"Fissure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to their store of food; and as he did so, he heard a distant and plaintive howl. He hastened in the direction, and in a quarter of an hour came to the mouth of a narrow gut between two icebergs. The stick of the harness had caught in the fissure, and checked the dogs, who were barking with rage. Sakalar caught the bridle, which had been jerked out of his hand, and turned the dogs round. The animals followed his guidance, and he succeeded, after some difficulty, in bringing them to where lay his game. He then fastened the bear and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... exclaimed as he reached a little fissure in the rock and bent downward. "I can hear some ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... of this great fissure, or opening in the cliff, a small stream of water enters by a cascade, flows through the bottom, winding in a varied course of about a quarter of a mile in length; and then runs into the sea across a smooth expanse of firm, hard sand, at the lower extremity ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... and chaotic rock heaps, or rounded deep fissures that cut the plateau like spider webs. Muscular and in good form as was the trio, frequent rests were necessary. They had one mishap. Na-che, lagging behind, slipped into a fissure. Enoch and Diana blanched at her sudden scream and ran back as she disappeared. Mercifully a great rock had tumbled into the crevice some time before and Na-che landed squarely on this, six feet below the surface. When Diana and Enoch peered over, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... over the bulwark of the vessel. The alley from the gate ran on between houses abutting the towers. A ball from one of Mahommed's largest guns had passed through the right-hand building, leaving a ragged fissure. Thither the Captain ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... took the tears of balsam, Took the resin of the Fir-Tree, Smeared therewith each seam and fissure, Made ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... kept the inn had a son who offered to walk with me as far as some chapel in the gorge of the Chavannon. We were not long in reaching the gorge, the view of which from the edge of the plateau was superbly savage. Descending a very rugged path through the forest that covered the sides of the deep fissure, save where the stark rock refused to be clothed, we came to a small chapel, centuries old, under a natural wall of gneiss, but deep in the shade of overhanging boughs. It was dedicated to St. John the Baptist, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... removed to the Island of Wia, where he was received by Ranald Macdonald; thence he visited places called Rossinish and Aikersideallich, and at the latter had to sleep in a fissure in the rocks. Returning once more to South Uist, Charles (accompanied by O'Neal and Mackechan) found a hiding-place up in the hills, as the militia appeared to be dangerously near, and at night tramped towards Benbecula, near to which another place of safety was found ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the centuries went, were registered here in mystic runes. The surface had weathered to a whitish-gray, but still in tiny depressions its pristine dark color showed in rugose characters. A splintered fissure held delicate fucoid impressions in fine script full of meaning. A series of worm-holes traced erratic hieroglyphics across a scaling corner; all the varied texts were illuminated by quartzose particles glittering in the sun, and here and there fine green grains of glauconite. He knew no names ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... such a difficulty would not occur again they pushed on, but had not gone far when another, and still more impassable, fissure presented itself. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution." Far away in France, Victor Hugo declared, "The eyes of Europe are fixed on America. The hanging of John Brown will open a latent fissure that will finally split the union asunder.... You preserve your shame, but you kill ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... in the fissure, lean over the brink of the precipice, and look downward, a little to the left, on the belt of woods which covers the strand between the water and the base of the cliffs. Here a gang of axe-men are at work, and Point ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... is, at first sight, an ideal method of drawing patterns, and it has for years been the only method practiced on machines. It has two disadvantages. The patterns are separated from the stripping plate by the necessary joint fissure between the two. Fine sand continually falls into this and, adhering to the joint surfaces more or less, grinds the fissure wider. This leads to a gradual reduction of size of patterns on vertical surfaces and a widening of the joint fissure often to such an extent that wire edges ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... the captain came out, and he and Burke put each bag into another, and these were tied up firmly at each end, for a single coffee-bag was not considered strong enough to hold the weighty treasure. Then the two carried the bags into the part of the cave which was lighted by the great fissure, and called the negroes. Then, each taking a bag on his shoulder, the party returned to the cove. On the next trip, Shirley decided to go with the captain, for he said he did not care for anything if he did not have ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... and bare appearance, owing to the alternate action of summer sun and winter frost. As the slopes approach the valley they become clothed with a garb of wild vegetation, which bursts forth from every fissure, and finds a foothold on every projecting rock: the base of the mountain is hidden in a tangled mass of glowing green, which the moist yet sunny Spring calls forth in abundance whenever the slopes are not too steep to retain a shallow layer of nourishing mould. It would be hard to find, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... said, "it don't look good to me. The formation runs too regular. What you need for a big mineral deposit is some fissure veins, where the country has been ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Vistula, and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which these districts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward extension of the German Empire; while their common religions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly differentiated from its interior, performs a certain historical function, and becomes, as it were, an organ of the living, growing ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... set; the zygomae are normal. The nose is large and very thin. There is arrested development of upper jaw. The ears are excessively developed and malformed. The face is very much lined, the nasolabial fissure is deeply cut, and there are well-marked horizontal wrinkles on the forehead, so that he looks at least ten years older than his actual age. The upper jaw is of partial V-shape, the lower well developed. The teeth and their tubercles and the alveolar process are ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... chapel, I began to hear the roar of a cascade in a thick wood of beech and chestnut that clothes the steeps of a wide fissure in the rock. My ear soon guided me to its entrance, which was marked by a shed encompassed with mossy fragments, and almost concealed by bushes of the caper-plant in full red bloom. Amongst these I struggled, till, reaching a goat-track, it conducted me, on the brink of the foaming waters, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... arduous labour in this direction enabled him to safely reach the top of the slope, where, to his great gratification, he discovered another platform of rock, about six feet wide. Passing along this, he came suddenly upon an irregular fissure in the rocky face of the precipice. This fissure was about four feet wide at the bottom, the walls sloping inwards, like a roof, until they met at a height of seven or eight feet from the ground. George at once unhesitatingly entered the opening, and found that it ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... Wales, but far exceeds it in striking effect. A dreary whiteness, unrelieved by hardly a single blade of vegetation, covers the whole, as if it had been recently cleft by a volcanic eruption, and had as yet had no time to smooth down the sharpness of its original fissure; and nothing occurs to break the silence, except the trickling of a narrow brook, which just finds room to creep along the side of the road, the distant bleating of numberless adventurous goats, climbing over head from the mere ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... above Warrangilla are haunted by two women, who tradition says were buried alive. Their spirits have never rested, but come out at all times from the huge fissure in the ridges where their bodies were put. Their anguished cries as the stones and earth fell on them are still to be heard echoing through the scrub there; and sometimes it is said one, keener sighted than his fellows, sees their spirit forms flitting through the Budtha bushes, ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... earthquake, prostrating the gigantic forest, and scattering the trees in all directions. Appalling indications remained of the power expended by these tremendous forces of nature. The largest forest-trees were found split from their roots to their tops, and lying half on each side of a deep fissure. The opening abysses, the entanglement of the prostrate forest, and the dense underbrush which had sprung up, rendered the whole region almost impenetrable. The country was almost entirely uninhabited. It had, however, become quite celebrated as being ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... down the stem, in a very surprising manner, and the stem lay in two blighted shafts: one resting against the house, and one against a portion of the old red garden-wall in which its fall had made a gap. The fissure went down the tree to a little above the earth, and there stopped. There was great curiosity to see the tree, and, with most of his former fears revived, he sat in his arbour—grown quite an old man—watching the people who came to ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... with every line and hue of the deep sea—chiseling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of their anatomy, and every moment of their motion—building his mountains rock by rock, with wind in every fissure, and weight in every stone—and modeling the masses of his sky with the strength of tempest in their every fold." It is curious—yet a searcher after nature's truths ought to know, as he is here told, that waves may be anatomized, and must be chiseled, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... he shrank from doing this, for it seemed ignominious to retreat, so he raised his head sharply again till his eyes were about level with the terrace platform, and there, a dozen feet away, was the tail part of the snake, disappearing in a fissure of the stone. ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... intensely earthly interruption the parable springs: thus the Lord makes the covetousness as well as the wrath of man to praise him, and restrains the remainder thereof. A fissure has been made in the mountain by some pent-up internal fire that forced its way out, and rent the rock in its outgoing; in that rent a tree may now be seen blooming and bearing fruit, while all the rest of the mountain-side is bare. "Out ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and among } the island groups. Oligocene. N. Africa. } Doubtfully represented } south of the Zambezi. Eocene. N. Africa, along east and } west coasts; Madagascar. } Cretaceous Extensively developed in } Diamond pipes of S. N. Africa; along coast } Africa; Kaptian and foot-plateaus in east } fissure eruptions; and west; Madagascar. } Ashangi traps of } Abyssinia {Jurassic N. Africa; E. Africa; K{ Madagascar; Stormberg } Chief volcanic period a{ period (Rhaeric) in S. } in S. Africa r{ Africa } r{Trias. Beaufort Series in S. } o{ Africa; Congo ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... at it steadily for a moment, then he said decidedly: "We must go and see what it is." Without another word he started toward the white, star-like spot, sliding his hand over the rocky wall, and springing over a fissure in the floor. ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... will be able to answer you;' and she led the way down amongst the ruins towards one of the dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts, and disclosed to us a set of beings scarcely less savage. The sombre walls of this gloomy abode were illumined by a fire, the smoke from which escaped through a deep fissure in the massy roof; whilst the flickering flames threw a blood-red glare on the bronzed features of a group of children, of two men, and a decrepit old hag, who appeared busily engaged in some ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... weather barren current miner cellar mettle pendent advice illusion assay felicity genius profit statute poplar precede lightning patience devise disease insight dissent decease extant dessert ingenuous liniment stature sculpture fissure facility essay allusion advise pendant metal seller minor complement currant baron wether mantel principal burrow canon surf wholly serge whirl liar idyl flour pistil idol rise rude team corps peer straight ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... gathering up the glittering scales with great eagerness, came forward, and with his hatchet struck a few heavy blows against a fragment that projected from a fissure in the rock, when it split from the solid mass, and revealed the precious ore, intermixed with quartz rock; then turning away with disdain, left them to amuse themselves, and took up his former position ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... a terrible shock of surprise—he was sinking! Was there nothing beneath his feet but the vague depths of air to the base of the mountain? He realized with a quiver of dismay that he had mistaken a huge drift-filled fissure, between a jutting crag and the wall of the ridge, for the solid, snow-covered ground. He tossed his arms about wildly in his effort to grasp something firm. The motion only dislodged the drift. He felt that it was falling, and he ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the direction to the Bottomless Pit, which is a deep hole in the ground that is only one of many such fissures in the earth found on the Colorado Plateau. Four miles east of Canon Diablo a narrow fissure from a few inches to several feet wide and hundreds of feet deep has been traced in a continuous line over ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... subdivision, rupture; compartition^; dismemberment, dislocation; luxation^; severance, disseverance; scission; rescission, abscission; laceration, dilaceration^; disruption, abruption^; avulsion^, divulsion^; section, resection, cleavage; fission; partibility^, separability. fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c; come off, fall off, come to pieces, fall to pieces; peel off; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... spoken of so slightingly was what they needed from this time on, and nothing else would save them. Luke had that brawn; Fuller did not. The scientist slipped and nearly lost his balance at the edge of a fissure, but Luke made no move to help him. It was every man for himself at this ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... bounded on either side by titanic masses of volcanic rock, rugged and moss-grown, with little patches of herbage here and there, or an occasional stunted pine growing out of an almost imperceptible fissure. The only signs of life in this wild spot consisted of a diminutive musk-ox here and there cropping the scanty herbage half-way up the apparently inaccessible height in spots from which it appeared equally impossible for the creature ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... juice "Of better herbs; with the inverted wand "Our heads are touch'd; the charms, already spoke, "Strong charms of import opposite destroy. "The more she sings her incantations, we "Rise more from earth erect; the bristles fall; "And the wide fissure leaves our cloven feet; "Our shoulders form again; and arms beneath "Are shap'd. Him, weeping too, weeping we clasp, "And round our leader's neck embracing hang. "No words at first to utter have we power, "But such as ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... porch. The small alcove space held a bed and a rustic chair. Above her the peeled poles of the roof descended to within a few feet of her head. She had to lean over the rail of the porch to look up. The green and red rock wall sheered ponderously near. The waterfall showed first at the notch of a fissure, where the cliff split; and down over smooth places the water gleamed, to narrow in a crack with little drops, and suddenly to leap ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... connection between the sea-ice and the Barrier. This connection had always haunted our brains. What would it be like? A high, perpendicular face of ice, up which we should have to haul our things laboriously with the help of tackles? Or a great and dangerous fissure, which we should not be able to cross without going a long way round? We naturally expected something of the sort. This mighty and terrible monster would, of course, offer resistance in some form ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... The fissure down the front of the Pink Lady's Slipper is not so wide but that a bee must use some force to push against its elastic sloping sides and enter the large banquet chamber where he finds generous entertainment secreted among the fine white hairs in the upper part. Presently he has feasted enough. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... convinced himself that at this point there were no loose blocks likely to fall. Having satisfied himself on this head, he descended again and took his place in the boat. This was moored by a rope a few feet long to a bush growing from a fissure in the rock close to the water's edge. He and Peter remained on watch with their poles, to fend off any pieces of ice which might be brought round by the waves, while the rest of the crew, wrapping themselves up in their ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... the foot of the lake, and extending across it from shore to shore, a large fissure in the ice usually appears during the winter. This fissure is sometimes so wide that a team cannot cross it, and many years ago a span of horses was accidentally driven into it. The crevice in the ice has caused much ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... my knees tremble, my heart break, must note the rumbling, heed only the shuddering down in the fissure beneath the rock ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... ever man made could have passed up this new track. It was difficult for ridden horses, and our loaded beasts had to be given time. We seemed to be entering by a fissure into the womb of the savage hills that tossed themselves in ever-increasing grandeur up toward the mist-draped heights of Kara Dagh. Oftener than not our track was obviously watercourse, although now and then we breasted higher levels from which we could see, through gaps between ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... church rock." It is doubtless an old cone of eruption, about thirteen thousand feet in height, and is really the upper end of the long ridge we had been following, which may perhaps represent a lava flow from it, or the edge of a fissure which at ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... fraud from the blind, no lie from the mute!" Such my cry as, rapid, I ran over Parnes' ridge; Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, a bar Jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way. Right! for I minded the hollow to traverse, the fissure across: "Where I could enter, there I depart by! Night in the fosse? Athens to aid? Tho' the dive were thro' Erebos, thus I obey— Out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! No bridge Better!"—when—ha! what was it I came on, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... cleistogamic flowers produced by Monochoria vaginalis are differently protected from those in any of the previous cases, namely, within "a short sack formed of the membranous spathe, without any opening or fissure." There is only a single fertile stamen; the style is almost obsolete, with the three stigmatic surfaces directed to one side. Both the perfect and cleistogamic flowers produce seeds. (8/19. Dr. Kirk 'Journal of the Linnean Society' volume ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... among the rocks or in burrows in the ground. It is similar both in size and shape to that of the Puffins, but is often quite heavily blotched with brown. Size 2.70 x 1.80. Data.—Unak Is., Alaska, June 30, 1900. Egg laid in a fissure of the rocks; no ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... all difficulties, and arrived late at our encampment near a village called Topechee, the whole distance being ten miles and a half. From the crest of the pass to Topechee was a gradual descent, the road bordering a tremendous fissure, deep and gloomy, along the bottom of which a pelting torrent forced its way. The variegated strata on the mountain side, forming distinct lines of red, yellow, blue, and brown, were very remarkable, and I much regret that I had not time to devote to them most strict examination ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... somersault on to a rough bank of spear grass. Shaking myself together and somewhat recovering from the shock, I discovered the tail and stern of my steed projecting above the ground, the remainder of him being invisible. It appeared he had planted his fore feet in a deep fissure covered with long grass, and just large enough to take in head and fore parts. The shock sent me over, as I described, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... bottom of a rock-walled fissure, about six feet wide by twenty feet in length. There was no way to climb out of this natural prison, for its granite sides, fifteen feet in height, were without crack, projection, or other foothold; indeed, in the light of the afternoon sun, one facade ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... state, and the chief settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... before the outward pressure, and the branches settled in the fissure of the rock by their own weight, forming a compact body, Duncan once more breathed freely. With a light step and lighter heart, he returned to the center of the cave, and took the place he had left, where he could command a view of the opening next the river. While he was in ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... to notice things, saw at once that the opening was partly natural. It looked as though the men who claimed to have made this wonderful discovery of rich copper-bearing quartz had also found a fissure in the rocks splendidly fitted for their purposes, since it allowed them to pass far into the side of the hill before they were compelled ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the commencement of the receptacle, is not long in increasing, preserving its rounded form up to the development of the asci. At this period, under the influence of the rapid growth of these organs, it soon produces at its summit a fissure of the external membrane, which becomes a more marked depression in the marginate species. The receptacle thus formed increases rapidly, becomes plane, more convex, or more or less undulated at the margin, if at all of large size. Fixed to the place where it is generated ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... way and that, on their laborious exploration, the silence fell profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and singular and horrid curiosities. One was a head of golden hair, supposed to be a relic of the captain's wife; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indeed. While pressing forward with undiminished effort, the Irishman found himself suddenly confronted with a solid, perpendicular wall of rock. The narrow chasm, or fissure, terminated. ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... striking is the fact that I, though now only sixty-seven years old, heard the Professor, in a field lecture at Salisbury Craigs, discoursing on a trapdyke, with amygdaloidal margins and the strata indurated on each side, with volcanic rocks all around us, say that it was a fissure filled with sediment from above, adding with a sneer that there were men who maintained that it had been injected from beneath in a molten condition. When I think of this lecture, I do not wonder that I determined never to attend ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... rose a rocky ridge to a considerable height, springing up which Long Hair motioned Tom to follow. The other side was quite precipitous; but a narrow fissure in the rock afforded a scanty footing, down which the Indian glided, Tom following him, although dizzy with the height. Passing along for a short distance, they came to a scrub oak, the roots of which had struck into the side of the ledge. Climbing around it, a small opening ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... through the vertebrae of the spinal column and the brain. The brain consists of three parts: The cerebrum, or great brain, consisting of two hemispheres, which, though connected, are divided in great part by a longitudinal fissure; the cerebellum, or little brain; and the medulla oblongata, or bulb. The spinal nerves consist of thirty-one pairs, which branch out from the spinal cord. Each pair of nerves contains a right and left member, distributed to the right and the left side of the body respectively. These nerves are ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... over the earth, had grown yet more dazzling. The whole valley floor seemed to be brought quite close to the eyes. The dark lakes glistened; the road lay between them, a blinding stripe of white. The mountains stood like a dark wall beneath the glistening sky, showing every gap and fissure in the rocks, which were like scars on their ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... We failed to convert one another to each other's views. When he became a member of 'The Disciples,' a mystic Oxbridge society, the fissure between us widened to a gulf. We nodded when we met, but that was all. With Girdelstone I was not on speaking terms. So when I found Monteagle on my threshold I confess ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... an almost constant attendant on that condition of the sphincter described by Agnew as sphincterismus, which also is productive of haemorrhoids and fissure, and often of fistula. That sphincterismus is caused in many cases by preputial irritation is as evident as that the same affection, or haemorrhoids or any other rectal or anal affection, will, in its turn, produce vesical and urethral ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Egypt and Syria, and in The Expositor for May 1886, in which he shows that great beds of bituminous limestone extend below the Jordan valley and much of the Dead Sea, and that the escape of inflammable gag from these through the opening of a fissure along a great 'line of fault,' is capable of producing all the effects described. The 'brimstone' of the Authorised Version is probably rather some form of bituminous matter which would be carried into the air by such an escape of gas, and a thick saline mud would accompany ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... was trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank. She turned aside and trotted over to it. The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a narrow fissure. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... decision. We cannot shelter behind it, and think to retire with honor when we have as yet only skirmished on the edges of the field. For the Chinese heathenism of California remains to-day, so far as we can see, substantially a solid mass, without any fissure, though not without a scar. Many chips have been struck off from it, and for these we bless God; but the rock-like hardness of the Chinese heart remains substantially unbroken. Say that all our missions ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 02, February, 1885 • Various
... white plume of steam, woven by the wind into soft, fantastic shapes, no longer capped the crater; its place had been usurped by thick, dark fumes of smoke swirling sullenly about. In the fading light I marked the red, malignant glow of a fissure newly broken out in the side of the ragged cone, from which came a thin, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Something of this was true all over the Colonies: no doubt what I noticed was but a phase of the general movement, part social, part religious, part political, now carrying us along with a perceptible glide toward the crisis of revolution. But here in the Valley, more than elsewhere, this broadening fissure of division ran through farms, through houses, ay, even through the group gathered in front of the family fire-place—separating servants from employers, sons from fathers, husbands from wives. And, alas! when I realized now for the ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... toward it, but found the light too feeble for him to distinguish surrounding objects by. It entered the cell through a small fissure in one of the walls, and after a few minutes was suddenly withdrawn. Frederick-Christian stumbled forward in the darkness and, after taking a few steps, his feet struck some object lying on the ground. Stooping ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... that the cliff might cave in. Indeed, the cliffs all around were cracked off, and in some places leaning over, apparently ready to fall; and even at the spot where the spectators stood looking into the crater, there was a fissure running along parallel to the cliff, some feet behind them. At first Mr. George was afraid to step over ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... reticulata is the species occurring on the Yucatan shores, while O. splendidula is found in other parts of the Gulf of Mexico. Representations of this shell are shown in Pl. 1, figs. 10-12. In figs. 10, 11, the lip and spire are apparent but in fig. 12 the lip only is seen as a white fissure against the general dark background. An earthenware vessel representing a tapir (Pl. 28, fig. 1) shows a string of Oliva shells about the animal's neck and similar strings very often decorate the belts worn by the personages represented ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... canon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... stuck out his figure, in a way to indicate that he gave permission to all to think of him exactly what they pleased. Those pockets were characteristic of the whole costume; their very name is unfamiliar to the twentieth century. They divide the garment by a fissure whose sides are kept together by many buttons, and a defection on the part of even a few buttons is apt to be inconvenient. James Ollerenshaw was one of the last persons in Bursley to defy fashion in the matter of pockets. His suit was of ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... through a stone fell through a fissure of the cave, and Luliban, who watched for the signal, dived outwards with the line of cinnet, and came behind Red-Hair and put the noose over his left foot, and Harry, who followed close, cast the stone he carried away and raised his hand and stabbed him ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... ever dreamed of, so strange that even men such as Peter, Sogrange and Dory, whose nerves were of iron, faced one another, doubting and amazed. The floor beneath them rocked and billowed like the waves of a canvas sea. The windows were filled with flashes of red light, a great fissure parted the wall, the pictures and book-cases came crashing down beneath a shower of masonry. It was the affair of a second. Above them shone the stars and around them a noise like thunder. Bernadine, who alone understood, was the first to recover ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Ford; "mount on my shoulders, my lad! I am still strong enough to bear you!" The young man understood in an instant. His father propped himself up against the rock. Harry got upon his shoulders, so that with his pick he could reach the line of the fissure. Then with quick sharp blows he attacked it. Almost directly afterwards a slight sound was heard, like champagne escaping from a bottle—a sound commonly expressed by ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... a direct line; his tail was long, for he dragged it over the snow; in brushing against a bush he left some of his hair which shows its color. He was very hungry, for, in going along, he has nipped at those high, dry weeds, which horses seldom eat. The fissure of the left fore foot left also its track, and the depth of the indentation shows the degree of his lameness; and his tracks show he was here this morning, when the snow was hard ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... and breast; then he is of brass far as to the fork. From there downward he is all of chosen iron, save that his right foot is of baked clay, and he stands erect on that more than on the other.[1] Every part except the gold is cleft with a fissure that trickles tears, which collected perforate that cavern. Their course falls from rock to rock into this valley; they form Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon; then it goes down through this narrow channel far as where there is no ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... passed away; and temples crumbled, and kings' tombs were forgotten, and cities were buried and others built over them after hundreds of years—and perhaps a few stones fell from a mountain side, or a fissure was worn, which the people below could not even see. And that was all. There they stood, and perhaps their secret was that they had been there for ever and ever. That was what the mountains said to Marco, which was why he did not want ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the darkness toward the dugout, Laramie whistled low and clearly, and planting his feet with care on a foothold of old masonry swung down to where a fissure opening in the rock afforded entrance into ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... hands outstretched to grasp her neck. But, at that instant, the frightened woman's strength suddenly gave way; her knees received the fall of the limp body. For a second she seemed huddled in a posture of prayer, then toppled over, slipped easily forward through a fissure in the wall and plunged headforemost into ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the range are porphyritic,** but the hills of Wingen present a variety of rocks, within a small space. In the adjacent gullies to the south of the hill, we find clay of a grey mottled appearance, and shale containing apparently a small quantity of decomposed vegetable matter; and near the fissure then on fire, occurred a coarse sandstone with an argillaceous basis. To the north-west, in a hollow containing water which drains from beneath the part ignited, is a coarse sandstone, in some places highly charged with decomposed felspar, and containing impressions of spirifers. The hill ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... by a column or cone (see my elegant drawing) of lava [Figure 4]. I do not doubt that the dikes are thus indirectly connected with eruptive vents. E. de B. seems to have observed many of his T; now without he supposes the whole line of fissure or dike to have poured out lava (which implies, as above remarked, craters of an elliptic or almost linear shape) on both sides, how extraordinarily improbable it is, that there should have been in a single line of section so many intersections of points eruption; ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... forest-trees, which throw out a broad sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hither, Jack with the Bear's Ear, and why dost thou thus waste my property?" Whereupon she began to lick with her tongue about the post, and no sooner did her tongue arrive at the fissure than Jack snatched the wedge from out of the post, and having entrapped her tongue he leaped up from the perch, and scourged her with the iron rods until she begged that he would let her go, promising that he should be in peace from ...
— The Story of Yvashka with the Bear's Ear • Anonymous
... black smoke of burning buildings and fields in the valley, or showed the white puff-like low clouds of the bursting shrapnel. Not for an instant did the roar diminish, not for a second was the kindly veil of night left unrent by a fissure of vengeful flame. Yet, all night long, as ceaselessly as the great guns poured out their angry fury, so did men pour out their indomitable will, and in that hell light of battle flame engineers labored to construct ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... was none. I was alone for an indefinite time with a dead man. But was he dead? I had little doubt, from the way his head hung, that his throat was cut, and a horrible fascination drew me to his side to examine. No; there was no sign of the hideous fissure I expected to find beneath the gray bristles of his beard. His head fell forward again into the same position, and I saw with horror that I had left two bloody fingermarks upon the gray shade of his sleeping-cap. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... clothed with shrubbery, partly naked, were so seamed and cleft and creviced that they appeared to promise many convenient retreats. But across the mouth of the valley extended an appalling barrier. From an irregular fissure in the parched earth, running on a slant from one wall to the other, came tongues of red flame, waving upwards to a height of several feet, sinking back, rising again, and bowing as if ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... so wide a running jump was necessary, and at times the smooth rock sloped on both sides toward the crevice rather steeply. Once the Major came sliding down a bare slope till at a point where he caught sight of the edge of a sombre fissure just where he must land. He could not see its width; he could not return, and there he hung. Luckily I was where by another path I could quickly reach the rock below, and I saw that the crevice was not six ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... opposite the aperture and between the giant cliffs that rose on either side of the narrow entrance a sight was revealed that filled their hearts with renewed hope and rejoicing, for a tiny cove was seen to lie beyond the fissure—a cove with a long, wide, sandy beach up which the waves, broken at the entrance to the little haven, rolled with much ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mumbled Ta-Vwots. "I know a way out of this that you don't know." With a few puffs of his breath and a few kicks of his legs he reached a great fissure that led into the rock behind him, and along this passage he scrambled until he came to the edge of it in a niche, from which he could watch his enemies digging. When they had made the hole quite ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless, vegetable parings, papers, scraps of metal. At every sweep of her broom the old woman bared the soul of the gutter, that black fissure on which a porter's mind is ever bent. The poor lover examined this scene, like a thousand others which our heaving Paris presents daily; but he examined it mechanically, as a man absorbed in thought, when, happening to look up, he found himself all but nose to ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... again the sky is cold, And down that fissure now no star-beam glides. Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old Still at the central point of space behold Another pole-star: for ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... breast And arms; thence to the middle is of brass. And downward all beneath well-temper'd steel, Save the right foot of potter's clay, on which Than on the other more erect he stands, Each part except the gold, is rent throughout; And from the fissure tears distil, which join'd Penetrate to that cave. They in their course Thus far precipitated down the rock Form Acheron, and Styx, and Phlegethon; Then by this straiten'd channel passing hence Beneath, e'en to the lowest depth of all, Form there Cocytus, of whose lake (thyself Shall ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... mouth of a treacherous fissure, and far down at its icy bottom lay all that was mortal of my old friend, Abner Perry. There would his body be preserved in its icy sepulcher for countless ages, until on some far distant day the slow-moving river of ice had wound its snail-like way down to the warmer ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... At night when the long perspective of arched columns are illuminated by the electric lamps, I am almost religiously impressed when I gaze upon the natural wonders of this cavern, which has become my prison. I have never given up hope of finding somewhere in the walls a fissure of some kind of which the pirates are ignorant and through which I could make my escape. It is true that once outside I should have to wait till a passing ship hove in sight. My evasion would speedily be known at the Beehive, and I should soon be recaptured, unless—a happy thought strikes ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... dwarf not only promised the desired information, but gave Dietrich the magic sword Nagelring, which alone could pierce the giants' skin. Then he led both heroes to the cave, where Grim and Hilde were gloating over a magic helmet they had made and called Hildegrim. Peering through a fissure of the rock, Hildebrand was the first to gaze upon them, and in his eagerness to get at them he braced his shoulder against the huge mass of stone, forced it apart, and thus made a passage for himself and for his ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... deliberation, not only animates external things and their specific types, but he also, by an exercise of memory, animates the psychical image of these special perceptions. If, for example, the primitive man personifies a stream of water which he has seen to issue from a fissure of the rocks, and ascribes to it voluntary and intentional motion, he also animates the image which reappears in his sphere of thought, and conceives it to have a real existence. He does not merely believe it to be a psychical and what may be called a photographic ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... extent, about two thousand feet above the villages. This shelf or valley appears to have suffered at some remote period from a terrible inundation. Landslips of great size and innumerable deep gorges and ravines furrow the bottom of the basin, until at length a principal fissure carries away the united ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... a fold in the natural rock, rising and falling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward. It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the chasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... took a short cut through the fields leaving the caravan to follow the main road. The trail brought us to a river about forty feet wide spanned by a bridge made from two narrow planks, with a wide median fissure. We led our horses across without trouble and Heller started to follow. He had reached the center of the bridge when his horse shied at the hole, jumped to one side, hung suspended on his belly for a moment, and toppled ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... moon. Watching, I saw him distinctly; then, as the moonlight darkened, the after part of the ship became as a single shadow against a sea almost as black. While I still watched, there came through a small fissure in the clouds a single moonbeam that swept from the sea across the quarter-deck and on over the sea again. By that momentary light I saw that Mr. Falk had ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... while in Podocarpus and Dacrydium, the outer cupula, as I formerly termed it,* may also, perhaps, be viewed as the testa of the ovulum. To this view, as far as relates to Dacrydium, the longitudinal fissure of the outer coat in the early stage, and its state in the ripe fruit, in which it forms only a partial covering, may be objected.** But these objections are, in a great measure, removed by the analogous structure already described in ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... in a place which seemed like a fissure rent in a mountain side, by some extraordinary convulsion of nature. All around rose black, precipitous cliffs. On the side nearest was the precipice by whose base he had passed; while over opposite was a gigantic wall of dark rock, Which extended far out into the sea. Huge waves thundered at its ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... together. Again it might be seen in the semblance of a collection of organ-pipes, or accumulated into mounds and cones of various dimensions. As our travellers moved forward, they felt that the lava grew hotter and hotter, and from every fissure issued gaseous fumes, which seriously affected their noses and throats; till, at last, when passed to leeward of the lava-river rolling from the lake, they were almost suffocated by the vapour, and it was with ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... water-mark to which the inflowing tide comes, one can easily imagine themselves upon an inland lake. Beyond is Strancally Castle, beetling over the river, set firmly in a foundation of crags. The local tradition carriers will gladly point out "The Murdering Hole," a natural fissure in the rocks, and here they will tell you that the departed Desmonds destroyed their guests after robbing them! Above the confluence of the Bride with the Blackwater, Villierstown and Camphire villages are passed, then the Awbeg ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... The next morning we left our camp, which was on the south side, opposite to a large island in the middle of the river, and at five miles reached a creek on the north side, of about twenty yards wide, called Split Rock creek, from a fissure in the point of a neighbouring rock. Three miles beyond this, on the south is Saline river, it is about thirty yards wide, and has its name from the number of salt licks, and springs, which render its water brackish; ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... voice, is always ready to follow us and show its leering shape when we pass under dark, vaulted bridges or stand in the secret shadow of churches. The echo! What is the echo, Olivie, you discoursed of so sweetly? It is the sound of our souls escaping from some fissure of the brain. It has color, is a living thing, the thin wraith that pursues man ever to his grave. Patel was an echo. When his soul leans naked against the chill bar of heaven and bears false witness, then his echo will tell the truth about his music—this damnable reverberating ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of the frog is the division in the middle line of the frog. In healthy feet, it consists of only a slight depression. In a disease, called "thrush," of the sensitive part which secretes the frog, the cleft forms a deep, damp and foul-smelling fissure, and the frog becomes more or less shrivelled up. The frog similar to the skin of the palms of our hands, requires frequent pressure to make it thick and strong. The horn of the hoof is merely a modification ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... appreciate its character, and comprehend its awfully impressive effects, it is necessary to see the bridge, the chasm, and the roaring water, from different projecting crags which impend over the river. At a little distance below the bridge, "the fissure gradually spreads its rocky jaws; the bottom opens; and, instead of the dark precipices which have hitherto overhung and obscured the struggling river, it now emerges into day, and rolls its murmuring current through ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... last it was light enough for them to see what changes the night had brought, they found that all the creeks and channels were open far out to sea, but in the bay where they were frozen in not a fissure could be seen in the ice, which lay ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's clear, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... fissure ploughed by a cannon ball within the walls of the Ursuline Convent furnished ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... however, a large number of other subcastes, and the tendency to fissure in a large caste, and to the formation of small local groups which marry among themselves, is nowhere more strikingly apparent than among the Brahmans. This is only natural, as they, more than any other caste, attach importance to strict ceremonial observance in matters of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the ruins, and taken evidence, they were of opinion that the mode of laying the pipes, and in such an unprotected way, was faulty, and that subsidence of the pipes probably occurred at the crossing of the puddle trench. A fissure in the puddle was created, affording a creep for the water, which, once set up, would rapidly increase the breach by scour; and this event was favored by the manner in which the bank had been constructed and the unsuitability of the material used, which, in the words of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... The waters from which Bath gets its fame are believed to owe their origin to the surface drainage of the E. Mendips, which percolates through some vertical fissure, perhaps at Downhead, to the heart of the hills, and are conducted by some natural culvert beneath the intervening coal measures, washing out as they go the soluble mineral salts, and whilst still retaining their heat ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... around, and the scene was well calculated to affect a nervous mind. It was a fit scene for the painter of the supernatural. The small apartment in which they were, was formed in great part from the natural rock; where a fissure presented itself, a huge pine-tree, overthrown so as to fill the vacuity, completed what nature had left undone; and, bating the one or two rude cavities left here and there in the sides—themselves so covered ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... much of a guide. The slope of every fissure seems to run naturally from the inland watershed to this basin. Hartley was sick and it was raining all the time, and coming out of any of these ravines he'd only have to make a slight turn to reach the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... washed overboard by the breakers as she passed through them, and was dashed to death, probably in an instant, by the fierce waves. The next day, when the storm had abated, the body was found far above where the brig lay fastened immovably in the vice-like fissure of enormous rocks. Twenty sovereigns, which perhaps the poor fellow had saved to bring home to his old mother, were found in a belt around ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... added steepness, the ardor of the explorer warmed. With impetuous haste he climbed the last dozen yards; when, as the anticipated summit was reached, he halted in abrupt, dismayed surprise; for with alarming suddenness the land broke off short, disclosing a deep gap or fissure, carpeted with heather and surrounded by natural protecting walls of rock, in the centre of which was set a miniature chapel built of ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... told him that he did not possess her full confidence, and he was too proud to ask it. So they lived together a few short weeks after marriage, on outward terms of courtesy and cordiality, but with this little rift of dissatisfaction gradually yet surely widening into a fissure that should rend each of these ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... started forwards trailing the footprints. Arriving at the river's edge they slid down the bank and followed the tracks over the snow-covered ice to the centre of the river. Here was open water for some distance; the powerful current at this point keeping open a ten-foot wide steaming fissure. The tracks hugged its edge to a point about four hundred yards westward, where the fissure closed up again and enabled them to cross to the opposite bank. Clambering up this their quest led them across a long stretch ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... THE PARIETAL AND OCCIPITAL LOBES (LATERAL SURFACE).—The Postcentral Fissural Complex—In this hemicerebrum, the postcentral and subcentral are combined to form a continuous fissure, attaining a length of 8.5 cm. Dorsally, the fissure bifurcates, embracing the gyre indented by the caudal limb of the paracentral. The caudal limb of the postcentral is joined by a transparietal piece. In all, five additional rami spring from the combined fissure. A vadum separates ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Ruzee-od Dowlah, the head singer. When the door of the apartment was closed, they first heard a frightful voice, without being able to perceive whence it came. Neither the minister nor the King could perceive the slightest opening or fissure in the ceiling. They then came out and closed the door, but immediately heard from within the peaceful salutation of 'salaam aleekom,' and the man appeared within as King of the Fairies, and presented his Majesty with some jewels and other offerings. All was here enacted ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... table's. However, it is not a bad illustration, Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a fissure, but remain at the same level, like the two halves of the table, it is not called a fault, but only a fissure; but if one half of the table be either tilted higher than the other, or pushed to the side, so that the two parts will ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... then only about twenty-five years old; but it had made haste to become offensive to every sense and sentiment of reasonable man. It had been built in the Spanish style,—a massive, dark, grim, huge, four-sided block, the fissure-like windows of its cells looking down into the four public streets which ran immediately under its walls. Dilapidation had followed hard behind ill-building contractors. Down its frowning masonry ran grimy streaks of leakage over peeling stucco and mould-covered brick. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the special questions which have arisen about the localization of functions in the nervous system, that of the function of certain areas known as "motor centres" has been eagerly discussed. The region on both sides of the fissure of Rolando in Fig. 3 contains a number of areas which give, when stimulated with electricity, very definite and regular movements of certain muscles on the opposite side of the body. By careful exploration of these areas the principal muscular combinations—those for facial movements, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... question." "It is not uncommon, however," adds the writer, "for persons to survive for a time the felling of the tree." The ordinary mode of effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling longitudinally for a few feet and pass the child, naked, either three times or three times three through the fissure at sunrise. In the West of England it is said that the passage should be "against the sun." As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay. The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... through that sulphurous cleft," Wotan answered, pointing to the deep fissure in the rock. "Swing thyself down and I will follow thee." He no sooner ceased to speak than Loge swung himself into the black abyss, and a frightful, sulphurous vapour arose from ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... aside, then stood trembling. Forms, some ragged, some attired with a violent picturesqueness, had started from without a fissure in the wood and from behind a huge wayside rock. Ian knew them at a glance for those brigands of whom he had heard mention and warning enough. Don Fernando ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... calm, but felt dull with disappointment. For all that, he saw why the mine had been abandoned. There was a fault in the strata, where the vein had slipped down, but the subsidence had cracked the rock above and he imagined that the fissure reached the surface. The air was fresh and not very cold; there was water close by, and Foster saw no reason why Daly should not have found the chamber a comfortable hiding-place. Yet he ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... eastern ridge, just below the extreme summit, hot sulphurous gases and vapor escape with a hissing, bubbling noise from a fissure in the lava. Some of the many small vents cast up a spray of clear hot water, which falls back repeatedly until wasted in vapor. The steam and spray seem to be produced simply by melting snow coming in the way of ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... the head with a blow from her inverted wand; and charms are repeated, the converse of the charms that had been uttered. The longer she chaunts them, the more erect are we raised from the ground; and the bristles fall off, and the fissure leaves our cloven feet; our shoulders return; our arms become attached[27] to their upper parts. In tears, we embrace him {also} in tears; and we cling to the neck of our chief; nor do we utter any words before those that ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... screamed Blythe; and at the same instant the crumbling summit of the ridge opened under our feet and a fissure hundreds of yards long yawned ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... at a copious stream which rushed forth from its recesses, and recruit our own exhausted strength with food and rest, was our first necessary resource. In tracing the rocky course of the current for a convenient watering place, Antonio discovered that it issued from a cavern, which, though a mere fissure exteriorly, was, within, of cathedral dimensions and solemnity; we all entered it and drank eagerly from a foaming basin, which it immediately presented to our fevered lips. Our first sensations were ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... banks intermingled their leaves, and another cataract plunged from the pool into a chasm, on which the sunbeams never gleamed. High above, on both sides, the steep woody slopes of the dingle soared into the sky; and from a fissure in the rock, on which the little path terminated, a single gnarled and twisted oak stretched itself over the pool, forming a fork with its boughs at a short distance from the rock. Miss Susannah often sat on the rock, with her feet resting on this tree; in time, she made her seat on the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... occurring within this village is a cave or underground fissure in the rocks, which evidently had been used by the inhabitants. The mouth or entrance to this cavern, partly obstructed and concealed at the time of our visit, occurs at the point A on the plan. On clearing away the rubbish at the mouth and entering it was found so obstructed with broken ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... British language a talking stone. {126} There was an ancient tradition respecting this stone, that at a time when a corpse was carried over it for interment, it broke forth into speech, and by the effort cracked in the middle, which fissure is still visible; and on account of this barbarous and ancient superstition, the corpses are no longer brought over it. The king, who had heard the prophecy, approaching the stone, stopped for a short time at the foot of it, and, looking earnestly at it, boldly passed ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... mighty "rift" in the mountains with a never-ending roar. It has been threatening rain for the last two hours, and now the first peal of thunder I have heard on the whole journey awakens the echoing voices of the caon and rolls and rumbles along the great jagged fissure like an angry monster muttering his mighty wrath. Peal after peal follow each other in quick succession, the vigorous, newborn echoes of one peal seeming angrily to chase the receding voices of its predecessor from cliff to cliff, and from recess to projection, along its rocky, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... barbarous oriental imagination and Hellenic art). Cheiron the Centaur has himself borne Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto, daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him to a dark fissure—a Bocca dell' Inferno—at the foot of Mount Olympus, such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen of Hades, in his ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... on a rock, with cliffs, either perpendicular and abrupt towards the river, or with broken craggs, whose jutting prominences, having a little soil, have been planted with orange and fig trees. A fissure in this rock, of great depth, surrounds the city on three sides, and at the bottom of the fissure the river rushes along with impetuous rapidity. Two bridges are constructed over the fissure; the first is a single arch, resting on the rocks on the two sides, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... ARTESIAN WELLS. The DEEPER ZONES OF FLOW lie in pervious strata which are overlain by some impervious stratum. Such layers are often carried by their dip to great depths, and water may circulate in them to far below the level of the surface streams and even of the sea. When a fissure crosses a water- bearing stratum, or AQUIFIER, water is forced upward by the pressure of the weight of the water contained in the higher parts of the stratum, and may reach the surface as a fissure spring. A boring which ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... on the chasm's brink, looking down into its unfathomable depths. This gigantic rent, hundreds of feet in width and thousands in depth, indicates that northwest-southeast line along which the volcanic forces of Ararat have acted most powerfully. This fissure is perhaps the greatest with which the mountain is seamed, and out of which has undoubtedly been discharged a great portion of its lava. Starting from the base of the dome, it seemed to pierce the shifting clouds to a point about 500 feet from the summit. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... if he be wise, he will not choose To find the doubtful way alone, lest night O'ertake him wandering, and her icy breath Chill him to marble; not alone will risk His foot unwonted on the glassy bed Of rifted glacier, lest a step amiss Should hurl him headlong down some fissure dark, That yawns unseen—thence to arise no more. But, furnished with a trusty guide, he mounts From peak to peak in safety, though with toil. Once on the lofty summit, he beholds A glory in earth's kingdom all undreamed Till now. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... woodmen, bent a forest pine to split, Into each fissure sundry wedges fit, To keep the void and render work more light. Out groaned the pine, "Why should I vent my spite Against the axe which never touched my root, So much as these cursed wedges, mine own fruit; Which rend me through, inserted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... a heap of ruins, which, covered with underwood, was close to the castle wall. It had probably been originally a projection from the building; and the small fissure, which communicated with the dungeon, contrived for air, had terminated within it. But the aperture had been a little enlarged by decay, and admitted a dim ray of light to its recesses, although it could not be observed by those who visited the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... true fissure vein," he said. "A expert could almost trace the lines of it under the snow. It'd fool anybody. The slide fills the front of it an' see them outcrops? Look like the real thing, only ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... been moved, the river having risen a foot or two, in consequence of the wind and the thaw, and there was a sort of icy wave cast up near the land, over which it was indispensable to pass, in order to get fairly on the river. As the top of this ridge, or wave, was broken, it exposed a fissure that enabled us to see the thickness of the ice, and this Guert pointed out in proof of its strength. There was nothing unusual in a small movement of the covering of the river, which the current often produces; but, unless ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... with an attentive eye, Colwyn next looked for the small door in the wall. It was not apparent: the wall-paper appeared to cover the whole of the wall on that side of the room in unbroken continuity. But a closer inspection revealed a slight fissure or crack, barely noticeable in the dark green wall-paper, extending an inch or so beyond a small picture suspended near the door of the room. When the picture was taken down the crack was more apparent, for it ran nearly the whole length of the space. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... this manner, more than half way along the stick, without encountering anything but the edges of the rocks. An inch or two further on, however, my patience was rewarded. In a narrow little fissure, just within reach of my forefinger, I felt the chain. Attempting, next, to follow it, by touch, in the direction of the quicksand, I found my progress stopped by a thick growth of seaweed—which had fastened itself into the fissure, no doubt, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... approached it apparently through a mere fissure in the rocks upon the opposite side and at a point where I had assured myself that there could be no passage. The little river gurgled at my feet, and in front of me I saw a candle flickering in the recesses of a cave, so elfinlike ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert |
