"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down by the current, grind and wear away the rock. In course of time great depths are hollowed out, and if it happens that some obstacle turns the course of the water, and the river finds a new outlet, a long deep gallery is left dry, and here and there an apparently bottomless pit where the water has acted on specially soft stone. From above, also, a steady action of moisture has been eating away the cliff, adding height to the cavern, as well as coating its roof and sides with a sparkling substance derived from the union of water and particles of the limestone, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Sometimes he saw her in his dreams, and through the long weeks in the hospital at the aviation camp when he had the fever she was with him constantly, beckoning, calling, luring him back to life when he was about to slip over the edge into the bottomless abyss, her laughter ringing in his ears after she had vanished into the mists. Then one night she and the fever had fled hand in hand and after that he could not recall her image, though ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... eight thousand one hundred feet high. The guides and travellers were then bound together by a strong rope, with three or four yards between each. We were about to advance upon the Bossons glacier. This glacier, difficult at first, presents yawning and apparently bottomless crevasses on every hand. The vertical sides of these crevasses are of a glaucous and uncertain colour, but too seducing to the eye; when, approaching closely, you succeed in looking into their mysterious depths, you feel yourself irresistibly drawn towards them, and nothing ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... long. And if he followed and insisted upon seeing her, the result might be more fatal still. He knew nothing of those personalities she may have concealed from him. For all he knew she might have depths in her nature as black as the bottomless pit. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hundred-eyed Argus was nothing compared with the scrutiny to which we were now subjected. Every wreath of curling smoke which rose from our lips was watched by the staring eyes as intently as if it were some deadly vapour from the bottomless pit, which would shortly burst into report and flame. A loud and vigorous sneeze from Dodd was the signal for a second panic-stricken withdrawal of the row of heads, and another comparison of respective ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You might as well look into the bottomless pit as ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... delighted with this arrangement that his gratitude knew no bounds. He would frequently compliment himself in private on the advantage of living with Paul, and when he went out to see his friends it was with the jovial air of the Man with the Bottomless Purse, for he did not feel the pound a year he had to pay, and Paul always seemed willing to undertake similar expenses on similar terms. He purchased a bronze over-mantel, he fitted the rooms with electric light, he bought (for the common use) a large prize dog for L56, and he ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... superstitious Romans viewed it with awe and affright. Whether it was due to an earthquake or the wrath of the gods is not for us to say. The Romans believed the latter; those who prefer may believe the former. But, so we are told, it seemed bottomless. Throw what they would in it, it stood unfilled, and the feeling grew that no power of man could ever fill ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Pasthorini say it? Sure whin Twenty-five comes, we'll have our own agin: the right will overcome the might—the bottomless pit will be locked—ay, double: boulted, if St. Pettier gets the kays, for he's the very boy that will accommodate the heretics wid a warm corner; an' yit, faith, there's: many o' thim that myself 'ud put in a good ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... once the sound of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the Public House—that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of waste. In the upper classes the "pub" ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... before or worse, and their best intentions merely make the road smooth for them,—you know where, children. For it is not the place itself that is paved with them as people say so often. You can't pave the bottomless pit, but you may ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to satisfy at least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have done since, and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, "the bottomless pit got roofed over," as it may be ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... of the great man's advice. He could vaguely recall the long pacings of the Louvre; the fixed scrutiny of face after face; vain chases; ignominious retreats; and all the wretched stages of that slow descent into a bottomless despair! At last there was a letter—the long-expected letter to Madame Merichat, directing the removal of Mademoiselle Delaunay's possessions from the Rue Chantal. It was written by a certain M. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a Tresidder, Jasper; they are all as deep as the bottomless pit, and as cruel as ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world—one would rather be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I hear the midnight mail go by—that same still face before it, the great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the most enormous imposts laid upon tobacco, insomuch that the colonists were obliged for some time to send the whole into the ports of Holland. The government of New England, more consistently, passed a complete interdict against tobacco, the smoke of which they compared to that of the bottomless pit. Yet tobacco, like other proscribed objects, throve under persecution, and achieved a final triumph over all its enemies. Indeed, the enmity against it was in some respects beneficial to Virginia, as drawing forth the most strict prohibitions against 'abusing ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... expedition was formed at once for Downey's Dump, a little town five miles away, where the railroad crossed a long bog on the Skagbog River. Here Downey, the contractor, had carried the railroad dump across a supposed bottomless morass and by good luck had soon made a bottom and in consequence a small fortune, with which he built a hotel, and was now the great man of the town for which ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a day on which the sun scarce cast a shadow, yet everything sent back his rays clearly, softened and sweetened, like the answer of an echo. It was a day for great deeds, such as were enacted before us; steel-strung frame pitted against steel-strung frame; bottomless endurance against its equal. And never were such jumpings, such prancings, such wild wavings of legs beheld by human eyes before. You cannot beat it into people's heads that the horned critters are the lords of brute creation; yet it is the fact. A bull chased a lion ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... his tail-stump with sleepy content. As I bent lower and stared closer into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as though I were staring down into a bottomless well, through a peep-hole into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was that eye, that dusky pool of love and trust. It was like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a soul. And I could stare into them without fear, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titian woods, With forms that no man can discover For the dews that drip all over; Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... have taken sanctuary in Christ, and the bottomless pit, an invincible and mighty wall of grace and heavenly power, and of the merits of Christ to save to the utmost all and every one that are thus fled to ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... crevasses reveal the ice. Only at its snout, where it breaks off, as a rule, in a high wall of ice, do we realize how huge a volume and weight it must have, far above toward its sources, or why so many of the crevasses on the upper ice fields seem almost bottomless. ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... recalled the strange impulse that came so near to sending her back to the side of the man who cried out to her from the depths of a bottomless pit. Something whispered from her heart that now was her time,—now! And then came the loud cry from her brain, drowning the timid voice of the merciful: "Wait! Wait! Not ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... does not illumine me,' resumed Baroni, 'I am entirely lost in the bottomless vale. Truly, I would give a thousand piastres if I could save my head by taking the capitani ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... reaching Stroud, the effect was singular and startling. The thick foliage arching over the river, quite shut out the little light the stars afforded, and as we had to descend into it, down a very steep bank, it was like plunging into a dark bottomless pit; the noise of the stream over the stones alone told us we should find a footing below. Into this gloomy cave our party one by one descended, the foremost calling out when he had reached the bottom, that the way was clear, and hastening across to prevent the horseman who followed ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... clearing, came to trouble him. These he always burned, but he could not forget, and the past was always with him, not exactly as it was on the night after his lawn-party, when it seemed to him that all the powers of the bottomless pit had united against him, and if ever a man expiated his wrong-doing in remorse and mental pain he was doing it. The laudations of the crowd which had cheered him so lustily were of no account, nor the honor conferred by giving the town his name. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... saved them from calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy: the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order; not from ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... terrible chasm in the Forum, most likely from an earthquake, but nothing seemed to fill it up, and the priests and augurs consulted their oracles about it. These made answer that it would only close on receiving of what was most precious. Gold and jewels were thrown in, but it still seemed bottomless, and at last the augurs declared that it was courage that was the most precious thing in Rome. Thereupon a patrician youth named Marcus Curtius decked himself in his choicest robes, put on his armor, took his shield, sword, and spear, ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... girl, with white teeth, rather boyish hands, and the blue-grey eyes predominant in Australia. She was usually dressed in silk, and she never wore an apron to protect the front of her frock. Naturally, too, she had a bottomless supply of pocket-money: if a subscription were raised, she gave ten shillings where others gave one; and on the Saturday holidays she flung about with half-crowns as Laura would have been afraid ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... antagonism to His; while yet, in manner insoluble to us, His will is supreme. The very powers which are arrayed against Him are His gift, and the issues which they finally subserve are His appointment. It does not need that we should be able to pierce to the bottom of the bottomless in order to attain and hold fast by the great conviction that 'there is no power but of God,' and that 'from Him are all things, and to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to persuade the world of the bottomless resource of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly have proceeded to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not be done with any common color without being compensated out of this grand confiscation of landed property. They have thrown upon this fund, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... light in the ravine was dispersed into fine splinters, which the fleeing flood seized and carried off below, but from on high the moonbeams fell in fresh skeins. You might have thought that by the pond a nixie157 was sitting, and with one hand was pouring forth a fountain from a bottomless urn, while with the other she cast sportively into the water handfuls of enchanted gold that ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... old Scotchman, "we gae doon an' doon till we come on what we ma ca' the primary rock, and under that there is nothin'—except," with a touch of religious enthusiasm, "maybe 'tis the bottomless pit, where auld Hornie dwells, as we are tauld in the Screepture; noo let us gae up again, an' I'll show ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... exclusion of everything else. He felt the drift strong around him; he knew that in the end he would resign himself to it. At the same time he sensed the abyss, felt the nearness of some dreadful, nameless cataclysm, a thing of black shadow, bottomless, terrifying. ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... so having showed him the way to crock his hough, (example is better than precept, as James Batter observes,) I taught him the plan of holding the needle; and having fitted his middle-finger with a bottomless thimble of our own sort, I set him to sewing the cotton-lining into one leg, knowing that it was a part not very particular, and not very likely to be seen; so that the matter was not great, whether the stitching was ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant, she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that have peered into that abyss, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... bottomless pit with your plans!' replied his accomplice; 'you have planned me out of ship, cargo, and life; and I dreamt this moment that Meg Merrilies dragged you here by the hair and gave me the long clasped knife she used to wear; you don't ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of canoes moved forward. Nakwisi was up in the first canoe with Uncle Teddy and Aunt Clara, while the Bottomless Pitt made the fourth passenger. After them came Hinpoha and Slim, paddling the second canoe with Antha and Dan as passengers; then Sahwah and the Monkey, paddling Migwan and Anthony; and lastly, Katherine and the Captain with Gladys and Peter Jenkins, and ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... with a 4.7 quick-firing gun hidden in a deck-house with imitation glass windows, the sides of which could be dropped flat on to the deck for the gun to be trained outboard by simply pressing an electric button on the steamer's bridge. Two life-boats, one on each side of the aft deck, were bottomless, and formed covers for two additional 12-pounder guns. A false deck in the bow shielded a pair of wicked-looking torpedo tubes, each containing an 18-inch Whitehead ready for launching; and the crew for each gun were able to reach their respective weapons, without appearing on deck, ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... scattering common in bubbled ice, the light plunges into the mass, where it is extinguished, the perfectly clear ice presenting an appearance of pitchy blackness. [Footnote: I learn from a correspondent that certain Welsh tarns, which are reputed bottomless, have this ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... shall go forth to meet the autumn, in Northern China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies to rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless abyss, where all past things ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... for the actors who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage—they must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slopes, ran in long zigzagging terraces at the angles of which our ponies had sometimes to scramble up stairways cut in the living rock. As the sun sank a light mist gradually spread over the coast below us, the distant islands grew dim, and we rode suspended, as it were, over a bottomless vale and a sea without horizon. Slowly, out of these ghostly wastes, the moon lifted herself in full circle, and her rays, crossing the cope of heaven, lit up a tall grey crag on the ridge above us, and the stem of a white-withered bush hanging from it—an isolated mass which (my companions ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the Japanese lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to the morrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by overflows right here ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... pay-by-instalment system. She had made several purchases of gewgaws, and had already paid three or four times their value, but was still in debt to the tallyman, who threatened all manner of impossible proceedings if she did not make up her arrears. Bottomless ignorance and imbecile vanity had been the girl's ruin, aided by a grave indiscretion on Peachey's part, of which he ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... there are five or six thousand—play an important part, and cover about one-sixth of the country, but these lakes, rivers, and waterways all take their share in the wood trade. Some of the lakes are really inland seas, and very rough seas too. Tradition says they are bottomless—anyway, many of them are of enormous depth. Tradition might well say the forests are boundless, for what is not water in Finland is one vast and wonderful ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... endure to hear as much of that suit, friend,' said the Quaker, 'as I have heard out of mere compassion for thee, I think verily thou wilt soon be at the bottom of the matter, unless it be altogether bottomless.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... best Hath he ordained all things, the ALL-WISE! For by experience rous'd shall man at length Dash down his Moloch-Idols, Samson-like And burst his fetters, only strong whilst strong Believed. Then in the bottomless abyss OPPRESSION shall be chain'd, and POVERTY Die, and with her, her brood of Miseries; And VIRTUE and EQUALITY preserve The reign of LOVE, and Earth shall once again Be Paradise, whilst WISDOM shall secure The state of bliss ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... foreign civil nations and by all strangers that come among you, and be scorned, and contemned; a custom both fulsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smelle of the pit that is bottomless." ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... he throws in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be dozing—bulldozing we might say—on the muddy bottom, and a stranger might say that he would ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... long-horn foolin' with the leg-throw for the first time, the other two bumped into them, the fire-faced devil-dragon slipped through, caught me full in the pantry, an' we all avalanched into the celler in one mixed up tangle. I can't describe it to you. I saw a photograph oncet of the bottomless pit at a revival meeting, and this lay-out was a card out of the same deck. I ain't stuck-up nor exclusive; but hang me if I ever want to get into such a mixed crowd again. We bit an' kicked an' hammered each other till I felt like quartz at a stamp-mill. The only light we had, came from the ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... allied that it is almost inevitable that those who indorse the former will resort to the latter—one representing the spirit of will, the other its most familiar manifestation. Rivalry for rivalry in wrongdoing—a neck-and-neck race to the bottomless pit. And yet there are many believers in the gospel of force, who have brought themselves to think that cruelty can be cured by greater cruelty—that the only way to win an antagonist away from inhuman acts is to surpass him in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the end of this very difficult bridge they dismount from their steeds and gaze at the wicked-looking stream, which is as swift and raging, as black and turgid, as fierce and terrible as if it were the devil's stream; and it is so dangerous and bottomless that anything failing into it would be as completely lost as if it fell into the salt sea. And the bridge, which spans it, is different from any other bridge; for there never was such a one as this. If any one asks of me the truth, there ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... were never thought of in our time; and do wonder what evil spirits have possessed you, to set forth so infamous devices void of any show of truth. I am sorry that you have so wilfully fallen from your best stay, and will needs throw yourself into the hurlpool of bottomless discredit. Was the haste so great to hie to such opprobry as that you would pronounce a never thought of action afore you had but asked the question of her that best could tell it? I see well we two be of very different natures, for I vow to God I would ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... furniture, bore witness in quantities to the disastrous hours they passed in her company. Poor Mamma Sophie avoided her own daughter, and was afraid to be left alone with her. She was the only person in the house who ever heard Athalie's natural voice, and to whom she showed the bottomless depths of the gulf her hatred had dug. Frau Sophie was frightened of sleeping in the same room with her, and in a confidential moment showed her faithful cook the black bruises which her daughter's hand had left on her arms. When Athalie came into her mother's room in the evening, she would pinch ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... snow, water, and almost bottomless mud covered the earth. With four horses on the wagon, Percy had worked nearly all day bringing in two "jags" of poor hay from the stack in the field. It was all the little mow ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... at the steering wheel. The turns had become shorter; more, Barry found himself righting the machine with sudden jerks as the car rounded the short curves where the front wheels seemed to hang momentarily above oblivion, as the chasms stretched away to seemingly bottomless depths beneath. Gradually, the severity of the grade had increased to ten, to twelve and in short pitches to even eighteen and twenty per cent! For a time the machine sang along in second, bucking the raises with almost human persistence, finally, however, to gasp and break in ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... those are beauties," cried Dotty; "I never saw any but cotton flannel ones before. But do you think the pond is as pretty as Bottomless Pond, Prudy, where Uncle ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... wild until, in the nineties, there came the discovery of acres of gold which attracted the wildest rush in the history of mining. There have been many wild rushes in different parts of the world, but those who went on the Yukon rush faced climatic conditions in blizzards, bottomless snow drifts and desperate cold, as well as on torrential streams and treacherous rapids, which, from the standpoint of hardship and privation, dwarf all other mining expeditions into insignificance. Of all this burden and exposure and ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... chapter which Mr. Williams devotes to chemicals. "The chemical trade," he tells us, "is the barometer of a nation's prosperity.... The discomforting significance of the appearance of chemicals in this Black List of mine will, therefore, be at once apparent." More follows about a "Bottomless pit for capital," and "Germany seizing the occasion while England has let hers ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... time in Holland viewing the wonderful power of art, which I observed in the fortifications of their towns, where the very bastions stand on bottomless morasses, and yet are as firm as any in the world. There I had the opportunity of seeing the Dutch army, and their famous general, Prince Maurice. 'Tis true, the men behaved themselves well enough in action, when they were put to it, but ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... and skill of a young goddess all would have failed. This goddess was named Lu-o. She had been idly watching the growth of the planet, when, to her horror, she saw the newly made ball slipping slowly from its place. In another second it would have shot down into the bottomless pit. Quick as a flash Lu-o stopped it with her magic wand and held it firmly until the chief god came dashing ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... looked at one another incredulously and smiled. The idea of a bottomless hole in the ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... his crudest device, "fatal," as his friend E.D. Cowen writes, "to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless black-walnut chair." Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few exchanges carelessly thrown there—the floor being also liberally strewn with them. As it was the only chair in the room except the one Field occupied himself, his caller, though never asked to do so, would be sure to see in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... a Pit-man to descend with us. So we changed our clothes and descended by the ladders in the pumpshaft. Pretty work to descend with the huge pump-rods (garnished with large iron bolts) working violently, making strokes of 12 feet, close to our elbows; and with a nearly bottomless pit at the foot of every ladder, where we had to turn round the foot of the ladder walking on only a narrow board. However we got down to the bottom of the mine with great safety and credit, seeing all the mighty machinery on the way, to a greater depth than I ever ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... devious windings will take thee up and down, back and across the Campagna that doth lie, with its cart burdened roads, fifty feet above our heads. By the light of thy lamp thou wilt see the walls change. No longer are they sharp, nor are there bottomless pits, for soon we enter the sleeping place of those whose bodies toil no more nor their hearts hunger for the freedom ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... the prisoners dressed themselves in mourning, and were carried to the camp in chains, with ropes on their necks, beating their breasts. Prostrate before Emmanuel's throne, they repeated their confession. They acknowledged that death and the bottomless pit would be no more than a just retribution for their crimes. As they excused nothing and promised nothing, Emmanuel at once delivered them their pardons sealed with seven seals. He took off their ropes and mourning, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... steep snow-banks and cross deep crevasses where a mountain-goat would hardly keep his footing. You must climb along steep cliffs where rocks are continually falling to crush you or knock you off into the bottomless depths. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... and new cuttings are put in, as long as the harvest of the weed continues. When the water, strongly impregnated with the particles of indigo, has run into the second vat or beater, they attend with a sort of bottomless buckets, with long handles, to work and agitate it, when it froths, ferments, and rises above the rim of the vessel that contains it. To allay this violent fermentation, oil is thrown in as the froth rises, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... less, beat anything in the way of marching that human nature ever experienced. The dust that had accumulated by the armies passing over on their march to Gettysburg was now a perfect bog, while the horses and vehicles sinking in the soft earth made the road appear bottomless. We would march two or three steps, then halt for a moment or two; then a few steps more, and again the few minutes' wait. The men had to keep their hands on the backs of their file leaders to tell when to move and when to halt. The night being so dark and rainy, we could not see farther ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... here from Texas." Drew took stiff hold of himself. He was walking that narrow ledge again, and with a wind ready to push him off into a bottomless gulf. "Rode with a wagon train as far as Santa Fe—from there on with military supply wagons to Tucson. I was in Kentucky after the war; went home with a boy from my ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... tea, or coffee, no butter, much less mild breakfast bacon), bath on alternate days, between eleven and noon. Something like a bath; on first investigation, seems bottomless; but plummet reaches conclusion at last. Here sit up to the chin for twenty minutes, shivering at thought of what would happen supposing bath sprang a leak. Luncheon at one, strictly supervised; between ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... University means; I perhaps better than you, because I've seen my father's experience. I don't often get bitter, but I come very near it when I look back and think how my mother had to plan and scrimp. I feel like condemning the whole University to the bottomless pit. I suppose Margery Randall would resent it if I told her so, but honestly I pity her; the more so because I've always envied her in a way. She's not used to denying herself anything, and there's bound to be a reckoning. It's inevitable, and then—I don't like to think of how ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... and translated. In other words, he descended immediately into a bottomless pit of confusion, and the Young Person followed him down. I really don't know when I have been so amused. I left them at the bottom of the pit as long as they diverted me. When they ceased to divert me, I exerted my intelligence, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... in spite of everything, as he had once defined love. It was terrible, heartbreaking, soul-destroying. She called on shame for help, but shame had fled. She was cold with a horrible fear lest he should find out and she should be for ever lost in the bottomless pit of humiliation. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... by one, during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave behind something evil in exchange. She was what they had made her. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea. Her heart was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires. Her body was a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs. The weight of all the iron and stone used in the construction of ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... seemed to stop breathing. He felt the tank balance ever so slightly. Staring with aching eyes through the portholes, he saw that they were on the edge of the old quarry, with a forty-foot drop down its steep sides before them. The black depth seemed bottomless. The tank was slipping over. When she shot down they would all ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... bottom to every thing—to good and bad; happiness and misery; hope, fear, faith and charity; even to a woman's mind, which I have sometimes fancied the most bottomless thing in nature. There may, therefore, well be a bottom even to the institutions ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that 'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... is no such separation: nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the litter from which the earth ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Rabelais);— He bangs and bethwacks them,—their backs he salutes With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots; His sermons with satire are plenteously verjuiced, And he talks in one breath of Confutzee, Cass, Zerduscht, 770 Jack Robinson, Peter the Hermit, Strap, Dathan, Cush, Pitt (not the bottomless, that he's no faith in), Pan, Pillicock, Shakespeare, Paul, Toots, Monsieur Tonson, Aldebaran, Alcander, Ben Khorat, Ben Jonson, Thoth, Richter, Joe Smith, Father Paul, Judah Monis, Musaeus, Muretus, hem,—[Greek: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Gardeur," remarked La Corne. "I grant he is a gay, jesting, drinking, and gambling fellow in company; but, trust me, he is deep and dark as the Devil's cave that I have seen in the Ottawa country. It goes story under story, deeper and deeper, until the imagination loses itself in contemplating the bottomless pit of it—that is ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... though temporarily paralysed, in gray there is no possibility of movement, because gray consists of two colours that have no active force, for they stand the, one in motionless discord, the other in a motionless negation, even of discord, like an endless wall or a bottomless pit. ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... and retreat keep the world at a moderate temperature, be instantly consumed by fire, so that instead of the infinite variety of the seasons all may be reduced to one uniform condition; let fire rage everywhere, followed by dull night, and let the bottomless abyss swallow up all the gods." Is it worth while to destroy all this merely in order to refute you? Even though you do not wish it, they do you good, and they wheel in their courses for your sake, though their motion may be due to some earlier ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... said: "Nobody should be surprised when we priests, bishops and popes sink into the bottomless abyss of immorality, for the celibacy of the priestcraft is only a cudgel in the hands of Catholic officials to drive us to ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... centres round the stupendous Bromo, possessing the largest crater in the world, a fathomless cavity three miles in diameter, veiled in Stygian darkness, and suggesting the yawning mouth of hell. This bottomless pit, bubbling like a boiling cauldron, pouring out black volumes of sulphureous smoke, and clamouring with unceasing thunder, was for ages a blood-stained altar of human sacrifice. Every year the fairest maiden of the Tengger was the chosen victim offered to Siva, who, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... reason to believe I was as fairly and squarely wretched as it is possible for an intelligent being to be. I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman; so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me. I have always hated a great height, but never before did I realise the full horrors of which such a position is capable. Oh, the sickening sensation of that yielding board resting on the two moving supports. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... of infidel and species of atheist will rejoice, if evolution be accepted,-whether modernists, liberals, rationalists, or simple unbelievers on their way to the bottomless pit. If evolution wins, Christianity ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... to kill her I don't know, for she set down. And jest then somebody yells, "Here we go down to the bottomless pit." ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... that this substance was filled at night with an icy coldness, carried away in an endless course towards a bottomless abyss, leaving nothing around them but the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly grew. But still the Boreal moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless Eternity: and I reached latitude 72 deg., not ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... My-Boots. No doubt My-Boots was a boozer; but then he had such a fantastic appetite that he was always asked to join those sort of gatherings, just for the sight of the caterer's mug when he beheld that bottomless pit swallowing his twelve pounds of bread. The young woman on her side, promised to bring her employer Madame Fauconnier and the Boches, some very agreeable people. On counting, they found there would be fifteen to sit down to table, which was quite enough. When ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... few minutes afterwards, "step this way; I want to have a word with you. Now, tell me are you goose enough to expect you will ever see the money again you so foolishly threw into the bottomless pit ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... so often and so justly complained of in the house of commons: that over and above the yearly allowance of seven hundred thousand pounds, many occasional taxes, many excessive sums were raised, and all sunk in the bottomless gulf of secret service. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds were raised in defiance of the ancient parliamentary methods, to secure the kingdom from a Swedish invasion; then the two insurance offices were erected, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... style higher than this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the thought couldn't help him. Her face drove the last of his curses from his lips, but it threw him into a fathomless despair, where he no longer defined his thoughts into words. Her face shone like a star, but it stood over a bottomless rift in the earth and showed how impassable its ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... Legionaries could take no thought of anything but the Caliph el Walid's hoard. As they stood, squatted, or knelt around the pits—pits about two and a half feet square and deeper than the deepest thrust of any arm—it seemed to them that bottomless lakes and seas of light were opening down, down below them into unfathomed ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... hard-drinking, blunt-spoken, rather stupid and decidedly gullible, but honest and straightforward character one of the stock types of the world. The book appeared as four separate pamphlets: the first being entitled 'Law is a Bottomless Pit, Exemplified in the Case of Lord Strutt, John Bull, Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon, Who Spent All They Had in a Law Suit'; the second, 'John Bull in His Senses'; the third, 'John Bull Still in His Senses'; and the fourth, 'Lewis Baboon Turned ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... emptiness of spirit, life had poured its excitements as into a thing bottomless as a mirror. He gave it back an image of words. He was proud of his words. They were his experiences and sophistications. Out of them he achieved his keenest diversion. They were the excuse for his walking, his wearing a hat and embarking daily for his work, returning daily to his home. They enabled ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... ascend the long chain from effect to cause, until he reaches the first cause, the womb wherein was first generated the subsequent distant effect. So, likewise, they cannot realize that at the start the imperceptible deviation from the aim by and by widens to a bottomless gap until the aim is missed. Then the greatest and the most devoted sacrifices are useless. The legal conductors of the nation, since March 6th, ignore ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... appeared to be practically bottomless, as Pat hauled out handful after handful till the skirt of Jane's neat little traveling dress began to sag dangerously with ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... this time, but what might they not expect now! From the moment he believed Michael Nikolaievitch no longer guilty, as he had imagined, Rouletabille fell into a bottomless abyss. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... deep, or more, or bottomless, lies Lake Belle-Marie, for no man has ever fathomed it. But no matter how deep, the moon lies to-night at the bottom, and you can see it shining there, deep down in the blue. The stars are smaller, so they stay ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... what surroundings! Endless colonnades of cypresses; long, motionless drapings of gray moss; broad sheets of noisome waters, pitchy black, resting on bottomless ooze; cypress knees studding the surface; patches of floating green, gleaming brilliantly here and there; yonder where the sunbeams wedge themselves in, constellations of water-lilies, the many-hued iris, and a multitude of flowers that no man had named; here, too, serpents great and small, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... accident. Bjaaland's sled fell into one of the numerous crevasses. At the critical moment we were fortunately able to come to Bjaaland's aid; had we been a moment later the sled with its thirteen dogs would have disappeared in the seemingly bottomless pit. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... association, awakened sympathies which few suspected themselves of possessing; and he has laid open darker recesses in the bosom than were previously supposed to exist. The deep and dreadful caverns of remorse had long been explored but he was the first to visit the bottomless ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Philistine. Let us show each other what we can do, and let us feel highly rewarded if we can give joy to each other. "A healthy sense and a human heart!"- -we ask nothing more, and yet all, if we realize the bottomless corruption of that sense, the wicked cowardliness of the heart of the so-called public. Confess, a deluge would be necessary to correct this little fault. To remedy these ills I fear our most ardent endeavour ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... gold-topped bottle, containing, not the ruddy burgundy which had become customary of late, but sparkling champagne. Surface referred to it, gracefully, as his medicine; doctors, he said, were apparently under the delusion that schoolmasters had bottomless purses. To this pleasantry Queed made no reply. He was, indeed, spare with his remarks that evening, and his want of appetite grieved ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... companions, who were to be captives for weeks, months, years, perhaps, first on the peninsula and afterward in German fortresses. The foundations were giving way, and everything was going down, down to the bottomless depths of perdition. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... save. Mr. Dill asked me yesterday if I did n't want to take Gran'ma Mullins to board for the honeymoon, an' I suppose I could maybe do it, but oh my! I can't say as I take to that idea much. I 'm fond o' Gran'ma Mullins, but these days Hiram is nothin' but a bottomless pit when she gets at him, 'n' a honeymoon is a long time to hear one person talk about one person. I can 't say as I ever had anythin' again Hiram except that time 't he did n't catch Jathrop to lynch him, but all the same I ain't over fond o' any one as goes around with their mouth half-open the ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... a deep impression of the truth of Cecil's memorable words: "Faith is the master-spring of a Minister," as well as of every Christian. "Hell is before me, and thousands of lost souls are shut up there in everlasting agony. Jesus Christ stands forth to save men from rushing into this bottomless abyss. He sends me to proclaim His ability and love. I ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... afflicted and exceedingly weakened, because the Pancalas and the Pandavas, those foremost of all wielders of weapons, are seen to proceed with great speed towards him at a time when speed is of the highest moment like strong men rushing to the rescue of a person sinking in a bottomless sea. The king's standard is no longer visible. It has probably been struck down by Karna with his shafts. In the very sight of the twins, O Partha, and of Satyaki and Shikhandi, and Dhrishtadyumna and Bhima and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... troglodytes thus devolved on the earl as bipeds who were in considerable ignorance of the sun, and had never been known to wash their feet since the day when they came into the world,—their world underground, chipped off from the Bottomless Pit! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
