"Lava" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Molokai I found that the slow work of centuries had nearly covered its lava with verdure. At dawn we were opposite Kalaupapa. Two little spired churches, looking precisely alike, caught my eye first, and around them were dotted the white cottages of the lepers. But the sea was too rough for us to land. The waves dashed ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... earthquake sleeps; Ye, who track the sulphurous tide, Or on hissing vapours ride,— 10 Spirits, come! From worlds of subterraneous night; From fiery realms of lurid light; From the ore's unfathomed bed; From the lava's whirlpools red,— Spirits, come! On Chili's foes rush with vindictive sway, And sweep them from the light of living day! Heard ye not the ravenous brood, That flap their wings, and scream for blood? 20 On ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... broke loose in the early part of Grant's second term, and, leaping from their lava-beds early in the morning, Shacknasty Jim and other unlaundried children of the forest raised merry future punishment, and the government, always kind, always loving and sweet toward the red brother, sent a peace commission with popcorn ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... possible attention to where you set your foot, past the unmelodious beggars, to the Ponte di Chiaia, bridge which spans the roadway and looks down upon its crowd and clamour as into a profound valley; thence proceed uphill on the lava paving, between fruit-shops and sausage-shops and wine-shops, always in an atmosphere of fried oil and roasted chestnuts and baked pine-cones; and presently turn left into a still narrower street, with tailors and boot-makers ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... jurisdiction. If we are not ready to exclaim with Burke, speaking of Revolutionary France, "It is but an empty space on the political map," we may at least adopt the response hurled back by Mirabeau, that this empty space is a volcano red with flames and overflowing with lava-floods. But whether we deal with it as "empty space" or as "volcano," the jurisdiction, civil and military, centres in Congress, to be employed for the happiness, welfare, and renown of the American people,—changing Slavery into Freedom, and present chaos into a Cosmos ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... easily befallen him with a mother so deeply honored! Around her spun all the boy's love desire and twined itself about her, and all that lava heated feeling belonging so peculiarly to the child alone. He had hung upon that idol the longing of his heart, the phantasies of a power of imagination lustfully excited, which is not indeed wanting in the best of children, although commonly these ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... the strong due to the weak. The costs of freedom would have been paid in the patient lifting up of a degraded race from the slough of servitude; and the nation would at the same time have avoided that slough of lava and fire wherein it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... forty to sixty men each. Such a company, starting at break of day, with ropes in hand, and walking two or three hours through the fern and underbrush loaded with the cold dew, made fast to their timber, and, addressing themselves to their sober toil for the rest of the day, dragged it over beds of lava, rocks, ravines, and rubbish, reaching the place of building ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... when imprison'd fires in central caves Burst the firm earth, and drank the headlong waves; And, as new airs with dread explosion swell, Form'd lava-isles, and continents of shell; Pil'd rocks on rocks, on mountains mountains raised, And high in heaven the first volcanoes blazed; In countless swarms an insect-myriad moves From sea-fan gardens, and from coral groves; Leaves the cold caverns of the deep, and creeps ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... face of the fact that even actors, speaking the 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 ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon ranges. These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Nature Island of the Caribbean" due to its spectacular, lush, and varied flora and fauna, which are protected by an extensive natural park system; the most mountainous of the Lesser Antilles, its volcanic peaks are cones of lava craters and include Boiling Lake, the second-largest, thermally active lake in ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... island. The traders and the Germans would appear in white ducks with white shoes smartly pipe-clayed, and white straw hats. The beachcombers would be in clean pyjama suits with bright-coloured neckties. Ordinarily these latter went about bare-headed, bare-legged and bare-bodied except for the lava-lava made of fibre from the paper mulberry tree and worn like a kilt about the hips; but now, in white men's garments, they sought to prove that they still were white men and civilised white men too. If the steamer were late, as very often happened, some of the visitors would take advantage ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... owing to unfavorable winds; and they observed along the banks many signs of early convulsions of nature. The earth of the bluffs was streaked with layers of coal, or carbonized wood, and large quantities of lava and pumice-stone were strewn around, showing traces of ancient volcanic action. The journal ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... imps or men as that field of rocks on the southeast corner of Jersey called, with a malicious irony, the Bane des Violets. The great rocks La Coniere, La Longy, Le Gros Etac, Le Teton, and the Petite Sambiere, rise up like volcanic monuments from a floor of lava and trailing vraic, which at half-tide makes the sea a tender mauve and violet. The passages of safety between these ranges of reef are but narrow at high tide; at half-tide, when the currents are changing most, the violet field becomes the floor of a vast mortuary ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thought, patches of dwarfish 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 Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... away out of danger, with a queer feeling about his heart, which was beating furiously. Mark had hoped to be able to make his way down the side of the crater to where his chum was and help him up. But a look at the steep sides and the uncertain footing afforded by the loose rocks of lava-like formation showed that ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... thy sweet cheek, while thy lips are With lava-kisses melting while they burn, Shower'd on his eyelids, brow and mouth ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Vesuvius and Aetna and breathed continually through the mouth of Stromboli. Sometimes these Plutonic ebullitions would come to the surface, making new islands rise up upon the waters like tumors of lava. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity with which sculptors endow the great ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... against a vile robber who had seized the fairest lamb of the sheepfold; but there was an intensely bitter, miserable feeling connected with it, that scorched and burned his higher aspirations like a stream of lava running ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... crystals of feldspar, they waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches, but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses made the vague ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... seemed to shut off whatever lay beyond the gaze of man, as though it veiled an ancient mystery. Indeed, the aspect of it thrilled me, I knew not why. I observed, however, that at one point in the mighty cliff there seemed to be a narrow cleft down which, no doubt, lava had flowed in a remote age, and it occurred to me that up this cleft ran a roadway, probably a continuation of that by which we had threaded the swamp. The fact that through my glasses I could see herds of cattle grazing on the slopes ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... itself, according to its requirements, unconsciously. Besides, his thoughts were less thoughts than mists. At the moment that the black flame of an irruption disgorges itself from depths full of boiling lava, has the crater any consciousness of the flocks which crop the grass at the foot of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... her. In answer to an 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 the earthly tenement. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... orchards and vineyards, and of which the middle was dry and barren. The eruption was accompanied by an earthquake, which destroyed several cities of Campania, particularly Pompeii and Herculaneum; while the lava, pouring down the mountain in torrents, overwhelmed, in various directions, the adjacent plains. The burning ashes were carried not only over the neighbouring country, but as far as the shores of Egypt, Libya, and even Syria. Amongst those to whom this dreadful ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... 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 ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human society which were so soon to find life in American Independence. It was from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there was a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of stillness that precedes the hurricane. It was indeed the eve of a momentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American Republic had risen, like ...
— Burke • John Morley
... five feet in depth, and scattered through the bluff at different elevations, some as high as eighty feet above the water: the hills along the river are broken, and present every appearance of having been burned at some former period; great quantities of pumicestone and lava or rather earth, which seems to have been boiled and then hardened by exposure, being seen in many parts of these hills where they are broken and washed down into gullies by the rain and melting snow. A great number of brants pass up the river: ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... marvellous region of lava beds, dikes and conic craters suddenly was passed, and the canal moved into the huge forest lands of the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... 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 ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... sound as 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
... themselves. One main tributary, a creek called Fletcher's Creek, takes its rise in a labyrinth of basaltic rocks, that for years defied the efforts of the whites to penetrate. This stream rising from its cradle in the dead lava, winds in and out of the encompassing stretches of rocks, until it emerges on the outer country, where it feeds and maintains two large lakes, ere it is lost in the sandy bed of one of the anabranches of the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep together. (And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing, among the palms and flowers. We would go over that path, he said, and we agreed, and we would see beautiful scenery, and strange native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... tried to cheat herself into the belief that the romantic warmth of a first attachment could not in any case be expected to last for many years—that in meeting indifference she was merely experiencing a common lot—that beneath his coolness there still lurked the old affection, as the lava will flow beneath the hardened crust—and that, if she were indeed losing the appearance of his love, it was merely because the claims of the court, the exigencies of the social world, or the demands of ambition had too ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... inexplicable provocations. It is like walking on a volcano. I have seen him two or three times draw himself up, bite his lip, and answer with an effort and a sharpness that shows how thin a crust covers the burning lava; but I acknowledge that he has been very civil and attentive, and speaks most properly of what he owes to you. I only hope he will not be hurt by the possession of so large a property so early in life, and I have an idea that our good aunt at Hollywell has done a good deal to raise ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fortified. Scott passed around Lake Chalco to the southwest, and thence moved west skirting the south shore. Santa Anna, intercepting the Americans, took up his headquarters at San Antonio, five miles from the city. His position was flanked on the west by broken lava, and on the east by marshy ground. The ground was as bad as could well be encountered. Santa Anna sent orders to General Valencia, who held a fortified hill in front of the Americans, to spike his guns, destroy his stores and retreat, but Valencia refused. Riley, occupying a hill ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... sea; the chicken stuffed with parsley which reminded him of the gardener, and the first gerkins with their poisonous flavour of verdigris which made such a jolly, crackling sound between his crunching teeth. The porter flowed through his veins like hot streams of lava; they drank champagne after the strawberries; a waitress brought the foaming drink which bubbled in the glasses like a fountain. They poured out a glass for her. And then they talked of ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... graphic account of the speakers and speeches at this meeting, but especially mentions Henry B. Stanton, who made the most powerful speech of the whole session, and was so severe on Congress, that a representative who was present arose to object to the "hot thunderbolts and burning lava" that had been let loose on the heads of "the powers that be, of those whom we were commanded to honor and obey." These remarks were so ridiculous as to excite laughter, and the manner in which ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... contained in the first volume of the Geological Society Transactions, may famish the inquisitive reader with a short summary of the principal appearances on which this opinion rests. "To my mind, the most interesting geological facts, are, 1. The intersection of the lava, by dikes at right angles with the strata.—2. The rapid dips which the strata make, particularly the overlaying of that of the Brazen Head to the eastward of Funchial, where the blue, grey, and red lavas are rolled up in one mass, as if they had slipped together ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... The great lava plain of Snake River, the Pedrigal country of eastern Oregon, Northern California and Mexico are without valuable ore deposits. The same may be said of the Pancake Range and other mountain chains of igneous rock in Nevada, while the adjacent ranges composed of sedimentary rocks are rich ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... 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 flowerless plants, such as sea-weeds, and in ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... hot to wear many clothes, yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted by a window, while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator, venturing into the ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... moving along. A single shell would form a perfect covering for a child. There are five distinct species found here, each inhabiting a different island. Chatham Island, the home of some, seems completely honeycombed with black truncated volcano cones that spring up everywhere, while masses of lava cover the ground, having been blown into weird and fantastic shapes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the work of our scientists, the toil of our farmers and our workmen in factory and shipyard, priceless as is the stream of young American manhood which we pour forth to stop the flood which flows like moulten lava across the green fields and peaceful hamlets of Europe toward the sea and turns to ashes and death all that it covers, these contributions have their deeper meaning in the American spirit. They are born of the love ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... week later I read in a newspaper that this man's house, which was known as Casa Bianca, together with his vineyards and his precious wine cellars, tunneled into the mountain side, had been obliterated by a stream of lava. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... obliged not to waste it, although we have a sufficiency; the tank is coated by a cement, formed of lime, obtained by the burning of the shells of fish. We make all our vessels that are submitted to the fire, of the same substance, mixed with pounded lava; it is burnt in the fire, and glazed ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... advantage what he learns from the Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a living rock:—where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like granite. ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... battle with some one else commanding. Had Canby been in other engagements afterwards, he would, I have no doubt, have advanced without any fear arising from a sense of the responsibility. He was afterwards killed in the lava beds of Southern Oregon, while in pursuit of the hostile Modoc Indians. His character was as pure as his talent and learning were great. His services were valuable during the war, but principally as a bureau officer. I have no idea that it was ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... 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; ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson
... fire was bursting from the mountain broken by the fall of Kokai. Whole villages were destroyed, rice-fields burnt up, river beds filled with the burning lava, and the homeless people were in great distress. So the Empress left the capital as soon as she had rewarded the victor Shikuyu, and journeyed with all speed to the scene of disaster. She found that both Heaven and earth had sustained damage, and the place was so dark that she ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... and we were suffering severely from thirst, nor indeed could we see any chance of relieving it till we reached the snow line far, far above us. After resting an hour or two, driven to it by our torturing thirst, we went on, toiling painfully in the burning heat up the lava slopes, for we found that the huge base of the mountain was composed entirely of lava beds belched from the bowels of the earth ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... suffer are after all but small in comparison to Holland. So I read that in Italy the people do build their towns on the slopes of Vesuvius, although history says that now and again the mountain bubbles out in irruption, and the lava destroys many villages, and even towns. In other countries there are earthquakes, but the people forget all about them until the shock comes, and the houses begin ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... march, that Lucretius is often wearisome and rough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of his poem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend to rhetoric. The scoriae, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, the jewels of his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood, that has the force to bear them all with equal ease—not altogether unlike that hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto in his picture of the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities and forests and men ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... peaks and whitened rocks stood out from the red background like blocks of marble on a cupola of burning brass, and resembled, amid the snows, the wonders of a volcano; the waters gushed from them like flames; the snow poured down like dazzling lava. ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... had just gone down behind a fleecy cloud-mountain and kindled a volcano, from whose silver-rimmed crater fiery rays of scarlet shot up, almost to the clear blue zenith; while here and there, through clefts and vapory gorges, the lurid lava light streamed down toward ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... jewel lay in earth Beneath a lava-buried city; The countless summers came and went, With neither ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... flirt with! Triplet had imagined this creature an incarnation of gayety, a sportive being, the daughter of smiles, the bride of mirth; needed but a look at her now to see that her heart was a volcano, her bosom a boiling gulf of fiery lava. She walked like some wild creature; she flung her hands up to heaven with a passionate despair, before which the feeble spirit of her companion shrank and cowered; and, with quivering lips and blazing eyes, she burst into a torrent ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... us at his leisure. I had read of people sleeping over volcanoes: our fate would have been quite as unpleasant, had we fallen into the water, as that of persons found napping at the moment a volcano commenced sending forth its streams of lava or showers ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... door into the passage way, and the door closed behind them. Idalia came out of her hiding-place—the bones of the widow——! She shook the mould off her cloak. She came near letting loose the hot lava of her passion. In the ring of the closed door hung the ring of the secret lock: the name that served as key was Hieronymus. She had only to put the iron pole across the door, shake up the rings, and then pound with her ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... Wetherill worked around to circle the huge amphitheater. The way was a steep slant, rough and loose and dragging. The rocks were as hard and jagged as lava, and cactus hindered progress. Soon the rosy and golden lights had faded. All the walls turned pale and steely ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... 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
... most excellent rules of art, fitting in such a manner as to make a durable piece of architecture. The stone itself, of which they are cut, is not of great hardness, being a blackish brown cavernous and brittle stony lava. The ground rose from the water side upwards; so that another wall, parallel to the first, about twelve yards from it, and facing the country, was not above two or three feet high. The whole area between the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... valley came a little wimpling 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 beds of Iceland. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... the lava formed by the great eruption in 1906. The whole of the railway line and ever so many houses were buried then. Don't you see bits of them peeping out ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... it has rent its dikes and burst its bed. The austere and glacial envelope of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of steep and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry scholar had never dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... distance discouraged him. With a single daring companion—a man who said he could find the way—he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... quite like him to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my nerves tingle as I recall the puppet ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... reached only by traversing miles of arid and rocky plains, exposed to the rays of a burning sun, vast extents of swamps and boggy pasture land, desolate wastes infested with serpents and scorpions, and a mountain range of blackish lava known as Khazu. It would have been folly to risk a march with the heavy Assyrian infantry in the face of such obstacles. Esarhaddon probably selected for the purpose a force composed of cavalry, chariots, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... novels. We could only decide that the plain, severe, many-storied houses with the shops underneath had charms inside to compensate for their outward lack. Not a tree anywhere, not a scrap of grass, only the lava pavement, and the view of the druggist's shop and the tourists' agency office. Miss Callis said she didn't see why man should be for ever bound up with the vegetable creation—it was like living in a perpetual salad—and was disposed to defend the Piazza di ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... ferment by moisture, and being thus expanded, at last produce eruptions and explosions. The mouth or chimney of a burning mountain is, in many instances, upwards of a mile across! from which, in an eruption, are emitted torrents of smoke and flame, rivers of lava, (consisting chiefly of bitumen and melted metal,) and clouds of cinders, stones, &c. to an immense distance. The wonderful quantity of these materials thrown out from the orifice almost exceeds belief; the lava rushes like a fiery torrent at a very rapid pace,—ravages ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... knew that the towering mass in front of us could be nothing else than a volcano, either dormant or extinct, for there was no sign of smoke rising from its summit, although the nature of the soil around us, consisting as it did of pumice stone, scoriae, and ancient lava, left no doubt as to the ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the snows of Lapland, or for having goitres amongst the Cretins of Le Vallais. Would you blame the ignorant nuns who, insensible of the danger of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius,[32] warmed themselves at the burning lava which flowed up to the windows of their cells? or would you think the French canoness an idiot who, at the age of fifty, was, on account of her health, to go out of her convent, and asked, when she met a cow for the first time, what strange animal that was? or would you think ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... seems to us as if we were waiting for somebody, as if the master were coming; and even the appearance of life which this abode offers makes us feel more sadly its eternal silence. It is with petrified lava that the greater part of these houses are built, which are now swallowed up by other lava. Thus ruins are heaped upon ruins, and tombs upon tombs. This history of the world, where the epochs are counted from ruin to ruin, this picture of human life, which is ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... six o'clock, and progress became easier now that we could see our way distinctly. The Cossacks seemed to grow lazier, halting as often as before and walking less briskly; in fact, they did not relish the exceeding roughness of the jagged lava ridges along whose tops or sides we toiled. I could willingly have lingered here myself; for in the hollows, wherever a little soil appeared, some interesting plants were growing, whose similarity to and difference from the Alpine species of Western ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... himself who deserved to bear the shame he would thrust on another. But 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 ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... on Landscape, says, "There are, I believe, four new experiences for which no description ever adequately prepares us, the first sight of the sea, the first journey in the desert, the sight of flowing molten lava, and a walk on a great glacier. We feel in each case that the strange thing is pure nature, as much nature as a familiar English moor, yet so extraordinary that we might be in another planet." But it would, I think, be easier to enumerate the Wonders of Nature for which description can prepare ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... mountains; some scoop out the valleys by water; others by ice; others heave up the mountains by fire; and some by the chemical expansion of their rocks; while others still upheave them by the pressure of molten lava from beneath; and others again make them out to be the wrinkles of the contraction of the supposed crust of the liquid interior. Of all these theories an able geologist says: "The many proposed theories of mountain elevation are based upon assumptions which ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... 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
... 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
... and sang loud. Victory was very near. Nevertheless, after a while the path grew steeper. He needed all his breath for climbing, and the singing died away. On the right and left rose huge rocks, devoid of lichen or moss, and in the lava-like earth chasms yawned. Here and there he saw a sheen of white bones. Now too the path began to grow less and less marked; then it became a mere trace, with a footmark here and there; then it ceased altogether. ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner
... with great attention to these words, broke into a murmur of approbation as the man finished speaking. The proud Castilian blood rushed like a stream of lava through their veins, and dyed their faces crimson. The manifestation became general. Young Alonza D'Ossuna openly asserted his opinion by putting on his plumed cap. His bold example was followed by the majority of the nobles, and their lofty nodding crests ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... Jago is very striking, yet simple: a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed of triturated recent shells and corals, which it has baked into a hard white rock. Since then the whole island has been upheaved. But the line of white rock revealed to me a new and important fact, namely, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... islands, when first raised above the sea, must have been active volcanoes, sending out hot from their craters the flood of lava and the heated rocks which now lie cold and hard, and overgrown with moss, to tell us of their ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... She pulled quickly on the reins, and the pony straightened. But instantly she felt its forelegs stiffen, felt it slide; the thought came to her that it must have slid on a flat rock or a treacherous stretch of lava. It struggled like a cat, to recover its balance, grunting and heaving with the effort, but went down, finally, sideways, throwing her ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... pentagons and hexagons. We cast a look at a spouter of circular shape, the Forja, and the Forno, a funnel-formed blowing-rock. The cliff is pierced with a multitude of caves, large and small, and their regular arches look as if the ejected matter, as happens with lava, had cooled and solidified above, while still flowing out in a fiery torrent below. Mostly, however, they are the work of wind ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... to the eye a beautiful chain of scenery. It has some very high mountains, particularly one called Diana's Peak, which is covered with wood to the very summit. There are other hills also, which bear a volcanic appearance, and some have huge rocks of lava, and a kind of half-vitrified flags. James Town is erected in a valley at the bottom of a bay, between two steep dreary mountains, and has from the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... near too, only that was no good, for the mater wouldn't let me go there, which was a most aggravating shame, and a terrible waste of opportunity, which I told her she would regret ever after. The crater was as jolly as could be, making no end of a smoke, and pouring out lava like a regular old smelting-furnace; but she said she wasn't going to bring me out to Italy to cure a cold, only to have me burnt up like one of those Johnnies they show you at Pompeii who were caught ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... "It's only a handful of lava," she explained, "that I picked up on Vesuvius. But Davy will like it because he thinks a volcano is such a wonderful thing. Here are some pebbles the boys will be interested in, because I found them on the field of Waterloo. They ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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, but a deserted city; more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... reaches its summer height or a sweet-grass wind blows soft or a cloudburst above the peaks strikes the southerly face of the range, winter unfrocks in a single night. A glacier of snow melts within twenty-four hours into a torrent of lava and bursts with incredible ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... (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 throw myself at the feet—" And ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... many conjectures respecting the discovery of fire. Probably the two real sources are of lightning that struck forest trees and set them on fire and the action of volcanoes in throwing out burning lava, which ignited combustible material. Either one or the other, and perhaps both, of these methods may have furnished man with fire. Others have suggested that the rubbing together of dead limbs of trees in the forests after they ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the shape of extra hard rock," replied the tunnel contractor. "Briefly, Paleozoic rocks make up the eastern part of the Andean Mountains in Peru, while the western range is formed of Mesozoic beds, volcanic ashes and lava of comparatively recent date. Near the coast the lower hills are composed of crystalline rocks, syenite and granite, with, here and there, a strata of sandstone or limestone. These are, undoubtedly, relics of the lower Cretaceous age, and we, or rather, my brother, states that he has ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... quickly past her, a dark lava stream of men and women, carried along by this song, which cleared every obstacle ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... suppose so. I'm scarcely an amateur of sermons. He's a volcano of sincerity, and never sends out ashes. It's all red-hot lava. Have you met ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of the climb I made my way again to the watercourse; it is here running steady and pretty full; strange these intermittencies—and just a little below the main stream is quite dry, and all the original brook has gone down some lava gallery of the mountain—and just a little further below, it begins picking up from the left hand in little boggy tributaries, and in the inside of a hundred yards has grown a brook again.[30] The general course of the brook was, I guess, S.E.; the valley still very deep ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken and frozen in its ice grave 200,000 years ago. The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the earth. The law of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the third and last effort to cast the great bell was to be made; and Ko-Ngai, together with her waiting-woman, accompanied her father to the foundry, and they took their places upon a platform overlooking the toiling of the moulders and the lava of liquefied metal. All the workmen wrought their tasks in silence; there was no sound heard but the muttering of the fires. And the muttering deepened into a roar like the roar of typhoons approaching, and the blood-red lake of metal slowly brightened like the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... unpromising. It is full of well-worn terms, 'sin,' 'death,' 'grace,' 'righteousness,' 'eternal life,' which suggest dry theology, if they suggest anything. When they welled up from the Apostle's glowing heart they were like a fiery lava-stream. But the stream has cooled, and, to a good many of us, they seem as barren and sterile as the long ago cast out coils of lava on the sides of a quiescent volcano. They are so well-worn and familiar to our ears that they create but vague conceptions in our minds, and they seem to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... snow ended. We thus came at last to land; but it was a land that seemed more terrible than even the bleak expanse of ice and snow that lay behind, for nothing could be seen except a vast and drear accumulation of lava-blocks of every imaginable shape, without a trace of vegetation—uninhabited, uninhabitable, and unpassable to man. But just where the ice ended and the rocks began there was a long, low reef, which projected for more than a quarter of a mile into ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... witnessed—the fire bursting every two minutes, and the noise with it like thunder: red-hot ashes came tumbling down continually where I stood sketching, many of which I brought away, and different pieces of the old lava which I hope to show you. The eruption took place a week or two after I left. But Pompeii exhibits now the most extraordinary remains of antiquity in the world; a whole city laid open to view; the habitations are unroofed, but, in other respects, are quite perfect. The house of Sallust, the Roman ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... they were touched by the revealing rod of Asmodeus. You were born to be my bride. Unite yourself with me, control my destiny, and my course shall be like the sun of yesterday; but reject me, reject me, and I devote all my energies to the infernal gods; I will pour my lava over the earth until all that remains of my fatal and exhausted nature is a black and barren ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... melting rocks. It seemed to be rising and falling beneath the successive blasts as if it were breathing; the things which were cast out reached a great height in the air; amid the jets of flame, torrents of lava were flowing down the side of the mountain; here creeping between steaming rocks, there falling in cascades amid the purple vapor: and lower down a thousand streams united in one large river, which ran boiling ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... is not simply a conflict between governments and nations for the attainment of certain political ends, Freedom and Nationality on the one side and Conquest and Tyranny on the other. It is also a great outburst of pent-up feeling, breaking like lava through the thin crust of European civilisation. On the political side, as we have said just now, the war reveals the fact that civilisation is still incomplete and ill-organised. But on the moral side it reveals the fact that modern society has broken down, that the forces and passions ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... search, the whole that we found was only nine gallons, in the course of the day. We advanced within two miles of the foot of the highest mountain in the island, on which is the volcano that is almost constantly burning. The country near it is all covered with lava, and has a most dreary appearance. As we had not been fortunate in our discoveries, and saw but little to alleviate our distresses, we filled our cocoa-nut shells with the water we found, and returned exceedingly fatigued and faint. When I ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... is of limestone pushed up through the tertiary crust by volcanic forces, but the long ridges which run off to the northwest are of lava, while the shorter and wider ones extending toward the southwest are of tufa. These ridges are from three to seven miles in length. It is shown either by remains of roads and foundations or (in three ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... the mighty glacier, creeping on like Time, silently, yet ceaselessly; the deep and picturesque fiord pent up between precipices, huge, bleak, and barren; the iceberg! alone a miracle; then the great central desert of black lava and glittering ice, gloomy and unknown but to the fleet rein-deer, who seeks for shelter in a region at whose horrors the hardy natives tremble; and last, but not least, the ruins of the Scandinavian inhabitants, and the present fast disappearing race of "the Innuit," or Esquimaux. ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... Like lava from a crater they poured over the slope above me; and above them, seeming prodigiously big against the weird sky, went the sheepman with his staff in his hand and a war-bag over his arm, while at his heels a wise collie followed. It was a picture done by chance very much as ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt |
