"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poor affairs, and not worth clearing off. Manchester fogs are much better and more frequent, but there is nothing to beat the real article as found in London, and in London if possible I intend to rig up some large machines and to see what happens. The underground railway also offers its suffocating murkiness as a most tempting field for experiment, and I wish I were able already to tell you the actual result instead of being only in a position to indicate possibilities. Whether anything comes of it practically or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... when it was 70 Deg. That is usually the period of greatest cold in each twenty-four hours in this region. The natives, during the period of greatest heat, keep in their huts, which are always pleasantly cool by day, but close and suffocating by night. Those who are able to afford it sit guzzling beer or boyaloa. The perspiration produced by copious draughts seems to give enjoyment, the evaporation causing a feeling of coolness. The attendants of the chief, on these occasions, keep up a continuous roar of bantering, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... on board the little vessels, as they labored about and parted from the doomed Osprey. Many were subdued with awe and joy at their deliverance; others broke the tense strain of the last hours in suffocating sobs. Every throb of the panting engines they answered with waiting heart-beats, as it sent them farther from the fearful wonder, now blazing in multiplex lines of fire against the gray horizon. Mr. Raleigh gazed after it as one watches ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Babylon where I was born, The lips that gape give back, the hands that grope, And noise and blood and suffocating scorn An eddy of fierce faces—and ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... brown-hearted chestnut burr from a souffle of maroons served on a silver dish. I could hear the moth-eaten string of steeds munching noisily over at one end of the huge darkness, and the odor that arose from their repast was of corn and not of suffocating gasoline. Tall weeds and long frames with teeth in them, which gave them the appearance of huge alligator mouths yawning from the dusk to snap me, pressed close on each side. Straps and ropes and harness were draped from the beams and along ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... disinfected nor cleaned for months. Faecal matter and other filth had been left to dry, harden and adhere with the tenacity of glue to the surfaces. Its removal not only taxed our strength to the supreme degree, but our endurance as well. The stench was suffocating and nauseating. Even the foul aroma of the strong cheap German tobacco which we were able to purchase at the canteen and to smoke while at this task, if our sentry were genial, failed to smother the more ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... those unfortunate beings had been kept under hatches, under a grating that had been fastened down with battens. They would have been left in that situation to be stifled in their confinement by the suffocating smoke, or burnt alive amid the blazing timbers, but for one merciful heart among those who were leaving the ship. An axe uplifted by the arm of a brave youth—a mere boy—struck off the confining cleats, and gave the sable sufferers ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the morning the work of destruction proceeded apace: the atmosphere became hourly thicker and more suffocating with smoke; great tongues of flame could occasionally be seen leaping skyward here and there above the tops of trees; dull boomings from time to time told of the blowing up of buildings; intermittent crashes of volley firing, mingled with shouts ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... thunder-shower compelled her to take instant refuge in the cabin, followed by Hannah and the child. The little dingy place dignified by that name, was crowded with trunks and packages, piled upon each other in endless confusion. And the close atmosphere was rendered more hot and suffocating from the mingled odours of brandy, onions, red-herrings, and tobacco. The smoke from several pipes floated in lazy wreaths through the confined space, and effectually concealed, for the first few minutes, the parties indulging in the dreamy ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the suffocating stillness of the afternoon a woman's voice was heard singing a concert-hall air, accompanied by a piano played with vigour and abandon. And Hodder, following the sound, looked out across the grimy yard—to a window in the apartment ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the doors and windows were closed, and the juniper boughs put on the fire. When the smoke reached a suffocating point, the fresh air was admitted. The cattle were fumigated in the same way and the painful solemnities ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... river in their boats, and landing under cover of their shields, crept under the long house where many families lived together. These houses stand on high poles. The pirates then set fire to dry wood and a quantity of chillies which they carried with them for the purpose. This made a suffocating smoke, which hindered the inmates from coming out to defend themselves. Then they cut down the posts of the house, which fell, with all it contained, into ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... the gray wall no longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... not there; I cannot bear The murmur of this lake to hear. A sound from there, Rosalind dear, Which never yet I heard elsewhere But in our native land, recurs, 65 Even here where now we meet. It stirs Too much of suffocating sorrow! In the dell of yon dark chestnutwood Is a stone seat, a solitude Less like our own. The ghost of Peace 70 Will not desert this spot. To-morrow, If thy kind feelings should not cease, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... his eyes in the direction of the fort, shuddered, heaved a profound sigh, and looking up to heaven with the apparent fervour that became his situation, seemed to pray for a moment or two inwardly and devoutly. The thick and almost suffocating breathing of one immediately beyond the coffin, was now distinctly heard by all. Halloway started from his attitude of devotion, gazed earnestly on the form whence it proceeded, and then wildly extending his arms, suffered a smile of satisfaction to illumine his pale features. All ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... moralizing runs through the whole of contemporary criticism—at least in England and America. Blatchford differs from the professorial critics only in the detail that he can actually write. What he says about Shaw has been said, in heavy and suffocating words, by almost all of them. And yet nothing could be more untrue. The moralist, at his best, can never be anything save a sort of journalist. Moral values change too often to have any serious validity or interest; what is a virtue today is a sin tomorrow. But the man who creates a thing of beauty ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... disappointed. At the end of a twenty-mile walk on a day of suffocating heat, Duchemin plodded wearily into the Hotel du Commerce, engaged a room for the night, and was given a telegram from London which rewarded decoding to some such effect ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... is stronger than any three men. The only reason all of us weren't destroyed at once is that they were slowly suffocating as they fought. The foot and a half of water we were in wasn't enough to let their gills function properly. Now if they were able to stand right up to us and not be handicapped by lack of water to breathe ... I wonder.... Is that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... gratified. I still hoped he might recover—the doctor said the chances of life and death were in his opinion equally balanced—and then he always loved the sea so dearly! There was something exhilarating to him in the motion of a vessel, and he spoke with animation of getting free from the almost suffocating atmosphere incident to the hot season, and drinking in the fresh sea breezes He talked but little more, however, than was necessary to indicate his wants, his bodily sufferings being too great to allow of conversation; but several times he looked up to ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... and in a few minutes the two men were in the centre of a ring of fire, which enlarged and increased in fury as the flames seized upon the dry material on all sides. The heat now was intense, and the smoke was blinding and suffocating. ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... past night recurred. The air of the cabin was close and suffocating. There seemed in that dark room before him some dread Presence, he knew not what; some Being, who had uncovered this his abode and enticed ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... chained him to a bitter existence. The air—the man's only chance for life—he commanded to be kept out by closed windows and drawn curtains. The room was always blue and foul with cigarette smoke; whosoever entered it must sit, suffocating, and listen to the imp's interminable gasconade concerning his ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... diameter, and one inch thick. Bright buff-colored, and having upon it a "fine nap." Upon removing this covering, a buff-colored, pulpy substance of the consistency of soft-soap, was found—"of an offensive, suffocating smell." ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... trailing a suffocating stench of cattle and hogs from its slatted stock-cars; and Ailsa was almost stifled before her train at last moved heavily southward, saluted by good-natured witticisms from the soldiers at the windows of the stalled ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... her on her knees before him and bared her neck, pretending to examine the burn; he fondled her too much and pressed her to him: she took offence and tried to draw away. Somehow or other his hand got entangled in a chain at her neck. She called out to him, "You are suffocating me," and tried to rise: but he cried out like a madman: "I will, I want to," and pressed what seemed to be a handkerchief over her face. She declared that she ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... his reins to a bystander. He was scarcely conscious of his movements; only that he was fighting for breath in a surging, suffocating press of equally excited human beings. From this he finally emerged, hatless, disheveled, into a small cleared space filled with flying sparks and stifling heat. Across it men rushed feverishly carrying pails of water. Dennison's Exchange on Kearny street, midway of the block ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... sleep? It must be past midnight, now, and she would walk, if she wanted to. Defiantly and in a triumph of self-assertion, she went to the open window and peered out into the stillness, illumined by neither moon nor stars. The night had the suffocating quality of hangings of ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... no instance did it give way as did the crust at "Crater hill," under which the fires were raging, though the incrustation appears to be very similar, abounding in vents and fissures and emitting suffocating exhalations of sulphur vapor. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... and Grim was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the heat they had sucked ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... that the pretty, bell-shaped pink and white flower on the vigorous vine clambering over stone walls and winding about the shrubbery of wayside thickets in a suffocating embrace is akin to the morning-glory of the garden trellis (C. Major). An exceedingly rapid climber, the twining stem often describes a complete circle in two hours, turning against the sun, or just contrary to the hands of a watch. Late in the season, when an abundance of seed ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... were having a sitting, and I went back to the kitchen. Of course Lizzie Tuoey, their former servant, was no more, and they had an ashy-black African woman. Some one was sobbing in the front room—the terrible sobs of a suffocating grief. There was a voice, too, a man's, but muffled, so that I couldn't make out any words. That died away, and the thin, bright tones of a child followed; then a storm of knocking, and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... croupier, another accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee, were all in the secret of the bedstead. There appeared some reason to doubt whether the inferior persons attached to the house knew anything of the suffocating machinery; and they received the benefit of that doubt, by being treated simply as thieves and vagabonds. As for the Old Soldier and his two head myrmidons, they went to the galleys; the woman who had drugged my ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... was hurrying back, her hand still grasping the wrist of the girl, when she was suddenly seized so violently by the throat as to cause her to release her captive, and to prevent her making any other sound than a sort of gurgling, suffocating noise. The Serpent passed his arm round the waist of his mistress and dashed through the bushes with her, on the north side of the point. Here he immediately turned along the beach and ran towards the canoe. A more direct course could have been taken, but it might have led to a discovery ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... by circumstance, walls of breathless brick and stone, suffocating with longing, you whose thought springs ever toward the gorgeous sunset and the ends of rainbows; who fly in dreams across the golden south seas to the far countries, you whose imagination transforms every ratty old square-rigger that ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... his heart, which was beating slowly but regularly, and, convinced that he was not dying, ran down into the after house. The cabin was empty: evidently the guard around the pearl handled revolver had been given up on the false promise of peace. All the lights were going, however, and the heat was suffocating. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... incense-laden dusk of the uncouth Church, in the religious gloom punctuated by the pervasive twinkle of a thousand hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating mass of palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females, toned down by the sombre shabbiness of the Russian moujiks and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... make my difficult way are strung with washing as far as the first bend. The dampness of the atmosphere has converted the dust and grime on banisters, wall, and stairs into a muddy dew. The little doll's-house of a place reeks with the suffocating odour of gas, fried fish, onions, and steam. In one of the two rooms on the first floor, the door of which stands open, I see—and myself am seen, not to say scowled at, by a couple of pipe-smoking navvies, three or four ragged children, and a little rabbit of a flat-chested ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... is, of course, easily counteracted by a short spurt, where spurting is possible, but it is a soul-harrowing thing to trundle along a mile of unridable road, in company with twenty importuning katir-jees, their diminutive donkeys filling the air with suffocating clouds of dust. There is nothing on all this mundane sphere that will so effectually subdue the proud, haughty spirit of a wheelman, or that will so promptly and completely snuff out his last flickering ray of dignity; it is one of the pleasantries ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... cold and more dense air rushing in, it seemed as if a sudden wind was blowing violently. The current drove the thick smoke, and showered the burning cinders, directly on the chesnut-tree. She felt the scorching heat, while the suffocating vapour almost deprived her of the power of respiration. She grew dizzy; yet still the only movement she made was, to turn her child a little in her arms, that he might be more effectually shielded from the smoke. At that moment, one of the warriors approached, in the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... hear one's own heart beat. Suddenly a yellowish-green ray of light flashed across the pavement, and lo! the upper rim of the moon peered above the house-tops, looking strangely large and rosily brilliant, . . the air seemed all at once to grow suffocating and sulphurous, and between whiles there came the faint plashing sound of water lapping against stone with a monotonous murmur as of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... successfully they cope with these invaders, new invaders continue to arise—new drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us. And so we are justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the future, when life is suffocating in the pressure against subsistence, that new, and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-organisms will continue to arise and fling themselves upon earth-crowded man to give him room. There may even be plagues of unprecedented ferocity that will depopulate great areas before the wit of ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... untold ages, a region of desolation and death, of naked peaks, rugged precipices, and rocky ravines. The heat from the overhead sun, intensified by the reverberations from the great masses of rock around us, and unrelieved by the slightest breath of air, was well-nigh suffocating. ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... apartments adorned with beautiful paintings. Numerous statues, vases, lamps, and other elegant works of art, have been recovered. Many skeletons have also been found, in the exact positions in which the living men were caught by the deadly shower of suffocating ashes. The excavators came upon the skeleton of a miser, who had been attempting to escape from his house, and whose bony fingers were still clutching the purse which contained the treasure he loved. There were also found in the barracks at Pompeii the skeletons of two soldiers ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... can never more love him. However,' she went on, 'let us talk no more of this. Discussion makes everything small. I will express my notions on this subject in writing to you, for at this moment they are suffocating me; I am feverish, my feet are standing in the ashes of my Paraclete. All that I see, these things which I believed I had earned by my labor, now remind me of everything I wish to forget. Ah! I must fly from hence as I fled from ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... heard him argue point after point—clearly, brilliantly, wittily; insulting the plaintiff in poetic terms; consigning him gracefully to the infernal regions; accentuating a fictitious and harmonious anger; drying his forehead without disarranging his hair; suffocating with the emotions he evoked; displaying real tears, and with them a knowledge, not only of law, rhetoric, philosophy, but of geometry, astronomy, ethics and the fine arts; blinding his hearers with the coruscations of his erudition; stirring them with his tongue, as with ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... vessel's side, that of the iceberg, lying black in the moonlight like a great coal crystal, grimly awaiting our approach, but the reality, as well as the figment, had disappeared when I emerged at sunrise from the suffocating cabin, to the atmosphere of the cool and quiet quarter-deck, which had just ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... thunder was but faintly heard now and then at such a distance as to enable us distinctly to hear the roar of the guns. Our horses could scarcely get through the sticky black mud, into which the white suffocating dust of the previous days had been turned by one night's rain. We, however, made our way to the parsonage of the village, for we had already made up our minds to ascend the steeple of the church to get a view of the surrounding country and a better ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lean aside, and look eagerly off to note the effect; —Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging—the young colonel leads himself this time, with brandished sword; I see the gaps cut by the enemy's volleys, quickly filled up—no delay; I breathe the suffocating smoke—then the flat clouds hover low, concealing all; Now a strange lull comes for a few seconds, not a shot fired on either side; Then resumed, the chaos louder than ever, with eager calls, and orders of officers; While from some distant part of the field the wind wafts ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... he perceived the cause of the uproar, although he could see nothing else, for the dense suffocating vapour with which the room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... or did anything is the marvel, with the hut constantly crowded by men who had nothing to do but gather round, in suffocating numbers, to stare at his pen travelling over the paper. 'They have done so a hundred times before,' he writes, actually under the oppression, 'but anything to pass an hour lazily. It is useless ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quite sure that he had gone, and silence, deep and complete, had fallen on the house, Hollyhock took down an old cloak from where it hung in a certain part of the hall, and wrapping it firmly round her shoulders, went out into the night. It was better out of doors—less suffocating, less lonely—and the girl's terribly low spirits began to rise. She was in for an adventure, and what Scots lassie did not love ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... me from hence; they are coming," murmured Calabash, in a suffocating voice, for the poor creature began ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... bitter recollections oppressed the maiden's heart; a deadly paleness overspread her cheeks; a suffocating feeling choked her voice; and had it not been for a sudden gush of tears, she would ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... swung his sight to the foremost, and drove a bullet straight through his chest. The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with crushing weight. A red sea rose before his eyes. In it he was submerged; the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating embrace of it he tried to cry out. He fought himself out of it, his eyes cleared, and he could see again. His rifle was no longer in his hands, and he was standing. Twenty feet away men were rushing upon him. His brain recovered itself with the swiftness of lightning. A bullet ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... happy human dwellings. There is here none of the sweet cool sea-breeze in which kindly fairies seem carrying on their graceful sport, forming blooming gardens and pillared palaces—there is only a suffocating vapor, rebelliously given back to the glowing sun ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... times as much as eighty degrees between day and night) was most trying to the troops, who had to carry the same clothes whether the thermometer was at freezing-point at dawn or at 110 deg. Fahr. at mid-day. Scarcity of water, too, was a great trouble to them, while constant sand-storms, and the suffocating dust raised by the column in its progress, added greatly ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... induce young ladies to sit up late at night; they cause them to dress more lightly than they are accustomed to do; and thus thinly clad, they leave their homes while the weather is perhaps piercingly cold, to plunge into a suffocating, hot ballroom, made doubly injurious by the immense number of lights, which consume the oxygen intended for the due performance of the healthy functions of the lungs. Their partners, the brilliancy of the scene, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... tucked in by my faithful comrades. It was hard at first to sleep with the head completely covered; there was such a sense of smothering, that I often ran the risk of the freezing rather than the smothering. One night, perhaps because of this suffocating sensation, I unconsciously uncovered my head. After a time I awoke suddenly to consciousness, to find that I was trying to pull off my now frozen nose which I thought was the end ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... and squealing and biting and kicking. A suffocating gray cloud of alkali dust hung over the corral, and, altogether, the scene was not only exciting, but it stirred feelings of alarm in some of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... which Loo Loo was conveyed was a wretched place. The walls were dingy, the floor covered with puddles of tobacco-juice, the air almost suffocating with the smell of pent-up tobacco-smoke, unwashed negroes, and dirty garments. She had never seen any place so loathsome. Mr. Jackson's log-house was a palace in comparison. The prison was crowded with colored people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... were thrown open, and then horses, mules, and carts, men, women, and children, pressed into Paris, at the risk of suffocating each other, and in a quarter of an hour all the ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... mistress, she saw a clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking. Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had something marshy about him—the succulent moistness and turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh, where ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... me quickly!" they heard her gasp, as though she were almost suffocating; and both of ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... down to sleep before dawn, but his rest was disturbed by wonderfully varied dreams, some beautiful, some hideous. He sprang up with a shriek, for a dream showed him the white snake coiling round his breast and suffocating him. But he thought no more of this horrible picture, and firmly resolved to release the princess from the bonds of enchantment, even if he himself should perish. Nevertheless his heart failed him more ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... like entering a crowded jail. From the rows of rude bunks, hundreds of meager, begrimed faces were turned upon us; while seated upon the chests, were scores of unshaven men, smoking tea-leaves, and creating a suffocating vapor. But this vapor was better than the native air of the place, which from almost unbelievable causes, was fetid in the extreme. In every corner, the females were huddled together, weeping and lamenting; children were asking bread from their mothers, who had none to give; and old men, seated ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... soldiers, who have gallantly rescued a couple of children that have been burning and suffocating under roof). Yes, take 'em off to the hospital! Poor little creatures—not much hope for them, I'm afraid! (To Colonel.) A bad ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... throe that was almost like a literal death. This—on this he had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were suffocating; he tore it open as he swayed backward on his knees. He did not hear—or he did not heed—the laugh among the little crowd on the bald—satirical, rallying, zestful. He was deaf to the strains of the violin, jeeringly and jerkingly ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... all her packing; then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll have a bath and ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and the battle was resumed. Now, despite John Steele's vigilance, the two came together. Tom Rogers' arm wound round him with suffocating power; strove, strained, to hurl him to earth. But the other's perfect training, his orderly living, saved him at that crucial moment; his strength of endurance lasted; with a great effort he managed to tear himself loose and at the ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... her to be exaggerations of trifles—she could feel no pity for them: their satisfaction was derived from sources unintelligible to her. And the social atmosphere around her seemed still and close and suffocating; so that she was like to cry out at times for one breath of God's clear wind—for a shaft of lightning even—to cut through the sultry and drowsy sameness of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... true. Barren, stony, and deserted, the road twisted in and out below them, visible from that elevation for a considerable distance. Beryl looked over it in silence. Her heart was beating in great suffocating throbs, while she strove to summon her resolution. Could she do this thing? Dared she? On the other hand, could she face the alternative risk? Her face burned fiercely yet again as she thought ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... on the face of the dead, turned ghastly pale and, with a low moan and suffocating sob, fell fainting into the motherly ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... welcome than the sod on its banks. Without blankets or covering we sank in each other's arms for mutual warmth on the dew-drenched grass; and blistered feet and aching limbs and hunger and thirst and suffocating despair are ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... from his aunt. As he spoke he dropped, panting and exhausted with his speed, into a chair and laid his hand upon his breast to still its heavy, suffocating throbs. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense?[65] A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, 10 Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... old hag downstairs had called the music-room. The partitions of all the rooms on the floor had been roughly torn down to form this apartment; hardly a pane of glass remained intact in the windows; the dingy, whitewashed walls were covered with scrawls and drawings in charcoal. A suffocating, nauseous odor rose up, absolutely overpowering the smell from the neighboring tanyards. There was no furniture except a broken chair, upon which lay a dog whip with plaited leather lash. Round the room, against the wall, stood some twenty ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... the lungs, even a severe bronchitis, is more or less serious for the patients and their hearts. The mucous membrane of their bronchial tubes and air vesicles is always hyperemic, and it takes little more congestion to all but close up some of the passages. and dyspnea or asthma, or suffocating, difficult ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... the black imagination of this William Foster that will come like a suffocating cloud upon the imaginations of others, especially of——" She suddenly broke off. Catherine, wondering why, glanced up at her mother and saw that she was looking towards the far end of the big drawing-room. Jenny was sitting there, under a shaded lamp. She had some work in her hands ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sweeps across the cool air of a summer evening for an instant, suffocating and unnerving, so Ebn Ezra's last words swept across David's spirit. His breath came quicker, his eyes half closed. "Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that suffocating hold, struggled fruitlessly to lift her face from her husband's shoulder into which it was ruthlessly pressed, and only ceased to struggle when the end of that terrible flight came with a jolt and a jar and a final, sickening ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... station with his detachment early on the previous day; had relieved four outposts between dawn and dusk, covering eighty miles of desert road, with four brief halts for rest; and had spent a night of suffocating wakefulness in a sun-baked windowless room, built out from the base of the last post relieved. It was all in the day's work—as Frontier men understand work. The exposure and long hours in the saddle had little effect upon his whipcord ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... suffocating look from the aqueous eyes of Mirandy destroyed the last spark of Ralph's pleasure in his triumph, and sent that awful below-zero feeling all ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... was not that which kept you talking to her half an hour while I've sat suffocating ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... that I saw a very strange thing, a hare in a rage. It seemed to go mad, of course I mean spiritually mad. Its eyes flashed fire; it opened its mouth and shut it after the fashion of a suffocating fish. At last it spoke in its own way—I cannot stop to explain in further detail the exact manner of speech or rather of its equivalent ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... Queen Gulnare, "I shall with pleasure satisfy the king of Persia. We can walk at the bottom of the sea with as much ease as you can upon land; and we can breathe in the water as you do in the air; so that instead of suffocating us, as it does you, it absolutely contributes to the preservation of our lives. What is yet more remarkable is, that it never wets our clothes; so that when we wish to visit the earth, we have no occasion to dry them. Our language is the same with that of the writing ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... before a private altar: perhaps the peril to which the king might be exposed in the next day's foray inspired her with more than usual devotion. While thus at her prayers she was suddenly aroused by a glare of light and wreaths of suffocating smoke. In an instant the whole tent was in a blaze: there was a high gusty wind, which whirled the light flames from tent to tent and wrapped the whole ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... the suffocating Pale, the Government took good care to prevent the artificially pent-up Jewish energy from rushing through it. However, heaving cooped up for so long, the Jews began to press through the opening. In the wake of the artisans, who, on account of the indicated restrictions of the law or because ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... her lips, an agony of unutterable horror seized on her in an instant. She crossed the room unsteadily, with a maddening confusion in her head, with a suffocating anguish at her heart. She caught at the table to support herself. The faint clink of the bottle, as it fell harmlessly from her loosened grasp and rolled against some porcelain object on the table, struck through her brain like the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... crime complete, scarce knowing what he did, (So goes the tale,) beneath the altar there In the high church the stiffening corpse he hid, And then, to 'scape that suffocating air, Like a scared ghoule out of the porch he slid; But his strained eyes saw blood-spots everywhere, And ghastly faces thrust themselves between His soul and hopes of peace with ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... the crater we dismounted, and, leaving our horses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the cracked and heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil's caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can be approached only on the windward side. The first glance into that fearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it. You look upon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... toward us, very slowly. There was not a sound. The strength of the odor increased until it was almost suffocating. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered through one or another of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... breaking day struggled in, just clearly enough to enable her to distinguish things. The room looked dreary, clothing was strewn about, the chairs were out of their places, and the remains of the evening meal were still on the table. A moist heat pervaded this scene of disorder. The suffocating air seemed laden with a sense of ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... a perfectly healthy married woman that when jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling up in her throat and suffocating her. Pride came into play in part; she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an ignorant girl to her—a woman of great physical ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... up-wellings of feelings long trampled on and suppressed—momentary awakenings of conscience, of repentance, of regret—sharp realisations of an envy that was no longer ignoble but moral, softer thoughts of George, the suffocating, unwilling recognition of what love meant in another woman's life—these messengers and forerunners of diviner things passed and repassed through the spaces of Letty's soul as she lay white and passive under Marcella's yearning look. There was ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt. I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!—That I was re-enacting the most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet—I went! It seemed to me at the time that my duty lay ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... did not dare to recall them, so confused was she by the angelic visions of bliss. Sometimes, in the middle of her great bed, she would rouse herself suddenly, her two hands joined and pressed against her breast as if a heavy burden were weighing her down and almost suffocating her. She would then jump up, rush across the room in her bare feet, and, opening the window wide, would stand there, trembling slightly, until at last the pure fresh air calmed her. She was continually surprised at this great change in herself, as if the knowledge of joys ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... with history and suffocating with association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... imitativeness, with figured, honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now—now, after years—I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere, all vapid with the suffocating death—ah, it was terror too deep, nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted at the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and voluntary return by the whole ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... day Edwin and Myrna were sent out to the Randolph Bartletts', and Rose and Quin cleared the decks for the hard fight ahead. Fan Loomis came in to help nurse in the day-time, and Quin was on duty through the long, suffocating August nights. ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... grievances. Since the Kingdom of God is the highest thing there is, an attempt to block it or ruin it is the worst sin. Our hope for the advance of the race and its escape from its permanent evils is conditioned on keeping our moral perceptions clear and strong. Suffocating the best specimens of moral intelligence and intimidating the rest by their fate quenches the guiding light of ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... especially exhibiting unmistakable symptoms of improvement already, due doubtless to the large quantities of fruit which they had consumed on the preceding day. The wounded, too, were doing exceedingly well, the coolness of the large tent in which they had passed the night, as compared with the suffocating atmosphere of their confined quarters aboard ship, being all in their favour, to say nothing of the assiduous care which Phil bestowed ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Backwood settlement or Atlantic island, as pretty a Utopian prescription, under the designation of a constitution, as could well be desired in the most philosophical community. But one of those sad trifles which suffocate great ideas, and sometimes terminate in suffocating philosophers, put a stop to my further enlightenment for the present, by drying up the treasury of the Socratics. The philosophers were the most civil as well as the most unfortunate people in the world. One or other of them was ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... pale and his fingers began to twitch alarmingly. He stared before him with wide-opened eyes and began to cough and to choke as if suffocating—dying. ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... go and fall on my knees and confess all," he murmured, and began to ascend the narrow and very steep stairs. On every floor the doors of the kitchens of the several apartments stood open to the staircase, and emitted a suffocating, sickening odor. The entrance to the office he was in search of was also wide open, and he walked in. A number of persons were waiting in the anteroom. The stench was simply intolerable, and was intensified ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... first words, she felt as if she were hurled into a deep, ice-cold abyss, filled with darkness, into which she plunged swiftly, helplessly, well knowing that she would never return to the light. She was suffocating. She would have liked to resist, to struggle, to call ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... only be a plunge down into that swollen rushing torrent, and he would be past all rescue. An instant of suffocating pain, then singing in his ears, sparks in his eyes, unconsciousness—annihilation perhaps—who knew? Just then any other world, any other penalty, seemed preferable to ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... when under her hands appeared a little instrument of jointed steel. . . . She was talking to him softly as to a sick child. He drew a quick breath—his eyes wide as a low cry came from him, and the whole forest seemed to quiver with a suffocating interest, monkeys ever pressing nearer. Skag saw one little brown hand stretch (twisting as if to bury its thumb) and lay hold of Carlin's dress. . . . Then he sighed, like a whip of air when a spring is released and Skag saw the ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... guests. Almost every one was still about when the signal was given, and this cellar where the electric lamps burned brightly soon took on the aspect of a drawing-room, in spite of all. One lone man, however, stood disconsolate, literally suffocating beneath a huge cavalry cape, hooked tight up to his throat. As the perspiration soon began rolling from his forehead, a friend seeking to put him at his ease, suggested he open ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... weeks from the beginning of the cough, the peculiar feature of the disease appears. The child gives fifteen or twenty short coughs without drawing breath, the face swells and grows blue, the eyeballs protrude, the veins stand out, and the patient appears to be suffocating, when at last he draws in a long breath with a crowing or whooping sound, which gives rise to the name of the disease. Several such fits of coughing may follow one another and are often succeeded by vomiting and the expulsion of a large amount of ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... we knew absolutely nothing of what was taking place around us. Not one word did we dare even whisper to each other, our only means of communication being through our hands. The night was intensely dark and the air was close—almost suffocating. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... was one of the most brutal recorded in the annals of modern war. Whole regiments sprang at each other's throats, the men fighting each other like animals; trees were cut down by the bullets which tore through them from every direction; bursting shells set fire to the woods, suffocating the wounded or burning them to death; wild charges were made, ending in wilder stampedes or bloody repulses; the crackle of flames rose high above the pandemonium of battle and dense smoke-clouds drifted chokingly above this hideous carnival of death. Thus for two days the armies staggered ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... nerves was excessively disagreeable and oppressive. We found the officer who had charge of the vessel confined to a small space in the after-part of the deck near the tiller. The pressure of this dense mass of human beings was suffocating, and the crowd was so great that one poor slave who had fallen overboard in the night, on the voyage, was never missed until ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... snow until they reached the ice itself. It was suffocating, for the wind had blown in the entrance and fresh air was excluded.... Jim felt the body close to him—it was still as death. A great fear swept through him. She was not strong enough for this trial—she was——! He thrust his hand inside the thick ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... confreres. One of these was a tall, pale, ascetic-looking man, with grey hairs, and retreating forehead, slow in speech, and lugubrious in demeanour. The other, his antithesis, was a short, rosy-cheeked, apoplectic-looking subject, with a laugh like a suffocating wheeze, and a paunch like an alderman; his quick, restless eye, and full nether lip denoting more of the bon vivant than the abstemious disciple of Aesculapius. A moment's glance satisfied me, that if I had only these to deal with, I was safe, for I saw that they were of that stamp of country ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... and hot. The black cloud bank that had hung over the Costejo Mountains earlier in the evening now covered the whole western half of the sky. Night sounds seemed almost stifled by the suffocating heat. From the pasture below the stables the faint call of a kill-deer suddenly shrilled out, followed by intense silence. No lightning flash filled the wall-like blackness slowly creeping over ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying.... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... earth, her face had become overspread with a deep blush. While he looked she raised them, but after a single glance, at once quick and timid, she withdrew them again, a still deeper blush mantling on her cheek. He now felt a sudden thrill of rapture fall upon his heart, and rush, almost like a suffocating sensation, to his throat; his being became for a moment raised to an ecstacy too intense for the power of description to portray, and, were it not for the fear which ever accompanies the disclosure of first and youthful love, ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... named Badebec, daughter to the king of the Amaurots in Utopia, who died in childbirth; for he was so wonderfully great and lumpish that he could not possibly come forth into the light of the world without thus suffocating his mother. But that we may fully understand the cause and reason of the name of Pantagruel which at his baptism was given him, you are to remark that in that year there was so great drought over all the country of Africa that there passed thirty and six months, three weeks, four days, thirteen ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... sound of a muffled fall in the next cabin. He sprang to his feet, seizing his weapon. The electric light wire had been cut so that the cabin was in suffocating darkness. By some instinct he forced himself flat against the wall by the door. The next second the door was flung open and two forms hurled themselves with a grunt upon the bunk. He fired twice and darted out ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... home with him; and I say to myself, "I would die here alone rather than that he, my darling boy, should be shut in here and treated as I am;" for his temper, if so opposed, would make him a maniac. I have dreamed of seeing him looking wretched and crying for fresh air, for he was suffocating. All the time I had those troubled dreams, I was smothering with gas coming in my room through the small grating intended to admit heat to make us comfortable, but it did not. I was obliged to open the window to be able to breathe; my lungs required ...
— Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum • Mary Huestis Pengilly
... Ticonderoga beggars all description. Old seamen, who had been in many a hard-fought battle, and had stood at their guns under the most deadly fire the enemy could pour upon them, without flinching, now deserted their stations, and ran about through the blinding and suffocating smoke that filled the turret, with blanched cheeks, trampling each other under their feet, and utterly disregarding the commands of their officers, who ran among them with drawn swords, and endeavored to force them back to their guns. It was some ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... into the attic, but the staircase, he found, was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture below the next floor. He took her into a long dormitory, shut the door on those pungent and pervasive fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling with excitement as an immensely helmeted and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... out in the woods," she rejoined with her accustomed candour. "The suffocating fumes of incense and orthodoxy overpowered me in the chapel, and I was miserable besides—soul-sick. But the fresh air is a powerful tonic, and it has exhilarated me, the stars have strengthened me, the voices of the night spoke peace to me, and the pleasant creatures, visible and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... been the stumbling-block of all the grammarians, scholiasts, and commentators; and remains inexplicable to the present day. Such works Charpentier admirably compares to those subterraneous places, where the air is so thick and suffocating, that it extinguishes all torches. A most sophistical dilemma, on the subject of obscurity, was made by Thomas Anglus, or White, an English Catholic priest, the friend of Sir Kenelm Digby. This learned man frequently wandered in the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... perseverance, and determined, therefore, to wait the result of his report ere I again moved the camp, to which we returned late in the afternoon of the second day of our departure. We found it unsufferably hot and suffocating in the reeds, and were tormented by myriads of mosquitoes, but the waters were perfectly sweet to the taste, nor did the slightest smell, as of stagnation, proceed from them. I may add that the birds, whose sanctuary we had invaded, as ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... water, for God's sake!" said a scarcely intelligible whisper, from the suffocating gloom of the almost ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... air, which had been hot all day—hot, but buoyant, but stimulant, but quick with oxygen—seemed to become thick, sluggish, suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a sudden silence—the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered; ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... "The intense and suffocating heat, the horrible odour, the maddening swarm of vermin that devoured us, the incessant thirst and wretched fare, sufficed not to satisfy our overseers. They sometimes struck us rudely, and very often threw down sea-water upon us, when they saw us engaged in prayer ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... and choking, staggering, suffocating, we dragged it into the outer room. "Get a window open!" he ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... o'clock on an intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot, withering, and powerful wind was abroad. The thermometer stood nearly a hundred in the shade, and the wind, so far from being a relief, was suffocating because of its heat and the dust ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... stirred up, drove it against the dwellings of the barbarians, whose doors were open to the caecias. The barbarians, having only the single opening to breathe through, upon which the wind fell, had their vision quickly obscured, and they were speedily overpowered by a suffocating difficulty of breathing, by reason of respiring a thick atmosphere filled with dust. Accordingly, after holding out with difficulty for two days, they surrendered on the third, and thus added not so much to the ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... throwing a strain heavily on the back of the thigh, and then the ball of the foot slipped back in the midst of a stride. Also the labor raised the temperature of the body incredibly. With no wind stirring it was suffocating. ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... awakened by a scream. Even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. When she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. She sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... returning suddenly. We passed the sentry between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass- fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was demonstrating before the frame-plan of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... is just as you see it on the surface—a fine, almost impalpable dust. We had to exercise the greatest care in searching through it, for the moment it was disturbed with a shovel it filled the air with suffocating clouds. Of course we shall have it removed by-and-by, and carted away, but I considered it better to allow it to remain here until we had penetrated somewhat further into the mystery than we have ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... down the hot and suffocating staircase to the first floor, where the fire raged with the utmost fury. Here the flames were bursting from the burning wing through every crevice into the passage. Ishmael, in his wet woollen clothes, and the boys in their blankets, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... unprepared and unable to resist. For a moment she was stunned, then her senses came back to her and she struggled wildly, but, stifled in the thick folds of the Arab's robes, against which her face was crushed, and held in a grip that seemed to be slowly suffocating her, her struggles were futile. The hard, muscular arm round her hurt her acutely, her ribs seemed to be almost breaking under its weight and strength, it was nearly impossible to breathe with the close contact ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... gloves, which, considering that it was quite a hot day, was rank cruelty, though—true daughter of Eve as she was—she seemed so pleased with her appearance that nothing would induce her to pull off her suffocating grandeur. She was not at all shy, and very old-fashioned for her seven years. The girls found her conversation most entertaining as they ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... vigor, and worked away at every moment when he thought he could do so unseen. One day, however, when he had reached some distance, he dislodged a large stone which blocked up the opening toward his cell. His terror was frightful. Not only was the air suffocating, and the darkness dreadful, but he knew that if any of the guards were unexpectedly to come into his cell, the opening must be discovered, and all his toil again lost. For eight hours he stayed in the tunnel paralyzed by fear. Then he roused himself, and by dint of superhuman struggles managed ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... least a column in the Telegraph," mused Robertson as the story neared its end. But he was already listening with one ear to what was going on in the big room, whence the sharp, clear tones of a speaker could be heard through the suffocating tobacco fumes. Over the heads of the attentive crowd hung a few gas-lamps, the globes of which looked like large oranges. Robertson gave his Mott Street hero the promised two dollar bill and then made his way to the rear room. Standing in the doorway, he could clearly distinguish the ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... save the very greatest, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the soul of man under the stress of sorrow, passion, anger, or as swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea—they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... resolved to bear myself as like a man as I could. I drew myself up, touched my cap in soldier-like fashion, and cried out. "Adieu;" and then, descending into the street, hurried away to hide the tears that were almost suffocating me. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... They will see therein, not the melancholy apparent to vulgar eyes, but the forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,—a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... hair enough then. But now she should have her deserts. Everything from as far back as he could remember should be recalled, for once in a way he would show her herself; now he had both the power and the right. His powers of discovery had been long hidden under the suffocating sawdust of the daily and nightly sawing; but now it was awake, and his ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... in the darkness, I began to recall how I had been lying with some one across me, and half suffocating me. ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... then with flying, reckless feet, jumping from boulder to boulder, slipping and sliding, but, as she said afterwards, going too fast to fall. The person in the water had put up a wet hand, crying hoarsely for help, and the leaping, suffocating bound which her heart gave told her that it was Jervis Ferrars ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... time Juffrouw Laps was getting a little air, so much that there was now no danger of her suffocating. She threw the mutilated remains of the ginger cake on ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... trying to explain that queer feeling of timidity, should suddenly press her hand hard over her heart! It was throbbing almost to the point of suffocating her, so possessed was it by the joy of a sudden and ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... suffocating breath Loads the dank pinion of the gale with death.— 195 With fear and hate they blast the affrighted groves, Yet own with tender care their kindred Loves!— So, where PALMIRA 'mid her wasted plains, Her shatter'd aqueducts, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... might perhaps have spared a little stiffness, but it would not have ameliorated the chief annoyances—the closeness, the dirt, and the vermin. It was well that it was winter, or the first of these would have been far worse, and, fortunately for Estelle, she was one of those whom suffocating air rather ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up to the demand, or why I came back to you. You are evidently not curious, but I'm going to tell you. Soon after I left you, I fell very sick, and lay in the saloon of a little desolate settlement for days. The place was suffocating, and the wind blew the alkali dust in. They had only horrible brandy, and bitter water to drink it with, and I lay there on my back, panting, with the flies crawling over me. I knew if I stayed any longer it would finish me, and when there came a merciful ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... overburdened by grief, and full of regret at being compelled to part from the father she so fondly loved, she had accepted the inevitable, fully realising the dull greyness of the life that lay before her. Surely her exile there was a cruel and crushing one! The house seemed so tiny and so suffocating after the splendid halls and huge rooms at Glencardine, while her aunt's constant sarcasm about her father—whom she had not seen ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... said Brandur. Too bad! And he blew out his breath, as though suffocating from strong smoke or ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... crockery and the fall of plates. Driven from our stronghold on deck, indiscriminately crammed in below like figs in a drum; "weltering," as Carlyle has it, "like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers," the cabin windows all shut in, we tried to take it coolly, in spite of the suffocating heat. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... himself at the impression the man's information had made upon him. Dismay, anger, and shame struggled for the mastery in his breast. What a suffocating air he breathed in this house! How vile and underhand and insincere were the people by whom he was surrounded! But was this true that Auguste told him? Did he not lie and slander like the rest? Was he not doing the servant far too great ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... desperate race! The strength of the fugitives began to fail, and no refuge, no hope, seemed near. Alas! to some the race was lost. The blinding effect of the dense smoke that filled the atmosphere, the suffocating smell of the burning mass of vegetable matter, and the lurid glare of the red flames that came on so rapidly, overpowered alike the horses and their riders: while the roaring of the fire—which sounded like a mighty rushing ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... the city walls. Men young and vigorous crushed forward with beds or trunks upon their backs; children laboured under the weight of bundles, or rolled barrels of oil, wine, or spirits before them. And the air, rendered suffocating by smoke and flame, was moreover confused by the crackling of consuming timber, the thunder of falling walls, the crushing of glass, the shrieks of women, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... smell. Presently horsemen came galloping by on their way to warn ranchers of the fire, and every little while a man would come out and report the progress made in checking it. It was an oppressive, hidden danger, for nothing could be seen from the valley of the actual flames through the thick suffocating curtain of smoke that hung over all. The only avenue of escape was by way of the road to Gilroy, and the fire threatened momentarily to cut this off. Not wishing to abandon the place to its fate, Mrs. Stevenson thought out a plan for ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez |
