"Lava" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... descend from the ancient Via Latina, which has been excavated for some distance, and is found with wide sidewalks of stone (lava) similar to the sidewalks in Pompeii. The narrow carriage-way is deeply rutted, which makes one think that the old Romans had hard bumps to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... expedition, it was in a state of eruption, the earliest instance of the kind on record, though doubtless not the earliest.13 Since that period, it has been in frequent commotion, sending up its sheets of flame to the height of half a mile, spouting forth cataracts of lava that have overwhelmed towns and villages in their career, and shaking the earth with subterraneous thunders, that, at the distance of more than a hundred leagues, sounded like the reports of artillery!14 Alvarado's followers, unacquainted with the cause ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... down on the opposite end of the same step, where there was no protection from the heat. I now noticed that she carried a basket in her hand, from which she produced a variety of objects, evidently manufactured from lava. These she arranged by her side, and examined with care, every now and then casting an impatient look toward me. There was a wildness in her eye, and a quaintness in her whole demeanor that pleased me, especially as her features were almost without a fault. So I remained where ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... darkness of peace and forgetting, but contrarily the past marched in review before his consciousness: The twin worlds of Thole revolving about each other as he fled down the shallow ravine before the creeping wall of lava, while the ancient mountain grunted and belched, and coughed up its insides. The terrible pull of the uncharted black star as it tugged at the feeble Starduster. The enervating heat and humidity of perpetually cloudy Thymis. Pyramids of gleaming penryx crystals piled ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... rooms of that elegant mansion; or that its enviable (?) master and mistress were treading upon the verge of a volcano which, at any moment, was liable to burst all bounds and pour forth its furious lava-tide to consume them. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... remember, on the evening we came to the story of Kusha and Lava, and those two valiant lads were threatening to humble to the dust the renown of their father and uncles, how the tense silence of that dimly lighted room was bursting with eager anticipation. It was getting late, our prescribed period of wakefulness was drawing to a close, and yet ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... our chairs within the protection of the almond tree, and watch the sun sink slowly to a level with the masts of a bark that is bound for Java and the Bornean coasts. The black, dead lava of our island becomes molten for the time, and the flakes of salt left on the coral reef by the outgoing tide are filled with suggestions of the gold of the days of '49. A faint breeze rustles among the long, fan-like leaves of the palm, and brings out the rich yellow ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... blazing with heat. Its narrow, perpendicular paths seemed to run with burning lava. Its top, the main square of the settlement, was of baked clay, beaten hard by thousands of naked feet. Crossing it by day was an adventure. The air that swept it was ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... clatter of the horses' hoofs over the lava rocks; the padded beat of the easy plains lope as they left the lava for the ashy silt; then no sound but the swash of saddle leather along trail marks that cut the crusted silt like tracks in soft snow. The wind had been flaring a steady torrid white flame. Now it began to come in puffs and whirls ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... he said to Tom, who was engaged in watching the automatic apparatus of the camera, to see when he would have to put in a fresh film. "It wouldn't take much of this sort of thing to destroy a big city. But I don't see any streams of burning lava, such as they always say come out ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... fragments. The sovereignty of the people or true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful sovereignty of the States, ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... off on to the plain, some of them crossing the trail, where we had to push and jump the stock across them. In dropping a rock into them there seemed to be no bottom. All about them the ground was covered with pieces of broken lava, largely composed of gravel stones that had been welded together by intense heat. A half mile or so from the mountain stood a block of the same material, which was nearly square in shape and larger than a ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... magnam misericordiam tuam. Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam. Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea, et a ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... through its Jurassic or Mesozoic period, there must be any amount of some kind of game." Just then a quiver shook the Callisto, and glancing to the right they noticed one of the volcanoes in violent eruption. Smoke filled the air in clouds, hot stones and then floods of lava poured from the crater, while even the walls of the hermetically sealed Callisto could not arrest the thunderous crashes that made the interior of the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... had "jist got religion"; and then again subsiding to a buzzy state, occasioned by the whimpering and whining voices of persons giving spiritual advice and comfort! How like a volcanic crater after the evomition of its lava in a fit of burning cholic, and striving to resettle its angry ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... 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 ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... awe. For there had been that trembling of the earth; there were here and there openings in the trees through which vast blackened roads of rock seemed to come down to the sea, zigzag tracks which it was plain enough were the cooled-down and hardened streams of lava which had made their way to the sea during some eruption of the calmly beautiful mountain which rose so peacefully toward the clouds, one of which seemed to have remained to act as its ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... Sky-Bird drew them toward the volcano, for it was directly in their course. As they approached, they could see flames licking their way upward from the dark mass of rock constituting the shaft, and could make out streams of lava pouring over the sides of the crater, going down into the unknown blackness below. What a sight it was! How their pulses beat! How their ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... called the "lava-nut," of which the animals are very fond, and they will go a long distance in search of it. The keepers are provided with a quantity of these nuts, and the man with whom the animals are most familiar throws a few to the one selected. As soon ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... private houses of the famous buried city lie far below the surface trodden by our feet. To visit Herculaneum it is necessary for us to descend some seventy to a hundred feet into the depths of the earth, passing more than one layer of ancient lava, for Resina and Portici themselves are but modern editions of former towns that have been engulfed in the course of ages. If the stranger can derive any solid satisfaction from the descent by a gloomy underground passage and from fleeting glimpses of ancient walls and dwellings seen through ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... hate or fear violently. They may have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics, emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be related to anything else, provided it ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... slopes were bare except for grass on which sheep and goats were grazed, and a few scattered trees. Studying the place through glasses I observed that these slopes were crowned by a vertical precipice of what looked like lava rock, which seemed to surround the whole mountain and must have been quite a hundred feet high. Beyond this precipice, which to all appearance was of an unclimbable nature, began a dense forest of large trees, cedars I thought, clothing it to the very top, that is so far as ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... sentiments are everywhere publicly advocated; the licentiousness of the press has reached a pinnacle which menaces us with ruin; there is no law which these shameless newspapers respect; no rank which is safe from their attacks; no ancient landmark which the lava-flood of democracy does not threaten ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deities. Snorro, the same who advised the inquest against the ghosts, had become a convert to the Christian religion, and was present on the occasion, and as the conference was held on the surface of what had been a stream of lava, now covered with vegetable substances, he answered the priests with much readiness, "To what was the indignation of the gods owing when the substance on which we stand was fluid and scorching? Believe ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... blue car, fifty yards in the lead, overhauled a Ford in trouble. In the loose, sandy trail the big car slowed and stopped abreast of the Ford. There was no passing now, unless Mack Nolan wanted to risk smashing his crank-case on a lava rock, millions of which peppered that particular portion of the Mojave Desert. He ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Minnesota (1862) and in Montana (1866); but the worst offenders were the Apaches of Arizona, and against them General Crook waged war in 1872. Toward the close of 1872 the Modocs left their reservation in Oregon, took refuge in the Lava Beds in northern California, and defied the troops sent to drive them back. General Canby and several others were treacherously murdered at a conference (1873), and a war of several months' duration followed before the Modocs were forced to surrender. In 1874 the Cheyennes (she-enz'), ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... Oklahoma and in Texas. In the western interior limestones predominate; 6000 ft. of limestone are found at Eureka, Nevada, beneath 2000 ft. of shale. On the Pacific coast metamorphism of the rocks is common, and lava-flows and tuffs occur ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... sometimes cannot help thinking it within the range of possibility, that even you, volcano as you are, may, one day, cool down into something of the same habitable state. Indeed, when one thinks of lava having been converted into buttons for Isaac Hawkins Browne, there is no saying what such fiery things may be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... got some distance yet," he said to Sam. "Dawg was goin' steady as a woodchuck ten mile' from water. Reckon my guess was right,—he wore his pads out crossin' the lava beds, though what in time any hombre who ain't plumb loco is trapesin' round there for, beats me. There is some grazin' on top of the Cumbre mesa, enough for a small herd, but the other side is jest plain hell with the lights out, one big slice of ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... of which is the Calaveras skull, found in 1886 in the auriferous gravels of Calaveras County, California, at an extraordinary depth. The miners, in excavating a shaft, passed through several layers of lava and gravel, forming a total thickness of seventy-nine feet of lava and a considerable thickness of gravel, making nearly one hundred and thirty feet in all. At this depth a skull was found imbedded in the gravel, which, if authentic, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Triplett's curious behavior. A call from Baahaabaa. We visit William Henry Thomas. His bride. The christening. A hideous discovery. Pros and Cons. Out heart-breaking decision. A stirrup-cup of lava-lava. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... treated you badly the result would be the same. Life has been much too kind to you, Clavey, and your little disappointments have been so purely romantic that only your facile emotions have played about like amiable puppies on the roof of your passions. It's time the lava began to boil and the lid blew off. Your creative tract would get a ploughing up and a fertilizing as a natural sequence. Your plays would no longer be mere models of architecture. I am not an amiable altruist. I don't long to see you happy. I'm rather ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the bed of which, three or four hundred feet beneath us, was surrounded by steep and in many places overhanging sides. It looked like an enormous cauldron, four or five miles in width, full of a mass of cooled pitch. In the center was the still glowing stream of dark red lava flowing slowly toward us, and in every direction were red-hot patches, and flames, and ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... che suo dannaggio sogna, Che sognando disidera sognare, Si che quel ch'e, come non fosse, agogna; Tal mi fec'io non potendo parlare: Che disiava scusarmi e scusava Me tuttavia e not mi credea fare Maggior difetto men vergogna lava, Disse'l maestro, che'l tuo non e stato: Pero d'ogni tristizia ti disgrava; E fa ragion ch'io ti sempre allato, Se piu avvien che fortuna t'accoglia Dove sien genti in simigliante piato: Che voler cio ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 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 in their ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... 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
... fur and the twitchings of her tail, the children might not have discovered her. "Look," she said, stretching out one of her great pads toward the south, where the trail ran thin and white across a puma-colored land, streaked with black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted in red, wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck like honeycombs ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... with its ebon spots? And then he thought: "I know some women fail, And cease to be so very beautiful. And I have heard men rave of certain eyes, In which I could not rest a moment's space." Straightway the fount of possibilities Began to gurgle, under, in his soul. Anon the lava-stream burst forth amain, And glowed, and scorched, and blasted as it flowed. For purest souls sometimes have direst fears, In ghost-hours when the shadow of the earth Is cast on half her children, from the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Pic Bory had a way of tossing high into the air huge spouts of boiling lava, which rushed with great force down the mountain-side, overwhelming everything which came in the way. Now, just as gunpowder rammed into a cannon drives heavy balls immense distances, so this lava is driven out of the craters by gases which are imprisoned below the crust of the earth. When ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... already a half-forgotten thing of the past, and Rome had again subsided into its usual course: in the earlier hours, a city of well-filled streets, astir and vocal with active and vigorous trade and labor; then—as the noontide sun shed from the brazen sky a molten glow, that fell like fire upon the lava pavement, and glanced from polished walls until the whole atmosphere seemed like a furnace—a city seemingly deserted, except by a few slaves, engaged in removing the triumphal arches hung with faded and lifeless flowers, and by a soldier here and there in glistening ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above; Such kisses as belong to early days, Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move, And the blood's lava, and the pulse a blaze, Each kiss a heart-quake—for a kiss's strength, I think, it must ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian lava, on the line of least resistance. Dolly followed his example, filling a garment she called her pinafore with whatever mould or debris was attainable, and bringing it with much gravity and some pride to help on the structure of the dyke. A fiction, rather felt than spoken, got in the air that Sapps ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... crater, running and holding a handkerchief to our nose an we passed through the smoke, when the wind blew it to our side. The crater was just like an empty funnel, wide at the mouth, and narrowing to a throat. The lava was hard enough to bear us; but there were numerous fumeroles or red-hot chasms, in it, which we could look into. Somerville bought a number of crystals from the guides, and went repeatedly to Portici afterwards to complete our ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... of volcano mountains in this, as in almost all the other islands of the eastern Archipelago. They are called in the Malay language gunong-api, or more correctly, gunong ber-api. Lava has been seen to flow from a considerable one near Priamang; but I have never heard of its causing any other damage than the burning of woods. This however may be owing to the thinness of population, which ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... it again at random. He tore the pretty trinket away, and dashed it into the grate, and a curse broke from his shut teeth, as he saw it fall glowing among the hot embers. Then he turned back to the beginning, and began to read more deliberately, allowing his anger to cool and harden, like lava, above his ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... twenty-five, placed for the first time upon the sunny pavements of Naples, takes a new lease of life,—at least of its imaginative part. The beautiful blue stretch of sea, the lava streets, the buried towns and cities, the baths and ruins of Baiae, the burning mountain, piling its smoke and fire into the serene sky, the memories of Tiberius, of Cicero, of Virgil,—all these enchant him. And beside these are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... "Quite right. And the lava might overflow him and take the mould of him, like the sentinel at Pompeii, if he's of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Session of Parliament. Suppose, also, that two entirely impassable barriers, say of five miles in width, half a mile high, and red hot, were thrown across England; one from Gloucester to Harwich, and another from Liverpool to Hull, and at the same time the sea were to become a mass of molten lava, so no water communication should be possible; the political, mercantile, social, and intellectual life of the country would be convulsed in a manner which it is hardly possible to realise. Hundreds of thousands would die through the dislocation of existing arrangements. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... authorities; on the seas surrounding the island pack-ice frequently became a menace to shipping, and there also occurred unusually long and vicious series of volcanic eruptions. These culminated in the late eighteenth century (1783), when the world's most extensive lava fields of historical times were formed, and the mist from the eruption was carried all over Europe and far into the continent of Asia. Directly or indirectly as a consequence of this eruption, the greater part of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 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, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... said she, touching his shoulder with the tips of her fingers. "If you bring me a beautiful lava bracelet perhaps I'll forgive you for going ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... grasses, and below this another stratum of tinted rock; and so down to the plain. The side-view of this group showed it to be wildly distorted, the strata lying at every angle, coming out against the distant lava-peaks and the green slopes below them in a glory of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... monument, Leonard pushed him through the window after Wingfield, and then cast his eye round the building before he himself descended. The sight was magnificent in the extreme. Prom the flaming roof three silvery cascades descended. The choir was in flame, and a glowing stream like lava was spreading over the floor, and slowly trickling down the steps leading to the body of the church. The transepts and the greater part of the nave were similarly flooded. Above the roar of the flames and the hissing plash of the descending ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... we drifted down a warm flat sea. Then one morning we came on deck to find ourselves close aboard a number of volcanic islands. They were composed entirely of red and dark purple lava blocks, rugged, quite without vegetation save for occasional patches of stringy green in a gully; and uninhabited except for a lighthouse on one, and a fishing shanty near the shores of another. The high mournful mountains, with their dark shadows, seemed to brood ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... throbbing life of Asia would receive a sudden and violent check; Semitism would be thrust back; Aryanism, just pushing itself to the front, would shrink away; the monotonous Egyptian tone of thought and life would spread, like a lava stream, over the manifold and varied forms of Asiatic culture; crushing them out, concealing them, making them as though they had never been. The victory of Babylon, on the other hand, would mean room for Semitism to develop ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... tinted with turquoise blue. Immediately over the section where the sun had so lately disappeared, the gradations of color were multiform and brilliant, fading into each other's embrace. Close to the water line, where sky and ocean mingled, there was a mound of quivering flame that seemed like burning lava pouring from some volcanic source. This lavish display of iris hues was softly reflected by the vapory tissue of clouds that hung over the opposite expanse; the shades changing to ruby and sapphire tints alternately, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the professor. "If this is a volcano, with lava in it, the water of the ocean, pouring in on the other side, may be ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... came along and revealed anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata, which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all through the desert; and there's a good deal of lava oozing over them, too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the west, or the Colorado leaking in from ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... said, with defiant shrug of shoulders and a straight gaze into her sister's eyes. "We rode out from gay Mana and continued the gay progress—down the lava trails to Kiholo to the swimming and the fishing and the feasting and the sleeping in the warm sand under the palms; and up to Puuwaawaa, and more pig-sticking, and roping and driving, and wild mutton from the upper pasture-lands; and on through Kona, now mauka" (mountainward), "now down to the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... sleeping among its cabbage gardens, "quiet as gunpowder," yet with this tremendous conspiracy brewing in its bosom is an object ten times as sublime (in a moral point of view, mark me) as Vesuvius in repose, though charged with lava and brimstone, and ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... have found her way to the cathedral blindfold; one had to turn round by the Place de Jaude and take the Rue des Gras; but more than that she could not tell him; the rest of the town was an entanglement, a maze of sloping lanes and boulevards; a town of black lava ever dipping downward, where the rain of the thunderstorms swept by torrentially amidst formidable flashes of lightning. Oh! those storms; she still shuddered to think of them. Just opposite her room, above the roofs, the lightning conductor of the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... loveliness, forming one extremity of the Bay of Naples. Its soil is rich, its sea bright and limpid, its breezes cool and healthful. Isolated by its position, it is yet within easy reach of Rome. At that time, before Vesuvius had rekindled those wasteful fires which first shook down, and then deluged under lava and scoriae, the little cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the scene which it commanded was even more pre-eminently beautiful than now. Vineyards and olive-groves clothed the sides of that matchless bay, down to the very line where the bright blue waters seem to kiss with their ripples the many-coloured ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... sullen roar from the crater of Mount Hood. Below the crater, the ice-fields that had glistened in unbroken whiteness the previous day were now furrowed with wide black streaks, from which the vapor of melting snow and burning lava ascended in dense wreaths. Men wiser than these ignorant savages would have said that some terrible convulsion ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... places where erosion has partly or wholly removed the later covering. An illustration of this condition is furnished in the Great Basin district of Nevada, where ore bodies have been covered by later lava flows. The ore-bearing districts are merely islands exposed by erosion in a vast sea of lava and surface sediments. Beyond reasonable doubt many more deposits are so covered than are exposed, and it is no exaggeration to say ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... the room itself were waincsotted in pannels of dark-stained wood; the window-curtains were of coarse green worsted, and encrusted with dust so ancient and irremovable, that it presented almost a lava-like appearance; the carpet that had once been bright and showy, was entirely threadbare, and had become grey with age. There were several heavy mahogany arm-chairs in the room, a Pembroke table, and an immense unwieldy ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... continue Pen's education with himself as textbook. He was engrossed in watching and tending the flood. Old Jezebel enjoyed herself thoroughly for a week. She fought and scratched at the mountainsides, but save the chafing of purple lava dust from their sides she made no impression on their imperturbability. She ripped down the last pouring, contemptuously leaving tons of rock and concrete at the foot of the concrete section. She roared and howled and shook the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... September, in the morning, the towering volcano of the chief island was signalled; a huge snow-covered mass, whose crater formed the basin of a small lake. Next day, on our approach, we could distinguish a vast heaped-up lava field. At this distance the surface of the water was striped with gigantic seaweeds, vegetable ropes, varying in length from six hundred to twelve hundred feet, and as ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... is a little singular, the calcareous limestone on Deal occurring two hundred feet above the sea and between granite; whilst on Erith vesicular lava was found. These islands are connected with Flinders by a sand ridge, on which the depth is 28 and 30 fathoms; but the islets and rocks between would appear, from the evidence of upheaval we have just cited, to be elevated portions of a submerged ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... produces. But this has not always been the fate of the under-surface molten rocks, for sometimes they have burst by volcanic vents clear through the crust of earth, where, turned instantly to pumice and lava by release from pressure, they build great surface cones, cover broad plains ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... in Nature is more magnificent than a Volcano in activity. It has been my good fortune to have stood more than once at the edge of the crater of Vesuvius during an eruption, to have watched the lava seething below, while enormous stones were shot up high into the air. Such a ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... 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 from choice that ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... turned pale, then red, then pale again, and cried eagerly, "Then all the world should not part us. Why torture me with such a question? Ah! you have heard something." And in a moment the lava of passion burst wildly through its thin sheet of ice. "I was blind. This is why you would save me from this unnatural marriage. You are breaking the good news to me by degrees. There is no need. Quick—quick—let me have it. I have waited three years; I am sick of waiting. Why ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... passenger steamers that ply on the lake. In winter also it sometimes entirely breaks up its covering of ice and gives off great clouds of steam. Evidently the bottom of the lake is sporadically pierced by discharging hot springs or, perhaps, by streams of lava. Evidence of some great underground convulsion like this is afforded by the mass of killed fish which at times dams the outlet river in its shallow places. The lake is exceedingly rich in fish, chiefly varieties ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... on the top of a mountain, though the geographies do say, "A volcano is a mountain sending forth fire, smoke and lava," and give the picture of a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... straight and slowly through the very heart of the town. Like its historic namesake, the city lived under the eternal shadow of smoke, barring Sundays; but its origin was not volcanic, only bituminous. True, year in and year out the streets were torn up, presenting an aspect not unlike the lava-beds of Vesuvius; but as this phase always implies, not destruction, but construction, murmurs were only local and few. It was a prosperous and busy city. It grew, it grows, and will grow. Long life to it! Every year the city directory points with pride to ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... played alone, and these were her happiest moments. She played amongst the rotting, weed-grown stakes of an old pier, and "fancied" rooms among them—suites of rooms in which she would lodge her brothers and sister if they came to visit her, and where—with cockle-shells for teacups, and lava for vegetables, and fucus-pods for fish—they should find themselves as much enchanted as Beauty in the ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... and came upon a field of sleek purple lava sown all over with little lemon jets of silent smoke, which in their wan and melancholy glow might have been the corpse lights of those innumerable dead whose tombstone was the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... sincere devotion to their service deserve their forbearance and approval." This hope of Cleveland's was eventually justified, but not until after his public career had ended; meanwhile he had to undergo a storm of censure so blasting that it was more like a volcanic rain of fire and lava than ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... upon the first blush of the business, and hardly excuse him though I may afterwards learn he had ample provocation. Besides, your diatribe is not hujus loci. We take up a novel for amusement, and this current of controversy breaks out upon us like a stream of lava out of the side of a beautiful green hill; men will say you should have reserved your disputes for reviews or periodical publications, and they will sympathize less with your anger, because they will not think the time proper for expressing it. We are bad judges, bad physicians, and bad divines ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... clean down the creek. One of them told me he had lost 30l. in notes, which he had concealed in his cabin; but the flood had risen so quickly that he had been unable to save it. I picked up a considerable-sized stone that had been washed on to the Chinamen's ground; it was a piece of lava thrown from one of the volcanic hills which bound the plain,—how many thousands of years ago! These volcanic stones are so light and porous that they swim like corks, and they abound in many ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... over the trampled gardens and vineyards of France. A great volcanic lava field of flame and ashes—burning, smoking—many miles in extent—showed where Paris had been. Around it ragged creatures were prowling, looking for something to eat, digging up roots in the fields. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion,—of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise Macpherson's Ossian here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... torrents—the Bise, Mas, and Volane. From the heights behind the town there is a magnificent view. In the neighbourhood is the extinct crater, the Coupe d'Aizac, covered with a beautiful reddish lava. Inns: ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... from the showers of stones and ashes cast up by the mountain. His nephew, called Pliny the younger, has left a full account of the disaster, and the cloud like a pine tree that hung over the mountain, the noises, the earthquake, and the fall at last of the ashes and lava. Drusilla, the wife of Felix, the governor before whom St. Paul pleaded, also perished. Herculaneum was covered with solid lava, so that very little could be recovered from it; but Pompeii, being overwhelmed ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... down to us by the few survivors indicate the continual wails of horror rending the sky while the volcanic disturbances continued. Thousands and millions ran from place to place to find shelter from the storm of fire. At one place the surface would open and at another the lava would run. Fate, with a merciless hand, was dragging each one into one or ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... scholiast, his name was CAESIUS BASSUS, a much admired lyric poet, who was living on his own farm, at the time when Mount Vesuvius discharged its torrents of fire, and made the country round a scene of desolation. The poet and his house were overwhelmed by the eruption of the lava, which happened A.U. 832, in the reign of Titus. Quintilian says of him (b. x. chap. 1.), that if after Horace any poet deserves to be mentioned, Caesius Bassus was the man. Si quem adjicere velis, is erit Caesius Bassus. Saleius Bassus is mentioned ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... had broken upon Paris with its fearful events. The revolution had for the first time opened the crater, after subterranean thunder had long been heard, and after the ground of Paris had long been shaken. The glowing lava-streams of intense excitement, popular risings, and murder, had broken out and flooded all Paris, and before them judgment, discretion, and truth even, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... lid-lashes all sear, Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colours all inflam'd throughout her train, She writh'd about, convuls'd with scarlet pain: A deep volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder-mooned body's grace; And, as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars, Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars: 160 So that, in moments few, she was undrest Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst, And rubious-argent: of all these ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... his charming work 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 ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... to follow words with deeds. The affair ended by mutual acquaintances leading Captain Sam from the Babbitt Hardware Company's store, the captain rumbling like a volcano and, to follow up the simile, still emitting verbal brimstone and molten lava, while Mr. Babbitt, entrenched behind his counter, with a monkey wrench in his hand, dared his adversary to lay hands ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... Clouds is rather doubtfully traced upon the maps. It is supposed that this vast plain is strewn with blocks of lava vomited by the neighbouring volcanoes on its right side, Ptolemy, Purbach, and Arzachel. The projectile was drawing sensibly nearer, and the summits which close in this sea on the north were distinctly visible. In front rose a mountain shining gloriously, the top of which ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park, Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time; And on the tables every clime and age Jumbled together; celts and calumets, Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries, Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere, The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls, Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer, His own ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... liquid lava of rage inside; but he had had enough to do with police power to know that it would help him not at all to permit an eruption against a police official while he was in the very heart ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava—" ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... to Pompeii and went over it. As you know, it is a Roman town buried under the lava and ashes of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. I walked about the streets of the town and saw the houses, the temples, the theatre, the squares.... I saw and marvelled at the faculty of the Romans for combining simplicity with convenience ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... combines the qualities of Corfu and Catania. The near distance, so richly cultivated, with the large volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo rising from the sea, is like Catania. Then, across the gulf, are the bold outlines and snowy peaks of the Abruzzi, recalling Albanian ranges. Here, as in Sicily, the old lava is overgrown with prickly pear and red valerian. Mesembrianthemums—I must be pardoned this word; for I cannot omit those fleshy-leaved creepers, with their wealth of gaudy blossoms, shaped like sea ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... still safe, even from the chance of Numidian foray, and it was along its lava-paved level that the long convoy of sick and wounded writhed slowly northward ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... "old man" with which we had marked the top, I counted five several dykes or outcrops to the east (inland), and one to the west, cutting the prism from north to south; the superficial matter of these injections showed concentric circles like ropy lava. The shape of the block is a saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced by quartz veins of the amorphous type, crystals being everywhere rare in Midian ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of his danger, but was commanded to run the boat ashore. Those who explored the land found a vast mountain casting up flames and another mountain pouring out smoke. Soon the party came across great spouting fountains of boiling water, and they found the ground beneath their feet to be burning lava. ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... rather doubtfully marked out upon the maps. It is supposed that these vast plains are strewn with blocks of lava from the neighboring volcanoes on its right, Ptolemy, Purbach, Arzachel. But the projectile was advancing, and sensibly nearing it. Soon there appeared the heights which bound this sea at this northern limit. Before them rose a mountain radiant with ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... class are more abundant about intrusive igneous rocks, that is about igneous rocks which have stopped and cooled before reaching the surface,—than in association with extrusive igneous rocks which have poured over the surface as lava flows—but the latter are by no means insignificant, including as they do such deposits as the Lake Superior copper ores, the Kennecott copper ores of Alaska, some of the gold-silver deposits of Goldfield and other Nevada camps, ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... what had been said at Zotique's, his rotund black stole writhed as if founts of lava boiled in him; his face swelled to the likeness of a fiery planet; indignation choked his speech for four minutes by the face of the tall clock in his sitting-room; and then the lava rose to the ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... living polypi, we find enormous masses of madrepores and other lithophyte corals set in the texture of those shelves. (* The surface of these shelves, blackened and excavated by the waters, presents ramifications like the cauliflower, as they are observed on the currents of lava. Is the change of colour produced by the waters owing to the manganese which we recognize by some dendrites? The sea, entering into the clefts of the rocks, and in a cavern at the foot of the Castillo del Morro, compresses ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt |
