"Crater" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where it burst, then dashed up the street. Skillfully avoiding heaps of brick and mortar scattered along the way, quicker than it takes to tell, we traversed two blocks and reached a point just opposite the ruined church. Here we rushed full into an ugly crater, our machine fouled and our ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... would suggest the existence of the grand elliptical crater of some extinct volcano. But instead of the black sulphuric scoria, that you might expect to see strewed over its base, you behold a verdant landscape of smiling loveliness, park-like plains interposed with groves and copses, here and there a mound of rock-work, ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... over Jimmie's shoulder. "Say, old pal, that's bum luck! By God, I'm sorry!" And Jimmie, who wanted nothing so much as somebody to be sorry with, clasped Bill in his arms, and burst into tears, and told over and over again how he had gone to what had been his home, and found only a huge crater blown out by the explosion, and how he had gone about calling his wife and babies, until at last they had brought him one leg of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... a golden land of small hills and valleys. Beyond, to the north, they glimpsed another portion of the valley, and, still beyond, the opposing wall of the valley—a range of mountains, the highest of which reared its red and battered ancient crater against a rosy and mellowing sky. From north to southeast, the mountain rim curved in the brightness of the sun, while Saxon and Billy were already in the shadow of evening. He looked at Saxon, noted the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... Rust—queer name, don't you think?—and he's from Wisconsin. Just a rough-diamond sort of chap, but fairly well educated. He and I were in some pretty hot places, and it was he who pulled me out of a shell crater. I'd "gone west" sure then if it hadn't been ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... to secure their attendance at the right time and place, this food is so arranged and distributed as to effect that object with wonderful perfection. The leaves are bi-pinnate. At the base of each pair of leaflets, on the midrib, is a crater-formed gland, which, when the leaves are young, secretes a honey-like liquid. Of this the ants are very fond; they are constantly running about from one gland to another to sip up the honey as it is secreted. But this is not all; there is a still ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the German lines beyond Hill 60. I could watch the flight of the projectile and its bursting in a sheet of flame over the enemy's line. The opposing guns were hard at it, while away in the distance the rapid rattle of rifle fire told of the tragedies that were being enacted near the crater that Captain Perry had blown in Hill 60. Away to the south a momentary flash like sheet lightning on an autumn evening would light the horizon with a baleful gleam, and after a long interval the muffled roar of a ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... relic of antiquity which Doncaster has yet produced, and is of exquisite engraving and workmanship. Upon the capital, or top of the stone, a small space above the sculpture of the altar itself, is a crater or flowing bowl,[4] sacred to Bacchus, the god of wine; on the dexter, or right side of the altar, is a flower-pot, or cornucopiae, with five branches in it, loaded with leaves and fruit, sacred to Ceres, or Terra-Mater, the goddess of plants; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... an hour going over his life and his friendship with Iron Skull when a quick step sounded on the Elephant's back and Penelope swung past him out to the edge of the crater that formed the Elephant's east side. She stood there, her gray suit fluttering in the night wind, looking far and wide as if the view were new to her. Then she sat down on the ground, clasped her arms across her ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... coral islands built up on an underwater volcano; central lagoon is former crater, islands are part of the rim; average elevation less than ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... mountain on our big elephant hunt. The details of those twelve days of adventuring in districts, some of which were probably never traversed before by white men, our experiences with the natives, our climb up the side of the mountain and our camp in the crater; our icy mornings, our ascent of the highest peak, and our explorations of the ancient homes of the cave-dwellers—all are part of a remarkable series of events that have nothing to do with an elephant story. In the forests we saw ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... we came is nothing but a bridle-path, and a very rough one at that, traversing miles and miles of old lava flows. We had almost ridden to the crater's brink before we discovered, in the dim twilight, the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... it had been growing down. The moss was gathering all over the round, rough logs on the outside, and the weeds and wild vines each year grew still more ambitious to get quite to the top of the cabin, and peep down into the mysterious crater of a chimney that forever smoked in a mournful and monotonous sort of way, as if watchers were there—Vestal virgins, who dared not let their fires perish, on penalty ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... desire to see or feel it again. Our boy, Mick Duffy, has been ill with it these ten days. Honora said to his father, Brian, "How can you be so fond of Michael; now that he lives with us, you hardly ever see him!" "Oh, how could I but be fond of him, the crater that sends me every guinea ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the ground, dodging in and out, running forward, halting or suddenly retreating, I worked my way gradually forward, while all the world about me was upheaving and spouting and belching forth to the heavens, as if I had been caught in the crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without warning. The history of Panama is strewn with "dynamite stories." Even the French had theirs in their sixteen per cent, of the excavation of Culebra; in American annals there is one for every week. Three days before, one of my Empire friends set off one ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... described, unless it might be his remarkable countenance. The face of this Indian ordinarily wore a thoughtful cast, an expression which it is not unusual to meet with in a savage; though at times it lighted up, as it might be with the heat of inward fires, like the crater giving out its occasional flames beneath the hues of a saddened atmosphere. One accustomed to study the human face, and to analyze its expressions, would possibly have discovered in that countenance lines of deep artifice, together with the traces of a profound and constitutional ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... lava streaming up from regions below ground, and pouring along the surface for a distance of forty, fifty, and even sixty miles, as in Iceland and Hawaii. Think of red-hot cinders flung from a volcano-crater to a height of ten thousand feet. Think of lakes of liquid fire in other craters, five hundred to a thousand feet across, huge cauldrons of boiling rock. Think of showers of ashes from the furnace below of yet another, borne so high aloft as to be carried ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to firm land on the other side. Some of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... require a light-bearer besides himself, so Dinny was told to come, and after a little opposition he followed his master and their guide to the extent of about a mile, when the lad began to creep and slide down a well-wooded place in the plain that looked like the crater of an ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... a bird's song above the great thunder of the fires,—"For thy sake, O my Father!" And even as she cried, she leaped into the white flood of metal; and the lava of the furnace roared to receive her, and spattered monstrous flakes of flame to the roof, and burst over the verge of the earthen crater, and cast up a whirling fountain of many-colored fires, and subsided quakingly, with lightnings and ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... whole distance. At the point where the mules must be abandoned, a number of guides offered to carry me up, or to drag me up by means of a rope! But I climbed it. A cloud hangs over it all the time, which is occasioned by the column of steam that issues from its crater. The entire upper part of the peak is perfectly bare of vegetation, and covered with fine cinders, rapilli, &c., through which escapes a gas that almost suffocates the ascending traveler. At the top we shouted into the crater and heard distinct ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... Lipari Islands, the weird sulphur crater of the Volcanello, a giant flower which smokes and burns, an enormous yellow flower, opening out in the midst of the sea, whose ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... crater of ERROR while TEREBUS clears the kitchen. ERROR continues stirring Soup and tapioca custard on the stove. Strong smell ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... are embraced within a circle the radius of which is from a thousand to twelve hundred feet, and the whole of this surface seems to be a smothered crater covered over with an incrustation of sufficient strength and thickness to bear usually a very heavy weight, but which in several instances yielded and even broke through under the weight of our horses as we rode over it. We quickly dismounted, and as we were making some examinations, the crust broke ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... Caribbean Sea 0 m highest point: lava dome in English's Crater (in the Soufriere Hills volcanic complex) estimated at ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... seemed to have but a single crater, whence arose a column of fire, lighted by transverse rays; one would have said that part of the magnificence of the phenomenon was due to electricity. Above the flames floated an immense cloud of smoke, red below, black above. It rose with great ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... extending this note to a disproportionate length: "The Dead Sea below, upon our left, appealed so near to us, that we thought we could have rode thither in a very short space of time. Still nearer stood a mountain upon its western shore, resembling in its form the cone of Vesuvius, and having also a crater upon its top which was ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... consisted of twelve or thirteen men, and the small ambulance waggon which we used for provisions. The French doctor had remained behind with De la Rey. We moved very fast. At Zoutpan—a sunken kopje like the mouth of a crater, with a pan at the bottom, from which the salt is got—I met some old acquaintances, who pretended to have come there for salt. During our talk my suspicions were roused by their curiosity, and by their knowledge of President Steyn's arrival. ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... roses in blossom, the yellow mimosa flower, the wild moncha, with a white flower, growing everywhere, and the great variety of evergreen trees (none that I have seen being deciduous) make the country very pretty. The great bare volcanic hills, each with its well-defined crater, stand up from among the woodlands, and now from among pastures grazing hundreds of oxen; and this, with the grand sea views, and shipping in the harbour, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... peaks an' see wonderful sights.... So much for that. Now, if you really want to learn—or if you only want me to tell you—well, that's no matter. Only I'll win the bet!... You'll see how this park lies in the crater of a volcano an' was once full of water—an' how the snow blows in on one side in winter, a hundred feet deep, when there's none on the other. An' the trees—how they grow an' live an' fight one another an' depend on one another, an' protect the forest from storm-winds. An' how ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... fine black sand, showing the volcanic character of the mountain peak above, which Green said was over eight thousand feet high and had an extinct crater on the top; and, when Fritz and his brother had jumped out of the boat, they proceeded up to the little settlement of the islanders, which was called "Edinburgh" out of compliment to his Royal Highness Prince Alfred, who had visited the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... fantastic shapes by the sea, or the mountain torrents carving away the lava of which they were all composed. For the whole of the islands were volcanic, and Port Lloyd itself is nothing more than the crater of a vast volcano, which in some tremendous convulsion of nature has sunk from its former high estate low enough to become ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Well, just a little like the whitewashed crater of an active volcano. At any rate, it is the glorious companion piece to Kilauea in Hawaii. In these wonders of nature you behold the extremes, fire and ice, having it all their own way, and a world of adamant ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... degrees higher than the average of Great Britain. But to this the most tranquillising reply is the assurance that mere heat, even to a degree beyond that of Ceylon, is not unhealthy in itself. Aden, enclosed in a crater of an extinct volcano, is not considered insalubrious; and the hot season in India, when the thermometer stands at 100 deg. at midnight, is comparatively a healthy period of the year. In fact, in numerous cases heat may be the means of removing the immediate sources of disease. Its first ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... traces of earlier volcanic eruptions, and the summit of one of its hills resembled a crater. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the wind changed, driving the cloud of ashes to the southward and sufficiently clearing the atmosphere to allow the angry glow of the crater to be distinctly seen. Now it shot a pillar of fire thousands of feet straight into the heavens; then it would darken and roll skyward great clouds that were illumined by the showers ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... many and many a time; and it's little I cared for it. But then there was a place to go into, and dry clothes to put on, and a warm male to look forward to, with perhaps a drop of the crater afterward; and that makes all the difference in the world. What we are going to do ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... almost a dead cert that there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor bases his assertions on photographs—hundreds of photographs—of a crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied. I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me with the triteness of ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... ponds in rainy weather fill up with water, which pours from one pond into another, so that the hill-top is loud with the noise of the brooks. For many weeks, the armies fought for this patch of hill. It was all mined, counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each explosion the crater was fought for and lost and won. It cannot be said that either side won that summit till the enemy was finally beaten from all that field, for both sides conquered enough to see from. On the enemy side, a fortification of ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... far as I know Italian towns; and yet, now that I have written it, I remember Perugia, and feel that the observation is a mistake. But at any rate Siena is remarkably picturesque, standing on such a site, on the verge and within the crater of an extinct volcano, and therefore being as uneven as the sea in a tempest; the streets so narrow, ascending between tall, ancient palaces, while the side streets rush headlong down, only to be threaded by sure-footed mules, such as climb ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ascent was an enormous crater or valley, apparently of volcanic origin, which furnished covering and concealment to a large force of Moroccan troops in reserve, who completely filled it. They, like the children, seemed to be perfectly oblivious of the high-explosive ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... fissures and chasms of the same scoriated volcanic rock, from 40 to 60 feet deep, but which there was not sufficient light to penetrate entirely, and which I had not time to descend. Arrived at the summit of the hill, I found that it terminated in a very perfect crater, of an oval, or nearly circular form, 360 paces in circumference, and 60 feet at the greatest depth. The walls, which were perfectly vertical, and disposed like masonry in a very regular manner, were composed of a brown-colored scoriaceous ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... a mere match-head down in the ground, Claude hadn't noticed it before. He followed the Colonel, and when they reached the spark they found three officers of A Company crouching in a shell crater, covered with ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... and leveled floor of a small ringwall "crater," and beneath its colorful dome of rainbowy perma-plastic, it sizzled. Dealers in mining equipment made overnight fortunes which they lost at the gaming tables just as quickly. In the streets one rubbed elbows with denizens from every part of the solar system; many of them curiously ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... the Lake of Agnano and the Grotto del Cane; very pretty lake, evidently the crater of a volcano; saw the dog perform; a sight neither interesting nor cruel; the dog did not mind it a bit, and the old woman must make a fortune, for she had eight carlins for it. The grotto is very hot and steaming; a torch goes out held near the ground, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... with us, I think, Whose souls were formed on the brink Of a crater, where rain and flame Had mingled and crystallized. One venturous day Love came; Found us; and bound with a link Of gold the jewels ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... of solid ground to the shores of the Bay. Behind the city to the north rose the mountain side, not seared with the traces of lava as in these days, nor surmounted by a smoking cone, but radiant with vineyards and gardens which extended unbroken up to the very rim of the ancient crater. Amidst the greenery of the luxuriant slopes peeped forth innumerable farms and villas of wealthy Romans, for this exquisite spot had long become an abode of cultured leisure. Within the closely packed streets of the town itself there were to be ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... started to get at it, was sitting on the front bench braced up forwards and staring towards what he was hearing like a man watching his brother balancing across a narrow plank stretched over a crater. He had his hands on the crook of his old stick and he was working at the crook as if he was trying to tear it off. I wonder he didn't, the way he was straining at it. And every now and then while Humpo was leading on the witnesses, and when Sabre saw what they were putting up against him, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... overlying skin or mucous membrane gives way an ulcer is formed. The margins of a cancerous ulcer (Fig. 57) are made up of tumour tissue which has not broken down. Usually they are irregular, nodularly thickened or indurated; sometimes they are raised and crater-like. The floor of the ulcer is smooth and glazed, or occupied by necrosed tissue, and the discharge is watery and blood-stained, and as a result of putrefactive changes may become offensive. Haemorrhage is rarely a prominent feature, but ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... this theory was given during the two or three years after the great eruption of Krakatoa, near Java. The volcanic debris was shot up from the crater many miles high, and the heavier portion of it fell upon the sea for several hundred miles around, and was found to be mainly composed of very thin flakes of volcanic glass. Much of this was of course ground to impalpable dust by the violence of the discharge, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... crater of the old man's heart was breaking up, for the interview was recalling all the associations which centred around the death of his son. Captain Bodine evoked a strange mixture of antipathy and interest. There was something in the man which compelled ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... ascended the mountain the second time succeeded in reaching the crater at the top, with but little of the labor they encountered in their first attempt. Three of them—Anderson, Stone and Buckner—wrote accounts of their journey, which were published at the time. I made no notes of this ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of gas, agitated by phenomenal tempests whose flaming streamers extend afar. The smallest of these flames is so potent that it would swallow up our world at a single breath, like the bombs shot out by Vesuvius, that fall back within the crater. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... of gulfs or circles, narrowing as they descend, and terminating in the centre; so that the general shape is that of a funnel. Commentators have differed as to their magnitude; but the latest calculation gives 315 miles for the diameter of the mouth or crater, and a quarter of a mile for that of its terminating point. In the middle is the abyss, pervading the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the opening; which reduces the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a size comparatively small. These territories are more or less ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till, lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them, until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night. All truths, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Well, Fritz came with such a rush he didn't look for me. There was a lot of him passed. I scrunched down inside this crater the best I knew how and directly I knew I must let our folks know. Then's when I sent up my signals — in code, ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution—there would be an eruption, and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward athwart the sky, like stones and balls of flame driven from the vomiting crater of a furious volcano! No. This is a right like the right of breathing. This is a liberty that broods upon us like the atmosphere. The grand American doctrine that men may speak what they think, and may print what they speak—that all public measures ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... hitting itself on the head with a stuffed club has gradually elevated the body politic to the enviable position occupied by the all-powerful king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives in the lowest depths of the crater of Riabba. His power is in direct ratio to the taboos which hem him in. Convinced that bathing is a crime against his dignity, that sunlight is incompatible with his royal lineage; convinced that his prestige ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... verge of the crater, at the very summit of the mountain, commanded a view of all the surrounding country. The rock upon which it was built projected over a precipice, whose abysses were concealed by creeping plants, cactus, and bamboos. The species ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... swear by the light of the Comet-King's tail!" And he tower'd with pride as he spoke, "If again with these magical colours I fail, The crater of Etna shall hence be my jail, And my food ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... it. She must have excitement. It is like dram-drinking. And then, you know, they are always living in the crater of a volcano." ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... hissing as they entered the ocean. On the 30th of April, about one month after the terrible earthquake by which the city of Caraccas, three hundred and sixty miles distant, was destroyed, and twelve thousand of the inhabitants buried in the ruins, an eruption took place from an old crater on the summit of this mountain in St. Vincent, at which for more than a century had shown no symptom of life. The eruption was sudden and over whelming. Stones and ashes were scattered over the island; ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... that ultimately he died, and having sold himself to "Jimmy Square Foot," his spirit was transferred from Ratcliffe Highway to a volcanic island in the Mediterranean called Stromboli. There he frequently appeared in his professional garb, standing by the edge of the crater along with his satanic friend who was reputed to have secured an eternal lease of this rock in order to provide a suitable abode for some of those to whom he had been closely attached during their earthly pilgrimage. Whenever the volcano was unusually active, the sailors who were in the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... in that direction, and attempted to gain the point from which it seemed to come; but found the way barred by a yawning opening in the deck, from which poured smoke and flame as though it were the crater of a volcano. Then he ran back, and at length found himself on top of the after house, cutting with his pocket knife at the lashings of a life raft; for he realised that the ship was sinking so rapidly that she might plunge to the bottom ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... little distance, a rugged figure in homely garments stood leaning upon a hoe and regarding George with a cold interest. The apex of this figure was a volcanic straw hat, triangular in profile and coned with an open crater emitting reddish wisps, while below the hat were several features, but more whiskers, at the top of a long, corrugated red neck of sterling worth. A husky voice issued from ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... make arrow-heads; also they detach the skull and keep it in a chest in the house, saying that it is the man himself. They even set food before the skull, no doubt for the use of the ghost. Yet they imagine that the ghosts of the dead go to the great volcano Tamami, where they are burnt in the crater and thus being renewed stay in the fiery region. Nevertheless the souls of the dead also haunt the forests in Santa Cruz; on wet and dark nights the natives see them twinkling in the gloom like fire-flies, and at the sight they are sore afraid.[570] So little consistent with itself is the creed ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... upwards in a tremendous explosion. The masts were flung out of her and the hull opened like a shattered basket. So violent was the shock that men were thrown to the deck of the King George and she quivered as though her bows had rammed a reef. Black smoke spouted as from a crater and debris rained down on ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... or so steeply that I saw no way of climbing them—walls you might call them, a good hundred feet high, and widening gradually towards the top, but in a circle as regular as ever you could draw with a pair of compasses. Any fool could see what had happened—that here was the crater of a dead volcano, one side of which had been broken into by the sea; but the beauty of it, sir, coming on top of my weakness, fairly made me cry. For the walls at the top were fringed with palms and jungle trees, and hung with creepers like curtains that trailed ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... storms could make this fire die out, yet there comes a time to most of these volcanic islands when the life and energy of the mountain seems gone, taken away, we know not how, by the same Great Hand that lighted it, and the lonely rock is now ready to be turned into a home for man, for this silent crater, this hard, broken crag, will, after a time, become a fair island home. God does not leave His works incomplete, and He has servants who will change this desolate ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... her opinion in perfectly good faith, Elvira had not spoken to her any more and had remained angry. But Mea's nature was not inclined to sulk. Whenever she felt herself injured, words of indignation poured out from her like fiery lava from a crater. After that everything was settled. She had been obliged to sit day after day on the same bench with the sulking girl, and to come to school and leave again without saying a word. Should this situation, which ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... philosopher's eminence. It is curious, however, that her estimate of her son in her only recorded, and perhaps slightly apocryphal utterance, is of a somewhat unexpected character. "Our Davie's a fine goodnatured crater, but uncommon wake-minded." The first part of the judgment was indeed verified by "Davie's" whole life; but one might seek in vain for signs of what is commonly understood as "weakness of mind" in a man who not only showed himself to be an intellectual athlete, but who had an eminent ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... immediately set to work upon the task, and soon had Professor Jameson's metal head removed from the machine which he had wrecked in his fall down the crater. All during the painless operation, the professor kept up a series of thought exchanges in conversation with the Zoromes, and it seemed but a short time before his head surmounted a new machine and he was ready for further exploration. In the course of his operation, the space ship had moved to a ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... anywhere, and yet you can hear it all the time. If you are one side, it seems to come from the other, and go around to that side and it is back where you came from. Inside the island is a circular pocket or walled-in harbor, like the crater of a volcano, that is entered through a narrow passage between two cliffs. Altogether it's a curious place, but as for ghosts—well, I've been there many a time and never saw one yet. But then, I do not believe in spooks, and perhaps that accounts for it. It's like the believers in spiritualism, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... Lago di Nemi is the crater of an extinct volcano. Hence the comparison to a coiled snake. Its steel-blue waters are unruffled by the wind which lashes the neighbouring ocean into fury. Hence its likeness to "cherished hate," as contrasted with "generous ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... in thousands of Japanese scrolls. Here, many a time, Mary had sat and watched the white cone shining in the sunlight. She understood why it was called the "Peak of the White Lotus," The low green hills at its feet were the leaves of the flower and the eight sided crater, perfect ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... Wallace observes, St. Helena must have formed a kind of natural museum or vivarium of archaic species of all classes, the interest of which we can now only surmise from the few remnants of those remnants, which are still left among the more inaccessible portions of the mountain peaks and crater edges. These remnants of remnants are ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Holland looked like a quiet night on the Dead Sea. Finally the drag of old man Gravity won all bets. The Wildcat's bulging eyes witnessed a high dive entirely surrounded by frightened fish and the soft mud which lay two feet below the water surface. From the crater of the mud volcano the writhing form of the neat Dwindle Daniels finally emerged. His form-fitting environment of mud churned and splashed in a blast of agitated language. Somewhere in the vortex ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... the loader his execrations. Jasper Titus was one of the worst players I've ever seen, but he was the personification of gentility, even under the most provoking circumstances. For instance, at the famous "Crater," it was my good fortune to pitch a ball fairly on the green from the tee. His mashie shot landed his ball about twenty feet up the steep hill which guards the green. It rolled halfway back. Without a word of disgust, or so much as ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... two, Mounts Shasta and Ranier, are more than fourteen thousand feet high. All these mountains were formed of material thrown out of the interior of the earth during the building of the Columbia plateau. The process was very similar for each. About some one exceptionally active crater immense quantities of scoriae[1] and lapilli[2] accumulated. Then came streams of fiery lava, some of which, hardening upon the outer slopes of the crater, added still more to the growth of the mountain. The process was very slow, ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... way our feet sank deep in volcanic dust. At the top the air was very cold, keen, and rare, but somewhat oppressive to the lungs. None of us cared to smoke, after eating and drinking, but the view afforded us was perfect; limitless, so far as atmospheric conditions went. In appearance the crater differed little, I presume, from others in a state of quiescence. Smoke and steam poured forth continually, in one spot in large volumes; while from many places issued little jets, such as puff from the out-door ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... this kind actually happened in North America — perhaps not longer than a thousand or two thousand years ago. The scene of the supposed catastrophe is in northern central Arizona, at Coon Butte, where there is a nearly circular crater in the middle of a circular elevation or small mountain. The crater is somewhat over four thousand feet in diameter, and the surrounding rim, formed of upturned strata and ejected rock fragments, rises at its highest point one hundred and sixty feet above the plain. The crater ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Is it merely harmful; merely waste? God forbid! God has forbidden that anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise and well-made world. The carbonic acid which passes from your lips at every breath—ay, even that which oozes from the volcano crater when the eruption is past—is a precious boon to thousands of things of which you have daily need. Indeed there is a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl, from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... kind of innate belief which men entertain of the repose and immovability of the terrestrial strata." And further on he says—"The earthquake appears to men as something omnipresent and unlimited. From the eruption of a crater, from a stream of lava running towards our dwellings, it appears possible to escape, but in an earthquake, whichever way flight is directed the fugitive believes himself on the brink of destruction!" No familiarity with the phenomenon can blunt this feeling. The ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... in the bottom of the trenches themselves; lengths of it were lying among the shattered buildings behind the lines. The British shells and bombs must have tossed it about as you would toss hay with a rake. In the tumbled ruins behind the lines you simply stepped from one crater into another. Into many of those craters you could have placed a fair-sized room. One big shell, and two unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon balls, lay there on a shelf ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... works, and Heaven extolled their glory; from the worm in the dust, which no earthly being has been able to create, to the eagle soaring above the heights of the earth: from the grain of sand on the sea-shore, to the gigantic crater, which, at the Lord's command, vomits fire out of its throat which has been closed for thousands of years: they all spoke with one voice which is not heard by the haughty, being only manifest and comprehensible to the humble. These were the words of ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... been another matter; but the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of the crater. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... near forgetting an incident of their visit which I afterwards had good cause to remember. The morning of my talk with Mr. Allen I went to the stables to see how he had used Cynthia, and found old Harvey wiping her down, and rumbling the while like a crater. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of Rocca di Papa, before you begin that ascent through the woods of Monte Cavo, are the Campi d'Annibale, the former crater of the volcano of Mons Latialis, grass fields whose legend Pascarella tells us: that when Hannibal encamped there the Romans raised the necessary money by selling the ground of the enemy's camp! A strange, unexpected place; a great green basin, bleak and bare, marked only by fences ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Harbor; he wanted to go over to see his old friends in the "Ark." Yonder it lay, lifting its glowing mass into the deep night of the eastern sky. The red of the sinking sun fell over it. High overhead, above the crater of the mass, hung a cloud of vapor, like a shadow on the evening sky. Pelle, as he wandered, had been gazing at this streak of shadow; it was the dense exhalation of all the creatures in the heart of the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... eruption of Mt. Vesuvius since the days when it buried under molten lava and ashes Pompeii and Herculaneum occurred on April 6, 1906. Almost without warning the huge crater opened its fiery mouth and poured from its throat and fiery interior and poured down the mountain sides oceans of burning lava, and warned 60,000 or 70,000 inhabitants of villages in the paths of the fiery floods that their only safety was in immediate flight. From the very start the scene ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Just then a quiver shook the Callisto, and glancing to the right they noticed one of the volcanoes in violent eruption. Smoke filled the air in clouds, hot stones and then floods of lava poured from the crater, while even the walls of the hermetically sealed Callisto could not arrest the thunderous crashes that made the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... on aching legs, and stumbled here and there among the rubbish heaps, still circumvented by the yawning crater of the quarry; or perhaps he only thought so, for the darkness was already dense, the snow was growing thicker, and he moved like a blind man, and with a blind man's terrors. At last he climbed a fence, thinking ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and merely make a crater in the earth. Besides, someone must be in the house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... N. depth; deepness &c adj.; profundity, depression &c (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit^, hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking sonar; bathometer^. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is very strang you have never wrote it is Twenty year if live till may it is a strang thing you doant com to see her She is stark stone blind and lives with son john at gurtain I hope and trust you will send us word how you are getting Fanny mother is not only a very poor crater somtimes Mother often thinks she should often like to see your bazy and joby you might com land see us in the summer if we had nothing elce I ca il find them something to eat if mother never see you in this ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... were sprung, so numerous a tribe That now not all the houses left in town Made shift to shelter them without the help Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard. They were at Bow, but that was not enough: Nothing would do but they must fix a day To stand together on the crater's verge That turned them on the world, and try to fathom The past and get some strangeness out of it. But rain spoiled all. The day began uncertain, With clouds low trailing and moments of rain that misted. The young folk held some hope out to each other ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... south and east on the declivity of a long range of hills, and encircling a gulf of 16 miles in breadth, and as many in length, which forms a basin, called Crater by the Neapolitans. The city appears to crown this superb basin. One part rises towards the west in the form of an amphitheatre, on the hills of Pausilippo, St. Ermo, and Antiguano; the other extends towards the east, over a more level territory, in which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... of the Journal, reflection intensified Darwin's perception of the singularity of the Galapagos fauna. "Considering the small size of these islands," he says, "we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken sea was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... slowly rose higher, a marvellous scene was disclosed. At first the earth beneath us, buried as it was in night, resembled the hollow of a vast cup of ebony blackness, in the centre of which, like the molten lava run together at the bottom of a volcanic crater, shone the light of the illuminations around New York. But when we got beyond the atmosphere, and the earth still continued to recede below us, its aspect changed. The cup-shaped appearance was gone, and it began to ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... letter lately received from an American missionary lady at the Sandwich Islands, from which we extract the subjoined vivid description of the great volcano at Hawaii: 'You know,' says the writer, 'something, I suppose, of the geological character of this island. It seems as though a vast crater had boiled over and poured its fiery liquid in every direction. This lava, having cooled and hardened, forms the basis of the island. The district of Kau is a rich, luxuriant spot, surrounded by desolate fields of scoriae, which renders it difficult ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... [15]—and essentially unhealthy. [156] Our loss in operatives is only equalled by our waste of rupees; and the general wish of Western India is, that the extinct sea of fire would, Vesuvius-like, once more convert this dismal cape into a living crater. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... reached should be disinfected by means of chlorin gas liberated from the chlorid of lime by crude carbolic acid. This is accomplished by making a cone of 5 or 6 pounds of chlorid of lime, in the top of which a deep crater is made for the placement of from 1 to 2 pints of crude acid. The edge of the crater is thereupon pushed into the fluid, when a lively reaction follows. The fumes of chlorin are strongly irritating to the respiratory tract and therefore all ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... pluck it out! My strength is breaking, and still Thou makest my burden heavier than I can bear." He stopped, breathless and trembling. The same visions was flitting across his closed eyes; the same silence gaped like a dry crater in his soul. "There is no help in earth or heaven," he said, very ...
— Padre Ignacio - Or The Song of Temptation • Owen Wister
... and Wilson, his Brigade Major, took us through their cave dwellings. Ex-westerners say that in France they have nothing to touch these Australian tunnellings. In one place they are boring into a crater only 20 feet from the Turkish trench. There is nothing unusual in the fact, but there is in the great depth they are going down so as to cross the danger zone far below the beaten track of mines and counter-mines. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... called Wells, of Tasmanian birth, and equal, in an emergency, to six or a dozen natives for his own share. We saw nothing of natives, however, and were rewarded with wonders of geology. The little Mount Eeles cone surmounted, we looked far down into a vast crater of miles in circuit, whose sharp-ridged, angry, unsettled-looking sides could barely convince us that we looked upon an extinct volcano. Hardly did its aspect reach the solid quiet of the Vesuvian interior, as described by some scanty classic records, prior to the grand, sudden, ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... is only 11 miles long and 8 broad. Their entire superficial area is about 6,100 miles. They are to some extent bounded by barrier reefs of coral, and have few safe harbours. Their formation is altogether volcanic, and they possess the largest perpetually active volcano and the largest extinct crater in the world. They are very mountainous, and two mountain summits on Hawaii are nearly 14,000 feet in height. Their climate for salubrity and general equability is reputed the finest on earth. It is almost absolutely ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... gone an' fallen out of the dress-circle this time," a voice exclaimed after an extra steep dive into a badly-filled shell crater. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... abreast of the Diatomaceoe bank, which reposes in part on its base. Hence it may not appear preposterous to conclude that, as Vesuvius receives the waters of the Mediterranean, with its fish, to eject them by its crater, so the subterranean and subaqueous forces which maintain Mount Erebus in activity may occasionally receive organic matter from the bank, and disgorge it, together with those volcanic products, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... flames died down the men crept closer to inspect the results. The heat had melted the snow for many yards outside the orbit of fire, revealing a border of dull and sodden grass. Beyond this border a blackened crater had eaten its way straight down to the reclaimed earth below. Shouting and rejoicing greeted this evidence of triumph. What if the Grass could advance at will in summer? It could be subdued in winter and thus kept in check till the ingenuity ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to stuff, and snakes. If it hadn't been for the troubles breaking out, he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery,—the crater of an exhausted volcano in Virginia." McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously. "Fact, Sir. In Mercer County. But the guerrillas interfered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... reached an ammunition wagon surrounded by the enemy; then, without pausing an instant, he thrust the hand holding the pistol through the opening of the wagon and fired. A frightful explosion followed, a volcano had burst its crater and ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere |
