"Spiral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection Five, Paragraph ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... drowns itself in our dam. We take it out, and open it on the bank, and kneel looking at it. Above are the organs divided by delicate tissues; below are the intestines artistically curved in a spiral form, and each tier covered by a delicate network of blood-vessels standing out red against the faint blue background. Each branch of the blood-vessels is comprised of a trunk, bifurcating and rebifurcating into the most delicate, hair-like threads, symmetrically ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... which ends in sleeping sickness belongs here as well as do several other similar kinds that produce serious troubles for various mammals and birds. The Spirochaeta, about which there has been so much recent discussion, also belong here. These are simple spiral-like forms (Fig. 10), that are sometimes classed with the simple plants, bacteria, but Nuttall and others have shown very definitely that they should be classed with the simplest animals, the Protozoans. These are the cause of relapsing fevers ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... large spiral staircase which filled the space of a round tower, and was lighted from the top by a lantern of rich, coloured glass on which were emblazoned the arms of the family. Then they entered the vestibule, an apartment spacious enough for ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... a triangular stalk with a single envelope with a pith on the inside, which could only be divided into slices with a knife, either in stripes of a width permitted by the sides of the prism, or else shaved round and round, like the operation of cork making, and producing a long spiral shaving. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... and spiral columns of vapour rose around the altar, and from each column came a spectre of fire ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... portion of vaulted roof still remains to protect the poet's family place of interment, which opens to the sides in lofty Gothic arches, and is defended by a low rail of enclosure. At one extremity of it, a tall, thriving young cypress rears its spiral form. Creeping plants of different kinds, "with ivy never sere," have spread themselves very luxuriantly over every part of the Abbey. Amongst other decorations, we observed a plum-tree, which was, perhaps, at one period, a prisoner, chained to the solid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest animals, a single mass of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... full of salt, and went after the Mouse-bird. It was at the bottom of the big tree, creeping up, round and round, as if on a spiral staircase, and the Brownie began to climb in the same way. But every little while the climber had to stop and rest. This had strange results, for there is a law in Brownie land, that wherever one of the little people stops to sit down, or rest, a toadstool ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the young inventor as he re-entered the library a few minutes later, "when you warp the wing tips in making a spiral ascent it throws your tail wings out ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... majority of cases, the spiral or band spacing is altogether too large, and, from conversations with Considere, the speaker understands that to be the inventor's ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... and started hacking the upper part off the worn sole. "At the little hut, where they pile up the stiffs before they bury them—you know, just to the left outside the abri—they leave lots of their boots around. I can pick up any number I want." With a clasp-knife he was cutting the leather in a spiral, paring off a thin lace. He contracted his bushy eyebrows as he bent over his work. The candlelight glinted on the knife blade as he twisted it ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... washed and the "life" passes to the water, then is taken up by the air and breathed. Thus he suffered both immediate and remote effects from emissions. The first result was to make him incapable of work; by breathing in the "life" later on he became a degenerate. Wind or the spiral movements of air was another origin of life. Wind is a spirit, in defence of which he quoted the Greek pneuma. The words wind and word are the same, the former being derived from the latter through wird. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... portion of that mediaeval building, half monastic, half military, exposed even then to the searching winds many bare and roofless chambers; broken vaults filled with driven sands; more than one spiral stair with hanging steps leading into space. But the massive square keep had been substantially restored. Although roofless its upper platform was as firm as when it was first built; and in a corner, solidly ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... said, and knelt again in my seat. The plane suddenly seemed to swerve. Then it slanted at a most terrifying angle, and began to descend rapidly towards the earth in a spiral form. I filmed the scene on the journey. To say the earth looked extraordinary would be putting it very mildly. The ground below seemed to rush up and mix with the clouds. First the earth seemed to be over one's head, then the clouds. I am sure the most ardent futurist ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... inner lock-door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent, water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at the ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... earth beyond the calms of the tropics, and that it thence proceeds with an increasing eastward motion, appearing in our northern hemisphere as the prevailing northeastward winds. Approaching the poles with a spiral motion, the air there rises, according to this hypothesis, in a vortex, and returns toward the equator in the upper atmosphere, gradually acquiring a westward motion; till, returning to the tropics, it is again brought down to the earth, and thence proceeds, with a still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... all, of the crew must have joined their comrades in the sanctuary of the haunted cave. The accuracy of this deduction was proved by the presence of the smoke column on the hill. Indeed, the opinion was generally held that its spiral clouds were denser than at any previous hour, thus showing that the defenders were endeavoring to ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... live a large, yellowish, black-spotted Limax, and two Helices of middling size. In the bay itself are found a few of the gilled snails with spiral shells; and a considerable number on the outward coast, which is washed by the ocean. Here are several species of the genera Murex, Fusus, Buccinum, Mitra, Trochus, and Turbo. Further, there are found here a large Fissurella, and ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... spiral figure on each side of the chin, a semi-circular figure over each eyebrow, and two, or sometimes three, lines on each lip, are all the tattooing the New Zealand women ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... it were, until they coincide as nearly as we please with the figure to be measured. In many cases his procedure is, when the analytical equivalents are set down, seen to amount to real integration; this is so with his investigation of the areas of a parabolic segment and a spiral, the surface and volume of a sphere, and the volume of any segments of the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... his fine, high-keyed notes, sometimes in a querulous tone, and again in the most cheerful and good-natured temper imaginable, now gliding up a tree trunk, now scudding down head foremost, anon circling in a spiral course. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... in which the cabin had stood was covered with undergrowth. Swithin entered the door of the tower, ascended the staircase about half-way on tip-toe, and listened, for he did not wish to intrude on the top if any stranger were there. The hollow spiral, as he knew from old experience, would bring down to his ears the slightest sound from above; and it now revealed to him the words of a duologue in progress at the summit ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... one above the other; at the greatest altitude above all which is a glory finely done. The aperture north and south into the choir are (ascending up three steps of black marble) by two iron folding-doors, being, as that under the organ-gallery, &c., exquisitely wrought into divers figures, spiral branches, and other flourishes. There are two others at the west end of the choir, the one opening into the south aisle, the other in the north, done by the celebrated artist in this ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... the scene impressed Tunis as well. When they came up finally upon the brink of the headland they saw a spiral of smoke rising from one of the chimneys of the distant Ball homestead. The man pointed to it and, smiling down upon her, repeated a verse he had read somewhere which he knew expressed the hope ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... irresolution, stole off under a low-browed old door-way communicating with a queer black many-sided little quadrangle; for it is by no means necessary that a quadrangle should, in this least mathematical of universities, be quadrangular. Groping and stumbling his familiar way up the darkest of spiral staircases, Maitland missed his footing, and fell, with the whole weight of his body, against the door at which he had meant ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... human monad, which is neither physical, nor can its constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements. In short, the mineral monad is one—the higher animal and human monads are countless. Otherwise, how could one account for and explain mathematically the evolutionary and spiral progress of the four kingdoms? The "monad" is the combination of the last two Principles in man, the 6th and the 7th, and, properly speaking, the term "human monad" applies only to the Spiritual Soul, not to its highest spiritual vivifying Principle. But since divorced from the latter ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... after the Pillar of Trajan, only more lovely in the purity of its white marble, it was one of the rare objects of art that gave Warwick a claim to distinction and justified the pride of its citizens. Around it were carved innumerable figures of soldiers, climbing a spiral pathway. Indistinguishable now in the moonlight, they still remained in the memory, like the echo of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the twelve steps which formerly led up to it. To-day the base of the columns of the porch is on a level with the pavement; consequently what was once the ground-floor of the house of which we speak is now its cellar. A portico, reached by a few steps, leads to the entrance of the tower, in which a spiral stairway winds up round a central shaft carved with a grape-vine. This style, which recalls the stairways of Louis XII. at the chateau of Blois, dates from the fourteenth century. Struck by these and other evidences of antiquity, Godefroid could not help saying, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... complicated observatory like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the eye-piece. As I looked around the heavens to find the great spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... rehearsing there with them? she asked herself. At once the answer came. Because your husband hates you—because he wants to make love to another woman. Then, like one crazed, she clattered down the iron spiral staircase to the stage. She did not even hear Mortimer and Dubois cry out as she pushed ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... of Neolithic religion. Recent discoveries in New Caledonia have proved the existence in these far-off islands, as in Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland, of these strange symbols, coupled with the concentric and spiral designs which are usually associated with the genius of Celtic art. In the neighbourhood of Glasgow, and in the south-west of Scotland generally, stones inscribed with designs closely resembling those on the New Caledonian rocks have been found in abundance, as at Auchentorlie and Cockno, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... withholding her silver-lace flouncings from the raw edges of moving landscape, high-stepped to a rearward dressing room; the khaki clad hero brushing past her and the pink satin drummer boys for first place down a spiral staircase. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... light filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the room, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "tuning" receivers and transmitters, but the principle underlying them all is analogous to that of mechanical vibration. If a weight is suspended from the end of a spiral spring, and given an upward blow, it bobs up and down a certain number of times per minute, every movement from start to finish having exactly the same duration as the rest. The resistance of the air and the internal friction of the spring ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... way, but if I win I shall remain here," was all that the jurors could get in answer to their questions. Nobody knew the youth. He was a handsome, ruddy young fellow of about six and twenty, with a little spiral moustache twisted upwards in betyar fashion, flowing curly locks gathered up into a top-knot, black flashing eyes, and a bold expressive mouth, slight of build, but muscular and supple. His dress was rustic, but simple almost to affectation; you ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... there was! The children could hardly believe their eyes, when below them they saw the most tempting little spiral staircase of white stone or marble steps, with a neat little brass balustrade at one side. It looked quite light all the way down, though of course they could distinguish nothing at the bottom, as the corkscrew twists of the staircase entirely ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... spiral pump for draining docks or raising water to any proposed height,—the invention of that wonderful man. It is also used to remove grain in breweries from a lower to a higher level. The name has been recently applied to the very important ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Ton-Welt, give me now more stimulus than the written Word; for music seems to contain everything in nature, unfolded into perfect harmony. In it the all and each are manifested in most rapid transition; the spiral and undulatory movement of beautiful creation is felt throughout, and, as we listen, thought is most clearly, because most ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the man, "it will be best for you to cross our Valley and mount the spiral staircase inside the Pyramid Mountain. The top of that mountain is lost in the clouds, and when you reach it you will be in the awful Land of Naught, where ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... fill up, if you can, any chinks that I haven't seen through already," he concluded, throwing his legs again over the back of the settee, and elevating his eyebrows as the cigar smoke curled in spiral ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... insect aid is necessary to transfer the tiny, hairy spiral ejected from each cell of the antherid, after it has burst from ripeness, to the canal of the flask-shaped organ at whose base the germ-cell is located. Perfect flowers can fertilize themselves. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... was too thick to be plaited; it needed rather to be twisted round and round, and have its fine silkiness compressed into massive coils, that encircled her head like a crown, and then were gathered into a large spiral knot behind. She kept its weight together by two large coral pins, like small arrows for length. Her white silk sleeves were looped up with strings of the same material, and on her neck, just below the base of her curved and milk-white throat, there ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... pardon. Her way of gathering her thick hair into a crown of plaits above the broad, curving lines of the bandeaux upon her forehead, added to the queenliness of her face. Imagination could discover the ducal coronet of Burgundy in the spiral threads of her golden hair; all the courage of her house seemed to gleam from the great lady's brilliant eyes, such courage as women use to repel audacity or scorn, for they were full of tenderness for gentleness. ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... you expect," retorted Mr. Martin with a vindictive gleam in his eye, "when you give a man one of these here spiral staircase cigars? Old Peter himself couldn't keep straight along one subject if he tackled a cigar like this. Well, sir, I always thought Mel had a mighty mean time of it. He had to take care of his mother and two sisters, his little brother and an aunt that lived with them; and there ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... of England. Great oak chests stood against the walls, hung with rusting swords and armour and empty powder-horns. A carven seat was beside the cold hearth, and in a corner was a tall spinning-wheel, and the carven stair led in a spiral ascent of ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... of every morn we were all gathered together with one accord in the long hall, from which, after the litanies had been read (for so I will call them, being an Episcopalian), the five classes from the five sets of benches trotted off in long files, one boy after the other, up the five spiral staircases of stone, each class to its destination; and well do I remember how we of the third sat hushed and still, watched by the eye of the dux, until the door opened, and in walked that model of a good Scotchman, the shrewd, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... May-trees, every village had its common Maypole, gaily adorned with wreaths and flags and ribbons, and sometimes painted in spiral lines of colour. The Welsh Maypoles seem to have been made from birch-trees, elms were used in Cornwall, and young oaks in other parts of England. Round these Maypoles the young villagers danced, and green booths were often set up on ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... castle opens into one of these intermediate apartments. On the left-hand side of the entrance has been a spiral staircase, leading to the rooms above and to the top of the castle, which has had a flat roof, surrounded by a parapet and several turrets. The walls of this tower are very strong and firm; a deep buttress is placed at each ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... it might be called—which gives coincident warning. The innumerable Asters mark this period with their varied and wide-spread beauty; the meadows are full of rose-colored Polygala, of the white spiral spikes of the Ladies'-Tresses, and of the fringed loveliness of the Gentian. This flower, always unique and beautiful, opening its delicate eyelashes every morning to the sunlight, closing them again each night, has also a thoughtful charm about it as the last of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... we were adjoined Honoria's boudoir, from which a secret passage led down by a spiral to a panel behind hangings; raising these, one could enter the drawing-room unobserved. Dalton paused midway in the secret passage, and through a loop or narrow window concealed by architectural ornaments, and which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... with that hand that always shook a little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly with the toe of his boot. He threw back his handsome head and sent out the last mouthful of smoke in a thin, lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a pity it was that he should have crushed that costly-looking ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... rarely vibrating his pinions, he mounts and mounts in an ascending spiral till he appears a mere speck against the summer sky; then, if the mood seizes him, with wings half closed, like a bent bow, he will cleave the air almost perpendicularly, as if intent on dashing himself to pieces against the earth; but on nearing the ground he suddenly mounts again on broad, expanded ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... but not as bad as you might think. They probably aren't much, if any, outside the orbit of Mars, and they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the Ecliptic, so we'll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral to cover that field. We ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve hours, but if we don't, we'll widen our spiral and keep on trying until ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... curiously at the English soldiers. Some were playing polo on the hard brown space to the left, and from the windows of the building men leaned out, their shirt-sleeves rolled up and their strong arms bared to the sun. They smoked short clay pipes, and innumerable little blue spiral clouds mounted skyward. Obviously the heat did not greatly inconvenience them, for they laughed and sang and drank ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... nowhere more of it consecutively, perhaps, than appears upon this present page." There is, indeed, to put it otherwise, no more one all-enveloping fact than there is one all-enveloping spire in an endlessly growing spiral, and no more one all-generating fact than there is one central point in which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite" belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... me because I was lame. It would have gone hardly with me had not Eurynome, daughter of the ever-encircling waters of Oceanus, and Thetis, taken me to their bosom. Nine years did I stay with them, and many beautiful works in bronze, brooches, spiral armlets, cups, and chains, did I make for them in their cave, with the roaring waters of Oceanus foaming as they rushed ever past it; and no one knew, neither of gods nor men, save only Thetis and Eurynome who took care of me. If, then, Thetis has come to ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... The biscuits should bake in about fifteen minutes. For a hurry meal each camper can take a strip of dough, wind it spirally around a peeled thick stick, which has first been heated, and cook her own spiral biscuit by holding it over the fire and constantly turning the stick. Biscuits, in common with everything cooked over a hot wood-fire, need constant watching that they may not burn. Test them with a clean splinter ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... is reversed, and every revolution carries us farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our harmless ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it had arrived half way between the cloud and the sea. The water beneath, then ruffled on its surface, increasing its agitation more and more until it boiled and bubbled like a large cauldron, throwing its foam aside in every direction. In a few minutes a small spiral thread of water was perceived to rise into the air, and meet the tongue which had wooed it from the cloud. When the union had taken place, the thread increased each moment in size, until it was swelled into a column of water several feet in diameter, which continued to supply the thirsty ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a cast iron funnel c d i of the elevation, (fig. 12), having above a sheet iron hopper a b to receive the peat, and within a series of six knives fastened in a spiral, and curving outwards and downwards, (figs. 13 and 14); another series of three similar knives is affixed to a vertical shaft, which is geared to a crank and turned by a man standing on the platform ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... good, large ball, which made a clean, pretty hole, without tearing. "Now," he explained kindly to Lawrence, "the ball from one of these infernal rifled concerns goes gyrating and tearing its way through you, and makes an orifice like a posthole." He illustrated his meaning with a sweeping spiral motion of ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet—is it not facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Lecon de Danse" by Degas—that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in the foreground, and their mothers are ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the hammer; the hammer beats against another called the anvil, and this against a third called the stirrup; and the quiver of the stirrup is passed on to a little window, opening into a little room with a spiral key-board; and from this, the wave travels along a nerve to the brain. As the waves reach the brain, the brain hears. In this way we hear all sorts of sounds, from the tick of a watch to the whistle ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... of a tall magnolia, the rattlesnake—after going once round the tree, and apparently smelling the bark—slowly and carefully wound itself into a spiral coil, close in to the trunk. Its body now presented the appearance of a speckled and glittering cable, as they are usually coiled on the deck of a ship. The tail with its horny appendage protruded beneath, and the flat head peeped over ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... extent, and before they begin to break to pieces, are terminated by perpendicular cliffs of clear ice or frozen snow, always on one or more sides, but most generally all round. Many, and those of the largest size, which had a hilly and spiral surface, shewed a perpendicular cliff, or side, from the summit of the highest peak down to its base. This to me was a convincing proof, that these, as well as the flat isles, must have broken off from substances like ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... of the rock on which Fougeres stands, as seen on this side, we may compare it to one of those immense towers circled by Saracen architects with balconies on each story, which were reached by spiral stairways. To add to this effect, the rock is capped by a Gothic church, the small spires, clock-tower, and buttresses of which make its shape almost precisely that of a sugar-loaf. Before the portal of this church, which is dedicated to Saint-Leonard, is a small, irregular square, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... arched window-space nearest to them. A thin spiral of blue-grey smoke curled through it and evaporated into the shadows of the trees. After a moment it was followed gently ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... a spiral stair, three steps at a time, Black did not stop till he gained the attics, and leaped through the open doorway of a garret, where he found an old woman wailing over a bed on which lay the corpse of a man with a coffin ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... at the Gorgon!" cried the mother, as the battered head of an ancient doll was displayed over his shoulder by Perseus, decorated with two enormous snakes, one made of stamps, and the other a spiral of whalebone shavings out ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... old houses, of which the best specimens are Nos. 8 and 9, offices of the London Road Car Company, and No. 10. In the first a well-furnished ceiling proclaims an ancient drawing-room; in the second panelled walls and a spiral staircase set off a fine hall. This house has a beautiful doorway of the old scallop-shell pattern, with cherubs' heads and ornamental brackets decorating it. In the third house a ceiling is handsomely ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... high or low, in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian Orders—a very beautiful work, executed with extraordinary grace. And he had made a model for the whole, which is said to have been a marvellous thing, as may still be imagined from the beginning of the work, unfinished as it is. Moreover, he made a spiral staircase upon mounting columns, in such a way that one can ascend it on horseback; wherein the Doric passes into the Ionic, and the Ionic into the Corinthian, rising from one into the other; a work executed ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the finest portion of the building, stands the great altar, at which none but the Pope may read mass. Over this altar extends a giant canopy of bronze, with spiral pillars richly decorated with arabesques. The weight of metal used in its construction was 186,392 pounds, and the cost of the gold for gilding was 40,000 dollars; the entire canopy is worth above ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... to the top of the staircase, which stood up firm, though the building had fallen away on almost every side of it. It was rather a giddy affair at first, sitting on the top stair of a spiral staircase of which part of the walls were gone, while the bare rafters of the roof let the water be seen through them. Mildred soon grew accustomed to her place, however, and fixed her eyes on the raft with which the boys were plying in the stream. She supposed ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... same face—using a figure of speech—the type transmitted from mother to daughter: the same high front and facial angle, the same outline of the nose, straight as a ray of light, with the delicate spiral-like curve of the nostril which meets you in the Greek medallion. Their hair, too, was alike in colour, golden; though, in that of the mother, the gold showed ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Thus, it makes as much progress in its longitudinal advance to the eighth point as in its oblique advance over eight points. In the same manner, withes for the eight divisions of the diameter, fastened obliquely at the intersections on the entire longitudinal and peripheral surface, make spiral channels which naturally look just like those of a ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... Ed had built a row of blocks completely around the circle, he trimmed the first blocks which he had placed to a wedge, that he might build his circle of blocks up in a spiral. ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... of a melon and if it crackles a little bit, all right; if it makes no sound then go to another. Commercial pickers look at the little spiral between the melon and the nearest leaf. If it is withered they pick the melon, if fresh, ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... of Ionic style. It consisted in the best examples of a high bell-shaped core surrounded by one or two rows of acanthus leaves, above which were pairs of branching scrolls meeting at the corners in spiral volutes. These served to support the angles of a moulded abacus with concave sides (Fig. 30). One example, from the Tower of the Winds (the clepsydra of Andronicus Cyrrhestes) at Athens, has only smooth pointed palm-leaves and no scrolls above a single row of acanthus leaves. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... SPIRAL: One husband! The woman consenting to marriage takes but one. For her there is no widowhood. That punctuation of the sentence called death is not the end of the chapter for her. It is the brilliant proof of her having a soul. So she exalts her sex. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... you get to a rising ground on the western bank where stands a single hut, and about half a mile in the forest there are a few more: some of them square and some round, with spiral roofs. ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... picture is one of these jays mounting from branch to branch around the stem of a pine tree, from the lower limbs to the top, as if he were ascending a spiral staircase. This seems to be one of their regulation habits when they find themselves under inspection. If you intrude on their domestic precincts, their cry is quite harsh, and bears no resemblance ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... banking, cement, oil transshipment, salt, rum, aragonite, pharmaceuticals, spiral-welded ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... approach his station, he flies along, just over the water, and occasionally hovers with rapidly moving wings over the spot where he sees a trout or minnow. In the next instant, descending with a quick spiral sweep, he seizes a fish, with which he rises to his post and swallows it in an instant. All these proceedings were watched frequently by the children, with intense delight, as they stood concealed among the bushes, not daring to move for fear of ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton
... emblazoned shields of the Delmes, and their cognate families. The entrance to the chantry, was through a little turret at its north-eastern corner, the oaken door of which, studded with quarrel-headed nails, was at one time never opened, but when the priests ascended the six steep and spiral steps, and stood around the tomb to chant ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... in Fig. 12 is the older design. The segments are held against the flat bearing surface of the case by spiral springs set in brass ferrules. The circle is held together by a bronze strap screwed and drawn together at the ends by springs. Still other springs press the straps against the surface upon which the carbon bears, cutting off leaks through joints and across horizontal surfaces ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... flat-bottomed flaring bowl ornamented internally with spiral ridges and undulated margin shown ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson
... centuries of lower civilisation and ruder implements. Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already attained. One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite Maori spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a bishop's crozier at the top, taken by the great native ferns. Examples of resemblance, to be accounted for by the development of a crude early idea, may be traced most easily ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... takes us from the corner of the canvas to the extreme distance and thence in a circuit back; in another it moves on a flat plane like an ellipse in perspective. Again, first catching the eye in the centre, it unfolds like a spiral. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... prevalent amongst the men concerning Hunter's condition. He had 'broken his spiral column', he had 'conjunction of the brain', or he had injured his 'innards' and would probably never be able to 'do no more slave-drivin''. Crass—who had helped Mr Rushton to 'price up' several small jobs—began to think it might not ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... jammed his hat on his head, seized the suit-case and umbrella, and galloped down the steps. The spiral marble staircase echoed his clattering flight; scrub-women heard him coming and fled; he leaped a pail of water and a mop; several old gentlemen flattened themselves against the wall to give him room; ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... how high the steeple is of the nearest church to where you live, and multiply that height by the necessary number, you will get some idea of the magnitude of this prodigious column. The lightning rod, that came down the side of it in a spiral line, looked like a spider's web that had been, by chance, blown against the chimney ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... pivoted on a support, A. Passing through it at the forward end is a metal bar having at the top a knob, K, which can be grasped conveniently in the fingers; at the other a brass screw, O, which is normally pulled down against the contact, N, by the spiral spring, S. The contact M under K is in connection with the binding post T1 and N with binding post T3; K is joined up to T2, and ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... DISENGAGEMENT contact with the opponent's rifle is abandoned and the point of the bayonet is circled under or over his bayonet or rifle and directed into the opening attacked. This attack is delivered by one continuous spiral movement of the bayonet from the ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... once in a state of infinite alarm, and there she was upon the landing, leaning forward over the top of the chest of drawers beside her open bedroom door, and weeping. I never saw such weeping. One thick strand of black hair had escaped, and hung with a spiral twist down her back; never before had I noticed that she ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... absorbed attention an ant which was making a laborious spiral ascent of his cane. Not until it had gained a vantage point on the bone ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in the glaring spiral of a fresh scar two hand-breadths wide went the swath along which the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to support the stone should have a spiral at the bottom in which to lay the gem, and this should be so placed that the latter will be completely submerged at all times, but not touching bottom or ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... lazily upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie Dale's eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral, followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy, undulating, fantastic shapes—and the strong, square jaw set suddenly hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back to him to-night! ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... average diameter of ten hundred feet, rose a circular structure tapering irregularly until it settled to a point six thousand feet in the air. Around this, as a center, ranged terraces, hanging gardens, aerial boulevards, and spiral electric railways. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... impressions all of them." He spoke without raising his voice, but Mr. Cupples could perceive that he was ablaze with excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined in detail. Look—!" ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... by a familiar catch. Ask a friend to define the word "spiral." He will find it difficult to express the meaning in words. And nine persons out of ten while groping for appropriate words will unconsciously describe a spiral in the air with ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... design, are magnificent in effect and are enriched with sculpture as well as with mosaic. In the gospel ambo in the cathedral of Ravello (1272), and also in that of the convent of the Trinita della Cava near Salerno, the spiral columns inlaid with mosaic stand on the backs of lions. In the epistle ambo at Salerno and the gospel ambones at Cava and San Giovanni del Toro in Ravello, the columns support segmental arches carrying the ambones; the epistle ambo ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... instance, however different from another, can be shown to be a term of some series of continued fractions. When this is coupled with the geometrical law governing the evolution of form, so manifest in some departments of the animal kingdom, e. g., the spiral shells of the Mollusca, it is difficult to believe that there is not, in Nature, a deeper-seated and innate principle, to the operation of which natural selection is merely an adjunct. The whole range of the Mammalia, fossil and recent, cannot furnish a species which ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... real. The beautiful green moss changes into forests, the black ribbons into railways, and the white ribbons into highways. What I had thought from a distance to be a huge curtain of black smoke, becomes the beautiful city of Nancy. We are only 800 feet above the field. One more spiral ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... devious, deformed, tortuous, sinuous, winding, flexuous, curved, curvilinear, spiral, labyrinthial; distorted, awry, askew, wry; dishonest, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Butterfly doing? As the steamer raced onward, that aerial wonder had swung in a spiral, and was now seemingly hovering about, awaiting the arrival ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... into the hair and ears. The hair is worn very long, rolled into little curls and plentifully oiled. A most peculiar deformation is applied to the nose and results in extreme ugliness: the septum is perforated, and instead of merely inserting a stick, a springy spiral is used, which presses the nose upward and forward, so that in time it develops into an immense, shapeless lump, as if numberless wasps had stung it. It takes a long time to get used to this sight, especially as the nose is made still more conspicuous by being painted with a bright red stripe ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... lights. The bridge Louis XV., by which this Temple of Hymen was reached, formed in itself an avenue, whose double rows of lamps, and obelisks and more than a hundred columns, each surmounted by a star and connected by spiral festoons of colored lights, produced an effect so brilliant that it was almost unendurable to the naked eye. The cupola of the dome of Saint Genevieve was also magnificently lighted, and each side outlined ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... across the Spiral Arm, a sprawling sphere of influence vast, mighty, solid at the core. Only the far-flung boundary shows the slight ebb and flow of contingent cultures that may win a system or two today and lose them back tomorrow or a hundred years from now. Xanabar is the trading post of the galaxy, for ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith
... debate on the Coercion Bill. He was describing the promises of equal laws to Ireland, with the restrictions on Irish liberty which were contained in the Bill, and as he described restriction he gradually raised the fingers on one hand, then turned them spiral fashion until he had pointed the index finger to the roof—- as though he were describing the ascent of a funambulist to the top of spiral stairs. It was at once eloquent and grotesque, and the House cheered and cheered yet again without any distinction of party—the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to a small extravagance. I contracted with a carpenter to build an ornamental tower, fifty-five feet high, twenty feet across at the base, and fifteen feet at the top, sheeted and shingled, with a series of small windows in spiral and a narrow stairway leading to a balcony that surrounded the tower on a level with the top of the tank. This tower cost $425; but it was not all extravagance, because a third of the expense would have been incurred in protecting the engine and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... simple frame and box mounted on wheels, in front of which is a cylinder, set with spiral knives, acting in concert with curved spring teeth, in combination with a straight knife, which forms a perfect shear, and severs the head from the stalk; the heads are at the same time discharged into the box. The teeth being made to spring and vibrate, not a particle ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring |
