf. He was not alone. The whole county rose, raging, horror-struck. Posse after posse was formed, sent out, and returned, without so much as a clue. Upon no one could even the shadow of suspicion be thrown. The Other had withdrawn into an impenetrable mystery. There he remained. He never was found; he never was so much as heard of. A legend arose about him, this prowler of the night, this strange, fearful figure, with an unseen face, swooping in there from out the darkness, come and gone in an instant, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... black stones, and it hath two towers of brass, which the beholder seeth resembling two corresponding fires; and thence it is named the City of Brass." They ceased not to proceed until they arrived at it; and, lo, it was lofty, strongly fortified, rising high into the air, impenetrable: the height of its walls was eighty cubits, and it had five and twenty gates, none of which would open but by means of some artifice. They stopped before it, and endeavoured to discover one of its gates; ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... in New York and Chicago, Lucien Apleon, was well-known, but only in certain of the English circles was he known. Those who knew him, whether men or women, fairly idolized him, in spite of the impenetrable mystery that ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... young general by bowing respectfully, but Bonaparte took no further notice of him, and walked again rapidly up and down. The smile had already vanished from his face, which had resumed its immovable and impenetrable expression. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... accompanied him to the gate; and we all crowded round him as he stepped into his chaise. When the Captain was gone, I tried to sound my father as to the cause of so sudden a departure. But my father was impenetrable in all that related to his brother's secrets. Whether or not the Captain had ever confided to him the cause of his displeasure with his son,—a mystery which much haunted me,—my father was mute on that score both to my mother and myself. For two or three days, however, Mr. Caxton ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of a trained and active mind—are the durable charms and wholesome influences in all society. These are among the results of a really liberal education. Education does something to overcome the prejudices of mere ignorance. Of all sorts of massive, impenetrable obstacles, the most hopeless and immovable is the prejudice of a thoroughly ignorant and narrow-minded woman of a certain social position. It forms a solid wall which bars all progress. Argument, authority, proof, experience avail nought. And remember, that the prejudices of ignorance are responsible ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... Blenheim,—making the most of every undulation,—flinging down a hillock, a big lump of earth out of a giant's hand, wherever it was needed,—putting in beauty as often as there was a niche for it,—opening vistas to every point that deserved to be seen, and throwing a veil of impenetrable foliage around what ought to be hidden;—and then, to be sure, the lapse of a century has softened the harsh outline of man's labors, and has given the place back to Nature again with the addition of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... unparalleled exertions of a single individual, chemical science has assumed a new aspect. Bodies have been brought to light which the human eye never before beheld, and which might have remained eternally concealed under their impenetrable disguise. ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... the dark curtain, but there was no opening,—no chink by which I could see into the world beyond. Will no kind hand draw the veil aside but for a moment? There it has hung unlifted age after age, concealing, with its impenetrable folds, all that mortals would most like to know. Myriads and myriads have passed within, but not one has ever given back voice, or look, or sign, to those they left behind, and from whom never before did they conceal thought or wish. Why is ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... where he had been hit, but it sank powerlessly. It seemed as if he were being turned round in a circle by an invisible hand. Thousands of fiery sparks shot up suddenly from the dark cloud—the night closed completely round him—deep, impenetrable night, and still, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... but also he knew that never in their close intercourse had he been able to fathom John Harman. A shadow rested over the wealthy and prosperous merchant. Never until now had Hinton even approached the cause; but now, now it seemed to him that he was grappling with the impenetrable mystery, that face to face he was looking at the long and successfully hidden sin. Strong man as he was, he trembled as this fear came over him. Whatever the cause, whatever the sudden and swift temptation, he felt an ever-growing conviction that long ago John and Jasper ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... the marshy islands of the Gulf, outside of Lake Pontchartrain, wild hogs are to be found. In 1853 it became known that an immense wild boar lived upon the Chandeleur Islands. He was frequently hunted, and though struck by the balls shot at him, escaped uninjured, his tough hide proving an impenetrable barrier to all assaults. There is always, however, some vulnerable point to be found, and in 1874 some Spanish fisherman, taking an undue advantage of his boarship, shot him in the eye, and then clubbed him ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... a smart pace, for fully ten minutes, trying not to think, but feeling painfully conscious that my courage was ebbing fast. Then I paused for breath. Ugh! how foul the air smelt! I told myself that it was worse even than the impenetrable darkness—and that was bad enough. I recalled to mind how I had gone through tunnels—this very one among others—in a comfortable lighted carriage, and had drawn up the window, sharply and suddenly, to keep out the stale, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... wall of flame Ab had so lately looked upon still rises between us and those who no longer live. We reach out for some knowledge of those who have died, and go almost into madness because we can grasp nothing. Silence unbroken, darkness impenetrable ever guard the mystery of death. In the long ages since the cave man ran that day, love and hope have in faith erected, beyond the grim barriers of blackness and despair, fair pavilions of promise and consolation, but to the stern examiners of physical fact and reality there has come no ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... rose higher on each side, sheer shining walls, whose reflection made the clear water almost black. The huge arch of the cave's entrance faced them. Behind was the dark channel, and beyond it the sunlight on the sea, before them the impenetrable gloom of the cave. The noise of the water dropping from its roof into the sea beneath struck their ears sharply. The hollow roar of the sea far off in the utmost recesses of the cave came to them. The ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... thousand horse and foot whose merit and fidelity were of an unequal complexion. We may discriminate the janizaries, who have been gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national cavalry (the spahis of modern times); twenty thousand cuirassiers of Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia, whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timur: and a colony of Tartars, whom he had driven from Kiptchak, and to whom Bajazet had assigned a settlement in the plains of Adrianople. The fearless confidence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... at work within them, and the black glistening water, carved into countless hollows and ridges by the agitation of its surface; the whole apparently motionless as if modelled in metal. Then comes the blackness of darkness, so thick and impenetrable that the half-stunned skipper, scarcely conscious of where he is, dares not move by so much as a single footstep lest he should step overboard. The next moment down comes the rain, not in drops, not even in sheets of water, but in a perfectly overwhelming deluge of ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... mechanically and examined the postmark. So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in which the Post Office had wrapped it, there was something with a "sea" at the end and a "t" in it. Chelsea? No! Battersea? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Dundas, his reserve to the world being taken for the same thing as indifference to his daughter, and resented as an offence. But for the third time in his life Sebastian was found capable of maintaining this impenetrable reserve. Pepita's true status in her own country—madame's suspicious debts and those damaging letters from London—Leam's hiding-place: he had had strength enough to keep his own counsel about the first two unbroken, and now he betrayed no more about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... frame covered with sleeping aquatic birds, would flash into the field of vision ahead, like one of Professor Pepper's patent ghosts, stand out for a moment in brilliant white relief against a background of impenetrable darkness, and then vanish with the swiftness of summer lightning, as the electric beam left it to search ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... is disparaged in its importance, what becomes of this arithmetical illustration of the superiority of foreign trade, when by the same standard we come to measure it against the home trade, scarcely less a subject of depreciation and vituperation than the colonial, with thinkers of the same impenetrable, if not profound class as the member for Stockport? Here, for his edification, we consign the resulting figures from the standard set up by himself, as they may be found calculated and resolved from minute detail into grand totals in the "General Statistics of the British Empire," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... or to the sky, but dwelt on earth, either near its former habitation or in a distant region from which it might return. Its powers of movement and action are then held to be all that imagination can suggest. Such souls move through the air or under the ground, enter houses through obstacles impenetrable to the earthly man, pass into the human body, assume such shapes as pleases them. Divested of gross earthly bodies, they are regarded as raised above all ordinary limitations of humanity. Of these conceptions, that of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... their side of the slide for a distance of several hundred yards up and down the side of the mountain and for several miles athwart it the underbrush was impenetrable for horses and wicked travelling for men. There had been a forest fire four years before, and everyone knows what ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... us welcome and note what it brings, and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... be on fire. Round and round he went like some trapped animal; then he threw himself madly upon a mass of tangled underwood and succeeded in breaking through to a more open space. This also seemed unfamiliar, and in the dim light of the stars the tall trees shut him in as if with towers of impenetrable shadow; silence seemed to lay everything under a spell of terror, ominous of ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... than the one which, on August 25, 1890, conveyed to Sweden, to their last resting-place, the remains of the great engineer, John Ericsson, whose inventive genius had clad the wooden navies of the world in armor of impenetrable iron and steel. Little had he dreamt when, in 1839, at the age of thirty-six (he was born at Vermland, Sweden, on July 31, 1803) he came to the United States in one of the old wooden ships of that day after ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... my way along for fifty yards between them and the rock-face I should gain an opening which, observed from below, had seemed to promise me an excellent view of the next beach. But they hung so heavily that I found myself struggling in an almost impenetrable thicket; and when at length I gained the opening, and drew breath, above the splash of waves on the beach I heard a sound which caused me to huddle back like a rabbit surprised in the mouth ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... for a few minutes, as if a cover had been clapped upon the sky, and then, again, the murk would roll off, and the reddish gleam would reappear. These swift alternations of impenetrable gloom and unearthly light shook the hearts of the dumfounded statesmen even more than the roar ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... dowde under his chin, and put a high-crowned hat on his head, he made a figure so comical that even Hogarth's humour can scarcely parallel; yet our hero thought himself of something else to render his disguise more impenetrable: he therefore borrowed a little hump-backed child of a tinker, and two more of some others of his community. There remained now only in what situation to place the children, and it was quickly resolved to tie two to his back, and to take the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... had a vision of Duncan Farll's hard, stupid face, and impenetrable steel head; and of himself being kicked out of the house, or delivered over to a policeman, or in some subtler way unimaginably insulted. Could he confront Duncan Farll? Was a hundred and forty thousand pounds and the dignity of the British nation worth ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... pleased and against whom they pleased. A word of contempt against the King or the government, a joke, a detached phrase, was enough. It is incredible how many people, justly or unjustly, were more or less ruined, always without resource, without trial, and without knowing why. The secret was impenetrable; for nothing ever cost the King less than profound ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about them they could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... trenches have been carried, for the purpose of penetrating water-bearing strata, and reaching impenetrable ground, in some cases, has been as much as 160 ft. below the natural surface of the ground, and the expense of timbering, pumping, and excavation in such an instance can be easily imagined. This may be realized by referring to Fig. 4, giving a cross-section of the Yarrow dam, in which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... her, gazing at her with his calm, impenetrable eyes. It was near noon of that day following their escape from the Water Festival. They had flown possibly two thousand miles. The Sun had risen, but after a time—since their enormous speed and change of latitude had affected the angle at which ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Martigues in an extraordinary and unusual fog, reminiscent of London, except that it was not black and sooty. It was dense, however; dense as if it were enshrouding the Grand Banks, and of the same impenetrable, milky consistency. To be sure the morning sun had not had an opportunity as yet to burn it off—automobilists on tour are early birds, and the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in by impenetrable gloom. ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Two hours later, fifteen miles north-east of Sanders Island, the 'Endurance' was confronted by a belt of heavy pack-ice, half a mile broad and extending north and south. There was clear water beyond, but the heavy south- westerly swell made the pack impenetrable in our neighbourhood. This was disconcerting. The noon latitude had been 57 26 S., and I had not expected to find pack-ice nearly so far north, though the whalers had reported pack-ice ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... words; but became eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when he was banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of large issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked, encircled Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him tender and wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm silently ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... were themselves going northwards, and for a few days we skirted, in company with them, the western borders of the Cross Timbers. The immense prairies of Texas are for hundreds and hundreds of miles bordered on the east by a belt of thick and almost impenetrable forests, called the Cross Timbers. Their breadth varies from seventy to one hundred miles. There the oak and hiccory grow tall and beautiful, but the general appearance of the country is poor, broken, and rugged. These forests abound with ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... open Bert might have made good his escape. His legs and wind had once won him a Marathon from the fleetest flyers of the world. But here conditions were against him. Vines reached out to trip him. Impenetrable thickets turned him aside. He had to dodge and twist and squirm his way through ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... that she could offer would pay it. He did not mean to let her go up on deck, and it would be as useless as undignified to attempt carrying out her will with a high hand. If there were any hope, it was in stratagem. Without breaking another lance against the impenetrable armour of his obstinacy, she turned her back upon him, swept into her cabin, and shut the door. Having done so—her little bag still grasped in her hand—she flew to the porthole and peered out. If a boat had ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... for the child, he left him on a small plain at the bottom, with strict injunctions not to stir from it till his return. Scarcely, however, had he gained the summit, when the horizon was darkened by an impenetrable mist. The anxious father instantly hastened back to find his child; but owing to the unusual darkness, he missed his way. After a fruitless search of many hours, he discovered that he had reached the bottom of the valley, and was near his own ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... huntsman tramped across a clearing, a one-time cornfield high on the side of the mountain, he saw a mass of fog rolling towards him, and before he could descend below its level he found himself enveloped in the mist of a passing cloud. Heavy as a palpable thing it closed around him, impenetrable to the eye, chilling to the whole physical being, fraught with discouragement and ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... of the world. The result is ugly or beautiful, according to the emotion thus for ever embalmed. The loves of such people are intuitive—shared with instinct and above, or below, reason; their hate is similarly impenetrable—preserved in a vacuum. For only a vacuum can hold the sweet for ever untainted, or the bitter for ever unalloyed. Mary Dinnett belonged to this order. She was now dead, and concerning the legacy of her unchanging attitude ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... that the one which more generally had the upper hand in the struggle was the secret society of United Irishmen; whose members individually, and whose local head quarters, were alike screened from the attacks of its rival, viz., the state government at the Castle, by a cloud of impenetrable darkness. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Boniface[35] disgraced, betrays the smack, In anno Domini, of Falstaff sack. Arms cross'd, brows bent, eyes fix'd, feet marching slow, A band of malcontents with spleen o'erflow; Wrapt in Conceit's impenetrable fog, Which Pride, like Phoebus, draws from every bog, 490 They curse the managers, and curse the town Whose partial favour keeps such merit down. But if some man, more hardy than the rest, Should dare attack these gnatlings in their nest, At once they ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... immediately followed the arrival of the new comers were the coolest and most salubrious of the year. But, even in those months, the pestilential influence of a tropical sun, shining on swamps rank with impenetrable thickets of black mangroves, began to be felt. The mortality was great; and it was but too clear that, before the summer was far advanced, the second colony would, like the first, have to choose between death and flight. But the agony ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... built by King Kamehameha I is on a bluff 100 feet high, separated from the beach by a low level space 100 yards wide. This flat contains many stone structures, but their number, design, and character can not be ascertained on account of the almost impenetrable growth of algaroba. One of them is a rectangle about 50 by 150 feet, the walls high and thick; probably it is an older temple. There is some modern work here, because in one place a wall is cemented, perhaps ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... I see, within the wall raised around my birthplace by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable. This is the wall which the Czar with all his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of torture could not pierce, the mob with their firebrands could not destroy. This wall within the wall is the religious ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... is used for tracking boats up-stream, skirted the extreme edge of a high-cut-bank bordering the river. On the one hand a single false step would have precipitated them to the beach twenty-five feet below; on the other hand the branches of an impenetrable undergrowth scourged their faces as they ran. Here and there the rain had worn deep fissures, across which leaped the nymph Natalie, with the panting Silenus close at her heels. She was running desperately over unfamiliar ground, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. She got away quicker than he; but ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... is bounded on the east by the mountain country of the Lolos, which extends north nearly to Yachau (supra, pp. 45, 48, 60), and which, owing to the fierce intractable character of the race, forms throughout its whole length an impenetrable barrier between East and West. [The Rev. Gray Owen, of Ch'eng-tu, wrote (Jour. China B.R.A.S. xxviii. 1893-1894, p. 59): "The only great trade route infested by brigands is that from Ya-chau to Ning-yuan fu, where Lo-lo brigands are numerous, especially in the autumn. Last year I heard of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... records by him [Ingle] has involved this episode in impenetrable obscurity, &c."—Johnson, Foundation of ...
— Captain Richard Ingle - The Maryland • Edward Ingle
... for several days till the weather became stormy; then, as their heart was not in the venture, they put back to Europe with a fresh stock of the legends Henry had so heartily despised. They had come to an impenetrable mist, which had stopped their progress; apparitions had warned them back; the sea in those parts swarmed with monsters; it became impossible ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... one another, and Betty turned her attention to Senator North. He was standing alone for the moment, glancing about the room. His attitude was one of absolute repose; he did not look as if he ever had hurried or wasted his energies or lost his self-control in his life. His face was impenetrable; his eyes, black and piercing, were wholly without that limpidity which reveals depths and changes of expression; his mouth was somewhat contemptuous, and betrayed neither tenderness nor humour. If possible, he stood even more squarely on his feet than the other ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... sometimes inland, through portions of wood, part of that great impenetrable primeval forest that at one time completely covered the whole of Sitka, sometimes quite on the edge of the water. Here there were rocks and boulders, and little coves of white sand and stretches of miniature beaches, with the lip of ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... Orinoco, you find among the Piroas, the Macos, and the Macquiritares, milder manners, a love of agriculture, and remarkable cleanliness in the interior of their cabins. On the ridges of mountains, amidst impenetrable forests, man is forced to fix himself, to clear and cultivate a corner of the earth. That culture demands little care, and is richly rewarded: while the life of a hunter is painful and difficult. The Guamos of the Mission of Santa Barbara are kind ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... from the track and let it rest on this person. There he found a singular attraction. Had he seen that face before, or why did it provoke vague reminiscences of great cypresses overhead, and deep-shaded leafy distances with bayous winding out of sight through them, and cane-brakes impenetrable to the eye, and axe-strokes—heard but unseen—slashing through them only a few feet away? Suddenly ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... back they struck new country, great stretches of almost impenetrable scrub, tropical jungle, and belts of bamboo. In this cover wild cattle evidently abounded, for they frequently heard the bellow ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still alive—the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it all—slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the too indulgent officials smile ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... river) lay a serpent of so enormous a size, that it kept the whole Roman army from coming to the river. Several soldiers had been buried in the wide caverns of its belly, and many pressed to death in the spiral volumes of its tail. Its skin was impenetrable to darts: and it was with repeated endeavours that stones, slung from the military engines, at last killed it. The serpent then exhibited a sight that was more terrible to the Roman cohorts and ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... with staring eyes, and outstretched neck; and he sprang to his feet abruptly ashamed of his fear, took four steps, seized the drapery with both hands, and pulled it wide apart. At first, he saw nothing but darkened glass, resembling plates of glittering ink. The night, the vast, impenetrable sketched behind as far as the invisible horizon. He remained standing in front of this illimitable shadow, and suddenly he perceived a light, a moving light, which seemed ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... apparent diameter subtended at the balloon an angle of about sixty-five seconds, and whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute and impenetrable blackness. Farther than this, little could be ascertained. By twelve o'clock the circular centre had materially decreased in circumference, and by seven P.M. I lost sight of it entirely; the balloon passing over the western ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to clasp me about as with a thousand arms, flinging and dragging me hither and thither but ever downward, until I could hold my breath no longer, when with a great irresistible gasp my lungs filled with water, darkness and silence profound and impenetrable shut me in, a thousand quaint, fantastic fancies thronged my brain, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... at once took his place, and this one expressed a decided opinion. He could hear nothing at all, that woman could never have suffered from phthisis. Then others followed him; in fact, with the exception of five or six whose smiling faces remained impenetrable, they all joined the defile. And the confusion now attained its apogee; for each gave an opinion sensibly differing from that of his colleagues, so that a general uproar arose and one could no longer ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... put out your fires when you quit the bivouac," continued Ingolby aloud, as he gazed ahead of him through the opening greenery, beyond which lay Gabriel Druse's home. Where he was the woods were thick, and here and there on either side it was almost impenetrable. Few people ever came through this wood. It belonged in greater part to Gabriel Druse, and in lesser part to the Hudson's Bay Company and the Government; and as the land was not valuable till it was cleared, and there was plenty of prairie land to be had, from which neither stick nor stump must ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lights of a passenger train crossing the bridge, just a short distance away, that made me realize where I was. The train thundered into the darkness; but louder than the roar of the train was that of the water directly ahead, and hidden in the impenetrable shadow over on the right shore was a noise much like that made by a ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... Hans; "thou hast had thy share of life." He strode over the prostrate body, and darted on. And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the East, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven, and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade. The sun was setting; it plunged towards the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... occasionally overhanging limbs of trees, unnoticed in the gloom, struck our faces. By what uncanny skill the negro was able to navigate, how he found his way in safety along that ragged bank, remains a mystery. To my eyes all about us was black, impenetrable, not even the water reflecting a gleam of light; indeed, so dense was the surrounding gloom that in the deeper shadows I could not even distinguish the figure of the girl seated beside me in the cockpit. Yet there was scarcely a break in the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... exposure to hunger and exhaustion, and the freezing blasts of winter? Or, in their weakness, were they attacked by the famished wolves of the mountains? The dying scene of Petion and Buzot is involved in impenetrable obscurity. Its tragic accompaniments can only be revealed when all mysteries ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... for breath and deadly pale when, just after Els's arrival, she stepped from the chair. It had become intensely hot. Within the vaulted corridor with its solid, impenetrable walls, a cooler atmosphere received her, and she hoped to find in her own chamber fresher, purer air, and—at least for the next ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... about her, and that only just behind her, and just above her, was the path clear. Without knowing it, she had climbed and climbed till she was very near the top of the pass. She looked down into a witch's cauldron of mist and vapour, already thickened with snow, and up into an impenetrable sky, as it seemed, close upon her head, from which the white flakes were beginning to ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... much meaner now, with its paint all faded and mottled, cracked and blistered! It had no knocker, not even a slit for letters. All that it had was a large-ish key-hole. On this my eyes rested; and presently I moved to it, stooped down to it, peered through it. I had a glimpse of—darkness impenetrable. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the spectators of this little scene, were differently affected by it. The glance, moist with joy, which his wife cast upon her eldest child was a fatal revelation to the husband of the secrets of a heart hitherto impenetrable. That eldest child was all Juana; Juana comprehended him; she was sure of his heart, his future; she adored him, but her ardent love was a secret between herself, her child, and God. Juan instinctively enjoyed the seeming indifference of his mother in presence of his father and brother, for she pressed ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... She was impenetrable in her confidence. It clothed her about like armour. Not for a moment would she doubt—she dared not! Harry was coming back to the house that afternoon. Would he break something—some little china ornament upon the mantel-shelf? He ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... to give you the news at once in one striking and terrible sentence. And I could write that sentence. A tragedy, wrapped in mystery as impenetrable as a London fog, has befallen our quiet little house in Adelphi Terrace. In their basement room the Walters family, sleepless, overwhelmed, sit silent; on the dark stairs outside my door I hear at intervals the tramp of men on unhappy missions—But ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... of pale phosphorescent mist had just appeared on the port bow, which spread and spread till it blotted out sea and sky, and all was one dim, impenetrable pall. From the far distance came a strange, ghostly whisper, while the sea-birds, which had hitherto kept close to the vessel, flew away ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... them, seem almost to exceed belief. This insect is formed by nature for a state of war, not only upon other insects, but upon each other. For this state nature seems perfectly well to have formed it. Its head and breast are covered with a strong natural coat of mail, which is impenetrable to the attempts of every other insect, and its belly is enveloped in a soft, pliant skin, which eludes the sting even of a wasp. Its legs are terminated by strong claws, not unlike those of a lobster; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... that salt comes by bestowal and in conjunction with the vaguely indeterminate lumps of matter that associate with man. As if in fifty centuries of man-herding they had made but one step out of the terrible isolation of brute species, an isolation impenetrable except by fear to every other brute, but now admitting the fact without knowledge, of the God of the Salt. Accustomed to receiving this miracle on open bowlders, when the craving is strong upon them, they seek ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... all its brightness in the years of his maturity. Finally, the book teaches a beautiful lesson of fortitude in adversity, of suffering patiently borne and valiantly overcome by a spirit that, greatly gifted by Nature, exercised its strength until the thin silver lining illuminated the apparently impenetrable blackness of the cloud that overhung Georg Moritz Ebers's useful ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... appeal Gwendolen recovered some of her self-possession. She spoke with dignity and looked straight at Grandcourt, whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers, and mysteriously arrested them: mysteriously; for the subtly-varied drama between man and woman is often such as can hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, according to obvious fixed marks. The word of all work, Love, will no more express the myriad modes of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... on we struggled, the forest apparently growing more dense at every step, and at length we seemed so surrounded with impenetrable thickets that we were obliged to halt and consult as to the best route to the team, which ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... that the Maharatha Sansaptakas of our army appointed for the overthrow of Arjuna were all slain by Arjuna himself, then, O Sanjaya, I had no hope of success. When I heard that our disposition of forces, impenetrable by others, and defended by Bharadwaja himself well-armed, had been singly forced and entered by the brave son of Subhadra, then, O Sanjaya, I had no hope of success. When I heard that our Maharathas, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... the line. With only the railing of their little platform between them and the abyss, they ran over ravines hundreds of feet deep—the valley, a thousand feet sheer, below. And in that valley, not a sign of house, of path; only black impenetrable forest—huge cedars and Douglas pines, filling up the bottoms, choking the river with their debris, climbing up the further sides, towards the ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... saw no more of her Cousin Allan. He had gone when she rose next morning, gone away in a slow, even downpour of rain, that was devoid of every hope of blue sky or sunshine. On the river they were in a cloud of fog impenetrable to sight, and inexpressibly dreary. Everything also in the little boat was clammy and uncomfortable. There was a long day before Allan; for his business scarcely occupied him an hour, and then he went out ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... General's mask was impenetrable, and at the end of his reading he turned back to read and re-read many pages, holding the book to the light, and seeming to examine ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... to drive any man indoors. Not only was the darkness impenetrable, but the raw mist enveloping hill and valley made the open road anything but desirable to a belated ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... shores of the great Bear Lake a slow growth of four centuries scarce brings a circumference of thirty inches to the trunks of the white spruce. Swamp and lake, muskeg, and river rocks of the earliest formations, wild wooded tracts of impenetrable wilderness combine to make this region the great preserve of the rich fur-bearing animals whose skins are rated in the marts of Europe at four times their weight in gold. Here the darkest mink, the silkiest sable, the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... of human nature, which, together with her extreme delicacy, with regard to the feelings of others, formed the keystone which unlocked to her the secret recesses of hearts, which, to a less careless observer, would have been veiled in impenetrable ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... literature (as opposed to scientific publications, for example), is typographically simple and can be rendered beautifully into type without encoding it into proprietary word processor file formats or impenetrable markup languages. ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... understand. (Fierce uproar. Cleopatra becomes white with terror.) Hearken, you who must not be insulted. Go near enough to catch their words: you will find them bitterer than the tongue of Pothinus. (Loftily wrapping himself up in an impenetrable dignity.) Let the Queen of Egypt now give her orders for vengeance, and take her measures for defense; for she has renounced ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... indeed were all ready, and tents could easily be procured; but it was likewise necessary to prepare provisions, to pack up clothes, and to send forward a set of native pioneers to clear the way through brushwood, otherwise impenetrable. The Admiral was in such ecstacies at the prospect of an adventure which was to cost some trouble, that he allowed nobody rest till everything had been put in train. Early in the morning of the next day but one, we accordingly set out in several of the flag-ship's boats, accompanied ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... about that," said the lawyer. "A crook is never really clever. He always leaves some loophole which leads to detection. He thinks he is secure, that his disguise is impenetrable, but there is always someone watching him, closely observing his every move. And, the first thing he knows, he has walked into a trap, the handcuffs are snapped, and the electric chair looms grimly ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... our progress westerly was to be apprehended. At twenty minutes past ten, however, the weather having become hazy and the wind light, we perceived that the ice, along which we had been sailing for the last two hours, was joined, at the distance of half a mile to the westward of us, to a compact and impenetrable body of floes, which lay across the whole breadth of the strait, formed by the island and the western point of Maxwell Bay. We hauled our wind to the northward, just in time to avoid being embayed in the ice, on the outer edge of which a considerable ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... in accordance with my theory that the "till" or "hard-pan," next the earth, was caked and baked by the heat into its present pottery-like and impenetrable condition, long before the work of cooling and condensation set loose the floods to rearrange and form secondary Drift out of the upper portion ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... three or four days to a week. The latter part of April, when the little peeping frogs are in full chorus, one comes upon places, in his drives or walks late in the day, where the air fairly palpitates with sound; from every little marshy hollow and spring run there rises an impenetrable maze or cloud of shrill musical voices. After the peepers, the next frog to appear is the clucking frog, a rather small, dark-brown frog, with a harsh, clucking note, which later in the season becomes the well-known brown wood-frog. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... leader, the other two lads perceived that they had blundered upon a spot in which several horses had been left unguarded by the search parties, while they pushed their way on foot through the impenetrable brush. But it was not this fact so much that caused them to catch their breaths with gasps of amazement, as something else which ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... thoughts had been entirely absorbed in the literary projects which he discussed with his new friend, the grave and good and serious-minded Gori, and one or two Sienese professors, after that first feeling of attraction had died away, and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an impenetrable armour of poetic interests, Alfieri decided, on his return to Florence, that he was quite sufficiently of a new man to expose himself without any danger to such a lady as the Countess of Albany. He was, after all, a different individual from that inane, dull, violent young man who ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Sue Paynter's, into which I went once to lift out her little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one's else in the world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley's, in its clear whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a sense of her impenetrable character. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... forbid) we ought not to conclude therefrom, that the first manifestation of her miraculous power proceeded from an evil spirit and not from heavenly grace; we should believe rather that our hopes have been disappointed because of our ingratitude and our blasphemy, or by some just and impenetrable judgment of God. We beseech him to turn away his anger from us and vouchsafe unto us ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... aptitude and their education—say, by virtue of their Election—to the army of Law and Order. They will not, we may be sure, be recruited from those whom long years of labour and want of cultivation have tendered stiff of finger, slow of ear and of eye, impenetrable of brain. We must get them from the boys and girls. We must be content if the elders learn to take delight in the hand-work which they cannot execute, the decorative work which they can never hope wholly to understand, the music and singing in which ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... mountains, naturally try for the adjacent Big Cameroon; the other reason is that Mungo Mah Etindeh, to which Burton refers as "the awful form of Little Cameroon," is mostly sheer cliff, and is from foot to summit clothed in an almost impenetrable forest. Behind these two mountains of volcanic origin, which cover an area on an isolated base of between 700 and 800 square miles in extent, there are distinctly visible from the coast two chains of mountains, or I should think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon ranges. These ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... what reception her addresses met with, and quite indifferent to the many rebuffs she momentarily encountered. To me by what impulse driven Heaven knows this amorphous piece of womanhood seemed determined to attach herself. Whether in the smoky and almost impenetrable recesses of the cabin, or braving the cold and penetrating rain upon deck, it mattered not, she was ever at my side, and not only martyring me by the insufferable annoyance of her vulgar loquacity, but actually, from the appearance of acquaintanceship ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and sleeping. Then he stepped back again; barred the door and walked up through the stable-yard into the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... considerable population than Old Spain; and can it be doubted that that part of Venezuela which is most fertile and easy of cultivation, that is, the 10,000 square leagues remaining after deducting the Llanos and the almost impenetrable forests between the Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, could support in the fine climate of the tropics as many inhabitants as 10,000 square leagues of Estramadura, the Castiles, and other provinces of the table-land ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... valleys that branch out from the sides of the volcanic chain of Auvergne were once, no doubt, filled with impenetrable forests: gloomy wildernesses, thick as those of American wilds, where scarcely the light of the sun could penetrate, and tenanted only by the wolf, the bear, the boar, and the stag. Now these forests have disappeared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... who are equally unable to make war or peace, and refused to look beyond the question of his own personal safety, guaranteed as it was by the dikes and marshes of Ravenna. As all attempts to conduct a satisfactory negotiation with this emperor failed before his impenetrable stupidity, Alaric, after instituting a second siege and blockade of Rome in 409, came to terms with the senate, and with their consent set up a rival emperor and invested the prefect of the city, a Creek named Attalus, with the diadem and the purple robe. He, however, proved quite ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... circumspect, looking upon morality in its proper light. Its all doubtful! doubtful! doubtful! There is Elder Pemberton Praiseworthy; he preaches, preaches, preaches!—his preaching is to live, not to die by. I do pity those poor negroes, who, notwithstanding their impenetrable heads, are bored to death every Sunday with that selfsame sermon. Such preaching, such strained effort, such machinery to make men pious,—it's as soulless as a well. I don't wonder the world has got ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted. And immediately from a dismantled stall in the street, where ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... unpleasant, led over the hills, avoiding the westward curve of the Rhone, directly towards Lyons. About noon, we came in sight of the broad valley in which the Rhone first clasps his Burgundian bride—the Saone, and a cloud of impenetrable coal-smoke showed us the location of Lyons. A nearer approach revealed a large flat dome, and some ranges of tall buildings near the river. We soon entered the suburb of La Guillotiere, which has sprung up on the eastern bank of the Rhone. Notwithstanding ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... hours of the day, the scenery was as interesting and picturesque as can be imagined. The banks were literally covered with hamlets and villages; fine trees, bending under the weight of their dark and impenetrable foliage, everywhere relieved the eye from the glare of the sun's rays, and, contrasted with the lively verdure of the little hills and plains, produced the most pleasing effect. Afterwards, however, there was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... manufactory smoke for a sky. A man accustomed to the grace and infinity of nature's foliage, with every vista a cathedral, and every bough a revelation, can scarcely but be angered when Poussin mocks him with a black round mass of impenetrable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick instead of a trunk. The fact is, there is one thing wanting in all the doing of these men, and that is the very virtue by which the work of human mind chiefly rises above that ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the surface snow which they drive before them. Sounding with long poles, explorers find that below the powdery snow of the latest snowfall lie successive layers of earlier snows, which grow more and more compact downward, and at last have altered to impenetrable ice. The ice cap formed by the accumulated snows of uncounted centuries may well be more than a mile in depth. Ice thus formed by the compacting of snow is distinguished when ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... gained the main wall of the house, and there found open windows and (upon further cautious investigation) a doorway, likewise wide to the bland night air. Hesitant on the threshold of this last he sought with impotent senses to probe impenetrable obscurity—listening, every nerve taut and vibrant, for some sound significant of human tenancy, and detecting never an one. In spite of this, it was without the least confidence that presently he ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the colony. There were social distinctions in Canada, to be sure, but the boundaries between different elements of the population were not rigid; there were no privileges based upon the laws of the land, and no impenetrable barrier separated one class from another. Men could rise by their own efforts or come down through their own defaults; their places in the community were not determined for them by the accident of birth ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... with the dried pods of the Gummiferous Accia: thus prepared, they are impenetrable to the rain, and it may be affirmed that, for their suppleness, as well as for the brilliancy and finesss of their grain, they might become a valuable fur in Europe, either for use or ornament. The most beautiful of these skins seemed ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... Black, sobbing water, darkness impenetrable! The instinctive fear of apprehension caused him to look in every direction for possible eye-witnesses. Every drop of blood in his body seemed turned to ice with horror. Down there in that black, chill water lay the body of his wife, the woman he had loved through all ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... asserted to be impenetrable. That is, if a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be condensible by any force. But atoms of matter do not touch. It is thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till there were no discernible substance ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... took a foot trail where the bluff, having rolled back a mile from the river, tumbled precipitately into a deep yawning gully. From the timbered eminence the prospect below was as dank and gloomy as a paleolithic fern forest. Sodden, mossy, and almost impenetrable, the hill split and dropped into Choke Gulch. From far down within the black and tangled fastnesses came the solemn ripple of slow-running water. A veil of weird loneliness hung over the cavernous place and the air that shivered up to the three was ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... centre. "His career as a partisan," says his faithful biographer, the novelist Simms, "in the thickets and swamps of Carolina, is abundantly distinguished by the picturesque; but it was while he held his camp at Snow's Island that it received its highest colors of romance. In this snug and impenetrable fortress, he reminds us very much of the ancient feudal baron of France and Germany, who, perched on a castled eminence, looked down with the complacency of an eagle from his eyrie, and marked all below him for his own. The resemblance is ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... and soon came to the surface after the plunge, but the shadow of the rock retarded his search. At last he found her, and then a new difficulty, that of landing, presented itself. The shore was covered with a fringe of impenetrable brushwood, which gave him the scantiest support, and it was impossible to mount the face of the rock. Almost in despair, he looked across the water, where he saw in the moonlight a fisherman's boat. Slowly the little craft obeyed his repeated calls for help. Sturdy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
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