"Earthquake" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Devil was not idle. In the night-winds he and his legions would shriek and yell and rattle among the scaffolding and cranes in vain. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, he shook the structure with a frightful earthquake, which terrified all Alsatia, and, although whole streets were thrown down in Strasburg, yet the foundations of the Wunderbau, as the Germans love to call it, were not loosened, and no stone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... :earthquake: [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test quality-assurance procedures at its ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... crowd in this street, Courtier, which of all crowds in the whole world can best afford to be left to itself; secure from pestilence, earthquake, cyclone, drought, from extremes of heat and cold, in the heart of the greatest and safest city in the world; and yet-see the figure of that policeman! Running through all the good behaviour of this crowd, however safe and free it looks, there is, there always must be, a central ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Palisades, running from the east towards the west; at which end is seen the town of Port Royal standing a few feet above the water, and looking complacently down on its predecessor, buried eight fathoms below the surface by the earthquake of 1692. Here, too, is the Royal Naval Yard, hospital, barracks, and the works of Fort Charles defending the entrance, which is rendered still more difficult of access to an enemy by the Apostles' Battery erected on the opposite side, with a fine range ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going up ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning-star shines dead, As on the jag of a mountain-crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle, alit, one moment may sit, In the light of its golden wings. And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... sciences presuppose physical science; but few of the physical sciences presuppose moral science. The reason is obvious. There are many phenomena (an earthquake, for example, or the motions of the planets) which depend upon the laws of matter exclusively; and have nothing whatever to do with the laws of mind. Many, therefore, of the physical sciences may be treated of without any reference to mind, and as if the mind existed as a recipient ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... that of the flattest sterility. Christophe was submerged by his life. All his powers had shot up and grown too fast, all at once, suddenly. Only his will had not grown with them: and it was dismayed by such a throng of monsters. His personality was cracking in every part. Of this earthquake, this inner cataclysm, others saw nothing. Christophe himself could see only his impotence to will, to create, to be. Desires, instincts, thoughts issued one after another like clouds of sulphur from the fissures of a volcano: and he was forever asking ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... its fury depopulates a district, or a small tract of land over which it passes perhaps once in a century—the earthquake rumbles through the hidden recesses of the earth, and here and there the yawning cavern swallows the ill-fated inhabitants that dwell upon its surface; the lightning's stroke blasts in a moment, and cuts ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... of a sudden the mountains swam, The rivers piled their floods in a dam, The ridge above Los Gatos Creek Arched its spine in a feline fashion; The forests waltzed till they grew sick, And Nature shook in a speechless passion; And, swallowed up in the earthquake's spleen, The wonderful Spring of San Joaquin Vanished, and never ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... been menaced with an earthquake in 427 B.C. Posidon was 'The Earthshaker,' god of earthquakes, as well as of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... before we arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja,[8] the Merchants' Exchange; and Pepe described to us the feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket. The shock of an earthquake had tilted the table up on one side. While we were in Mexico there was a slight shock, which set the chandeliers swinging, but we did not even notice it. In April, a solemn procession goes from the Cathedral, on a day marked in the Calendar as the "Patrocinio ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... show themselves, it seems as if the heavens, the sun and moon, were all about to be annihilated; one would think that the earth could not support their presence. On the appearance of an archangel, there is an earthquake in every part of the world; it is preceded by a stronger light than that which accompanies the apparition of the angels; at the appearance of a demon it is less strong, and diminishes still more when it is a hero ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... in rainfall, and most potable resources concentrated in the Turkish Cypriot area); water pollution from sewage and industrial wastes; coastal degradation; loss of wildlife habitats from urbanization natural hazards: moderate earthquake activity international agreements: party to - Air Pollution, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution; signed, but not ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... was miserable enough. She did not venture so much as to look at August, who sat opposite her, and who was the most unhappy person at the table, because he did not know what all the unhappiness was about. Mr. Anderson's brow foreboded a storm, Mrs. Anderson's face was full of an earthquake, Cynthy Ann was sitting in shadow, and Julia's countenance perplexed him. Whether she was angry with him or not, he could not be sure. Of one thing he was certain: she was suffering a great deal, and that was enough to ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... heard of you working all day like a common labourer, with your hands bleeding and your nails broken—and how you told the captain to 'crack on' (I think he said) in the storm, when he was terrified himself—and the danger of that horrid mutiny"—(Nares had been obligingly dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse)—"and how it was all done, in part at least, for Jim and me—I felt we could never say how we ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Republican period; there were numberless dwellings of the Imperial era; there were unfinished structures that were being completed at the time of the city's overthrow. For, sixteen years before Vesuvius suddenly awoke from its long sleep, the neighbourhood had been visited by the severe earthquake shock of 63, and the effects produced by this disaster had not nearly been effaced, when the great event of 79 transformed the town into a huge museum for the delight and instruction of future generations. ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order of things which seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy, the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their weakness. The end of human probation, the final dissolution of organised society, and the destruction of man's home on the surface of ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... wives were oot waitin' their tatties, an' they roared to Sandy to stop; but Sandy cudna. The tatties were fleein' ower the back door o' the cairt, an' the scales were rattlin' an' reeshlin' like an earthquake; an' there was Sandy, bare-heided, up to the knees amon' his tatties, ruggin' an' roarin', like the skipper o' some schooner that was rinnin' on the rocks. I'll swear, Sandy got roond his roonds an' a' his tatties ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... perjury betrays it without inquiry.' Nor would he, to excite a speedy reformation, have conjured up such phantoms of terrour as these: 'A few years longer, and perhaps all endeavours will be in vain. We may be swallowed by an earthquake: we may be delivered to our ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the earth in twain with the earthquake's riving blow, loosens the bands of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out the lava streams from the volcano's cone, as kings pour wine from an earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... greater worldliness have hampered his familiar and in time destroyed its power, just as education destroys the more subtle instincts. Whilst the learned seismographer eats his dinner, cheerfully unconscious of the coming earthquake, his dog shivers beneath ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... and came back to Jacksonville with her husband Charles, the year of the earthquake at Charleston, South ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... Jorullo. When, in September, 1759, Jorullo was suddenly elevated into a mountain eleven hundred and eighty-three feet above the surrounding plain, two small rivers, the Rio de Cuitimba and the Rio de San Pedro, disappeared, and some time afterward burst forth again during violent shocks of an earthquake, as hot springs, whose temperature I found, in 1803, to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... smooth and pale yellow in the saucerlike basin between Barren Butte and the foothills of Starvation. In the soft light of the afterglow it seemed to smile at him with a glint of malice, like the treacherous thing it was. For Furnace Lake is treacherous. The Big Earthquake (America knows only one Big Earthquake, that which rocked San Francisco so disastrously) had split Furnace Lake halfway across, leaving an ugly crevice ten feet wide at the narrowest point and eighty feet deep, men said. Time and passing storms had partly filled the gash, but it was there, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... of Iuly 1591. there hapned an earthquake in the Iland of S. Michael, which continued from the 26 of Iuly, to the 12 of August, in which time no man durst stay within his house but fled into the fields, fasting and praying with great sorow, for that many of their houses fel down, and a towne called Villa Franca, was ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... we were off at daybreak, our way lying up a narrow ravine for a short distance, and then between a couple of masses of rock, which seemed to have been split apart by some earthquake; and directly we were through here the dull humming buzz that we had heard more or less for days suddenly fell upon our ears with a deep majestic boom that rose at times, as the wind set our way, ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... in our boyhood, while feeling, but quite unable to express, the emotions which were suggested by the bold shapes of mountains resting against the stars, mirrored from below in lakes and wild torrents, and quaking sometimes in concert with the quaking couch of the half-slumbering earthquake, the poems of Ossian served to give our thoughts an expression which they could not otherwise have found—how they at once strengthened and consolidated enthusiasm, and are now regarded with feelings which, wreathed around earliest memories and the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... hurt than the war itself. It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this. Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock. The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind. Their speech was a vocabulary of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties, but to old commanders and to distorted traditions. They ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... and covered with a green sward, you would have something not unlike a "rolling prairie." Some think that, when these prairies were formed, some such rolling motion actually existed, by means of an earthquake, and that all at once the ground ceased its undulations, and stood still! It is an interesting speculation for the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... the inclination of Mount Franklin favours the flow of water towards the valleys which we are exploring just now. To turn aside this flow, an earthquake would be necessary to change the mountain's ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... the spot the official's astonishment at the extraordinary destruction became greater and greater. The rock had been rent as if by an earthquake, to the distance of ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... ruin of so many of your Mammon-worshippers. With the return of commercial facilities, that article of commerce will again find purchasers enough to raise its value. Not that way is the iniquity to be overthrown. A deeper moral earthquake is needed. {148} We English had ours in India; and though the cases are far from being alike, yet a consciousness of what we ought to have been and ought to be toward the natives could not have been awakened by less than the ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Spaniards occupied the island of Mindanao, there lived in the valley of the Rio Grande a very strong man, Bantugan, whose father was the brother of the earthquake and ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call 'Kinabutasan,' a name that in their language means 'place that was cleft open'; from which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among the Indians."—Fray Martinez de ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... baptized in. When I got out I had a white dress to put on. Dey had a tent fer us to go in to change our clothes. We was baptized in de Fairforest jes' above de Harris Bridge. Everybody sung while we was going under de water. Some of 'em shouted, too. It took de earthquake to shake religion in my husband. He was Emanuel ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There must have been huge forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably the mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and when the strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm, being perhaps crushed together with greater force, remained higher than the centre, and so the water lodged between ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... for two hundred yards, before and behind them. Millions of tons of solid matter seemed to be raised. The shrowk in its ascent was caught by the uplifted debris. Beast and riders experienced in that moment all the horrors of an earthquake—they were rolled violently over, and thrown among the rocks and dirt. All ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... as a quarry owner. He confessed that he never made any profits out of his quarry, and this, in spite of the enormous volume of business that had been caused by the destruction of San Francisco by the big earthquake. For six years the rebuilding of San Francisco had been going on, and his business had quadrupled and octupled, and yet he was ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... of New Feliciana, La., was an old acquaintance of Richards and myself, and an excellent specimen of a warm-hearted, impetuous, breakneck Kentuckian, with a share of earthquake in his composition that might be deemed large, even in Kentucky. He had come to Louisiana some eight years previously, a voyage of a thousand miles or more down the Cumberland River, the Ohio, and Mississippi, in a flat boat with half a dozen negroes, some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... that nothing save an earthquake could get me from the house, and whistling, with some significance, "The Deil Has Nae Got all the Fools," he left me without a good-by word. After he had gone I went forth into the open to be alone. The stars were shining brightly through ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... earthquake activity around Pacific Basin; hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts; tornadoes in the midwest and southeast; mud slides in California; forest fires in the west; flooding; permafrost in northern Alaska, a major ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 7. And its clamour outbellows the thunder, its lightning outlightens the sun. 1340 From the springs of the morning it thunders and lightens across and afar To the wave where the moonset ends and the fall of the last low star. With a trampling of drenched red hoofs and an earthquake of men that meet, Strong war sets hand to the scythe, and the furrows take fire from his feet. Earth groans from her great rent heart, and the hollows of rocks are afraid, And the mountains are moved, and the valleys as waves in a storm-wind swayed. From ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon her first impulse to ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... that the most frequent and evident of these causes are variations of atmospheric pressure and local storms. With regard to earthquake shocks as a cause of such fluctuations of level, it is a singular and significant fact that since Forel has established the delicate self-registering apparatus on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, no less than twelve earthquake shocks have been experienced in ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... enormous boulders some thirty feet in diameter. In among them extend rocky labyrinths which can be explored with torches. On every hand are immense masses of Shawangunk grit hurled together over the cliff as if with the convulsions of an earthquake. Upon these acres of rock around the lake grow the most luxuriant lichens and the forests in June are efflorescent with laurels and azalias. The finest point of vantage is on Eagle Cliff; I have climbed there often to ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... theories, that it becomes important to possess an instrument which shall, if possible, indicate the direction of the shock, as well as its intensity. An observation made a few years since at Odessa, after an earthquake which happened during the night, suggests a simple instrument by which the direction of the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... had two sons drowned in the Johnstown flood, that Lloyd heard the description of Clara Barton's five months' labor there. A doctor's wife who had been in the Mt. Vernon cyclone, and a newspaper man who had visited the South Carolina islands after the tidal wave, and Charleston after the earthquake, piled up their accounts of those scenes of suffering, some of them even greater than the horrors of war, so that Lloyd dreamed of fires and floods that night. But the horror of the scenes was less, ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... rich and well-to-do class"; in the large towns he appoints only "people with carriages."[4126] Many of them in the country and several in the towns are legitimists[4127], at least at heart, and Napoleon knows it; but, as he says; "these folks do not want the earthquake"; they are too much interested, and too personally, in the maintenance of order.[4128] Moreover, to represent his government, he needs decorative people; and it is only these who can be so gratis, be themselves, look ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Miss Roots. As for an engagement, she was not aware that there ever had been one; there was once, she admitted half-way downstairs, an understanding, probably misunderstood. He had better ask Horace Jewdwine straight out. "But," she assured him from the doorstep, "it would take an earthquake to get the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... sights. Then at the fourth opening, the pale horse, bestridden by Death, went mournfully abroad. At the fifth seal, the crowded souls beneath the altar cry out for restlessness; they are clothed in white robes, and bidden to be patient for a while. Then, at the sixth seal, falls the earthquake, the confusion of nature, the dismay of men, before the terror of the anger of God; and the very words the wrath of the Lamb, have a marvellous significance; the wrath of the Most Merciful, the wrath of one whose very symbol is that of a blithe and meek innocence. Then ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... myself and daughter. We were accompanied by E. J. Babcock, my secretary, and A. J. Galloway and son, in the employ of the Coast Line road, over which we were to pass. We stopped at Charleston, where the ravages of a recent earthquake were everywhere visible. Fort Sumter, which we visited, was a picture of desolation. Such a large party naturally attracted attention. At Jacksonville we encountered our first reporter. He showed me an article in which it was stated that we were on a political trip. This I disclaimed and ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... that bends to them is the true glory of God. All these other things are but the fringes; the centre of glory is the Love, which is the mightiest and the divinest thing in the Might Divine. The sunshine is far stronger than the lightning, and there is more force developed in the rain than in an earthquake. That truth is what Christianity has made the common possession of the world. It has thereby broken the chains of dread; it has bridged over the infinite distance. It has given us a God that can love and be loved, can stoop and can lift, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... ants had not been affected by the heat, and were packed in great masses and evidently fast asleep; they soon recovered, however, and walked off slowly in different directions, as if wondering if an earthquake ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... gossiping portress, in a nightcap and shuffling savates, relating or drinking in the wonderful and the intimate. One of his masterpieces represents three of these dames, lighted by a guttering candle, holding their heads together to discuss the fearful earthquake at Bordeaux, the consequence of the government's allowing the surface of the globe to be unduly dug out in California. The representation of confidential imbecility could not go further. When a ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... year, on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, there was an earthquake in divers places, and in the summer following a great pestilence in divers parts, and many devout Brothers and Sisters departed ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... said thickly, and disappeared beneath a huge pocket-handkerchief. Muffled sounds, as of distant explosions of dynamite, together with earthquake shudderings of the bedclothes, told of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... humble. They demonstrate conclusively that there is nothing in man which the dissecting-table will not explain; that his aspirations towards another life have their root in the fear of death, or, say others of them, in that of earthquake or thunder; that his affinities with the past are merely inherited from remote ancestors who lived in that past, perhaps a million years ago; and that everything noble about him is but the fruit of expediency or of a veneer of civilisation, while everything base must be attributed to ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... here, both of you," he said. "This is nonsense. You'll die sure enough of fright if you keep on this way. I was a fool myself to be startled. Everything it is is an earthquake." ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... Storm-wind's hand, By the Passion-tempest whirled! Ever straining, Never gaining, Never keeping, Young or old! Whither going Never knowing, Wherefore weeping, Never told! Rising, falling, disappearing, Seeking, calling, hating, fearing; Blasted by the lightning shock, Trampled in the earthquake rock; Were I man I would not plead In the roll of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... surprised. She had seen little jars and rubs before in the family, but this morning she seemed to have happened in upon an earthquake. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... observation, or, which is more probable, that no accurate measurement of the subject, by which this quantity of decrease might have been ascertained, had been taken and recorded. It must be also evident, that a very small operation of an earthquake would be sufficient to render every means of information, in this manner of mensuration, unsatisfactory ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... divers fag-ends of speeches, stinging dialogues, and choice tit-bits of scenes, (all of which I will mercifully spare you,) when a chance peep into Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets' showed me mine own fine subject as the work of some long-forgotten bard! This moral earthquake demolished in a moment my goodly aerial fabric; the fair plot burst like a meteor; and an after-recollection of a certain French tragedy-queen, Agrippina, showed me that the ground was still further preoccupied. But it is high time to tell the destined ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... can lay down their weapons for a time, and offer one general and sincere tribute to genius. In these exciting times, we hear of revolutions in Spain and Portugal, deaths of crowned men, with indifference, but a shock as astounding as that of an earthquake in the city of Peru was felt throughout Europe when the numerous periodicals spread the unexpected intelligence that the gifted Malibran was no more, that in the fulness of her talent and her beauty, just commencing the harvest ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... rumble beneath them, and the house quivered. They all started up in affright, and rushing to the hall found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also. They had sent to wake their captain, who said from their description that it must have been an earthquake, an occurrence which, although very rare in that country, had taken place almost within the century; and then went to bed again, strange to say, and fell fast asleep without once thinking of Curdie, or associating the noises they had heard with what he had told them. He had not believed Curdie. ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... solitudes of Horeb, he seeks to commune with God. He listens for some manifestation of the deity; he is ready to do His bidding. He hears the sound of a rushing hurricane; but God is not in the wind. The mountain then is shaken by a fearful earthquake; but Jehovah is not in the earthquake. Again the mountain seems to flash with fire; but the signs he seeks are not in the fire. At last, after the uproar of contending physical forces had died away, in the profound ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to "clear up," ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... astonishment of his faithful people had been mute and passive: they suddenly rose with unanimous and irresistible fury. Theophilus escaped, but the promiscuous crowd of monks and Egyptian mariners was slaughtered without pity in the streets of Constantinople. [50] A seasonable earthquake justified the interposition of Heaven; the torrent of sedition rolled forwards to the gates of the palace; and the empress, agitated by fear or remorse, threw herself at the feet of Arcadius, and confessed that the public safety could be purchased only by the restoration of Chrysostom. The Bosphorus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... there many years she dreamed a dream. And in the dream she seemed to have departed from the land of the Taurians and to dwell in the city of Argos, wherein she had been born. And as she slept in the women's chamber there befell a great earthquake, and cast to the ground the palace of her fathers, so that there was left one pillar only which stood upright. And as she looked on this pillar, yellow hair seemed to grow upon it as the hair of a man, and it spake with a man's voice. And she did to it as she was wont to do to the strangers that ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... astonishing thing was that Peter seemed at once to be seized with the Bucket Lane position. He was now, he understood, in a world of earthquake—wise citizens lived from minute to minute and counted on no longer safety. He began also to eliminate everything that was not absolutely essential. At Brockett's he had never consciously done without anything ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... only half-persuaded fretful guest. 'You subject the winds to serve you; that's a gain. You do actually accomplish a resonant imitation of the various instruments; they sing out as your two hands command them—trumpet, flute, dulcimer, hautboy, drum, storm, earthquake, ethereal quire; you have them at your option. But tell me of an organ in the open air? The sublimity would vanish, ma'am, both from the notes and from the structure, because accessories and circumstances produce its chief effects. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... upon my doorstep—which, by the way, happens to be a rough hewn slab some ten feet square surmounted by a portcullis that has every intention of falling down unexpectedly one of these days and creating an earthquake. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... stood him in good stead, when (as told in the sixth volume, "Tom Swift and His Wireless Message") the airship in which he, Mr. Damon and a friend of the latter's (who had built the craft) were wrecked on Earthquake Island. There Tom was marooned with some refugees from a wrecked steam yacht, among whom were Mr. and Mrs. Nestor, father of a girl of whom Tom thought a ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... reached a period when a great civil revolution seems to be at hand. Virginia is about to be shaken by an earthquake, to writhe under intestine wars, and it may be necessary for you to take sides. I warn you to have a care which side you choose, for a mistake means death. You had better know something of the condition of the country before you make ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... had a similar tradition, and showed temples in their cities which were Phoenician in character.[310] Justin, or rather Trogus Pompeius, whom he abbreviated, writes as follows:—"The Syrian nation was founded by the Phoenicians, who, being disturbed by an earthquake, left their native land, and settled first of all in the neighbourhood of the Assyrian Lake, and subsequently on the shore of the Mediterranean, where they built a city which they called Sidon on account of the abundance of the fish; for ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... French had made an aerial raid upon Wesel. From within it sounded as if the whole Allied Army were pounding the building. On top of the prison anti-aircraft guns were mounted and when they were discharged, which was continuously and rapidly, they shook the building violently. Indeed an earthquake could scarcely have set up a more ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... from his lips before the ground shook as if convulsed with an earthquake. A red flame shot skyward behind them, and a mighty, reverberating roar went rumbling ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... fell out in Venezuela. At first the Patriots were successful; Miranda defeated the Royalists and took Valencia. The principal towns fell into the hands of the insurgents. Then, came the terrible earthquake of 1812, which not only shattered the resources of the Patriots, but was skilfully used by the Church as a proof that Providence had taken sides against the rebels. Monteverde, the Spanish general, recaptured Valencia. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... a peculiar interest to Pompeii. That city, which seemed to have no good luck, had been violently shaken by earthquake in the year B.C. 63. Several temples had toppled down along with the colonnade of the Forum, the great Basilica, and the theatres, without counting the tombs and houses. Nearly every family fled from the place, taking with them their furniture and their statuary; and the Senate hesitated a long ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... with the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and the sight of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of knowing just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the double file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... voice you bring me to cultivate?" continued the maestro. "This that sounds like the rumblings of a subterranean earthquake? Boom! boo-o-om! Like that, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... every mile from the Pole, and wilder with every mile towards the Horn. Now they are so enormous that even the truck of the tall Yankee clipper staggering along to {123} leeward cannot be seen except when both ships are topping the crest. Wherever you look there seems to be an endless earthquake of mountainous waves, with spuming volcanoes of their own, and vast, abysmal craters yawning from the depths. The Victoria begins to labour. The wind and water seem to be gaining on her every minute. ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... of the world do not men feel an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do not repent and turn unto the Lord their God? Go where we will we are conscious of that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of the hurricane and the earthquake; none escape it: an all-pervading sense of rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts of all men. May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordained in order that the still small voice of the Lord may be the more clearly heard and welcomed as salvation? Is it not ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... It occupied—that dismal thing!— The path that he was following. Before he'd time to stop and fly, An earthquake trifled with the eye That saw a ghost. He fell as fall the early good; Unmoved that awful vision stood. The stars that danced before his ken He wildly brushed away, and then He saw ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... watches over those who see no other way out of an embarrassing predicament save the unlikely arrival of an earthquake or an aeroplane now intervened in Mrs. Milo's behalf. Dora came in, showing that the bell had, indeed, been summoning the mistress of the house. Behind Dora was Tottie, and the attitude of each to the other was ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... taught how to erect buildings earthquakeproof. The most powerful seismographs in the world are in this university. I saw a record of the San Francisco earthquake that was made by these instruments—just when it started, when it was at the worst, length of time it lasted and all about it. Here in this building is a picture of a place where, during an earthquake, the ground was ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... road chased each other like the figures in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... him; he came to life again in a twinkling, animate with threefold strength and cunning. The man on his chest was thrown off as by a young earthquake; and Lanyard's right arm was no sooner free than it shot out with blind but deadly accuracy to the point of his assailant's jaw. A click of teeth was followed by a sickish grunt as the man ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Coudre.—Vide Brief Recit, par Jacques Cartier, 1545, D'Avezac ed. p. 44; also Vol. II. of this work, p. 172. Charlevoix says, whether from tradition or on good authority we know not, that "in 1663 an earthquake rooted up a mountain, and threw it upon the Isle au Coudres, which made it one-half larger than before."— Letters to the Duchess of ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... was a sight that the men say they will never forget. It looked as if an earthquake had struck it. The published photographs do not give any idea of the indescribable mass of ruins to which our guns reduced it. The chaos is so utter that the very line of the streets ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... deadened the roar of his assailant as he flung himself aloft in his struggles to grapple his nimble foe, and, missing his aim, rolled onward his boiling waves until they broke on the beach with the shock of an earthquake, amid ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sinister, growing, hissing sound like escaping steam filled my ears. Then followed a roar as of distant thunder, which grew louder every instant. This terrifying noise culminated in a tremendous explosion, which seemed to rock the hills as an earthquake would; the illumination waxed to a glare so fierce that I clapped my hands over my eyes to save them. I thought the end of the world had come. I could think of no natural phenomenon that would explain it. My wits were staggering. The deafening explosion trailed off into the rumbling roar that had ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... shock of an earthquake was felt, presenting a rumbling noise, very audible, proceeding from ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... swathed woman stood, looking out upon that slaughter, calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquillity—viewing it, it came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... broaches some confused ideas regarding the possibility of an internal growth of rocks, but finally declares himself in favor of an upheaval of the land by earthquakes, "although," he observes, "no such rising was apparent immediately after the earthquake of Egersund, yet the earthquake may have opened the way for other causes producing ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 89. This island was said to have been torn away from the isle of Inarime by an earthquake; for which reason it received its name from the Greek verb procheo, which means ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... incredible after the day that I've had? Where do the things join? What's all that got to do with the horrors I've been through to-day, with the Forest, the cholera, Marie, Semyonov.... With all that's happening in Europe? With this mad earthquake of a catastrophe? And yet one thinks of such silly things. I can see them doing Othello with their cheap ermine, bad jewellery and impossible wigs. I expect Othello's black came off as he got hotter and hotter; and the Rev. I. R. Glass ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... sleep long. Their slumbers were broken by a rumbling sound as of a coming earthquake; the walls of the house shook, and peals of thunder echoed ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... the matter with this household?" Billie's thoughts continued. "One would think an earthquake had shaken us out of our senses. Even Papa is out of sorts. I don't think I ever saw him quite this way before. As for me, I can't seem to pull out of the general depression. It's just closing in on us and ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... men advanced deeper into the drift, an occasional ore-car, pushed by its panting human team, rumbled heavily past, while every now and then came dull, tremulous shocks like those of an earthquake. These were blasts on other levels, or in other parts of the one ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the hill, and I do not believe there is a living creature of any description on the island. If there is, it will be so much the worse for them half an hour hence, about which time something very like an earthquake will take place, for I have lighted a slow match communicating with a magazine containing about three tons of powder in bulk, to say nothing of perhaps a couple of thousand cartridges. The buildings are all effectually fired, as you may see; and we have brought off a boat-load of ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... him, and at last Peter realized that he never had taken seriously the ideas of the First Apostolic Church of American City. He listened to the moans of the wounded, and to the shouts and uproar of the crowd, and began seriously figuring out what could have happened. There had once been an earthquake in American City; could this be another one? Or had a volcano opened up in the midst of Main Street? Or could it have been a gas-main? And was this the end, or would it explode some more? Would the volcano go on erupting, and blow Peter and his frail packing-box thru the walls ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... the Sage of Ferney accept the chain of cause and effect, and agree that without the kicks, the earthquake, the auto-da-fe, and all the other items of his uneasy career, it was impossible he should be eating pistachio nuts and preserved lemon-rind in that arbour? And, in consideration of the bitter sweet of these delicacies, was he prepared to welcome (retrospectively) the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... landscape rose in a gentle slope to the summit of the thundering mountain. But indications were not wanting of the peril with which the city was threatened. The whole district is volcanic; and a few years before the final catastrophe, an earthquake had shaken Pompeii to its foundations; some of the buildings were much injured. On August 24, A.D. 79, the inhabitants were busily engaged in repairing the damage thus wrought, when suddenly and without any previous warning a vast column of black smoke burst from the overhanging mountain. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... The Chartists stirred again, and renewed their not unreasonable or treasonable demands; but all in vain. There is really something awful about the strength and solidity and impassivity of England. When the French monarchy went down in the earthquake shock of that wild winter, and a republic came up in its place, it surely would have been no wonder if a vast tidal-wave of revolution caused by so much subsidence and upheaving had broken disastrously ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... themselves. And the general feeling, as it was described to me by a grave citizen whom I met in a morning walk (for the overmastering sense of a public calamity broke down every barrier of reserve, and all men talked freely to all men in the streets, as they would have done during the rockings of an earthquake), was, even among the boldest, like that which sometimes takes possession of the mind in dreams—when one feels oneself sleeping alone, utterly divided from all call or hearing of friends, doors open that should ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... some culture, but not too much, was describing the adventure of her husband, who had been in Messina at the time of the earthquake. ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... quite so like that of the Cyrus as some to be mentioned later, but still pretty close to the elder overture. "The illustrious Aronce and the adorable Clelia" are actually going to be married, when there is a fearful storm, an earthquake, and a disappearance of the heroine. She has, of course, been carried off; one might say, without flippancy, of any heroine of Madeleine de Scudery's not only that she was, as in a famous and already quoted saying, "very liable to be carried off," but that it was not in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... it, Why hast thou made me thus? The old jest of one who tried to lift himself in his own basket, is but a tame picture of the man who imagines that, by working solely through existing sects and parties, he can destroy slavery. Mechanics say nothing, but an earthquake strong enough to move all Egypt can bring down ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... on our street, but it takes a bit more study to get at the secret. There is a certain reticence about us. It would take an earthquake to cause much fraternization along Pine Street. Perhaps it is because three houses out of every four bear the tablets of doctors. The average layman fears to stop and speak to his neighbour for fear it will develop into a professional matter. We board up our front windows at night ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... have the legend of the flood: remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake—a cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... on the mainland, on February 20, 1835, the worst earthquake ever recorded in Chile occurred, and it was followed for twelve days by no less than 300 tremblings. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations; the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... not break, but they swayed and separated as you would part your two interlocked hands. The ground of the little valley fairly gave way, the nest tilted over till its contents fell into the chasm. It was like an earthquake that destroys a hamlet. ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... safe to assume things, I will go on to suggest to you that the Satyricon was planned, on the Homeric model, in twenty-four books, and will leave you to—in the striking words used recently by The Times of the Japanese earthquake—"grope for analogies" between the text which follows and the fifteenth and sixteenth books of the Odyssey, which you have, doubtless, by heart. But, if I know you at all, you are more likely to be groping for analogies between the characters ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... learned leech Perished in a tumult many years ago, Accused—our learning's fate—of wizardry, Rebellion, to the setting up a rule And creed prodigious as described to me. His death, which happened when the earthquake fell (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss To occult learning in our lord the sage Who lived there in the pyramid alone) Was wrought by the mad people—that's their wont! On vain recourse, as I conjecture it, To his tried virtue, for miraculous help— How ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... green seems opprest, and the Plain afraid Of a Something to come, whereof these are the proofs,— Neither earthquake, nor storm, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... by a zone of violent volcanic and earthquake activity sometimes referred to as the "Pacific Ring of Fire"; subject to tropical cyclones (typhoons) in southeast and east Asia from May to December (most frequent from July to October); tropical cyclones (hurricanes) may form south of ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... echoed. "You should be in my room when an earthquake has killed my lamp. I do not understand. How can you call this dark? Let me see: yes, you have eyes, and big ones, bigger than Madam Watho's or Falca's—not so big as mine, I fancy—only I never saw mine. But then—oh yes!—I know now what is the matter! You can't see with ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... every topographical advantage, for they held possession of the "Cockpits." Those highlands are furrowed through and through, as by an earthquake, with a series of gaps or ravines, resembling the California canons, or those similar fissures in various parts of the Atlantic States, known to local fame either poetically as ice-glens, or symbolically as purgatories. These chasms ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... tall, supple body drawn up by the swing of her arms, cried out, "See, now I relax and just let it fall," and bending with the downward rush of the blade, drove it deep into the brown earth. A forward thrust of the long handle ("See, you use it like a lever," she explained), a small earthquake in the soil, and the tool ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the notice taken of the row by the habitues of the opium den on the high floor. The two or three clients who were stretched on the low couches were either entirely under the influence of the drug or too listless to worry about anything short of an earthquake—if even that would have ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... have given him affinity with the unearthly; while he spoke so tremendous were the ideas which he conveyed that it appeared as if the human heart were far too bounded for their conception. His feelings seemed better fitted for a spirit whose habitation is the earthquake and the volcano than for one confined to a mortal body and human lineaments. But these were merely memories; he was changed since then. He was now all love, all softness; and when I raised my eyes in wonder at him as he ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... an earthquake could ever bottle up the flow of animal spirits that usually possessed ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... thunder-struck Enceladus Groveling beneath the incumbent mountain's weight, Lies stretched supine, eternal prey of flames; And, when he heaves against the burning load, Reluctant, to invert his broiling limbs, A sudden earthquake shoots through all the isle, And AEtna thunders dreadful under-ground, Then pours out smoke in wreathing curls convolved, And shades the sun's bright orb, and blots out day. Here in the shelter of the woods we lodged, 20 And frighted heard strange ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... incredulity which astonished his friends, especially when contrasted with his tenderness for many puerile superstitions. He could scarcely be induced to admit the truth of any narrative which struck him as odd, and it was long, for example, before he would believe even in the Lisbon earthquake. Yet he seriously discussed the truth of second-sight; he carefully investigated the Cock-lane ghost—a goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called "spiritualism," and with almost equal absurdity; he told stories to Boswell about a "shadowy being" which had once been ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... thought an earthquake nothing less than might be expected after such language. Louder and still louder grew the rumbling, until the very walls shook. Everybody turned to a ghastly white. The Vicar's face bore eloquent witness to ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Taylor's letter to Hunsworth as soon as I had read it. Thank God she was safe up to that time, but I do not think the earthquake was then over. I shall long to hear tidings ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... as the jolliest; and laughed so uproariously, that their hemispheres all quivered and shook, like vast provinces in an earthquake. Ha! ha! ha! how they laughed, and they roared. A deaf man might have heard them; and no milk could have soured within a forty- two-pounder ball shot ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville |
