"Lava" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mass of at least fifty different tints, from a fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the streets the illusion of beauty passes: you find yourself in a crumbling, decaying town, with buildings only two stories high. The lower part, of arched Spanish design, is usually of lava rock or of brick, painted a light, warm yellow; the upper stories are most commonly left unpainted, and are rudely constructed of light timber. There are many heavy arcades and courts opening on the streets with large archways. Lava blocks have been used in paving as well as ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the superimposed rock must have been worn off at a rate of less than a hundredth part of an inch every year in order to lose two or three miles of it in twenty-five million years. As the granite was wrinkled up by the movement of the earth's crust, certain cracks opened and filled with lava, forming dikes. The geologist to-day can glance at these dikes and tell the period of their formation as casually as a jockey looking at a horse's mouth can tell his age. He could also tell of the "faulting," or slipping down, of adjacent masses of solid rock, which has occurred ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... (for he did not yet call himself Senor Cristoval Colon) set out for Porto Santo—a lonely rock some miles north of Madeira. Its southern shore is a long sweeping bay of white sand, with a huddle of sand-hills beyond, and cliffs and peaks of basalt streaked with lava fringing the other shores. When Columbus and his bride arrived there the place was almost as bare as it is to-day. There were the governor's house; the settlement of Portuguese who worked in the mills and sugar-fields; the mills themselves, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who is not a liar and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... fire are vomited from the inmost depths: in the daytime the lava-streams pour forth a lurid rush of smoke: but in the darkness a red rolling flame sweepeth rocks with uproar to ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... motor-boat fighting the tide, had crept through a gray-green river of men, stained, as though from the banks, by mud and yellow clay. And for hours, while the car was blocked, and in fury the engine raced and purred, the gray-green river had rolled past her, slowly but as inevitably as lava down the slope of a volcano, bearing on its surface faces with staring eyes, thousands and thousands of eyes, some fierce and bloodshot, others filled with weariness, homesickness, pain. At night she still saw them: the white faces under the sweat and ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... felicity comes with her presence, and distraction with her absence,—whether her eyes make the morning brighter for thee, and her tears fall upon thy heart like molten lava,—whether heaven would be black and dismal without her company, and the flames of hell turn into ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... Grandly and impressively it grew—slowly, serenely, majestically it rose toward the welkin, the relaxing keel parting the mastheads to give it a fair chance. I have stood at Naples and seen Vesuvius painting the town red—from Catania have marked afar, upon the flanks of AEtna, the lava's awful pursuit of the astonished rooster and the despairing pig. The fiery flow from Kilauea's crater, thrusting itself into the forests and licking the entire country clean, is as familiar to me as my ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... which we had marked the top, I counted five several dykes or outcrops to the east (inland), and one to the west, cutting the prism from north to south; the superficial matter of these injections showed concentric circles like ropy lava. The shape of the block is a saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... have felt the slightest trepidation in going into battle with some one else commanding. Had Canby been in other engagements afterwards, he would, I have no doubt, have advanced without any fear arising from a sense of the responsibility. He was afterwards killed in the lava beds of Southern Oregon, while in pursuit of the hostile Modoc Indians. His character was as pure as his talent and learning were great. His services were valuable during the war, but principally as a bureau officer. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... Island of the Caribbean" due to its spectacular, lush, and varied flora and fauna, which are protected by an extensive natural park system; the most mountainous of the Lesser Antilles, its volcanic peaks are cones of lava craters and include Boiling Lake, the second-largest, thermally active lake ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma and in Texas. In the western interior limestones predominate; 6000 ft. of limestone are found at Eureka, Nevada, beneath 2000 ft. of shale. On the Pacific coast metamorphism of the rocks is common, and lava-flows and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... like a long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs,—left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... took my own saddle ashore: and being mounted on a fine mule, we all began our journey towards the hill. The road is rough, but has evidently once been made with some pains, and paved with blocks of porous lava; but the winter rains have long ago destroyed it, and it does not seem to be any body's business to put ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... journeys onward in the saddle towards the Pacific Ocean. Here are the imposing barrancas of Jalisco which he traverses, and marks how they are buried in the profuse vegetation which presses up to the very border of the lava of smoking Ceboruco. Thence the myrtle forests of Tepic are penetrated. On the tropic lakes thousands of log-like alligators lie, gloomily awaiting their prey. From the verge, which rich forests fringe, and where brilliant water-weeds ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... good-tempered, but was very dilatory in everything. His greatest peculiarity was, that although he had a hearty laugh for every joke, he did not take the jokes of others at the time that they were made. His ideas seemed to have the slow and silent flow ascribed to the stream of lava (without its fire): and the consequence was, that although he eventually laughed at a good thing, it was never at the same time with other people; but in about a quarter or half a minute afterwards (according to the difficulty of the analysis), when the cause had been dismissed for other topics, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... modern houses in that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and Pompeii, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trastaverini scarves, Genoese velvets and filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... did the word mean? Was there aught in the world but fire—flames—fierce, withering, smothering, consuming heat? He thought the shales crackled as they melted beneath him! He thought his feet sank to the ankles in molten lava, and were so heavy he scarce could drag them! He thought the blazing sun shot out great tongues of flame, like the arms of a monster devilfish, which twined about him, transforming his blood to vapor and sucking it ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... The great lava plain of Snake River, the Pedrigal country of eastern Oregon, Northern California and Mexico are without valuable ore deposits. The same may be said of the Pancake Range and other mountain chains of igneous ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... through a forest of pines, the trail underfoot being of lava, as hard and smooth as a road could be. They were gradually drawing nearer to Sunset Mountain. After a time they turned off to the right, heading straight ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... some holes of the rocks; but after all our search the whole that we collected was only nine gallons. We advanced within two miles of the foot of the highest mountain in the island, on which is the volcano that is almost constantly burning. The country near it is covered with lava and has a most dreary appearance. As we had not been fortunate in our discoveries, and saw nothing to alleviate our distresses except the plantains and water above-mentioned, we returned to the boat exceedingly ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... spent at least ten years in trying to bury his temperament under layers of hard common sense. But all the time it was there, like boiling hot lava under a cold crust; and when Aline told me how he valued their friendship, I wondered whether she were right, and just how deeply his admiration of her was rooted in his heart. I wondered if she were the type of woman he would want, not only for a friend, but by and by for ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... worse for thee, caro, since the good bishop is better at stopping the lava than at quieting the winds. But there was danger, then, of losing the felucca and her brave ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... said, with defiant shrug of shoulders and a straight gaze into her sister's eyes. "We rode out from gay Mana and continued the gay progress—down the lava trails to Kiholo to the swimming and the fishing and the feasting and the sleeping in the warm sand under the palms; and up to Puuwaawaa, and more pig-sticking, and roping and driving, and wild mutton from the upper pasture-lands; ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... up without ever having ridden on the cars, save once or twice to Lava. Black Rim was the rim of the world to them, and their world held all that they yearned for. Belle sheltered them from too much knowledge of that other world, which held the past she hated and tried to forget. Much she taught ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... drove out from the swarming city toward those famous ruins, revealing to the curious so much of the old Roman civilization. After a drive of twelve miles past fields of lava and ashes, the accumulations from recent irruptions of Vesuvius, they arrived at the street of tombs, a fitting entrance to the desolated city. Here, the beautifully sculptured monuments, memorials of a departed generation, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... remarkable natural curiosity of the vicinity, certainly. The following interesting description of this rock is by Prof. Chandler: "The spring rises in a little mound of stone, three or four feet high, which appears like a miniature volcano, except that sparkling water instead of melted lava flows from its little crater. When Sir William Johnson visited the spring, and in fact until quite recently, the water did not overflow the mound, but came to within a few inches of the summit; ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... just in that dull state of rage in which the lava that the crater will afterward pour forth, is just prepared. As yet all is quiet, but be sure there will be an eruption, and the stream of red-hot lava will busy those who have dared ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... unlucky gush, Josephine turned pale, then red, then pale again, and cried eagerly, "Then all the world should not part us. Why torture me with such a question? Ah! you have heard something." And in a moment the lava of passion burst wildly through its thin sheet of ice. "I was blind. This is why you would save me from this unnatural marriage. You are breaking the good news to me by degrees. There is no need. Quick—quick—let ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... his winnings about his person—we saw the smile that curved the corners of his lips; he was calm, and we were maddened. The blood flowed temperately through his veins, but in ours it was burning lava, scorching as it went through every petty artery, and drying up all human thought—all ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the very youngest. I say more. As young feet can run fastest, so it is with young souls. You will never go to Jesus so easily as now. Let nothing keep you back. It is said that on digging up the ruins of Herculaneum, (the city that was buried under the lava of Mount Vesuvius,) the body of a man was found in an upright posture, in the act of running out of the door of his house to escape destruction. He had a bag of gold in his hand. Others had escaped in safety. But this miser loved his gold more than his life. He had returned ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... first raised above the sea, must have been active volcanoes, sending out hot from their craters the flood of lava and the heated rocks which now lie cold and hard, and overgrown with moss, to tell us of ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... a three-cornered nut called the "lava-nut," of which the animals are very fond, and they will go a long distance in search of it. The keepers are provided with a quantity of these nuts, and the man with whom the animals are most familiar throws a few to the one selected. As soon as the animal ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... these facts with attention, I am astonished every day that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and workshop. This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we hear the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... interminable lake of fire, amid whose scalding waves there rolled and tossed poor wretches like himself; and morning after morning he had returned by the same road, feeling as though a frost-breath had passed over the lake of fire, leaving it rough and leaden like a lava-deluged plain. But now, whence came the wonderful beauty of the widespread landscape? He knew in part, and brushed his old jacket sleeve across his swollen eyes. He feared that the vision was fated to pass away, ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... unearthly, above the Limagne. There was that upper valley of the Allier down which Csar had retreated, gathering his legions into the North, and there was that silent and menacing sky which everywhere broods over Auvergne, and even in its clearest days seems to lend the granite and the lava land a sort of doomed hardness, as though Heaven in this country commanded and did not allure. Never had I seen a landscape more mysterious than those hills, nor at the same time ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... stagnant pool of water, lest it breed malaria, and be careless when there are in the very heart of our city thousands of houses, devoted to various forms of dissipation, which day and night steam with miasma, and pour out the fiery lava of pollution, and darken the air with their horrors, and fill the skies with the smoke of their torment, that ascendeth up forever and ever? If a slaughter-house be opened in the midst of the town, we hasten down to the Mayor to have the nuisance abated. But now I make complaint, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... tombs which had recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth de Latour, Cornelius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours. Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava. Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as if he stept softly over the ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... long for the future to escape the endless vexations and miseries of the present. Our trade, which lately bloomed like a Neapolitan spring-day, is now covered with clouds and sifted with ashes, as if some angry Vesuvius had exploded its contents over us and shot the hot lava-tides among our snug vineyards and cottages. May we not also, in this case, as in that, draw some consolation from the knowledge that the stars are still shining behind the smoke, and that the sun will assuredly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... only an eminence of masonry, side and end walls, but no front, no portico. Where is art? Where is the presiding deity of the place? The ruins of your stable would not be more naked a thousand years hence. Stones on all sides, tufa, bricks, lava, here and there some slabs of marble and travertine, then traces of destruction—paintings defaced, pavements disjointed and full of gaps and cracks—and then marks of spoliation, for all the precious objects found were carried off to the museum at Naples, and I can show you ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... away out of danger, with a queer feeling about his heart, which was beating furiously. Mark had hoped to be able to make his way down the side of the crater to where his chum was and help him up. But a look at the steep sides and the uncertain footing afforded by the loose rocks of lava-like formation showed that this could not ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... one night in great terror and dread in the vicinity of Mount Etna, where they had landed. The awful eruptions of smoke, and flame, and burning lava, which issued at midnight from the summit of the mountain,—the thundering sounds which they heard rolling beneath them, through the ground, and the dread which was inspired in their minds by the terrible monsters that dwelt beneath the mountains, as they supposed, and fed the fires, all combined ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... have been added to matter since man's acquaintance with it. But it would be easy to add any number of them, or change any lower into higher. That is the [Page 263] meaning of the falling granite that becomes soil, of the pulverized lava that decks the volcano's trembling sides with flowers; that is the meaning of the grass becoming flesh, and of all high forces constitutionally arranged for mastery over lower. Take the ore from the mountain. It is loose, friable, worthless in itself. Raise it in capacity to cast-iron, wrought-iron, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... stupefaction, which was cold and rigid despite hot tears that were rolling from her eyes, would have struck the most thoughtless mind. Nothing is more terrible to behold than excessive grief that is rarely allowed to break forth, of which traces were left on this woman's face like lava congealed about a crater. She might have been a dying mother compelled to leave her children in abysmal depths of wretchedness, unable to bequeath them to any ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... belongings of one household in his gloved hands, and handing them to a waiting woman. Then, when they had grasped the idea and were gathering all they owned, he led them toward the safety of the trees. Five minutes after they had set off, the lava began to flow from the new-born volcano, scorching the ground for a hundred yards around, sparks smoking and smoldering ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... 24th (Christmas Eve)—I was up at four o'clock to gaze once more on the wondrous spectacle that lay before me. The molten lava still glowed in many places, the red cloud over the fiery lake was bright as ever, and steam was slowly ascending in every direction over hill and valley, till, as the sun rose, it became difficult ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... sulphurous air while fleeing from the showers of stones and ashes cast up by the mountain. His nephew, called Pliny the younger, has left a full account of the disaster, and the cloud like a pine tree that hung over the mountain, the noises, the earthquake, and the fall at last of the ashes and lava. Drusilla, the wife of Felix, the governor before whom St. Paul pleaded, also perished. Herculaneum was covered with solid lava, so that very little could be recovered from it; but Pompeii, being overwhelmed ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... than their names, Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park, Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time; And on the tables every clime and age Jumbled together; celts and calumets, Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries, Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere, The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls, Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer, His ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... one which formerly existed, but exists no longer. In volcanic regions it sometimes happens that the liquid lava, seeking the lowest ground, fills up the beds of the rivers which die and are replaced by water-courses running in other channels and in different directions. These dead streams are so few, and of so little importance elsewhere, that, as yet, I believe, no class name ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of the room itself were waincsotted in pannels of dark-stained wood; the window-curtains were of coarse green worsted, and encrusted with dust so ancient and irremovable, that it presented almost a lava-like appearance; the carpet that had once been bright and showy, was entirely threadbare, and had become grey with age. There were several heavy mahogany arm-chairs in the room, a Pembroke table, and an immense unwieldy sideboard, garnished with a few wine-glasses of a deep blue colour. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... was bursting from the mountain broken by the fall of Kokai. Whole villages were destroyed, rice-fields burnt up, river beds filled with the burning lava, and the homeless people were in great distress. So the Empress left the capital as soon as she had rewarded the victor Shikuyu, and journeyed with all speed to the scene of disaster. She found that both Heaven and earth had sustained damage, and the place ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... and yet marvellous region of lava beds, dikes and conic craters suddenly was passed, and the canal moved into the huge forest lands of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... had risen en masse. The flame had spread among them like lava to their lowest depths. Told that their section needed them, they had responded like the Douglas, "Ready, aye, ready!" Beyond this they were told nothing; and during those most precious weeks they waited, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... one, equally symmetrical, rose outside and above it. Following the brink of this lake to its upper end, they struck across to the head of the ravine. It terminated in a ridge, which looked down upon an immense field or sea of hardened lava, spreading over an area of several miles till it reached the ocean. This ancient bed of lava was full of the most singular and fantastic details of lava structure. It was a field of charred ruins, among which were more or less open caves or galleries, some large enough to hold a number of persons ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... silver and roses. The afternoon light came soft through the trellis, and you could not have looked for a fairer picture of settled ease. Yet I had that in my mind which shattered the picture. We were feasting like the old citizens of buried Pompeii, with the lava even now, perhaps, flowing hot from the mountains. I looked at the painted faces on the walls, and wondered which I would summon to our aid if I could call men from the dead. Smith, I thought, would be best; but ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... probable that the ancient northern elephant continued in existence in North America down to the time when this continent was inhabited by man. It can hardly be doubted that the very ancient human beings, whose remains are preserved to us beneath the lava streams of California, dwelt on the continent along with the mammoth. In excavations which I have made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, where a group of saline springs emerges at the bottom of a valley, there were disclosed a very great number of skeletons of this great ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... said Keawe; “for though my uncle has some coffee and ava and bananas, it will not be more than will keep me in comfort; and the rest of that land is the black lava.” ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... line where the volcanic forces which raised the high islands in the Bay of Fonseca had their first conflict with the sedimentary and primitive rocks of the interior. The river is full of boulders of quartz and granite reddened by fire, resembling jasper, and alternating with worn blocks of lava,—further evidences of volcanic action. Altogether, the country, in its natural aspects, reminds the traveller of the district lying between Pompeii and Sorrento, in Italy, and probably owes its essential ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,—for desire, once at the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though scarcely twenty-seven ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... island. Before long the Orion was rolling her sides in the glassy waters of the bay opposite the town. Once upon a time the island possessed a magnificent harbour—that of Garachico— but it was filled up by a stream of red-hot lava which flowed into it from an eruption of the mountain in 1705, and which committed much other damage. Glassy as was the surface, the rollers from the ever unquiet ocean came slowly in, causing; the vessels at anchor to dip their ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... presence of mind. Hence these two only, viz., he that has much forethought and he that has presence of mind, succeed in obtaining happiness. He, however, that is procrastinating meets with destruction. Diverse are the divisions of time, such as Kashtha, Kala, Muhurta, day, night, Lava, month, fortnight, the six seasons, Kalpa, year. The divisions of the earth are called place. Time cannot be seen. As regards the success of any object or purpose, it is achieved or not achieved according to the manner in which the mind is set to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... light could issue forth. Beyond this fierce horizon, farther yet Than vision's wing could bear my gaze, I knew Hell's desolate kingdoms stretched their iron wastes, Hell's burning mountains waved their brands of flame, Hell's lava rivers plunged in fury down ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... Harkness was to call it later, and shorten it again to "Fire Valley." The misty smokes of a thousand fires rose skyward from the lava beds of ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... at their residences." Then, after the man had gone, the mountain added, with mingled lava and contempt: "The most insatiable people I ever contracted to supply. They shall not have ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... offered in sacrifice to propitiate one of the many evil spirits whom these benighted people worship. On the day of the sacrifice I was bidden to be present, and not daring to refuse, I accompanied the queen to a barren spot at the foot of the mountain where some gaunt trees rose out of a bed of lava. Here we found Ackbau haranguing the victims, and describing to them the tortures they would shortly be called upon to suffer. One of the captives had been prepared for the sacrifice, and, but for the gravity of his position, his appearance might have excited mirth. His ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... said she, touching his shoulder with the tips of her fingers. "If you bring me a beautiful lava bracelet perhaps I'll forgive you for going away,—and some pink ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Pantheon or the Gobelins tapestry-mill, he has been jostled against, on the narrow sidewalks of narrow streets, by thousands of them. They are not such a conspicuous feature of the city's daily life now as they were when the volcano of revolution was belching its lava torrent through the streets; but they are there. They are not now occupied in the way they were then; they make less noise; they dress more quietly; they attend, in one way or other, to the business of getting a living. Some are working at trades; some are playing at soldiers; some are keeping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... belched its volcano of color and lava; of rose and gold, amber, salmon, primrose, sapphire, marigold; and in a stream these poured over Fuji's sides and down along the ridge-line of the lesser hills until they too were covered with a layer of molten glory a ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... to deny or reverse a universal assumption. The human mind has had a good many jolts since it began to think, but after each upheaval it settles down as peacefully as the vine-growers on Vesuvius, accepting the last lava crust ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... assured in the mining plans of the gold vein on Grizzly Slide, and the valuable lava cliffs located on Pebbly Pit ranch also finding a market as brilliant gems for use in jewelry, Polly and Eleanor decided to accompany Anne Stewart to New York, where she was going to teach in an exclusive school ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... and useful service not to be lost. Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian lava, on the line of least resistance. Dolly followed his example, filling a garment she called her pinafore with whatever mould or debris was attainable, and bringing it with much gravity and some pride to help on the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... caverns, and the numerous and extensive tea-tree swamps along the coast, plainly demonstrate that they are supplied by gradual filtration, or find their way through the interstices, or cells of the lava to the lower levels. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... a mould, others were egg-shaped, and all were hollow. With some difficulty I broke them, and found them to contain a bright red sand: they were, in fact, volcanic bombs that had been formed by the ejection of molten lava to a great height from active volcanoes; these had become globular in falling, and, having cooled before they reached the earth, they retained their forms as hard spherical bodies, precisely resembling cannon shot. The exterior was brown, and appeared to be rich in iron. The smaller specimens were ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... goes to the movies I confess that I enjoy its realities. Probably they educate me, and I take that with due meekness. Some of these realities I enjoy because they are unfamiliar, like the boiling of the lava lake in the Hawaiian craters and the changing crowds in the streets of Manila; some because they are familiar, like a college foot-ball game or the movement of vessels in the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... old Spartans, all ice and granite outside, all molten lava within, stood up looking at each other a minute or two without the quiver of an eyelid and then the ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... was admirable; for so hot The fire was, that were red Vesuvius loaded, Besides its lava, with all sorts of shot And shells or hells, it could not more have goaded. Of officers a third fell on the spot, A thing which victory by no means boded To gentlemen engaged in the assault: Hounds, when the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... burned me almost to madness, like hot lava underneath the deadening crust, was the thought that I had done a deed and a defensible deed, and was fleeing from it the same as a criminal. Such a contingency never had occurred to me or I might have taken a different course, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... reached a narrow ledge and walked along it a short distance. On coming to the end of the ledge he jumped down into a mass of undergrowth, where the track again became visible—winding among great masses of weatherworn lava. Here the ascent became very steep, and Moses put on what sporting men call a spurt, which took him far ahead of Nigel, despite the best efforts of the latter to keep up. Still our hero scorned to run or call out to his guide to wait, and thereby admit himself beaten. He pushed steadily on, ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... attractive. And what beautiful colors greeted our weary eyes as we drew nigher. I thought of that gate of Jerusalem the Golden, all enamelled with emerald, amethyst, chalcedony, and pearl sot in gold. The golden brown earth made from melted lava, the feathery foliage of the palms that riz up beyend the dazzlin' white beach, the crystal blue waters with myriad-hued fishes playing down in its crystal depths. Oh, how fair the seen as we approached nearer and see plainer and plainer ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... were heaped with masses of hardened lava in all kinds of grotesque shapes. It was utterly desolate and bare. Ruth shuddered as she ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... shouts Rupert; "Charge!" In one instant that mass of motionless statues becomes a flood of lava; down in one terrible sweep it comes, silence behind it and despair before; no one notices the beauty of that brilliant chivalrous array,—all else is merged in the fury of the wild gallop; spurs are deep, reins free, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... main tributary, a creek called Fletcher's Creek, takes its rise in a labyrinth of basaltic rocks, that for years defied the efforts of the whites to penetrate. This stream rising from its cradle in the dead lava, winds in and out of the encompassing stretches of rocks, until it emerges on the outer country, where it feeds and maintains two large lakes, ere it is lost in the sandy bed of one of the anabranches of the Burdekin. It is one of the strongest and most consistent ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... latter has been my nurse at night, his chief service being to keep me interested in the variety of his snoring. I really have had one damn hell of a time. The whole back and top of my head blew out, and I expected an eruption of lava to flow down my back. The only explanation of it is a combination of air-drafts and a little too much work and worry. I am now somewhat weak, but otherwise ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... easily befallen him with a mother so deeply honored! Around her spun all the boy's love desire and twined itself about her, and all that lava heated feeling belonging so peculiarly to the child alone. He had hung upon that idol the longing of his heart, the phantasies of a power of imagination lustfully excited, which is not indeed wanting in the best of children, although commonly ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... didn't throw it. I—I didn't throw it. I was sick. I—I've been sick. I—I——" Then, for he was only a boy with a man's burdens, his lip began to quiver pitifully; his voice shrilled out and his words came tumbling forth like lava; striving to make up by passion and reiteration what they lacked in logic and coherency. "I'm not a thief. I'm not. I'm honest. I don't know how it happened. Everything became a blur in the stretch. You—you've called me ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the eagles who trail the entrails of the slain. By conquest, intermarriage, or intrigue, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... spread about, joining each other and making more rapid headway—a dozen tiny volcanoes vomiting their deadly fumes and pouring forth their sluggish, boiling lava. The scene about us now was lighted in a horrible blue-green glare. A great cloud of thin smoke gathered, hung poised a moment, and then rolled slowly away—its deadly fumes hanging low to the ground and spreading ever wider ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... the bench near him, his clear cut face so suggestive of metallic medallions, gave no more hint of the smouldering flame at his heart than the glittering ice crown of Eiriksjokull betrays the fierce lava tides beating beneath ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... all our search, the whole that we found was only nine gallons, in the course of the day. We advanced within two miles of the foot of the highest mountain in the island, on which is the volcano that is almost constantly burning. The country near it is all covered with lava, and has a most dreary appearance. As we had not been fortunate in our discoveries, and saw but little to alleviate our distresses, we filled our cocoa-nut shells with the water we found, and returned exceedingly fatigued and faint. When I came to the precipice ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... when imprison'd fires in central caves Burst the firm earth, and drank the headlong waves; And, as new airs with dread explosion swell, Form'd lava-isles, and continents of shell; Pil'd rocks on rocks, on mountains mountains raised, And high in heaven the first volcanoes blazed; In countless swarms an insect-myriad moves From sea-fan gardens, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... that sung. One leap of Ocean scatters on the sand The quarried bulwarks of the loosening land; One thrill of earth dissolves a century's toil Strewed like the leaves that vanish in the soil; One hill o'erflows, and cities sink below, Their marbles splintering in the lava's glow; But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to the air, From shore to shore the blasts of ages bear; One humble name, which oft, perchance, has borne The tyrant's mockery and the courtier's scorn, Towers o'er the dust ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... shade regretfully, and followed into the rock-walled cavern into which Alwa had preceded them. It was nearly square—a hollow bubble in the age-old lava—axe-trimmed many hundred years ago. What light there was came in through three long slits that gave an archer's view of the plain and of the zigzag roadway from the iron gate below. It was cool, for the rock roof was fifty or more feet thick, and the silence of it seemed ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Protestantism. The Reformation is an event long past. That volcano has spent its rage. The wide waste produced by its outbreak is forgotten. The landmarks which were swept away have been replaced. The ruined edifices have been repaired. The lava has covered with a rich incrustation the fields which it once devastated, and, after having turned a beautiful and fruitful garden into a desert, has again turned the desert into a still more beautiful and fruitful ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with a fiery glare. The dark masses closing in the horizon were fringed with scarlet. A restless triangle of flames spread over the dark green waters. The foam turned red and the coast looked for an instant like molten lava. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... shell would form a perfect covering for a child. There are five distinct species found here, each inhabiting a different island. Chatham Island, the home of some, seems completely honeycombed with black truncated volcano cones that spring up everywhere, while masses of lava cover the ground, having been blown into weird and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... saw it alive—saw it burning with that which made the bush alive in the desert of Horeb—the presence of the living God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... drill of the Cossacks there is a charge as skirmishers (or "foragers") called the "lava," which is executed at a great pace and ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... mounted and packed, the preserved fruits must be divided for the Northern friends. Three happy weeks of life eventful, but life without crowding, and, above all, without interruption. "Think of it," cried Felix, as they took their last walk among the lava crags, the door-bell has not rung ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... There the later lava flow had been deflected. All that showed of the original eruption were occasional red outcropping rocks. Soil and grass had overlaid the mineral. Scattered trees were planted throughout the flat. Cacti and semi-tropical bushes mingled with brush on the rounded side hills. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him. There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's nature beneath; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend it; but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... last, worn out with the struggle, watching her wherever she went, more in love with her than he had ever been before, he wrote her long, mad, ardent letters in which his passion overflowed like a stream of lava. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their fiery agonies, they had struggled and wreathed and knotted together, and then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs of those terrific convulsions upon them. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... from those of Hesiod and of other mythographers, inasmuch as the latter were represented as the demons who forged the thunderbolts of Zeus, and were connected with the volcanic agencies chiefly in Sicily and Italy. Mount AEtna belching forth its lava streams may have suggested to the Greek imagination the sick giant Polyphemus in its caverns, drunk on the red destructive wine ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... forty-five degrees. These slabs are of different degrees of smoothness, graduated successively from coarse to fine. The squaws, who alone work at the mills, kneel before them and bend over them as a laundress does over the wash-tub, holding in their hands long stones of volcanic lava, which they rub up and down the slanting slabs, stopping at intervals to place the grain between the stones. As the grinding proceeds the grist is passed from one compartment to the next until, in passing through the series, it becomes of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... the volcano of Antuco. The mountain roared like some enormous monster, and vomited red smoke, mingled with torrents of sooty flame. The surrounding peaks appeared on fire. Showers of red-hot stones, clouds of reddish vapor and rockets of lava, all combined, presented the appearance of glowing sparkling streams. The splendor of the spectacle increased every instant as night deepened, and the whole sky became lighted up with a dazzling reflection of the blazing crater, while the sun, gradually becoming shorn of his sunset ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the captain, and he went on in the tones of a keen excitement: "Nature has provided us with our winter quarters; the stream of burning lava that is flowing there is the gift of a bounteous Providence; it will provide us all the warmth we need. No time to lose! To-morrow, my dear Procope, to-morrow we will explore it all; no doubt the life, the heat we want is reserved ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head: "Old Flame-eater," or "Lava-spitter," he would at times familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or "The Single-breasted Virgin"—these last, however, always in the musical Malay equivalent. He had no end of names—romantic, splenetic, of opprobrium, or outright endearment—to ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage. You have at present in England only one art of any consequence—that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance are not written for ever—not merely with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... force of this steam that even the bed of the sea has been heaved up by it into a burning mountain, from which great stones are cast high into the air; while down its sides flow melted rocks and metals, forming the lava which, when seen at night, looks like a stream of liquid fire, but quickly cools into a river of mud. All these strange things tell us terrible tales of the great heat which is somewhere in the heart of the earth, and help us to understand the verse which tells us all we really ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... her again as I saw her that evening, in spangles and tights. When I spoke to her first, her eye flashed so, I heard—as I fancied—the spark whiz From her eyelid—I said so next day to that jealous old fool of a Marquis. She reminded me, Bill, of a lovely volcano, whose entrails are lava— Or (you know my penchant for original types) of the upas in Java. In the curve of her sensitive nose was a singular species of dimple, Where the flush was the mark of an angel's creased kiss—if ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... under fierce and unrelaxing hearts of molten lava, which burn the doomed and which e'en ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... most economical contrivance possible. It is now little used. Yet either the batwing or the fishtail tip can be used in any common burner except the argand. The old brass and iron tips are mostly superseded by those of "lava," being liable to an early change of the orifice from incrustation and rust. In the flat-flame burners there are differences in the internal arrangement. Perhaps our young gas-manufacturer here can tell us what is now the most ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... stones of the mealing apparatus are of correspondingly varying degrees of roughness; those of basalt or lava are used for the first crushing of the corn, and sandstone is used for the final grinding on the last metate of the series. By means of these primitive appliances the corn meal is as finely ground as our wheaten ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... simply a conflict between governments and nations for the attainment of certain political ends, Freedom and Nationality on the one side and Conquest and Tyranny on the other. It is also a great outburst of pent-up feeling, breaking like lava through the thin crust of European civilisation. On the political side, as we have said just now, the war reveals the fact that civilisation is still incomplete and ill-organised. But on the moral side it reveals the fact that modern society has broken down, that the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... fierce Allah o'er his sands and broke, like lava-burst upon "The realms where reigned pre-Adamite Kings, where rose the Grand ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the best chairs, studied the dressing-table with its royal equipment. She went to the window and gazed out into Fifth Avenue, reviewing its slow-flowing lava of humanity—young royalty ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Vesuvius that is mentioned in history took place in the year 79, during the reign of the Emperor Titus. All Campagna was filled with consternation, and the country was overwhelmed with devastation in every direction; towns, villages, palaces, and their inhabitants were consumed by molten lava, and hidden from the sight by showers of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... directions from the mountain off on to the plain, some of them crossing the trail, where we had to push and jump the stock across them. In dropping a rock into them there seemed to be no bottom. All about them the ground was covered with pieces of broken lava, largely composed of gravel stones that had been welded together by intense heat. A half mile or so from the mountain stood a block of the same material, which was nearly square in shape and larger ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... the ground the water in the lakes became violently agitated and steam arose from fissures in the mountain side. Flames shot up to a considerable height above the crater and a torrent of black lava began to flow toward the lakes, falling into them with a loud hissing sound that was audible to the boys, even after they had put many miles between themselves and ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Roquet entered and informed him of what was going on. Bonaparte listened in silence, deep in thought, marble in which a torrent of lava boiled. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... spirit of the Reformer, for the most part unfolding in the simplest manner the great doctrines of the Gospel, but occasionally indulging in volcanic outbursts of indignation against the hierarchical corruptions of his day, and pouring out upon them the lava-tides of withering rebuke. ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... becoming steeper, and furrowed with deep gullies. Almost to the summit, whence issue perpetually faint wreaths of smoke, it is clothed with vegetation, and looks calm and beautiful, although beneath are hidden fires which occasionally burst forth in lava-streams, but more frequently make their existence known by the earthquakes which have many times devastated ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... resistance which makes, under skilful leaders, the English peasants the most enduring soldiery that the world has known since the day when the Roman sentinel perished amidst the falling columns and lava floods [at Pompeii], rather than, though society itself dissolved, forsake his post unbidden. "Saint Thomas defend us!" muttered a worthy tailor, who in the flush of his valour, when safe in the Chepe, had consented to bear the rank of lieutenant; ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon ranges. These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the party dismounted. Acme clung to the strap, fastened round their guide, and they commenced the ascent. In a short time, they had manifest proofs of their vicinity to the volcano. The ashy lava gave way at each footstep, and it was only by taking short and quick steps, and perseveringly toiling on, that they were enabled ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... which may give a notion of the general lie of the country. Append, if you can, a note or two, saying whether a plain is rich or barren; whether the rock is sandstone, limestone, granitic, metamorphic, or volcanic lava; and if there be more rocks than one, which of them lies on the other; and send them to be exhibited at a meeting of the Geological Society. I doubt not that the learned gentlemen there will find in your photographs a valuable hint or two, for ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... lay in a wheelshaped plain that may measure twelve miles across, and all around this plain are mountains clad to their summits with forests of oak and cedar trees. At the back of the city and in the centre of the ring of mountains is one, however, that is not green with foliage but black with lava, and above the lava white with snow, over which again hangs a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. This was the volcan Xaca, or the Queen, and though it is not so lofty as its sisters Orizaba, Popo, and Ixtac, to my mind it ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... protection to the work in progress beneath. Though I watched but a few minutes I was awed with the evident rapidity of the building. Dimly I could see the forms below being swung into place with a clock-like regularity and from numerous spouts great streams of concrete poured like flowing lava. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... I found that the slow work of centuries had nearly covered its lava with verdure. At dawn we were opposite Kalaupapa. Two little spired churches, looking precisely alike, caught my eye first, and around them were dotted the white cottages of the lepers. But the sea was too rough for us to land. The waves dashed against the rocks, and the spray ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... grand that I had ever witnessed—the fire bursting every two minutes, and the noise with it like thunder: red-hot ashes came tumbling down continually where I stood sketching, many of which I brought away, and different pieces of the old lava which I hope to show you. The eruption took place a week or two after I left. But Pompeii exhibits now the most extraordinary remains of antiquity in the world; a whole city laid open to view; the habitations are unroofed, but, in other respects, are quite perfect. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... all "liberals" has glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... time during which there was no life, we have no means of determining. That it was almost infinitely long is made apparent by the researches of eminent scholars on the cooling of lava. Toward the close of this extended period of time faint traces of life appear. Not life as we are apt to think of it. No nodding flowers were kissed by the sunshine of this early time. The earliest ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... you what answer you have made to this question hitherto? Whose friendship have you chosen? If, knowing what you know, you have not yet begun to act according to the immensity of the knowledge that is in you, then he who builds his house and lays up his treasure on the edge of a crater of molten lava is a sane, sensible person in comparison with yourselves. I say this as no figure of speech or bugbear with which to frighten you, but as an unvarnished unexaggerated statement which will be no more disputed by yourselves than ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... conical peak raised its head to the height of at least five hundred feet;* this hill was covered with rich grass, and there could be no doubt that it was of volcanic origin, for the rock of which it was composed was a vitrified lava resembling that of Ascension. It is from this lava that the natives form their most deadly spears, for which purpose it answers well, as it fractures easily, and the fracture resembles that of the coarse green glass of England; indeed a lump of this ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... feelings, all subordinated to the supreme emotion which dominates her. Her ideas follow one another with prodigious rapidity, and produce a lambent play which is fed by her heart alone. If she ceases to love, her mind becomes merely the scoria of the lava which yesterday ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... island would generally be considered as very uninteresting, but to anyone accustomed only to an English landscape, the novel aspect of an utterly sterile land possesses a grandeur which more vegetation might spoil. A single green leaf can scarcely be discovered over wide tracts of the lava plains; yet flocks of goats, together with a few cows, contrive to exist. It rains very seldom, but during a short portion of the year heavy torrents fall, and immediately afterwards a light vegetation springs out of every crevice. This soon withers; and upon such naturally formed hay the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... diameter of the ox, and having ascertained that as he inserted his proboscis into the hide of the animal, say the sixteenth of an inch, it gradually and regularly grew warmer, infer, in like manner (as the geologist) that the center of the animal was red hot lava! ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... places strew the plain; and near the confluence of the two chief branches of the Khabour, not only are old craters of volcanoes distinctly visible, but a cone still rises from the centre of one, precisely like the cones in the craters of Etna and Vesuvius, composed entirely of loose lava, scorim, and ashes, and rising to the height of 300 feet. The name of this remarkable hill, which is Koukab, is even thought to imply that the volcano may have been active within the time to which the traditions of the country extend. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... have had enough of horrors. And, beside, we are longing to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now. There are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit. The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... before him, and sang, till he sank beneath her spell. And as he sank, his brazen limbs clanked heavily, and the earth groaned beneath his weight; and the liquid fire ran from his heel, like a stream of lava, to the sea; and Medeia laughed, and called to the heroes, 'Come ashore, and water your ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... thousands of the faithful Chibcas, most powerful of all the tribes upon the Alta plain, which lies a green level between the heights of the white summits of the Andes, toiling up the barren lava sides of Mount Veneza to where, locked in its gray cone, lies the lake of Guadiva. He saw this lake smiling back at the blue sky, its waters clear as the mountain air which ripples across its surface. The lake of Guadiva! How many bronzed men had whispered this name and then dropped upon ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... been said, inherent in the system—it was not until the year 1995 (as the ancients for some reason not now known reckoned time) that the collapse of the vast, formless fabric was complete. In that year the defeat and massacre of the last army of law and order in the lava beds of California extinguished the final fires of enlightened patriotism and quenched in blood the monarchical revival. Thenceforth armed opposition to anarchy was confined to desultory and insignificant warfare waged by ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... warriors of Captain Jack in 1873 was waged in the lava beds of Oregon, and it had the distinction of being one of the first Indian wars to be well reported in the newspapers. We heard a great deal of the long and trying campaigns waged by the Army in revenge for the murder of General Canby in his council tent. We got small glory out of that war, ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... as she drew nearer, and could distinguish the different objects more plainly, the hillocks were transformed into human habitations, with small doors and windows; and the groups of trees proved to be huge lava masses, from ten to fifteen feet in height, entirely overgrown with verdure and moss. Everything was new, was surprising; and it was with pleasurable sensations of excitement and curiosity that Madame Pfeiffer landed on the shores of ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense she remembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his, she seemed to fall through a thin surface, as one might fall through the crust of a lava into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the thought of Capes, unable to escape from his image and the idea of his presence ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... verdure-clad slopes rose swiftly to the frowning crater walls. The crests of the walls were saw-toothed, volcanic peaks, capped and halo'd with captive trade-wind clouds. Every nook and crevice of the disintegrating lava gave foothold to creeping, climbing vines and trees—a green foam of vegetation. Thin streams of water, that were mere films of mist, swayed and undulated downward in sheer descents of hundreds of feet. And to complete the magic ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... literary, added much to his journalistic standing. He was a great sight-seer in those days, and a persevering one. No discomfort or risk discouraged him. Once, with a single daring companion, he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea, racing across the burning lava, leaping wide and bottomless crevices where a misstep would have meant death. His open-air life on the river and in the mining-camps had nerved and hardened him for adventure. He was thirty years old and in his physical prime. His mental growth had been slower, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... six o'clock, and progress became easier now that we could see our way distinctly. The Cossacks seemed to grow lazier, halting as often as before and walking less briskly; in fact, they did not relish the exceeding roughness of the jagged lava ridges along whose tops or sides we toiled. I could willingly have lingered here myself; for in the hollows, wherever a little soil appeared, some interesting plants were growing, whose similarity to and difference from the Alpine species ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... If we are not ready to exclaim with Burke, speaking of Revolutionary France, "It is but an empty space on the political map," we may at least adopt the response hurled back by Mirabeau, that this empty space is a volcano red with flames and overflowing with lava-floods. But whether we deal with it as "empty space" or as "volcano," the jurisdiction, civil and military, centres in Congress, to be employed for the happiness, welfare, and renown of the American people,—changing Slavery into Freedom, and present chaos into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various |
