"Lava" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she then play with her continents, and smile to see them struggle up from the sea only to sink again? Was it caprice that made her wrap her vast dominions in the icy bands of glaciers, or pour upon them lava torrents, and frequently convulse them with a mighty earthquake? If so, New Mexico and Arizona must have been her favorite playgrounds. At many points her rock formations look like whimsical imitations of man's handicraft, or specimens of the colossal vegetation of an earlier ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... internal heat of the earth, the elevation and depression of its crust, its belching forth of vapours, ashes, and lava, are its activities, in as strict a sense as are warmth and the movements and products of respiration the activities of an animal. The phenomena of the seasons, of the trade-winds, of the Gulf Stream, are as much the results of the reaction ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... he rounded a corner, Odin blinked his eyes. Far ahead of him was a red glow. Taking a deep breath, he thought he smelled smoke. Or was it sulphur? He had never been able to get one grim possibility out of his mind. What if some of the fires and lava streams of inner earth should lie between him ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... there are some things you cannot do! One of these is to inform a guest at your sister's wedding that the bridegroom is a villain. I had to choke back my rage against Sidney at its hottest, like Vesuvius swallowing its own lava, and resolve to fight the battle of Eagle March only on the lines of noblesse oblige—the lines on which he would choose to fight, no matter what ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... one by one came those convulsive sobs—that rend and wrench the physical frame as earthquakes do the earth. Then rose the sudden resolve—born of volcanic impulse, irresistible to mind as is the lava-flood to matter, sweeping before it all ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... Soiree (APPARTEMENT); he was presented to her as well as to me. He made me a very obliging compliment on his Master's part; I blushed, and answered only by a courtesy. The Queen, who had her eye on me, was very angry I had answered the Duke's compliments in mere silence; and rated me sharply (ME LAVA LA TETE D'IMPORTANCE) for it; and ordered me, under pain of her indignation, to repair that fault to-morrow. I retired, all in tears, to my room; exasperated against the Queen and against the Duke; I swore I would never marry him, would ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... down on the opposite end of the same step, where there was no protection from the heat. I now noticed that she carried a basket in her hand, from which she produced a variety of objects, evidently manufactured from lava. These she arranged by her side, and examined with care, every now and then casting an impatient look toward me. There was a wildness in her eye, and a quaintness in her whole demeanor that pleased me, especially as her features were almost ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... many thousands of the faithful Chibcas, most powerful of all the tribes upon the Alta plain, which lies a green level between the heights of the white summits of the Andes, toiling up the barren lava sides of Mount Veneza to where, locked in its gray cone, lies the lake of Guadiva. He saw this lake smiling back at the blue sky, its waters clear as the mountain air which ripples across its surface. The lake of Guadiva! How many bronzed men had whispered this ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... sleeps that mansion, ye may mark in every chink A gleam, as in the lava-cracks by the volcano's brink; Through key-hole and through window-slit, a white and sullen glow— And all above is rolling smoke, and all is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... rises the castle, built by Roger I.; in the chapel are frescoes representing his granddaughter, Adelasia, who founded the convent of St Lucia in 1157, taking the veil. The columns in the principal church are of black lava. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... invitation to come and spend the summer in the retirement of Ella's home, she says, "Even in this giddy place my heart is full to bursting; should I allow myself more time for meditation it would surely break, and pour forth its lava streams on the thirsty dust of human pride. In the dark, cheerless hour of midnight, my burning, throbbing brain still keeps its restless beating, scarce bestowing the poor refreshment of a feverish dream to strengthen ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... of investigating the composition and geological formation of the ground surrounding Port Arthur. I found most of the ground consisting of loose layers of lava scoriæ. The comparative easy capture of the otherwise immensely strong 203 Metre Hill did not surprise me. The texture of the ground, besides having a deadening effect on shell fire, made the approach to the forts by means of parallels surprisingly easy. The Japanese, by the way, also knew ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... be alarmed. Walter had not burst under the strain; but the pressure of the crowd had broken in the double doors of a cafe! The irruption was terrible. The way the crowd streamed in might be compared to the flow of molten lava. Walter described a parabolic curve and landed on a table, without suffering ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... we took a carriage and started from Naples on a trip to Mount Vesuvius. We drove along the bay for several miles, and when we reached the foot of the mountain we began to ascend through vast fields of lava, which had flowed there during previous eruptions. I always imagined that lava was white and smooth, but this was of a grayish-black color, ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one of lava which blocks its own course by congealing, and suddenly finds itself checked by dams which it has itself built. There is no Allegro ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... sung. One leap of Ocean scatters on the sand The quarried bulwarks of the loosening land; One thrill of earth dissolves a century's toil Strewed like the leaves that vanish in the soil; One hill o'erflows, and cities sink below, Their marbles splintering in the lava's glow; But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to the air, From shore to shore the blasts of ages bear; One humble name, which oft, perchance, has borne The tyrant's mockery and the courtier's scorn, Towers o'er the dust of earth's forgotten ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... term as "set us up housekeeping" should send molten lava racing through his veins, did not seem strange to Dr. Hubert Long. How could a man successfully keep his mind on dying when at last a work of art like Julie seemed within his reach? He knew that his plans ...
— The Deadly Daughters • Winston K. Marks
... Jurassic or Mesozoic period, there must be any amount of some kind of game." Just then a quiver shook the Callisto, and glancing to the right they noticed one of the volcanoes in violent eruption. Smoke filled the air in clouds, hot stones and then floods of lava poured from the crater, while even the walls of the hermetically sealed Callisto could not arrest the thunderous crashes that made the interior ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and came upon a field of sleek purple lava sown all over with little lemon jets of silent smoke, which in their wan and melancholy glow might have been the corpse lights of those innumerable dead whose tombstone ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... shall one day bear Sons to breathe God's bounteous air, If ye hear without a blush, Deeds to make the roused blood rush Like red lava through your veins, For your sisters now in chains; Answer! are ye fit to be Mothers ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... bit of rock-formation which strikes your fancy, and of every widely- extended view which may give a notion of the general lie of the country. Append, if you can, a note or two, saying whether a plain is rich or barren; whether the rock is sandstone, limestone, granitic, metamorphic, or volcanic lava; and if there be more rocks than one, which of them lies on the other; and send them to be exhibited at a meeting of the Geological Society. I doubt not that the learned gentlemen there will find in your photographs a valuable hint or two, for which they will be ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... volume v., page 601.) I have added a volcano to Albemarle Island, one of the Galapagos Archipelago (the author's "Journal of Researches," page 457). In the Sandwich group there are no active volcanoes, except at Hawaii; but the Rev. W. Ellis informs me, there are streams of lava apparently modern on Maui, having a very recent appearance, which can be traced to the craters whence they flowed. The same gentleman informs me, that there is no reason to believe that any active volcano exists ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... large share of Victor Hugo's life, and will procure him a certain place in the historical records of his period. But when all the commotion and the din have died away, as indeed in a great measure they have already done, these fiery diatribes, these burning lava-streams, will be of little more importance than the dustiest "memoires pour servir"—materials from which the historian, with much smoothing down and apologies for the pyrotechnics of a past age, will take here and there a vivid ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano: imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and the Rocky Mountains, in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma and in Texas. In the western interior limestones predominate; 6000 ft. of limestone are found at Eureka, Nevada, beneath 2000 ft. of shale. On the Pacific coast metamorphism of the rocks is common, and lava-flows and tuffs ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... has shown itself to be even thinner than I imagined. The lava-shell gave way, under our very feet, and I've had a glimpse of the molten fury that can flow about us without our knowing it. And like so many of life's tragic moments, it began out of something that is ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... thoughts of men dead three hundred years, move people to tears or cause their blood to blaze. The great pulpit orators, to whom allusion has already been made, preached carefully written sermons, yet over ten thousand hearts they poured lava tides that swept every prejudice in ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... famous volcano, standing four thousand feet high, and has wrought a great deal of destruction. In the eruption of 472, it is related that its ashes were carried to Constantinople; in 1066, the lava flowed down to the sea; in 1631, eighteen thousand lives were lost; and in 1794 a stream of lava more than a thousand feet wide and fifteen feet high destroyed a town. From my hotel in Naples I had a fine view of the red light rising from ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... strangely-blended impression of sadness and gayety sunk into our hearts as we gazed. All is vivacity, gracefulness, and sparkle, to the eye; but ah, what fires are smouldering below! Are not all these vines rooted in the lava and ashes ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had been in cadet days and more than one pursuit. Rivals they still were in the field of arms, for the name Harris had won for himself in Arizona Willett had matched in the Columbia, and now, fresh from the ill-starred campaign of the Lava Beds, was one of the few men to get something better than hard knocks, censure and criticism. Until the previous evening, not since the day they parted at West Point had they set eyes one on the other, and, knowing nothing of what had gone before and never dreaming of what ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... night in great terror and dread in the vicinity of Mount Etna, where they had landed. The awful eruptions of smoke, and flame, and burning lava, which issued at midnight from the summit of the mountain,—the thundering sounds which they heard rolling beneath them, through the ground, and the dread which was inspired in their minds by the terrible monsters ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... small, oblong, mortar-shaped vessel of lava. The width three inches, length when unbroken was probably four and a half inches; width of inside two inches, length probably three and one-fourth inches, depth of cavity three-fourths of an inch. On the portion remaining there are four feet; originally there were doubtless six. On one ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson
... back down into the darkness of peace and forgetting, but contrarily the past marched in review before his consciousness: The twin worlds of Thole revolving about each other as he fled down the shallow ravine before the creeping wall of lava, while the ancient mountain grunted and belched, and coughed up its insides. The terrible pull of the uncharted black star as it tugged at the feeble Starduster. The enervating heat and humidity of perpetually cloudy Thymis. Pyramids of gleaming ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... basaltic rocks, at whose base flow three impetuous mountain torrents—the Bise, Mas, and Volane. From the heights behind the town there is a magnificent view. In the neighbourhood is the extinct crater, the Coupe d'Aizac, covered with a beautiful reddish lava. Inns: ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the swollen torrent rolled roaring down the narrow valley, filling the whole water-course, about fifty yards wide, and advancing with a solid front a fathom high—a fathom deep does not convey the idea—like a stream of lava, or as one may conceive of the Red Sea, when, at the stretching forth of the hand of the prophet of the Lord, its mighty waters rolled back and stood heaped up as a wall ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... Arch of Trajan, we soon reach the great high-road, paved with diamond-shaped blocks of lava stone, extending a vast distance, even beyond Naples. This is the celebrated Via Appia. It takes its name from Appius Claudius the Censor. How the mind travels back into centuries long past! How the imagination recalls the glory of ancient times! ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... is a little village at the foot of Vesuvius—merciful Heavens! Many a person would be afraid to stay there, even half an hour, when the mountain quakes, the ashes fall in showers, and the glowing lava pours out in a stream. The houses there are by no means so well built, and the window-panes are not so clean as in this country. I almost fear that there are few glass windows in Resina, but the children ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be divided for the Northern friends. Three happy weeks of life eventful, but life without crowding, and, above all, without interruption. "Think of it," cried Felix, as they took their last walk among the lava crags, the door-bell has not ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the Bay of Naples, were destroyed. The emperor was so touched by the sufferings of the inhabitants that he expended nearly his whole private fortune in relieving their wants. Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were covered by lava or ashes, were thus preserved from farther decay, and, having been partially excavated and restored, enable us to form a truthful conception of the domestic life of the Roman cities in the age of Titus. We here enter the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... whilst studying the geological aspect of Santiago when "the line of white rock revealed a new and important fact," namely, that there had been afterwards subsidence round the craters, which had since been in action and had poured forth lava. "It then," he says, "first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. That was a memorable hour to me; and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of encountering some log which might injure the vessel. At last the Tomboro mountain hove in sight. We passed it about six miles off. The summit was not visible, being enveloped in clouds of smoke and ashes. The sides were, in several places, still smoking, evidently from the lava which had flowed down them not yet having cooled; and one large stream was discernible from the smoke arising from it, and which had reached all the way from the summit to the sea. Beating along the coast, we entered a bay where there was good anchorage, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... status quo, and wait events, became now, for some weeks or months, as much his policy as his accessibility to passion and sudden influences would permit. He seemed to feel that he should give time to the molten lava of his volcanic greatness to settle, harden, and assume its individualism among things received. Holding aloof, therefore, from indentification with either party—leaning now on one side, now on the other; his speeches more with the movement, his policy more with the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of Paris, De Lauzun, from a most diabolical spirit of revenge, joined the nefarious party which had succeeded in poisoning the mind of the Duc d'Orleans, and from the hordes of which, like the burning lava from Etna, issued calumnies which swept the most virtuous and innocent victims that ever breathed ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... to possess institutions and customs as well as life itself. In the valley towns, it is true, the railroads have brought and thrown down all the conveniences and incongruities of civilization. But ride away from the railroads into the mountains or among the lava mesas, and you are riding into the past. You will see little earthen towns, brown or golden or red in the sunlight, according to the soil that bore them, which have not changed in a century. You will see grain threshed by herds of goats and ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... 139. Many philosophers have believed that the central parts of the earth consist of a fluid mass of burning lava, which they have called a subterraneous sun; and have supposed, that it contributes to the production of metals, and to the growth of vegetables. See additional notes, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... got just the thing for Nan, neat but not gaudy, a sort of sign you see, and very appropriate for a doctor,' said Emil, proudly displaying a pair of lava earrings ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... some act of outrage against them. These buildings were, therefore, looked upon by the Hindoos, who composed the great mass of the people, as a kind of religions volcanoes, always ready to explode and pour out their lava of intolerance and outrage upon the innocent people ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to Aden to visit it in midsummer, but our voyage had not been timed with reference to seasons or our comfort. I shall not weary a reader with any attempt at description of the treeless surroundings and barren lava crags that constitute the scenery; which, moreover, many may have seen for themselves. What chiefly interested me were the Jews and the camels. Like Gibraltar, and in less measure Key West, Aden is a place where meet many and divers peoples from Asia, from Africa, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... nut called the "lava-nut," of which the animals are very fond, and they will go a long distance in search of it. The keepers are provided with a quantity of these nuts, and the man with whom the animals are most familiar throws a few to the ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... time; then, shaking and stammering with that inward rage that seemed to heave like molten lava in his breast, without ever coming to the surface of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sincere devotion to their service deserve their forbearance and approval." This hope of Cleveland's was eventually justified, but not until after his public career had ended; meanwhile he had to undergo a storm of censure so blasting that it was more like a volcanic rain of fire and lava than any ordinary ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... "whether felicity comes with her presence, and distraction with her absence,—whether her eyes make the morning brighter for thee, and her tears fall upon thy heart like molten lava,—whether heaven would be black and dismal without her company, and the flames of hell turn into roses under ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... glass to his eye, stared out of window, and there, sure enough, he saw the Firedrake. He was floating about in a sea of molten lava, on the top of a volcano. There he was, swimming and diving for pleasure, tossing up the flaming waves, and blowing fountains of fire out of his nostrils, like a ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... hated to wear a boiler iron overcoat all through the hot weather, after having lived so wild and free. But all this attention worried me so that I could not sleep, and many a night I would arise from the lava bed on which I had reclined, and putting on my dressing-gown and slippers, I would wander about under the stars and wish that I could be an unknown boy again in my far away home. But I could not. I often wished that I could die a natural death, but ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... she was calm. But this calmness could not last. Her heart was bleeding, burning, breaking! and its prisoned flood of fire and blood must burst forth at length. The volcano seems quiet; but the pent up lava in its bosom must at last give forth mutterings of its impending irruption, and swiftly upon these mutterings must ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... space drink up her ardours. She glows redly; the Fires retreat into her heart and her form is clothed with lava as with the Sea. Now is she muffled in her new-born clouds and the rains ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... pavement. Country women, in picturesque cinnamon-coloured skirts, moved gravely among the citizens. The houses, when not whitewashed, showed their building stone of red volcanic tufa; windows were aflame with cacti and carnations; slumberous oranges glowed in courtyards; the roadways underfoot were of lava—pitch-black. It was a brilliant medley, overhung by a deep blue sky. The canvas was indeed overcharged, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of the horses' hoofs over the lava rocks; the padded beat of the easy plains lope as they left the lava for the ashy silt; then no sound but the swash of saddle leather along trail marks that cut the crusted silt like tracks in soft snow. The wind had been flaring a steady torrid white ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... same course, we passed three miles from Cape Bedford, at 4 P.M. This is one of the most remarkable features on the coast, being a bluff detached piece of tableland, surmounted by a singular low line of cliffs, reminding me forcibly of the lava-capped hills on the river Santa Cruz, in eastern Patagonia. As far as I could judge, by the aid of a good glass, it seemed to be composed of a mixture of red sand and ironstone, of a very deep red hue, bearing a great similarity ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... valleys and fertile uplands of Coin, Cazarabonela, Almexia, and Cartama, and in ten days all those fertile regions were a smoking and frightful desert. Hence it pursued its slow and destructive course, like the stream of lava of a volcano, through the regions of Pupiana and Alhendin, and so on to the vega of Malaga, laying waste the groves of olives and almonds and the fields of grain, and destroying every green thing. The Moors of some of those places interceded in vain ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... despite hot tears that were rolling from her eyes, would have struck the most thoughtless mind. Nothing is more terrible to behold than excessive grief that is rarely allowed to break forth, of which traces were left on this woman's face like lava congealed about a crater. She might have been a dying mother compelled to leave her children in abysmal depths of wretchedness, unable to bequeath them to any ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs, binding her as if her feet were set in lava. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... phrase than mine in their eight pages,—her heart breathed in the words; one saw her looks in the lines; the expressions seemed still warm from her lips. In her, nothing evaporated during that slow and dull transition of the feeling to the word which lets the lava of the heart cool and pale beneath the pen of man. Woman has no style, that is why all she says is so well said. Style is a garment, but the unveiled soul stands forth upon the lips or beneath the hand of woman. Like the Venus of speech, it rises from ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... names conveyed but a hint of the awe they inspired. The fleet of three vessels bore the titles, Volcano, Vesuvius and AEtna. And the sparks that flew heavenward from their black chimneys were far more impressive to the people who crowded the shores than the smoke and lava of old Vesuvius to the lazy ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... she has been quiet for a hundred years or more and men have almost forgotten that she ever thundered and spouted and buried cities. But all at once she would move again. She would shoot steam and ashes into the sky. At night fire would leap out of her top. A few times she sent out dust and lava and destroyed houses and fields. A man who lived five hundred years after Pompeii was destroyed described Vesuvius as she was in his time. ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... most commonplace household created by man and woman would be a wonderful cosmography. But the novelist, even he who has the courage to write a dull book, can touch but here and there, on the little promontories of daily life, where it seems to him the spiritual lava boils up near the surface and betrays most poignantly the nature ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... above another, till their flashing ruby summits are lost in the burning void, high overhead. On! through and through these mountain-piles, into countless, limitless corridors, reared on pillars lurid and rosy as molten lava. Far down the corridors rise visions of flying phantoms, ever at the same distance before us—their raving voices clanging like the hammers of a thousand forges. Still on and on; faster and faster, for days, years, centuries together, till there ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... hill nearer than San Marino. Whether 'hell will be paved with' those 'good intentions,' I know not; but there will probably be good store of Neapolitans to walk upon the pavement, whatever may be its composition. Slabs of lava from their mountain, with the bodies of their own damned souls for cement, would be the fittest ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... that he was in time? Anxiously he flung a bolt of energy from his heat rod toward the lock, holding a flashlight under the other stump of an arm. The molten metal flowed to the floor like a rivulet of lava. ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... October, 1812, a mighty change had taken place. Every trace of vegetation had vanished from this part of the island; not a tree or a shrub remained. The rivers were dried up, and even the deep and dark chasms and gorges no longer existed. Cinders and ashes covered the mountain sides, and beds of lava were pouring down from the summit, and hissing as they entered the ocean. On the 30th of April, about one month after the terrible earthquake by which the city of Caraccas, three hundred and sixty miles distant, was destroyed, and twelve thousand of the inhabitants buried ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... the Pinacate Mountains of northwestern Mexico, on the eastern shore of the head of the Gulf of California, that we made our most interesting observations on wild big-horn sheep. On those black and blasted peaks and plains of lava, where nature was working hard to replant with desert vegetation a vast volcanic area, we found herds of short-haired, undersized big-horn sheep, struggling to hold their own against terrific heat, short ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... where only good people could get their work in, and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway, this thing ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... of time during which there was no life, we have no means of determining. That it was almost infinitely long is made apparent by the researches of eminent scholars on the cooling of lava. Toward the close of this extended period of time faint traces of life appear. Not life as we are apt to think of it. No nodding flowers were kissed by the sunshine of this early time. The earliest forms of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Not thou soft Architect of silvery gleams, Whose soul would simmer in Hesperian streams, Th' exhaustless fire—the bosom's azure bliss, That hurtles, life-like, o'er a scene like this;— Defies the distant agony of Day— And sweeps o'er hetacombs—away! away! Say shall Destruction's lava load the gale, The furnace quiver and the mountain quail? Say shall the son of Sympathy pretend His cedar fragrance with our Chiefs to blend? There, where the gnarled monuments of sand Howl their dark whirlwinds to the levin brand; Conclusive tenderness; fraternal ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... went to Pompeii and went over it. As you know, it is a Roman town buried under the lava and ashes of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. I walked about the streets of the town and saw the houses, the temples, the theatre, the squares.... I saw and marvelled at the faculty of the Romans for combining simplicity ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... changing the aspect of my vision. It appeared to me, in that dreamy dimness, whereof the judgment inquireth not and reason hath no power to rebuke it, that while I was still speaking unto those great ones, the several greetings I had poured forth in my fervour,—being as it were flowing lava from the volcano of my heart,—became embodied into mighty cubes of crystal; and in the midst of each one severally flickered its spiritual song, like a soul, in characters of fire. So I looked in admiration on that fashioning of thoughts, and while ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... two from the small newspapers published in the less populous countries. An editor down East, speaking of his own merits, thus concludes—"I'm a real catastrophe—a small creation; Mount Vesuvius at the top, with red hot lava pouring out of the crater, and routing nations—my fists are rocky mountains—arms, whig liberty poles, with iron springs. Every step I take is an earthquake—every blow I strike is a clap of thunder—and ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... it burning with that which made the bush alive in the desert of Horeb—the presence of the living God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... very dilatory in everything. His greatest peculiarity was, that although he had a hearty laugh for every joke, he did not take the jokes of others at the time that they were made. His ideas seemed to have the slow and silent flow ascribed to the stream of lava (without its fire): and the consequence was, that although he eventually laughed at a good thing, it was never at the same time with other people; but in about a quarter or half a minute afterwards (according ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... volcanic matter was actually erupted is 720 miles in one line and 400 miles in another line at right-angles from the first; hence, in all probability, a subterranean lake of lava is here stretched out of nearly double the area of the Black Sea. The frequent quakings of the earth on this line of coast are caused, I believe, by the rending of the strata, necessarily consequent on the tension of the land ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... authorities; on the seas surrounding the island pack-ice frequently became a menace to shipping, and there also occurred unusually long and vicious series of volcanic eruptions. These culminated in the late eighteenth century (1783), when the world's most extensive lava fields of historical times were formed, and the mist from the eruption was carried all over Europe and far into the continent of Asia. Directly or indirectly as a consequence of this eruption, the greater part of the live-stock, and a fifth of the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... herring-bones, spreading out as it went into the depressions to right and left, until the mighty pattern of fire shone in its full length and breadth on the flood of sand; and the workmen, who had been coaxing the sluggish, lava-like flood along with their iron rods, rested from their labors and wiped their hot brows, while a thin cloud of steamy vapor floated up to the begrimed rafters. Standing in the doorway we could watch the familiar pattern—the sow and pigs, it was called—die down to a dull rose red, and ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... selfishness of joy. The saved mariner is too happy when he touches the shore to give a moment's thought to his drowning brothers. With the indifference of happiness, with the contempt of bliss, heaven barely glances at the miseries of earth. Cities are devoured by the rushing lava; the earth opens and thousands perish; women raise their clasped hands towards heaven, but the gods are too happy to aid their children. The smiles of the deities are unacquainted with the tears of men. The shouts of heaven ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of the terminator which were mountain-tops rising out of darkness into the sunshine. There was Aristarchus and Copernicus and Tycho. There were the vast, featureless "mares,"—those plains of once-liquid lava which had welled out when monstrous missiles the size of counties buried themselves deep in the moon's substance. The moon could be seen as ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... visible—the black ramparts, crowded with dark figures and glittering arms, on the one side; on the other the red columns of the British, broad and deep, moving steadily forward like a stream of human lava. The light division stood at the brink of the smoking ditch for an instant, amazed at the sight. "Then," says Napier, "with a shout that matched even the sound of the explosion," they leaped into it and swarmed ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... hilly country toward the Little Colorado River. In the distance loomed the San Francisco Mountains, extinct craters which had belched fire and lava long, long ago at the birth of Arizona, when the earth was still in the travail of creation. We forded the Little Colorado at Sunset Crossing, a lonely colony, where a few Mormons were the only inhabitants of a vast area ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... beautiful and attractive. And what beautiful colors greeted our weary eyes as we drew nigher. I thought of that gate of Jerusalem the Golden, all enamelled with emerald, amethyst, chalcedony, and pearl sot in gold. The golden brown earth made from melted lava, the feathery foliage of the palms that riz up beyend the dazzlin' white beach, the crystal blue waters with myriad-hued fishes playing down in its crystal depths. Oh, how fair the seen as we approached ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... were cities of Italy, which were destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 A. D., being entirely buried under ashes and lava. During the last century they have been dug out to a considerable extent, and many of the streets, buildings, and utensils have been found in a ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... it were we should see clouds of smoke between us and the stars, and they're clear right down to the top of the mountain. Why, Brace, there must be a volcano here, and that's the reflection from the glowing lava. I've seen something like ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... scalding waves there rolled and tossed poor wretches like himself; and morning after morning he had returned by the same road, feeling as though a frost-breath had passed over the lake of fire, leaving it rough and leaden like a lava-deluged plain. But now, whence came the wonderful beauty of the widespread landscape? He knew in part, and brushed his old jacket sleeve across his swollen eyes. He feared that the vision was fated to pass away, ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... is rather doubtfully traced upon the maps. It is supposed that this vast plain is strewn with blocks of lava vomited by the neighbouring volcanoes on its right side, Ptolemy, Purbach, and Arzachel. The projectile was drawing sensibly nearer, and the summits which close in this sea on the north were distinctly visible. In front rose a ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... longed to ask, I introduced myself. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... set in the azure of sea and sky. No words of hers could give comfort as yet, so she would remain silent. Her trust was in the amiable ministry of time, which may bring solace to the tormented, human soul, even as it reclothes the mountainside swept by the lava stream, or cleanses and renders gladly habitable the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Adeline was not indifferent: for (Now for a common-place!) beneath the snow, As a volcano holds the lava more Within—et caetera. Shall I go on?—No! I hate to hunt down a tired metaphor, So let the often-used volcano go. Poor thing! How frequently, by me and others, It hath been stirr'd up till ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... last look about him saw the vision of modesty completely veiled; and then followed a dream of passion like that promised by the Prophet to the elect. Lips of stone turned to flame, breasts of ice became like heated lava, so that to Franz, yielding for the first time to the sway of the drug, love was a sorrow and voluptuousness a torture, as burning mouths were pressed to his thirsty lips, and he was held in cool serpent-like embraces. The more he strove against this unhallowed passion the more his senses ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... slowly through the very heart of the town. Like its historic namesake, the city lived under the eternal shadow of smoke, barring Sundays; but its origin was not volcanic, only bituminous. True, year in and year out the streets were torn up, presenting an aspect not unlike the lava-beds of Vesuvius; but as this phase always implies, not destruction, but construction, murmurs were only local and few. It was a prosperous and busy city. It grew, it grows, and will grow. Long life to it! Every year the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... several great fissures emitting smoke and steam, with occasional subterranean detonations. These were on the side of a small, flank crack which was smoking heavily. There was light pumice everywhere, but nothing like recent lava or scoriae. One fissure was completely lined with exquisite, acicular crystals of sulphur, which perished with a touch. Lower down there were two hot springs with a deposit of sulphur round their margins, and bubbles of gas, which, from its strong, garlicky smell, I suppose to be ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,—for desire, once at the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... isn't very near the city," he said to Tom, who was engaged in watching the automatic apparatus of the camera, to see when he would have to put in a fresh film. "It wouldn't take much of this sort of thing to destroy a big city. But I don't see any streams of burning lava, such as they always say come out ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... war against the warriors of Captain Jack in 1873 was waged in the lava beds of Oregon, and it had the distinction of being one of the first Indian wars to be well reported in the newspapers. We heard a great deal of the long and trying campaigns waged by the Army in revenge for the murder of General Canby in his council tent. ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... condition of profound agitation; he poured out a lava-flow of vituperation upon the heads of his men; he cursed them for weaklings and waster and hissed phrases shameful to them and discreditable to their parents. The crew increased their stroke. Already ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... brought down to us by the few survivors indicate the continual wails of horror rending the sky while the volcanic disturbances continued. Thousands and millions ran from place to place to find shelter from the storm of fire. At one place the surface would open and at another the lava would run. Fate, with a merciless hand, was dragging each one into one or another ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... earth, air, and water;" a plan (submitted to the unappreciating Government of Naples) to "extinguish the volcano of Vesuvius, by pumping water from the Bay into the crater, in consideration of the sum of one million florins, and a monopoly of working the extinct volcano for lava." ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... "stepped" tower, with its red-tiled, saddle-back roof, forms a striking feature in this weird and lonely landscape. The church itself is buried beneath the sand, leaving only the tower to mark the place that is called the "Pompeii of Denmark," sand, not lava, being answerable for this entombment. It is said that the village which surrounded the church was buried by a sandstorm in the fourteenth century. This scene of desolation, on a windy day, when the "sand fiend" revels and riots, is best left to the booming surf and avoided by those who do ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... composed of syenite capped with granite. The Isles of Shoals are also mostly syenite, but there are large boulders of coarse granite lying about, and in some places the syenite changes suddenly to granite as if the two had been welded together. Then there are dykes of dark brown trap or ancient lava, from four to ten feet wide running across the islands from south-west to north-east, and others again at right-angles to these. This would seem to indicate that the elevation above the surrounding plateau was due to volcanic action. The structure of White Island is very different from the others, ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... household in his gloved hands, and handing them to a waiting woman. Then, when they had grasped the idea and were gathering all they owned, he led them toward the safety of the trees. Five minutes after they had set off, the lava began to flow from the new-born volcano, scorching the ground for a hundred yards around, sparks smoking and smoldering ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... into them. On they ran, down the narrow canyon, now about three thousand feet deep, always on swift water, but for a time there were no bad rapids. On August 25th they reached a fall where the river was once dammed up for a great height by an overflow of lava from craters on and near the brink. One of the craters was plainly visible from below. The canyon appeared to have been once filled by the lava to the depth of fifteen hundred feet. They named the descent Lava Falls and made a portage. Not far below this they found a garden which had ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... there had been that trembling of the earth; there were here and there openings in the trees through which vast blackened roads of rock seemed to come down to the sea, zigzag tracks which it was plain enough were the cooled-down and hardened streams of lava which had made their way to the sea during some eruption of the calmly beautiful mountain which rose so peacefully toward the clouds, one of which seemed to have remained to act ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... cool, calculating creatures, who cipher out from day to day what is policy to do. She will act rightly till there is an irrepressible irruption, and then, beware. And yet these ebullitions enrich her life as the lava flow does the sides of Vesuvius. I shall be greatly disappointed if she is not ten times more kind, sympathetic, and self- forgetful than she was before; and as for that boy, she will keep him in the tallest clover for weeks to come, to make up ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... had noticed on Etna, the thickness of each stratum of earth between the several strata of lava. 'He tells me,' wrote Brydone, 'he is exceedingly embarrassed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain. That Moses hangs like a dead weight upon him, and blunts all his zeal for inquiry; for that really he has not the conscience to make ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle, have become fragmentary, not through the sudden destruction, but through the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... salad and little imitation volcanoes which were in reality cones of vanilla ice-cream in the center of which holes had been scooped and then filled with hot caramel sauce, which of course overflowed the sides in true lava fashion. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... Earthquakes threatened to topple down our convent towers. A lurid, baleful light hung in the heavens at night, and showers of ashes, borne by the wind, fell in our narrow valley. The monks talked of the earth being honey-combed beneath us; of Streams of molten lava raging through its veins; of caverns of sulphurous flames roaring in the centre, the abodes of demons and the damned; of fiery gulfs ready to yawn beneath our feet. All these tales were told to the doleful accompaniment of the mountain's ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... gilt-framed mirrors. I could hardly bear to look! It was like being shown by a hard-hearted surgeon the beating of a brain through the sawed hole in a man's skull. If one could have crawled through the crust of lava at Pompeii, a year after the eruption, one might have felt somewhat as at ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and so heavy that ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... and furrowed with deep gullies. Almost to the summit, whence issue perpetually faint wreaths of smoke, it is clothed with vegetation, and looks calm and beautiful, although beneath are hidden fires which occasionally burst forth in lava-streams, but more frequently make their existence known by the earthquakes which have ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... yellow, black, brown, and red, like so many brick-bats. These stones scattered for miles around, together with the hot-spring of the city, and many of the low dull Saharan hills, like so many heaps of scoriæ and lava, give apparently a volcanic origin to all these regions, or ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and yet marvellous region of lava beds, dikes and conic craters suddenly was passed, and the canal moved into the huge forest lands ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... woods. But as she drew nearer, and could distinguish the different objects more plainly, the hillocks were transformed into human habitations, with small doors and windows; and the groups of trees proved to be huge lava masses, from ten to fifteen feet in height, entirely overgrown with verdure and moss. Everything was new, was surprising; and it was with pleasurable sensations of excitement and curiosity that Madame Pfeiffer landed on the shores of ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... active days, the Pic Bory had a way of tossing high into the air huge spouts of boiling lava, which rushed with great force down the mountain-side, overwhelming everything which came in the way. Now, just as gunpowder rammed into a cannon drives heavy balls immense distances, so this lava is driven out of the craters by gases which ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... creepers and flowering parasites of the most brilliant hues. The Mayon, which is an active volcano, is comparatively bare, whilst also the Apo, although no longer in eruption, exhibits abundant traces of volcanic action in acres of lava and blackened scoriae. Between the numberless forest-clad ranges are luxuriant plains glowing in all the splendour of tropical vegetation. The valleys, generally of rich fertility, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... forerunners. Long past his prime he was, and bearing up with very visible effort against his years. An almost extinct volcano! But sufficient to imagination these glimpses of the glow that had been, and the sight of these last poor rivulets of the old lava. An almost extinct volcano, but majestic among mole-hills! Assuredly, the old school was a fine one. It had its faults, of course—floridness, pomposity, too much histrionism. It was, indeed, very like the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... leave it—it was cool—perhaps cold! What did the word mean? Was there aught in the world but fire—flames—fierce, withering, smothering, consuming heat? He thought the shales crackled as they melted beneath him! He thought his feet sank to the ankles in molten lava, and were so heavy he scarce could drag them! He thought the blazing sun shot out great tongues of flame, like the arms of a monster devilfish, which twined about him, transforming his blood to vapor and sucking it out ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... descent of about thirty feet into the plain. On the west side are a number of broken hills, and a small range composed of gypsum and lime, having the surface covered with fragments of quartz and ironstone, and a number of other pebbles. On the hill where the springs are we have found lava. There are numerous small creeks coming from the hill, and running in every direction. They seem to be all in confusion. The plain is about five miles wide. These I have ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... untamed handiwork of mountain, forest, and flood, as day after day he journeys onward in the saddle towards the Pacific Ocean. Here are the imposing barrancas of Jalisco which he traverses, and marks how they are buried in the profuse vegetation which presses up to the very border of the lava of smoking Ceboruco. Thence the myrtle forests of Tepic are penetrated. On the tropic lakes thousands of log-like alligators lie, gloomily awaiting their prey. From the verge, which rich forests fringe, and where ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... nickel, so that the whole procession could be inside the room at once. Then she called their respectful attention to her framed marriage certificate, and a similar document declaring the late Jacob Quincy Mills a Grand Something or Other in some lodge. Beneath these, on a shelf, were two tall lava jars filled with pampas grass, a pink china vase and a wreath of Easter lilies made of ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... of July had broken upon Paris with its fearful events. The revolution had for the first time opened the crater, after subterranean thunder had long been heard, and after the ground of Paris had long been shaken. The glowing lava-streams of intense excitement, popular risings, and murder, had broken out and flooded all Paris, and before them judgment, discretion, and ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... BASSUS, a much admired lyric poet, who was living on his own farm, at the time when Mount Vesuvius discharged its torrents of fire, and made the country round a scene of desolation. The poet and his house were overwhelmed by the eruption of the lava, which happened A.U. 832, in the reign of Titus. Quintilian says of him (b. x. chap. 1.), that if after Horace any poet deserves to be mentioned, Caesius Bassus was the man. Si quem adjicere velis, is erit Caesius Bassus. Saleius Bassus is mentioned ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... forth. Beyond this fierce horizon, farther yet Than vision's wing could bear my gaze, I knew Hell's desolate kingdoms stretched their iron wastes, Hell's burning mountains waved their brands of flame, Hell's lava rivers plunged in fury down ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... explosions in their assailants' midst. The form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended with lightning. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... narrow trail. It took him through a section of dead, crumbling lava and rotting rock; through a little stretch of timber, and finally along the bank of a shallow river—the Wolf—which ran after doubling many times, through the Circle ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... journeying, they reached the dense forest which covered the base of the mountain, and forcing their way upward, came by degrees to a more open region. As they neared the top the track ended, and they had to climb as best they could over the black glazed surface of the lava, which, having issued from the crater in a boiling flood, had risen into a thousand odd forms wherever it met with any obstacle, and continually impeded their progress. After this they arrived at the region of perpetual snow, which increased their difficulties, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... kiss the shore, the green slopes smile, the mountains decorate themselves with cloud-wreaths and rainbows; but there comes a dreadful day when the green and flowery earth yawns in horrid chasms, when Mauna Loa trembles and belches forth torrents of blood-red lava, when the ocean, receding from the shore, returns in a tidal wave that sweeps to the top of the palms on the beach and engulfs the people ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... freely with regard to this part of your hero's conduct. I question your philosophy in assuming that all that is noble in Byron's poetry was inconsistent with the possibility of his being devoted to a pure and good woman; and I repudiate your morality for canting too complacently about "the lava of his imagination," and the unsettled fever of his passions, being any excuses for his planting the tic douloureux of domestic suffering in a ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... clothes on, hurried up—to enjoy the astonishing spectacle of a "sea-fire." In the wake of the vessel I behold a streak of fire so strong that it would have been easy to read by its light; the water round the ship looked like a glowing stream of lava, and every wave, as it rose up, threw out sparks of fire. The track of the fish was surrounded by dazzling inimitable brilliancy, and far and wide everything was ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... hesitated, fearful that if I followed I should stumble or dislodge some of the lava blocks of which the rockery ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... quite finished by the great Creator. Through all this region volcanic action has been exceedingly vigorous. The effect of fire upon the rocks is plainly visible and widely spread. Whole mountains of volcanic rock exist. Floods of lava everywhere abound. The last feeble evidence of this gigantic force is to be seen in the hot springs on Gardiner River and on many other streams, and in the strange action of the ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... information, but also, so to speak, the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past eighty years, through his reading of the Gazette Nationale of those stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages—speeches that still burned like uncooled lava—of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... bearing of about 110 degrees, and crossed it at a long grassy flat; in its bed native wurlies between where we first struck it and crossed it; bearing of 40 degrees, long deep reach of water, banks well defined; bearing of 40 degrees, at three-quarters of a mile, creek, recrossed same on a bed of lava, all rent, abundance of water; at five and a half miles further struck the Leichhardt, its bed vast sheets of stones—rocks and small stones opposite side, lower down—the water in its bed is about or upwards of ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... of Casey such a storm rolled in off the barren hills to the south. "She's a-wettin' up that red lake a-plenty," observed Casey, squinting through the dirty windshield. "No trail around, either, on account of the lava beds. But I guess I can pull acrost, all right." Doubt was in his voice, however, and he was half minded to turn back and take the straight road to Vegas, which had been his first objective. But he discarded ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... and fell in sun-broken showers that freshened and brightened her own spirit. Madeleine seldom wept, and when the tears came, they sprang up from the very depth of her true heart, in a hot, bitter current which was less like the bubbling of a fountain than the lava bursting from a volcano. It is ever thus with powerful, yet self-controlled natures, and Madeleine's equanimity in the midst of trials which would have prostrated others, was not a lack of keen, quick sensibility, but an evidence ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... excursion to Pompeii, passing through Portici, and over the last lava of Mount Vesuvius. I experienced a strange mixture of sensations, on surveying at once the mischiefs of the late eruption, in the ruin of villages, farms, and vineyards; and all around them the most luxuriant and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... which we traveled during the morning ran over an exceedingly rough lava formation—a spur of the lava beds often described during the Modoc war of 1873 so hard and flinty that Williamson's large command made little impression on its surface, leaving in fact, only indistinct traces of its ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... wild farrago, save that the strange meaningless phrases were fraught with dim, mysterious significance. She caught glimmerings of profounds inexpressible and unthinkable that hinted connotations lawless and terrible. The woman's speech was a lava rush, scorching and searing; and Saxon's cheeks, and forehead, and neck burned with a blush that continuously increased. She trembled with fear, suffered qualms of nausea, thought sometimes that she would faint, so madly ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... a great stretch of unlovely sage and lava rock and sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain ridges reached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it. The railroad gashed it boldly, after the manner of the iron trail of modern industry; but the trails of the desert dwellers ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Pike was beyond his years wary as well as enterprising, calm as well as ardent, quite as rich in patience as in promptitude and vigour. But Alec Bolt was a headlong youth, volatile, hot, and hasty, fit only to fish the Maelstrom, or a torrent of new lava. And the moment he had laid that wager he expected his crown piece; though time, as the lawyers phrase it, was "expressly of the ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... trees, all mellowed by the moonbeams, had no charms for him. He maintained a profound silence—but it was not the silence of peace or reflection. He endeavored to recall the scenes of the past day, but could not bring them back to his memory. Even the fiery tide of thought, which, like burning lava, seared his brain a few moments before, was ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... Italy, made by the best modern houses in that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and Pompeii, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trastaverini scarves, Genoese velvets and filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... class are more abundant about intrusive igneous rocks, that is about igneous rocks which have stopped and cooled before reaching the surface,—than in association with extrusive igneous rocks which have poured over the surface as lava flows—but the latter are by no means insignificant, including as they do such deposits as the Lake Superior copper ores, the Kennecott copper ores of Alaska, some of the gold-silver deposits of Goldfield and other Nevada ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... trees, immense beyond belief. There were broad, smooth pools of inky black fluid that was oily and troubled in spots as though disturbed by some moving things under the surface. There were bare, rocky patches where the stones, the long drippings of ancient lava flow, were spread like bleaching gray skeletons of monsters. And over all, rising from pools and bare ground and jungle alike, ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... drag him down by the coat-tails, but he shook him off, and went on. Then he stopped dead and walked out, and the noise dropped like a stone. The whole thing didn't last five minutes. It was fine, Mrs. More; like—like lava; he was the only cool person there. I wouldn't have missed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Such lava welters redhot in the bowels of this Mountain; unknown to the world and to itself! A mere commonplace Mountain hitherto; distinguished from the Plain chiefly by its superior barrenness, its baldness of look: at the utmost it may, to the most observant, perceptibly smoke. For as yet all lies so ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage. You have at present in England only one art of any consequence—that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance are not written for ever—not merely with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your great English vice—European ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... finite bonds confine the Infinite? Though man, by choice of ill, must needs offend, Need God do ill that good may come of it? Must havoc's mad typhoon perforce descend? May naught else serve to fan the stagnant air? Must captive flame earth's quaking surface rend, Or seek escape in lava flood? and ere Effete society new structure raise, Must dearth or pestilence the ground prepare? Thus is it that a parent's care purveys His bounty, and, exacting rigorously The price in tears, each boon's full cost defrays? Thus, with vain thrift withholding the decree, That from his ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... rivulet like the remains of the river that had once been. They drank from it and rested and had some food, then they started with light hearts, taking the easy ascent to the high ground, treading a moss dark and springy like the moss that covers the old lava ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... their base, and separated like blocks beneath the operation of wedges; a portion of the vault was carried up toward heaven, as if by rapid currents; the rose-colored and green fire of the sulphur, the black lava of the argillaceous liquefactions clashed and combated for an instant beneath a majestic dome of smoke; then, at first oscillated, then declined, then fell successively the long angles of rock which the violence of the explosion had not been able to uproot from their bed of ages; they ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... starting point of the marvellous underground journey imagined in this volume, is invested at the present time with. a painful interest in consequence of the disastrous eruptions last Easter Day, which covered with lava and ashes the poor and scanty vegetation upon which four thousand persons were partly dependent for the means of subsistence. For a long time to come the natives of that interesting island, who cleave to their desert home with all that amor patriae which ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... little hard to pronounce), once saw the wind-person at Haarfontein. Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky, cloud, fire, and so forth, are only the schein, or sensuous appearance, of things that, in essence, are men or animals. A good example is the bringing of Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the 'culture-hero' of Melanesia. At first it was always day, and people tired of it. Qat heard that Night was at the Torres Islands, and he set forth to get some. Qong (Night) received Qat well, blackened his eyebrows, showed ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... supra.] I will say nothing. The poor Kaiser could not enjoy it much. He was dying of gout and gravel, and could scarcely stand on his feet. Poor gentleman; and the French are driven dismally out of Linz; and the Austrians are spreading like a lava-flood or general conflagration over Baiern—Demon Mentzel, whom they call Colonel Mentzel, he (if we knew it) is in Munchen itself, just as we are getting crowned here! And unless King Friedrich, who is falling into Mahren, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
