"Cliff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "You're a wise young fellow, you are. Go in for the real thing and don't bother with imitations. What's the use of jumping off a cliff made of pasteboard when you've got real roofs to climb over? What's the use of doing stunts in a studio when you can go on a bee-line hike across the country? You're a wise young fellow, you are. You stick to the boy scouts; ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... looked from Monfalcone across the dreamy blue of the empty gulf between, the town lay like a stone image, lifeless except for the white smoke curling gently from a single tall chimney into the quiet evening air. Much nearer along the coast was the Castle of Duina standing on an abrupt cliff. It belongs to the Grand Duchess of Thurn and Taxis, who used to gather parties of poets, painters, and writers there to stay in what was like a legendary palace looking down from its high headland upon the sunlit, sail-flecked Adriatic, stretching ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... remote, 'where one can live unscourged by Kingsley's "wind of God".' 'The island', he writes, 'is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the call of the vinedressers: one lies on the cliff and hears, a thousand feet below, the dreary wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the hillside smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass by.' No greater contrast could be found ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... up over the hill to a high cliff overhanging the river which makes a sounding board for those sounds, which never abate, of a distant battle across ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... circle in the largest room of the cottage. Here their eyes instantly became glued to a great bowl which was piled high with small rose-tinted cubes of some substance which resembled symmetrical and translucent crystals of pink quartz. That was Chaosite enough to blow the entire cliff into smithereens; and they were aware of it, and they eyed it ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a bit of the cliff, most likely," said Dick, "in fact it is almost bound to be if there is ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... through the shiny water—sank like stones—and for the first time since he had known them began to swim quickly. Kotick followed, and the pace astonished him, for he never dreamed that Sea Cow was anything of a swimmer. They headed for a cliff by the shore—a cliff that ran down into deep water, and plunged into a dark hole at the foot of it, twenty fathoms under the sea. It was a long, long swim, and Kotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... gold-mine, Micklebrown had an object in view. He hoped to discover a topaz in Cocklesea. We knew the reason for this optimism. We had been shown the lizard-brooch, a dazzling thing of gold and precious stones, which Micklebrown had picked up last Bank Holiday on the cliff at Cocklesea and presented to his fiancee, Miss Twitter, after inquiry at the police-station had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... night, and none was allowed on deck except the helmsman and two or three old hands till morning; but when I was ashore and on duty at the lookout I noticed three trees growing together just at the edge of the cliff at the point where it was highest, two miles away from the entrance to the cove. They were a big un and two little uns, and I feel sure if I were to see them again I ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number of chambers. He fills each ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... you know what Coppinger is. He thought he'd come upon traces of an old Guanche university, or sacred college, or something of that kind, like the one there is on the other side of the island, and he wouldn't be satisfied till he'd ransacked every cave in the whole face of the cliff. He'd plenty of stuff left for the flashlight thing, and twenty-eight more films in his kodak, and said we might as well get through with the job then as make a return journey all on purpose. So he took ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... once more, and they steadily lowered themselves from tuft to tuft, and from stone to stone, with more confidence, till they were about thirty feet from the foot, when farther progress became impossible, for, in place of being perpendicular, the cliff face sloped inward for some distance before ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... that we were as comfortable as possible, and on such a trip there could be no pleasanter or more interesting companion than John Burroughs—"Oom John," as we soon grew to call him. Where our tents were pitched the bottom of the valley was narrow, the mountains rising steep and cliff-broken on either side. There were quite a number of black-tail in the valley, which were tame and unsuspicious, although not nearly as much so as those in the immediate neighborhood of the Mammoth Hot Springs. One mid-afternoon three of them swam ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... water. On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had something fearful,—one would say the cliff was bleeding;—perhaps she did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen object.—And on the very next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and now, as he reached the foot of the cliff, the Princess Lora saw that he was handsome, for his visor was up, and even from that height she could see that his eyes were dark, and fine. He had seen her portrait that a great artist had painted, and he had vowed that he ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... forbidden my rabbits to be killed until my return; and the keeper was ordered simply to walk Wolfe to exercise on the farm. There was a large stone quarry in the vicinity, where there were a good many rabbits, some parts of which were so steep, that though you might look over the cliff, and shoot a rabbit below, neither man nor dog could pick him up without going a considerable way round. On approaching the edge of the quarry to look over for a rabbit, I was surprised at missing Wolfe, who invariably stole off in another direction, but ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... my first view of that beautiful sheet of water was from a projecting cliff 1000 feet above its surface, and it embraced not only the entire outline of the Lake with its charming bays and rocky headlands but also the magnificent forests of giant pines and firs in which it was embosomed, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... another may be enveloped in shadow. That which appears to be its summit may be only a portion of its outer edge, while that which seems to be its lower bed may really be a portion of its further border. A spectator, on the summit of a tall cliff, may observe what he takes to be a single cloud; while a second spectator, on lower ground, will perceive that there are two clouds. The motions of clouds are so deceptive, that they often seem to be moving in a curve over the ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... unexpected summons, no impertinent intrusion to disconcert their measures, my heroine was most unnaturally able to fulfil her engagement, though it was made with the hero himself. They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... thou, hieing lief, Awhile to leave th' Aonian cave, Where 'neath the rocky Thespian cliff Nymph Aganippe loves to lave In cooly waves ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... walks—at the reason of which luxury of freedom I have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and low-browed and brightly-daubed ruelles of the fishing-town and either across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this latter the site of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could ask for. Or I was as free for the haute ville ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... narrow valley between two hills, bucking and twisting as Don worked the control back and forth. As a high cliff loomed up in front of them, he pulled the flier up, then around in a screaming turn. A second later, they almost touched the tips of trees as they swung around the shoulder of a steep hill. The flier dropped abruptly, seeking the floor of a gorge, then swung violently as it followed a ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... that a great change had silently taken place. The mist continued to veil the sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the rising curtain of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their bases, revealing a great part of the sea and shore, and half of a cliff on the opposite side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep red, was now smitten by the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over the waters a splendour of carmine. As we gazed, the vaporous curtain sank upon ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... station at its foot, and several inns, and a tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England. Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... passed through the dry Bab ("sea gap"), cut by a torrent in the regular line of the coralline cliff, the opening of the Wady Mellah, off which lay our Sambuk. Marching up the Wady Maka'dah, our experienced eyes detected many small outcrops of quartz, formerly unobserved, in the sole and on the banks. The granite hills, here as throughout Midian, were veined and dyked with two different ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... me a life of dull monotony, with days devoted to watching the ocean, and sleepless nights of anxiety and despair. I had built a beacon upon the highest part of the cliff above our cave, to be fired in case of sighting a ship, and every morning, with the dawn, I mounted to this look-out to scan the horizon. Here I remained all day, and when darkness drove me to the shelter of the cave I tried to persuade myself that each night in this ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... money were spent to give this isolated cliff its present appearance, covered as it is with beautiful buildings, hotels, and villas, besides the magnificent Casino building, which was erected in 1862. Directly facing the sea, there is a succession of most beautiful gardens ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... form was exceedingly agreeable and beautiful to look at. Its hump shone with great beauty and seemed to occupy the whole of its shoulder-joint. And it looked like the summit of a mountain of snow or like a cliff of white clouds in the sky. Upon the back of that animal I beheld seated the illustrious Mahadeva with his spouse Uma. Verily, Mahadeva shone like the lord of stars while he is at his full. The fire born of his energy resembled in effulgence the lightening that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Blight, the author of one of the most useful little guide-books of Cornwall, "A Week at the Land's End," states that some eight or ten years ago the ruins of the ancient Chapel of St. Eloy, in St. Burian, were thrown over the cliff by the tenant of the estate, without the knowledge or permission of the owner of the property. Chun Castle, he says, one of the finest examples of early military architecture in this kingdom, has for many years been resorted to as a sort of quarry. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 147 (a.u. 607)] While Scipio was en route to Libya, Mancinus was sailing along the coast of Carthage. He noticed a point called Megalia which was inside the city wall and was located on a cliff having a sheer descent into the sea. This point was a long distance away from the rest of the town and had but few guards because of the natural strength of its position. Suddenly Mancinus applied ladders to it from the ships and ascended. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... danced jigs, on a flat rock by the riverside, as Samson played The Irish Washerman and The Fisher's Hornpipe. In the midst of the fun a puff of wind snatched the tall beaver hat from his head and whirled it over the side of the cliff into the foliage of a clump of cedars growing out of the steep cliff-side, ten feet or so below its top. Before any one could stop him the brave Irish lad had scrambled down the steep to the cedars—a place ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... only the merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff—town and cliff and the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place, seemingly; ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... extremity of the island, towards which I was steering, we found that it terminated in an almost perpendicular cliff of some fifty or sixty feet in height, constituting the northern part of the base of a high hill, rising almost to the dignity of a mountain, which was thickly-wooded almost to its summit, and to the very verge of the ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... journey, for we said we could stop at a village inn when the time came and get something warm. That was a good idea, only there were no villages. There was not even a country store in that lost land of forest and hill and rocky cliff and desolate open field. Now and then we came to a house, but so dead and forbidding was its aspect that we did not dare even to ask our way. Never a soul appeared in the door-yard, and if smoke came from the chimney it was ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... together, but with large patches consisting of one form alone. At first I thought that the two were nearly equal in number; but on examining every plant which grew close to the edge of a little overhanging dry cliff, about 200 yards in length, I found only 12 females; all the rest, some hundreds in number, being hermaphrodites. Again, on an extensive gently sloping bank, which was so thickly covered with this plant that, viewed from the distance of half a mile it appeared of a pink ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... To attack Forges Wood it would be necessary to advance over an open space entirely bare of any natural protection. On the right of the French positions the Germans occupied a strong post on a sort of island that overlooked the Woevre plain and having on one side a steep cliff. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... low-lying sand marshes and line of small hills, we noticed tiny black wind-mills spreading out their arms to the breeze, and wreaths of smoke curling up from the cliffs. Here and there the lowering sun would light up a window pane in the cliff, as if to remind us that these hillsides are burrowed out by the workers in the vineyards who make their homes here as in Touraine and ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... seemed to be weighing something in her mind. I had a fancy that when she spoke again it would be without that deliberation—almost restraint—which seemed to accord a little strangely with the girlishness of her appearance and actual years. She stood on the extreme edge of the cliff, her slim straight figure outlined to angularity against the sky. She remained so long without speech that I had time to note all these things. The sunshine, breaking through the thin-topped pine trees, lay everywhere about us; a little brown feathered ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "I was consulted by a sausage-king named Breitkopf, who wanted to sink an elevator-shaft from the top to the bottom of this very cliff, so he could reach his hundred-thousand-dollar launch in ease. Breitkopf didn't like my price; he insulted me in several rather unpleasant ways. The cliff is still here, I see. So am I. But ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... passing under frowning walls of cliff, and the murmur of the surf thundering about the caverns and buttresses of that rock-bound coast almost drowned the throb of the engines beneath their feet. Far out to seaward a formation of Mine-sweeping Sloops crept away to the west. Close inshore, where the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Saturday, and after dinner Martin proposed that we should walk to the head of the cliff to see Blackwater by night, which was a wonderful spectacle, people said, at the height of the season, so I put a silk wrap over my head ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Champollion deciphering the Rosetta Stone, or Rawlinson copying the cuneiform inscription on the cliff of Behistun, was ever faced by a more fascinating problem than that which confronts the solar physicist engaged in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic lines of sun-spot spectra. The colossal whirling storms ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... she threw her arms upward and outward to relieve their weariness, and then went to the open door. The tide was coming in, but the children were still paddling in the salt pools and on the cold bladder rack, and she stepped forward to the edge of the cliff, and threw them some wild geranium and ragwort. Then she stood motionless in the bright sunlight, looking down the shingle towards the pier and the little tavern, from which came, in drowsy tones, the rough ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... me the peaks of the Caucasus lie, My gaze from the snow-bordered cliff I am bending; From her sun-lighted eyry the Eagle ascending Floats movelessly on in a line with mine eye. I see the young torrent's first leap towards the ocean, And the cliff-cradled lawine essay its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... no room for them to fight there, and I had another plan. I sent some seven thousand men round the mountains, of which the secret paths were well known to them, bidding them climb to the crest of the precipices that bordered either side of the gorge, and there, at certain places where the cliff is sheer and more than one thousand feet in height, to make a great provision ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... easily be recognized by their brownish throat and breast, whitish forehead and buffy rump. They build one of the most peculiar of nests, the highest type being a flask shaped structure of mud securely cemented to the face of a cliff or under the eaves of a building, the entrance being drawn out and small, while the outside of the nest proper is large ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... lamenting. "For on the one side lay Scylla and on the other mighty Charybdis sucking down the salt sea water. Like a cauldron on a great fire she would seethe up through all her troubled deeps, and overhead the spray fell on the top of either cliff—the rock around roared horribly, and pale fear gat hold on my men. Toward her, then, we looked, fearing destruction; but Scylla meanwhile caught from out my hollow ships six of my company. They cried aloud in their agony, and there she devoured them shrieking ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... I looked eagerly down. The cliff fell away at an impossible angle, but sheer below ran out a narrow bench fifty yards wide. Around the point of the hill to my right-where the herd had gone-a game trail dropped steeply to this bench. I arrived just in time to see the sing-sing, still trotting, file ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... kettle and dishes were once more stowed away in the boat, and Valentine proposed climbing the cliff. ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... that done, the canoe is lifted out very gently, for a single blow against this hard granite boulder would shiver and splinter the frail birch-bark covering; they raise her very carefully up the steep face of the cliff and rest again on the top. What a view there is from this coigne of vantage! We are on the lip of the fall, on each side it makes its plunge, and below we mark at leisure the torrent we have just braved; above, it is smooth water, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, who had been drowned by falling overboard while asleep, but who before that had presumably done his duty, did not seem especially happy; while the harsh, resentful disposition evidently remained unsoftened, for Dido became like a cliff of Marpesian marble when AEneas asked to be forgiven, though he had doubtless considered himself in duty bound to leave her, having been twice commanded to do so by Mercury, the messenger of Jove. She, like the rest, seems to have had no occupation, while the consciences ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... to wreck! (The storm increases; she breaks forth wildly.) They come! I have bewitched them hither! No, no! I will not go with you! I will not ride without Sigurd! It avails not—they see me; they laugh and beckon to me; they spur their horses! (Rushes out to the edge of the cliff at the back.) They are upon me;—and no shelter no hiding- place! Ay, mayhap at ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... of the beach the Turks posted guns and enfiladed the Narrows beach. Thus the troops, as they landed, had to make their way through a rain of shrapnel, machine gun and rifle fire that wiped out hundreds. Despite the success of the Australian Brigades in clearing the beach and the face of the cliff, the Turkish fire ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... a quadruped, not yet furnished with wings, were suddenly inspired with the instinct of a bird, and precipitated itself from a cliff, would not the descent be hazardously rapid?" Doubtless the animal would be no better supported than the objection. But Darwin makes very little indeed of voluntary efforts as a cause of change, and even poor Lamarck need not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... work is hard, but our women often do it, and it is magnificent to see Dionea, in her short white skirt and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime with her beautiful strong arms; or, an empty sack drawn over her head and shoulders, walking majestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings with her load of bricks.... I am, however, very anxious to get Dionea out of the neighborhood, because I cannot help dreading the annoyances to which her reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even some explosion of rage if ever she should lose the indifferent contempt ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... a bowshot of the harbour, and a jutting cliff of marble, more graceful from a contiguous bed of myrtles, invited them to rest, and watch ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... from rock to rock, and over the sand by the sea, to a secluded nook under a cliff. Then, seated around a stone table, we began our conversation, while the ocean, like an importunate beggar, surfed and foamed away, filling up the intervals with its mighty roaring language, which poets ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... wood, bursting a way through a tangle of brush, plunging ever deeper into the wild until they came to a place where great rocks and boulders jutted up amid the green and the trees grew scant. Day was breaking, and before them in the pale light rose a steep cliff, whose jagged outline clothed here and there with brush and vines loomed up before ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... cliff of rocks was rough, and, when hoisted up, Hans and Fred were enabled to grasp at several cracks and projections. They laid hold vigorously and soon pulled themselves out of ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... next morning there was a consultation. Lovelle had not appeared and hunting was impossible on two shoots of powder. It was arranged that two of them should keep camp that day by the limestone cliff while Daniel Boone went in search of the missing man, for it was possible that Jim Lovelle had gone to seek ammunition from friendly Indians. If he did not turn up or if he returned without powder, there would be nothing for it but ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... O king, cased his body with armour made of gold, and put on a beautiful head-gear adorned with pure gold. Clad in bright armour of gold, he put on that head-gear. Indeed, O king, thy son then looked resplendent like a golden cliff. Clad in mail, armed with mace, and accoutred with other equipments, thy son Duryodhana then, O king, standing on the field of battle, addressed all the Pandavas, saying, "Amongst you (five) brothers, let any one fight me, armed with mace! As regards myself, I am willing to fight either Sahadeva, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the solid rock. A ray of glory flashed across its surface. The pilgrims looked whence it should proceed, but closed their eyes with a thrill of awful admiration, to exclude the fervid splendor that glowed from the brow of a cliff impending over the enchanted lake. For the simple pair had reached that lake of mystery, and found the long-sought shrine of ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vessel we were honoured with a general huzza, or in the English phrase with three cheers, echoed from the German sailors of our ship. This nautical style of bidding their friends farewell our Germans have learned from the English. The cliff where we landed was white and chalky, and as the distance was not great, nor other means of conveyance at hand, we resolved to go on foot to Dartford: immediately on landing we had a pretty steep hill to climb, and that gained, ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... pleasant rooms here, and established ourselves for the night. From this point we have a view of the beautiful lake, and of Skiddaw at the head of it. The cascade is within three or four minutes' walk, through the garden gate, towards the cliff, at the base of which the inn stands. The visitor would need no other guide than its own voice, which is said to be audible sometimes at the distance of four miles. As we were coming from Keswick, we caught glimpses of its white foam high up the precipice; and it is only glimpses ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... practice it before they fell into the hands of Justice, I am not able to say, but from several circumstances it seems probable that there was no long time intervening; for Price, in company with Sparks and James Cliff, attempted the house of the Duke of Leeds, and thrusting up the sash-window James Cliff was put into the parlour and handed out some things to Price and Sparks. But it seems they were seen by Mr. Best, and upon their being apprehended, Cliff confessed the whole affair, owned that it was ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... occur in Kansas are along Shoal Creek, Cherokee County. The brush mouse is found on low bluffs that are parts of higher systems, but in Cherokee County the mouse was not obtained from low bluffs separated by even a few miles from the cliff-system along Shoal Creek. As implied above the brush mouse is adapted for a scansorial mode of life; but other mice and rats inhabit the rocky crevices of low bluffs. Whereas the brush mouse is well adapted for living ...
— Natural History of the Brush Mouse (Peromyscus boylii) in Kansas With Description of a New Subspecies • Charles A. Long
... attitude, in his description of a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, which he calls "one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... love to all the spots where we had first seen each other, then met and walked; where we had sat, and talked, and loved, during the long and heavenly intercourse between ourselves and lonely Nature. We began by the lovely hill of Tresserves which rises like a verdant cliff between the valley of Aix and the lake; its sides, that rise almost perpendicularly from the water's edge, are covered with chestnut-trees, rivalling those of Sicily, through their branches, which overhang the water, one sees snatches ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... considerable difficulty to set up a line of telegraph over that portion of this road which passes through the great canon, as in many places the road has a perpendicular wall of rock upon one side and a perpendicular precipice on the other, and in one place is carried around the face of a cliff in this manner, at an elevation of some two thousand feet, directly over the river, being in some places blasted out of the solid rock, and in others supported by a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... hummocks, to Nancepean beach which extended northward in a wide curve until it disappeared two miles away in the wooded heights above the Rose Pool. The metalled coast road continued past the Hanover Inn, an isolated house standing at the head of a small cove, to make the long ascent of Pendhu Cliff three hundred and fifty feet high, from the brow of which it descended between banks of fern past St. Tugdual's Church to the sands of Church Cove, whence it emerged to climb in a steep zigzag the next headland, beyond which it turned inland again to Lanyon and rejoined ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... THAN ONE-HALF of the island,' you say, 'is devoted to the lepers.' Molokai—'Molokai ahina,' the 'grey,' lofty, and most desolate island—along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to west, the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... became silent, on seeing how correct the admiral's judgment had been; and the rest of the journey, as far as the little port of Wimereux, was made without hindrance from him. Arriving there, he climbed upon the cliff to encourage the cannoneers, spoke to all of them, patted them on the shoulder, and urged them to aim well. "Courage, my friends," said he, "remember you are not fighting fellows who will hold out a long time. Drive them back with the honors of war." And noticing the fine resistance ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... ye! read an immense account of it in the Penny Magazine ever so long ago; but whether it is famous for a breakwater, or a harbour, or a cliff, or some dock-yard machinery, I can't recollect; perhaps it's all of them together; we shall find out soon; for travelling, as Mrs M. says, enlarges the mind, and expands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Cliff and castle quiver grayly From the mirror of the Rhine Where my little boat swims gaily; Round her ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... way down, the track, which trended at first to the left, bent abruptly away to the right, from the edge of a low cliff of rock; and at this corner the men on the drag-ropes must also fling themselves sharply to the right to check the wheels on the verge of the fall. They did so, cleverly enough: but almost on the instant were jerked out of their footholds like puppets. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the Ganges there is a cliff called Vulture-Crag, and thereupon grew a great fig-tree. It was hollow, and within its shelter lived an old Vulture, named Grey-pate, whose hard fortune it was to have lost both eyes and talons. The birds that roosted ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... spot on the cliff, where a stream fell in a cataract on to the sand, and there was a rustic seat with a lovely view of the bay. Beth dropped on to the seat out of breath and looked curiously about her. The tide was high. The water, smooth, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... his rifle suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... upper gallery of this house upon the cliff, and watch the rising moon fling her golden bridge from the far horizon's edge, until it seems to rest upon the beach below, is a sight which would be worth something in a poet or a ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the schooner vanished, and its place was supplied by a remarkable white cliff, which from the extraordinary optical delusion it occasions gives its name to the noble port which is now called Ship Harbour. I have since mentioned this subject to a number of mariners, and have never yet heard of a person who was not deceived in a similar manner. As we passed through ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... death. Athos had seated himself with his son, upon the moss, among the brambles of the promontory. Around their heads passed and repassed large bats, carried along by the fearful whirl of their blind chase. The feet of Raoul were over the edge of the cliff, bathed in that void which is peopled by vertigo, and provokes to self-annihilation. When the moon had risen to its fullest height, caressing with light the neighboring peaks, when the watery mirror was illumined in its ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... been prowling in the bottom of the ravine, had been disturbed by the fall of the body of the savage near him, and started hastily to return to its abode, which lay high up on the face of the cliff. Malchus and his companion hurried forward to the spot where it had crossed the path. The way was plain enough; there were scratches on the rock, and the bushes growing in the crevices were beaten down. The path had evidently been frequently used ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-billed auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... tribe that had given them the peace-pipe. Farther on, the Mississippi made one of its many bends, carrying them awhile directly eastward, and below great rocks like castles. As the canoes ran along the foot of this east shore, some of the voyageurs cried out. For on the face of the cliff far up were two painted monsters in glaring red, green, and black; each as large as a calf, with deer horns, blood-colored eyes, tiger beard, a human face, and a body covered with scales. Coiled twice around the middle, over ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... deeds, of Hrothgr's sorrow, and the sore distress of the Danes, and having sought out fifteen warriors, he entered into a new-pitched ship to seek the war-king across the sea. Bird-like the vessel's swan-necked prow breasted the white sea-foam till the warriors reached the windy walls of cliff and the steep mountains of the Danish shores. They thanked God because the wave-ways had been easy to them; then, sea-wearied, lashed their wide-bosomed ship to an anchorage, donned their war-weeds, ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... day they travelled on, and at night they camped in a hollow among the rocks at the foot of a tall cliff. Jack was not ill-treated, and plenty of food was given to him, but the keenest watch was kept upon his every movement, and escape was a thing altogether beyond his reach. His captors were six in number, including the man who drove the elephant. The driver and Saya Chone were Jack's ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... talk, which seemed to play like lightning round a cliff at midnight, revealing not only measureless heights and soundless depths, but the greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of a picnic, the listener had an intuition that Heine's mind did indeed, as he claimed, reflect or rather refract the All. Only not sublimely blurred ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in the night and the temperature at four next morning was 40 degrees: embarking at that hour we glided quickly down the stream and by seven arrived at the Hook's encampment which was placed on the summit of a lofty sand cliff whose base was washed by the river. This chief had with him only three hunters and a few old men and their families, the rest of the band having remained at their snares in Bear Lake. His brother Long-legs and our guide Keskarrah, who had joined him ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the pack had taken after a doe that had crossed the scent, and they were now running in a different direction. I now imagined that the elk had gone down the ravine to the lower plains by some run that might exist along the edge of the cliff, and accordingly I started off along a deer-path through the jungle, to arrive at the lower plains by the shortest road that I ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... though he had leaped over the bleeding night-mists. Darkness and all night's adherents were annihilated. Pelicans and geese and curlews were in uproar, as at a concerted signal. A buzzard yelped thrice like a dog, and rose in a long spiral from the cliff to Melicent's right hand. He hung motionless, a speck in the clear zenith, uncannily ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets, and ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... 1900, while surveying in Wyoming, my party saw two wolves chase a two-year-old colt over a cliff some fifteen or sixteen feet high. I was on the spot with two others immediately after the incident occurred. The only injuries to the colt, aside from a broken leg, were deep lacerations made by wolf fangs in the chest behind the foreshoulder. In addition to ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... sea below and the light summer wind among the inland trees. They were looking into a combe half full of old, high furze in gay bloom that ran up to a fringe of brambles and a dense wood of mixed timber and hollies. It was as though one-half the combe were filled with golden fire to the cliff's edge. The side nearest to them was open grass, and fairly bristled ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... which although a large one, bore no comparison to that fiery mass. It is evident that this tale of Daimachus can only find credit with indulgent readers: but if it be true, it signally confutes those who argue that the stone was wrenched by the force of a whirlwind from some high cliff, carried up high into the air, and then let fall whenever the violence of the tempest abated. Unless, indeed, that which was seen for so many days was really fire, which, when quenched, produced such a violent ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Barranca: The dictionary definition is a ravine or gulch, but it also means a high bluff or cliff and in that sense is ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... below Abingdon may have been at Appleford, but was more likely between the high cliff at Clifton-Hampden and the high and dry spit of Long Wittenham. Below this again for miles there was no easy ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... as with face red with British blood he waves his sword and shouts to his legions. Now you may see him fighting in that cannon's glare, and the next moment he is away off yonder, leading the forlorn hope up that steep cliff. Is it not a magnificent sight, to see that strange soldier and that noble black horse dashing, like a meteor, down the long columns ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... comfortable. The igloo was a permanent one. Erected at the base of a cliff, covered over with walrus skin, lined with deer skin, and floored with planks hewn from driftwood logs, it was perfect for a dwelling of its kind. It stood in a hunting village on the Siberian shore of Behring ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... apparently, moreover, of immense altitude. Laurence Stanninghame, who was well acquainted with the Alps, now gazed in wonder and admiration upon these snow-capped Titans whose white heads seemed to support the blue vault of heaven itself, to such dizzy heights did they soar. Walls of black cliff, overhung with cornices even as with gigantic white eyebrows, towered up from dazzling snow slope, and higher still riven crags, split into all fantastic shapes, frowned forth as though to menace the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... his anxiety to catch every word that was uttered, had drawn his body close up to the edge of the cliff, his head and shoulders hanging ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... planted himself on it, had scarcely a moment to congratulate himself, on seeing, amid a wild chaos of cliffs and woods, the gloomy ruins of Geierstein, with smoke arising, and indicating something like a human habitation beside them, when, to his extreme terror, he felt the huge cliff on which he stood tremble, stoop slowly forward, and gradually sink from its position. Projecting as it was, and shaken as its equilibrium had been by the recent earthquake, it lay now so insecurely poised, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington lower road and the 'rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, overhanging shale cliff. Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... opened communications between Lorraine and upper Alsatia. This position had been one of some importance in the Middle Ages, at the time when the Vosges were beset with partisans from the two countries, always ready to renew border hostilities, the everlasting plague of all frontiers. Upon a cliff overlooking the village were situated the ruins which had given the village its name; it owed it to the birds of prey [falcons, in French: 'faucons'], the habitual guests of the perpendicular rocks. To render proper justice to whom it belongs, we should add that the proprietors ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of June 1625 was a significant day for the colony of New France. On that morning a blunt-prowed, high-pooped vessel cast anchor before the little trading village that clustered about the base of the great cliff at Quebec. It was a ship belonging to the Caens, and it came laden to the hatches with supplies for the colonists and goods for trade with the Indians. But, what was more important, it had as passengers the Jesuits who had been ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... arrival, an Indian had, by making a long journey around the cliff, gained the shelf of rock where Pedro was stationed, and been caught unawares and thrown down into the valley. It was the cry and the fall of this foe ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... others down, it would have been quite impossible for the solitary man on the ice to have withstood the strain. When the first man reached solid ice again there was another equally dangerous minute or two, for then all three behind him were on the snow slope. The beetling cliff, where the trail turned at right angles, was the acutely dangerous spot. With heavy and bulky packs it was exceedingly difficult to squeeze past this projection. Ice gives no such entrance to the point of the axe as hard snow does, yet the only aid in steadying the climber, ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... the old crater of Somma: Monte Nuovo, a mountain west of Naples; Somma, a mountain north of Vesuvius which with its lofty, semicircular cliff encircles the active ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... wigwam's cheering ray, Then, aloft through freezing air, With the snow-bird soft and fair As the fleece that heaven flings O'er his little pearly wings, Light above the rocks I play, Where Niagara's starry spray, Frozen on the cliff, appears Like a giant's starting tears. There, amid the island-sedge, Just upon the cataract's edge, Where the foot of living man Never trod since time began, Lone I sit, at close of day, While, beneath the golden ray, Icy columns gleam below, Feathered round with falling snow, And an arch ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the remainder of the Portuguese troops; and the Baharnagash with his officers secured the flanks. In eight days, the army came to the mountain of Gane of most difficult ascent, on the top of which was a city, and on the highest cliff a chapel, near which was a house hung round with three hundred embalmed bodies sewed up in hides. These external coverings were much rent with age, and discovered the bodies within still white and uncorrupted. Some supposed these were the Roman conquerors ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... the street. On one side it terminated abruptly on the cliff on which his dwelling was perched; on the other, it descended more gradually into the next thoroughfare; but up and down the street, on either hand, no one was to be seen. A slightly superstitious feeling for an instant crept over him. Then he reflected that the mysterious ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... moved ahead of him to the cliff on which the agency stood, and which overhung the harbor and the Indian Ocean. Her eyes were filled with trouble. As she raised them to his they begged of ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... land ceded to the United States by the aforesaid act of the legislature of Massachusetts for the purpose of erecting a lighthouse, to wit: Beginning at a stake and heap of stones (1 rod from the edge of the cliff of said head), thence east 11 degrees south 18 rods to a stake and heap of stones; thence south 11 degrees west 18 rods to a stake and heap of stones; thence west 11 degrees north 18 rods to a stake and heap of stones; thence north 11 degrees east ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My guide, who has a holy horror of excisemen and the police, stayed above on the cliff, because of a little coastguard station posted like a watchman on the shore. I made for a large red building which still maintained, in this burning solitude its three stories, in spite of broken ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... he said, halting. "I felt sure that we should find no one, and it is of no use taking so many of you from work; therefore, lads, I would advise your returning to the boats and going to work at once. My little brother and I will ascend to the top of the cliff there, from which we will be able to see all the neighbouring country, and give you timely warning should any natives appear. Pile your rifles on the beach, so as to have them handy; ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... to Rand's cheek. It was Mornie's voice. By leaning over the ledge, he could distinguish something moving along the almost precipitous face of the cliff, where an abandoned trail, long since broken off and disrupted by the fall of a portion of the ledge, stopped abruptly a hundred feet below him. Rand knew the trail, a dangerous one always: in its present ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... been nice," said he, drawing her hand a little on, and remembering as he did so his own picture of himself on the cliff with his sister holding ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope |
