"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand in his pocket for his knife, but it had been left behind! He then held out his hand to Joe, and in this dumb and piteous manner begged him to lend him his knife. Joe drew it from his pocket, but could not brace his nerves sufficiently to venture within the suffocating man's reach. At length he bethought him of his pole, and opening the blade thrust it in the end of it and cautiously handed it to Sneak. Sneak immediately ran the sharp steel through the many folds of the snake, and it fell to the ground in a dozen pieces! The poor man's strength ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... eleventh commandment is not to talk), but in a letter to Superintendent Primrose from Dr. Nyblett, the coroner near Nanton, Alberta, where was a reducing plant of the Natural Gas Company. The letter says, "It was reported to Constable Moorehead that some men were suffocating in the high-pressure station and he immediately rode over." He had no orders to go except from his own conscience, but there was no hesitation, though he knew the supreme danger. The letter goes on. "There was a disconnected four-inch ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... the logs were sufficiently seasoned to take fire, they were all too damp and soaked to burn. Oonamoo had hardly spoken when the blaze went out of itself. A perfect storm of arrows, tipped with burning tow, now came sailing in upon them, but the only inconvenience they occasioned was a blinding, suffocating smoke, which lasted, ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... a march of ten hours, with cool weather at first, but suffocating heat afterwards, we reached Edree, a town of El-Shaty, in a state of great exhaustion. During the latter part of the march, however, we had been cheered by the sight of the town, which stands on a small mound of yellow clay and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... protect myself as best I could. The shrieks of the wounded rang out on all sides. Tears came to my eyes when I heard the poor devils moaning with pain. The dust, the smoke, and the stench of the powder were suffocating. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... turned automatically at the pump; and we silently awaited the last suffocating moment of our ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the eastern slopes, the climate changed; and, as they came on the lower level, the fierce cold was succeeded by a suffocating heat, while tempests of thunder and lightning, rushing from out the gorges of the sierra, poured on their heads with scarcely any intermission day or night, as if the offended deities of the place were willing to take vengeance ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... himself with drawing plants, &c. in his chamber. The care and attention of Dr. Laidley contributed greatly to alleviate his sufferings; his company beguiled the tedious hours during that gloomy season, when the rain falls in torrents, when suffocating heats oppress by day, and when the night is spent in listening to the croaking of frogs, the shrill cry of the jackal, and the deep howling of the hyena; a dismal concert, interrupted only by the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... with which Kachi was dragging it, and cantered away full speed in the opposite direction to the one in which we were travelling. It is well known that at great altitudes running is a painful operation, for the rarefied air makes such exertion almost suffocating. Yet Kachi, having overcome his first surprise, was soon chasing the escaped beast, and, urged by the cheers of my other men, succeeded, after an exciting race, in catching the animal by its tail. This feat is easier to describe than to accomplish, for Tibetan sheep have very short, stumpy tails. ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... who knelt beside her, as if each tone revealed yet more the devoted love which led her there. Towards the conclusion of the service, and just as every one within the church knelt in general prayer, a faint, yet suffocating odor, borne on what appeared a light mist, was distinguished, and occasioned some slight surprise; by the group around the altar, however, it was unnoticed; and the men-at-arms, on looking towards the narrow windows and perceiving nothing but the intense darkness ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... the leaves and dead branches. They leap from tree to tree, and then with a roar the sheet of flame goes to the top of a tall pine. The air is like the breath from an oven and is filled with sparks and with suffocating smoke. The birds and animals ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... a banquet smiles, A common cheer for all;... e'en humble Giles, Who joys his trivial services to yield Amidst the fragrance of the open field; Oft doom'd in suffocating heat to bear The cobweb'd barn's impure and dusty air; To ride in murky state the panting steed, Destin'd aloft th' unloaded grain to tread, Where, in his path as heaps on heaps are thrown, He rears, and plunges the loose mountain down: Laborious task! with what delight when done Both horse and rider ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... suffocating—she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's countenance detached itself from the general blur. He had resumed his place ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... fixed in the 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 undergone ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and omnibuses that stood outside the I.B.&Q. depot was a Despardoux car, dazzling the eye with brass, and reflecting the passing throng in the deep, ruby, red of its highly polished surface. Its only occupant was Miss Grace Sinclair, suffocating in a leather coat, and with her shy, pretty face well concealed behind an automobile mask. At the side of the car, neatly pinned to one of the long rawhide baskets, was the following invitation ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... I noticed how utterly tired I was both in mind and body. I crept under the blankets and closed my eyes and saw a vast confusion of red and yellow patches, of severed limbs and staring eyes and blue, distorted faces of suffocating men. They thronged the darkness in ever increasing numbers and then they arranged themselves into a kind of gigantic wheel that began to turn slowly round and round. And suddenly I became conscious of a grief so intense that it seemed almost ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the metal table smoldered under the fiery meteorites and melted, and in a little while the meteorites themselves sizzled from view. Flames licked up from the floor; dense, suffocating fumes rose ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... fat flesh-coloured flies caught in a vast red spider's web. The whole place seemed redolent of evil—the motionless glossy slugs, the deadly parasite with its curiously obscene flowers, the littered undergrowth rotting in the water, all these filled Ishmael with a suffocating sense of doom. He stayed at gaze, yet longing to get away from this steamy place, where the gorse had gone grey beneath the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... further remonstrance. Suddenly, when she had reached the middle of the bridge, the plank cracked, gave way entirely, and in an instant she was in the foaming torrent below. She sank, and for one moment, one dreadful moment, she was under water, suffocating and terror-stricken, while all the events of her life seemed to rush before her like an instantaneous panorama. Then she felt the air again, and opening her eyes, found herself in Hugh's arms, as he strode out of the water and laid her ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... my cousin, I saw him fall, wounded, but could not go to his help. Peleton's nerves had broken down, and without me to lean on he must have stumbled. The flames took a firmer hold, the heat became intense, the smoke was suffocating. I called Raoul by name; he answered cheerily, bidding me ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... I was born, The lips that gape give back, the hands that grope, And noise and blood and suffocating scorn An eddy of fierce ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... never has done me the smallest hurt; he is kind, he is tender; but I 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
... 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
... house-door was pulled to with a bang. "That is Coppelius," I cried, terror-struck, and leapt out of bed. Then I heard a wild heartrending scream; I rushed into my father's room; the door stood open, and clouds of suffocating smoke came rolling towards me. The servant-maid shouted, "Oh! my master! my master!" On the floor in front of the smoking hearth lay my father, dead, his face burned black and fearfully distorted, my sisters weeping and moaning around him, and my mother lying near them in a ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... starting-point, and already he could distinguish the red glare of angry flames leaping beneath, fanned by the wind into great sheets of fire, and sweeping forward with incredible swiftness. These might not succeed in reaching the imprisoned men, but the stifling vapor, the suffocating smoke held captive by that overhanging rock, would prove ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... think the remedy must be nearly as bad as the disease; the oxy-muriatic acid has such a dreadfully suffocating smell. ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... 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 the conflagration of a home. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... had never known in my waking hours. All the strength that I had hoarded, all the desire for love that I had pushed aside, all of the fierce commotions of unrest that mark us from the brute, stirred in me till I felt as if I were suffocating, and cried out for a helping hand. But I was alone, and gray wastes surrounded me, and my surge of feeling beat itself out against desolation. I woke with sweat ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... a sickly, suffocating smell in her nostrils; and her eyes opened wide upon a face bent above her own. She had slept with a small lamp burning beside her, and by its dim light it seemed to her that ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... in one of these Paris passages. Think of a consumptive spitting blood and suffocating in a room one flight up, behind the 'ass-back' gables of, say the passage des Panoramas, for instance. When the window is open the dust comes in impregnated with snuff and saturated with clammy exudations. The invalid, choking, begs for air, and in order that he may breathe ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... approached the third, his legs were becoming weak. Volumes of air vibrated around him, a cramp gripped his epigastrium; he sat down on the ground, with eyes closed, no longer having consciousness of aught save the beatings of his own heart, which were suffocating him; then he flung his tourist's stick on the ground, and on his hands and knees resumed his ascent. But the three hammers attached to his belt began to press against his stomach; the stones with which he had ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... miles, over many a brimstone crag, and many a furious, ugly cataract and glowing precipice, every thing that we passed looking always frowningly downward; yet every thing noxious avoided us, except once, when having thrust my nose out of the veil, I was struck by such a suffocating, strangling exhalation as would have put an end to me, if my guide had not instantly assisted me with the water of life. By the time that I had recovered, I perceived that we had arrived at a kind of standing place; for in all this loathsome chasm it was impossible ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... winches hammered and pulleys screamed as the cases came up and the empty slings went down. The heat got suffocating and the slant of masts and deck made matters worse, because the men must hold the derricks back with guys while the heavy goods cleared the coamings of the hatch. Much judgment was needed to drop ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... absolution and communion, and the priest took his departure, leaving the two women alone in the suffocating cottage, while la Rapet began to look at the dying woman, and to ask herself whether it could last ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... opening covered with an old sack. Pulling this a little to one side I was greeted with a volume of suffocating smoke. I proceeded further, and diving in under the sack, got inside the room. In the midst of the smoke, sitting beside a crushed and battered fire-bucket, sat a man, his face illuminated by the flickering light from the fire. The rest of the room was bathed in mysterious darkness. ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... cries for help,—though the fire bounded up as if each separate flame had had a tiger's life, and roared as though, in every one, there were a hungry voice—though the heat began to grow intense, and the air suffocating, and the clamour without increased, and the danger of his situation even from one merciless element was every moment more extreme,—still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lest the crowd should break in, and should, of their own ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... conductor, stood in a vault some twelve feet wide and two hundred long, which extended under the whole of West Gotham Court. The walls of rough stone dripped with slimy exudations, while the pavements yielded to the slightest pressure of the feet a suffocating odor compounded of bilge-water and sulphuretted hydrogen. Upon one side of this elongated cave of horrors were ranged a hundred closets, every one of which reeked with this filth, mixed with that slimy ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... jerked to his feet by a terrible force, a force that sent him reeling and gasping against the wall. One of Rapaju's lieutenants stood before him with a tiny weapon in his hand, the weapon which had released the paralyzing gas he breathed. He was choking; suffocating. A black mist rose before him. He felt his knees give way. Dimly, as in a dream, he saw that Ora was in Detis' arms. Rapaju was on his feet, fingering his neck and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound. During this last phase of the dance, her artist audience stood there rigid, breathless, suffocating with ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed, and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him in ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and with a heart palpitating so violently that she felt at times almost suffocating, she watched the hardly discernible outline of the building from which the signal ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... which I 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 ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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 ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... "the licentious use of wealth," but he also recognises "the tyranny and the spiritual death of an iron-bound Socialism," that violent and venomous form of Socialism, which Mr. Punch this week has represented under the apt symbol of a clinging, hampering, and suffocating Serpent. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... and Canara. It is a white solid oil, fusible at a temperature of 97 degrees, and makes excellent candles, especially when saponified and distilled in the manner now adopted with palm oil, &c. It has one great advantage over coco-nut oil, that the candles made of it do not give out any suffocating acrid vapors when extinguished, as those made with ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Miles Canon, therefore, the season was far advanced and both men, without knowing it, were in a condition of mind to welcome any sort of a squall that would serve to freshen the unbearably stagnant atmosphere of amiability in which they were slowly suffocating. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... half in earnest; and when he had delivered that excellent woman into the care of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into outer darkness—where his home was—he felt as if he had never been the man he was until now, and that it was all for her sake and through her influence that this sudden and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's newly informed ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... 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, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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
... 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 by the smell of fresh ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Holding the picture up to show the rest. "There now!" chimed in the wife, her pale face lit Like winter snow with sunrise over it,— "That's what I'm always asking him.—But he— Well, as he's answering you, he answers me,— With that same silent, suffocating smile ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... of humours assailed him, and he yielded to it without a struggle. His attitude expressed his mood with relentless verity. Chin sunken upon his breast, eyes fairly distilling gloom, legs stretched out carelessly before him, he sat motionless, suffocating at the bottom of a gulf of discontent. His lips moved, sometimes noiselessly, again in ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... and Gentlemen,—I won't keep you one single moment in this suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr. Clemens faltered as if too much affected ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Baker had just closed his noble appeal to the new dominant party (of which he was one) not to peril a nation by the adoption of the old Roman cry of 'Vae Victis,'—when I left the Senate gallery for an hour, intending to return when I had breathed for awhile outside of that suffocating atmosphere. I passed to the front through the entrance under the collonade, and was just about to step out into the open air, when a voice arrested me. Surely I ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... denying it. Not one of us has escaped the irritation of temper naturally resulting from ten days experience of the fog which has been clinging with suffocating affection to earth and sea, putting an end to outdoor sport and indoor comfort, taking the curl out of hair, the starch out of dresses, the sweetness out of dispositions, and hanging like a pall over all efforts ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... 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 coat and felt the heart. It was ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... the benefit of the air: but I might have spared myself the trouble; for this humane commander refused my request, and ordered me to continue in the place allotted for the surgeon's mates, or else be contented to be in the hospital, which, by the by, was three degrees more offensive and more suffocating than our own berth below. Another, in my condition, perhaps, would have submitted to his fate, and died in a pet; but I could not brook the thought of perishing so pitifully, after I had weathered so many gales of hard fortune: ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... The suffocating heat of that night told upon him, however, severely— tough though he was or supposed himself to be—while he kept his lonely watch on the ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... Khosrul's life would have paid the forfeit for his temerity...when crash! ... a sudden and tremendous clap of thunder shook the hall, and every lamp was extinguished! Impenetrable darkness reigned, . . thick, close, suffocating darkness, . . the thunder rolled away in sullen, vibrating echoes, and there was a short, impressive silence. Then piercing through the profound gloom came the clamorous cries and shrieks of frightened women, . . the horrible, selfish scrambling, pushing and struggling ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... when one of his three hundred eunuchs had by chance been witness of the tyrant's drunkenness, Ibrahim slaughtered the whole band. Again, he is said to have put an end to sixty youths, originally selected for his pleasures, burning them by gangs of five or six in the furnace, or suffocating them in the hot chambers of his baths. Eight of his brothers were murdered in his presence; and when one, who was so diseased that he could scarcely stir, implored to be allowed to end his days in peace, Ibrahim answered: 'I make no exceptions.' His own ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... once served as the vestments of a Pagan priest. Further than this the senator's observation did not carry him, for the close, almost mephitic atmosphere of the place already began to affect him unfavourably. He felt a suffocating sensation in his throat and a dizziness in his head. The restorative influence of his recent bath declined rapidly. The fumes of the wine he had drunk in the night, far from having been, as he imagined, permanently dispersed, again mounted to his head. He was obliged to lean against ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... speaking when a huge volume of gas burst through the aperture, nearly suffocating the party and ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... mother was beginning to boil over, and the old-maid regime, which had crushed the life out of the Frenchwoman, was suffocating the Manx girl with its formalism. She was always forgetting the meal times regulated by the sun, and she could sleep at any time and keep awake until any hour. It tired her to sit demurely like a young lady, and she had a trick of lying ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Russia, from wrappers for sheet iron to bags for carrying a pound of cherries. After a final douche with boiling water, we mounted the high shelf, with its wooden pillow, and the artistic part of the operation began. As we lay there in the suffocating steam, Alexandra whipped us thoroughly with a small besom of birch twigs, rendered pliable and secure of their tender leaves by a preliminary plunge in boiling water. When we gasped for breath, she interpreted ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... shall never think in that way again, Mabel," gasped forth the Pathfinder, who appeared to utter his words like one just raised above the pressure of some suffocating substance. "No, no, I shall never think of you, or any one else, again in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... of a recent disaster by merriment and fiesta. In the night an infant had disappeared from its hammock under the mango-tree and no trace of it had ever been found. The mother, who had been sleeping on the ground near her babe, told a strange story of being awakened by a suffocating pressure on her chest; as she stretched out her hand in the dark, she encountered a cold, clammy mass that moved under her touch. She must have fainted, for when she was able to scream for assistance, her baby was gone, and there were no tracks in the sand. ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... throughout 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 ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... this it will readily be imagined that a Puna hut is no very agreeable or inviting retreat. Yet, when worn out by the dangers and fatigues of a long day's journey, and exposed to the fury of a mountain storm, the weary traveller, heedless of suffocating clouds of smoke and mephitic odors, gladly creeps into the rude dwelling. Taking up his resting-place on the damp floor, with his saddle-cloth for a pillow, he is thankful to find himself once again in a human habitation, even though its occupants be not ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... per cent. of acetylene, the figure is not trustworthy, because toxicological experiments upon animals seldom agree with similar tests upon man. If crude acetylene were diluted with a sufficient proportion of air to remove its suffocating qualities, the percentage of specifically toxic ingredients would be reduced to a point where their action might be neglected; and short of such dilution the acetylene itself would in all probability determine pathological effects long before its impurities ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... equator, the breeze kept falling and falling, and the atmosphere became suffocating in the extreme. It was the zone of calms, the ocean of dark, oily waters, in which boats remained for entire weeks with sails limp, without the slightest breath ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with inexplicable dread. He was ordinarily a courageous man, and had no nerves to speak of; yet, as his eyes followed the line of the ridge against the sky, he experienced terror, the elementary, nauseating terror of childhood, when the skin tingles, and the heart beats at a suffocating gallop. It was very dark, but momentarily his eyes grew accustomed to it. He was conscious of a queer, pungent smell, ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... family arms at the back; and she lay on nine or eleven pillows, laced with ribbon, and two large bows to each, very elegant and expensive in any country:—with all this, to prove that the Italians have little sensation of cold, here was no fire, but a suffocating brazier, which stood near the door that opened, and was kept open, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... permitted to quench my thirst that particular form of torture was alleviated for a few brief seconds, while the other was continuous and distracting almost to the point of being unendurable. It seemed to me that I lay for an age in that suffocating sick-bay, every moment of the time being heavy with indescribable torment; but as a matter of fact I was there little more than forty-eight hours, the skipper cracking on for Jamaica, in order that several bad cases—of which I was one of the worst—might ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Bongrand, suffocating with grief, as indignant as at the outburst of some low-bred fellow beside ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... many places were already knee-deep; and the boiling showers which came from the steaming breath of the volcano forced their way into the houses, bearing with them a strong and suffocating vapor. In some places immense fragments of rock, hurled upon the house roofs, bore down along the streets masses of confused ruin, which yet more and more, with every hour, obstructed the way; and, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over- dressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in which blood and lies were the least of the horrors. The theatres over there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential. People sit with their ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... should take to escape from this scene of disturbance: But their deliberations were considerably interrupted by the sight of volumes of fire rising from amidst the Convent's massy walls, by the noise of some heavy Arch tumbling down in ruins, or by the mingled shrieks of the Nuns and Rioters, either suffocating in the press, perishing in the flames, or crushed beneath the weight of ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... "I am suffocating, my poor Brigitte," she cried, wiping the tears that gushed from her eyes, now brilliant with fever, anxiety, and impatience. "He does not come," she moaned, looking round the room prepared for her son. "Here alone I can breathe, I can live! A few minutes more and he must be ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... the floor and keep our clothes in our trunks—except Lilly, who has an armoir without doors. Knives and forks for dinner to-day, though the table still consists of a single plank. The house really has a suffocating effect on me, there is such a close look about it. The front is fully a foot below the level of the street, while quite a flight of steps leads from the back door to the yard. In fact, the whole town consists of abrupt ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... that there was water there, and sponges and towels were close at hand, so without farther hesitation I poured out some of the water into a little basin, and taking a sponge, well bathed his face, after opening the window, for the cabin was suffocating. ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... 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 of his ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we may. Bring me that grating, Pearse. We will speed her in the dress she loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... about her, pecking the corn, even where it lodged in the edge of her little shoes, she said, "Poor things, I am glad they enjoy it!"—and even this one little act of love to the ignorant fellowship below her carried away some of the choking pain which seemed all the while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing into the hay, she sought the nest and filled her little basket with eggs, warm, translucent, pinky-white in their freshness. She felt, for a moment, the customary animation in surveying her new treasures; but suddenly, like a vision rising before her, came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... ... and stood still in the doorway, so greatly was she impressed by the inflamed, and at the same time deathly face, with its dim eyes fastened upon her. She felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold and suffocating dismay; the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... There they stood in the water to their necks, and watched the great fire as it divided at the little prairie, and swept around them, passing to left and right. It was a grim sight. All the heavens seemed ablaze, and the clouds of smoke were suffocating. Even there in the river the heat was most oppressive, and at times the faces of the boys were almost scorched. Then they would thrust their heads under the water, and keep them there as long as they could hold their ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... drew towards a close, the panes were less frequently shaken by the thunder of the artillery, the noise in the streets diminished, but the house became more and more filled with suffocating smoke. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... careful, Phil," she said, a suffocating feeling in her throat. "Your cough is frightful, and they say you have a fever. Do ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... The stem of a rare column rises amid the branches, the fragment of an arch hangs over and is supported by a dismantled tree trunk. And through the torrid twilight of the approaching storm the cry of the hyena is heard. The claws of the hyena are heard upon the crumbling tombs and the suffocating girl strives with her last strength to free herself from the thrall of the great lianas. But there comes a hirsute smell; she turns with terrified eyes to plead, but meets only dull, liquorish eyes, and the breath of the obscene animal ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... of our lonely duty was not enhanced in pleasure by the contemplation of scores of stretcher bearers carrying out men who had been caught unprepared by the gas and who were choking and suffocating from its effects. ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... the hive should be dry, and not a particle of frost should ever find admission; and in summer, the bees should not be forced to work to disadvantage in a pent and almost suffocating heat. (See these points discussed in ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... were attracted by the flames, which they followed to gobble up. Their presence was anything but pleasant, but I soon saw that it was utterly impossible to avoid them. The odour they caused was very disagreeable, while the suffocating heat of the rock on which the sun had been shining with full force for many hours was scarcely sufferable, and I wondered how the former inhabitants of the ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... two pictures in the breakfast-room at the Willows which occupied an important place in Elisabeth's childish imaginings. The first hung over the mantelpiece, and was called The Centenary Meeting. It represented a chapel full of men in suffocating cravats, turning their backs upon the platform and looking at the public instead—a more effective if less realistic attitude than the ordinary one of sitting the right way about; because—as Elisabeth reasoned, and reasoned rightly—if these gentlemen had not happened to be behind before ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... time, spent in those painful efforts, I felt bordering on despair from the fear that it was impossible for me to remember exactly every thing, and to confess each sin as it occurred. The night following was almost a sleepless one: and when sleep did come, it could hardly be called sleep, but a suffocating delirium. In a frightful dream, I felt as if I had been cast into hell, for not having confessed all my sins to the priest. In the morning, I awoke fatigued, and prostrate by the phantoms and emotions of that terrible night. In similar troubles of ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... first. Italy has changed a good deal in the meanwhile—changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the Feder! There's the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and there's the long low-ceilinged table-d'hote room, stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and puffing their "Cavours," with faces as innocent of soap as they were before the war of ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Tom, bless you!" cried the old man, in a suffocating voice, extending both his hands towards Tom, as they rose up; but the equilibrium was no longer to be maintained, and he reeled back in the arms of me and Tom. We lowered him gently down by the side of his wife; the old couple turned to each other, and embracing, remained ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by mortal stenches. A vapour, suffocating and malignant, scarcely allowed me to breathe. No suitable receptacle was provided for the evacuations produced by medicine or disease. My nearest neighbour was struggling with death, and my bed, casually extended, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the terrace where she had left them that perfect May night. They had gone out there immediately dinner ended, for study hour had lately been held from five to seven on account of the warm evenings, Mrs. Vincent objecting to the lights which made the house almost suffocating. ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... 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 have a mind to visit the earth, we have no occasion to dry them. Our common language is the same as that of the writing engraved ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... with world anew. Come now, to us, your adherents, who cannot flower from the ice. All the world gleams with the lilies of Death the Unconquerable, but come, give us our turn. Enough of the virgins and lilies, of passionate, suffocating perfume of corruption, no more narcissus perfume, lily harlots, the blades of sensation piercing the flesh to blossom of death. Have done, have done with this shuddering, delicious business of thrilling ruin in the flesh, of pungent passion, of rare, death-edged ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... the dense foliage grew depressing—suffocating. Each one longed breathlessly for the minute when he should emerge from this heavy timber-growth, even to do more rugged climbing. Distant rumbles were heard. Herb's prophecy was being fulfilled. Pamolah was grumbling at the trailers, and sending out his ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... so disheartening, so hopeless seemed the task, that Mother wavered in her mission; a choking, suffocating sensation blocked all her channels of delivery. The very flowers on the window- sill, she noted, drooped in a languishing decline; they had a lifeless air as of flowers that struggle for existence in deep shadow and have never known the kiss of sunshine. Through ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... yielding ropes until he got a foothold, swung himself over the top, cleared the entanglement below, and made a flying dash for the yawning mouth of canvas at the far end of the deck. It was incredibly hot and suffocating inside, but he wriggled frantically forward, clawing and kicking like a crab. At last a dim light ahead spurred him to one ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... these underground delvings. A feeling of dread came over him as he started along one of the gangways in search of Tom Evert, to whom he had been ordered to report for duty. The air seemed close and suffocating, and the lamps to burn with a more sickly flame than usual. To the boy the faces of the miners looked haggard, and their voices sounded unnaturally harsh. He overheard one of them say, "Ay, she's working, there's no doubt o' that; ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the suffocating gases and the smoke, and faint from pain and loss of blood, Houston had just staggered into the tunnel, when he heard the welcome sound of the voices of Lyle and of Morton Rutherford, and knew that ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise: What was thy pity's recompense? 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, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... first, rolling, with a sparse growth of yuccas, many of which were exceptionally large and fine. On the hills were occasional haciendas. This broken district was succeeded by a genuine desert, covered with fine dust, which rose, as we rode, in suffocating clouds. Here the valley began to close in upon us and its slopes were sprinkled with great cushion cactuses in strange and grotesque forms. After this desert gorge, we came out into a more open and more fertile district ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing over the vessel's bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping into the distance, and the land receding, gave me—coming on my wrath—suffocating emotions. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... balls. Just then two shells from the Confederate batteries passed through her cotton armor, one of them setting it on fire near the starboard wheel, while the discharge of her own bow guns produced the same effect forward. The flames spread rapidly, and the dense smoke was suffocating the men in the engine-room. Seeing that, if he delayed longer in order to ram again, he would probably lose his vessel, Ellet turned her head down stream and arrived safely abreast the army below. The fire was subdued by cutting her burning bales ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... could drink. What a labour of love that was, and what satisfaction to see them "visibly swelling" before my eyes! Till after sunset we laboured unceasingly, and I fancy none of us felt too strong. The thundery weather still continued; the heat was suffocating—so much so that I took off my hat and shirt, to the evident delight of the flies, whose onslaughts would have driven me mad had I not been too ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... with mental anguish alone, but with bodily pain. Worse than thirst it was, or the soreness of my bones. A new misery was fast growing upon me. My head swam with dizziness, the sweat started from my brow, and I felt sick both at the heart and in the stomach. I experienced a suffocating sensation in my breast and throat, as if my ribs were being compressed inwardly, and my lungs had not room enough to expand and let me breathe. My nostrils were filled with a nauseating smell—the smell of "bilge-water"—for being at the bottom of the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... on going to Mr. Brown's room, had found the atmosphere close and suffocating, and that gentleman, tossing restlessly on the bed from side to side, talking to himself in a wild delirium. She left the door ajar and began bathing his fevered head in cool water. This seemed to soothe him greatly and he sank back almost ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... about the deck for ampler circulation of air. Wind-sails, too, are constantly pouring a steady draft into the hold, except during a chase, when, of course, every comfort is temporarily sacrificed for safety. During calms or in light and baffling winds, when the suffocating air of the tropics makes ventilation impossible, the gratings are always removed, and portions of the slaves allowed to repose at night on deck, while the crew is armed to ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... hydrophobous in the middle of this paper, how would you distinguish the hydrophobous from the non-hydrophobous parts? You would say, as Voltaire of Rousseau, 'sa plume apparemment brulera le papier.' Such being the horror ever before our mind, images of eyeballs starting from their sockets, spasms suffocating the throat—we could not see a dog starting off into a yell of sudden discovery bound for the foot of our legs, but that undoubtedly a mixed sensation of panic and fury overshadowed us; a [Greek: Chermadion] was not ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 always in want of money, either ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... anniversary of the saint's achievement a free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... College. A woman fell down in a fainting fit, others stumbled over her, and thus formed an obstruction, which, being unknown to those in the rear, did not prevent them from forcing forward the persons in front, so that they too were pushed and trodden down into one frightful, struggling, suffocating mass of living and dying men, women, and children, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bound them hand and foot, and turned them adrift in a boat to be swallowed up by the waves or to perish of hunger. The Macleods retaliated by driving the population of Eigg into a cavern, lighting a fire at the entrance, and suffocating the whole race, men, women and children. [220] It is much less strange that the two great Earls of the house of Campbell, animated by the passions of Highland chieftains, should have planned a Highland revenge, than that they should have found an accomplice, and something more than an accomplice, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... moment. "The trees sometimes swept back, leaving an opening, and at other places," stretched—stretched, yes it was, "stretched their branches over,"—over —but how the wind roared in the trees, and what a pity that someone should have had a bonfire just there, the smell was suffocating—and the heat! How could she bear it! And, oh, dear! How dazzling the sun was— or the bonfire; the whole wood would be on fire if they did not take care! Oh, the ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch |
